Part 6

_John Dickinson._--Among all the political writings which were the immediate offspring of the baleful Stamp Act dispute, there stand out, as of the highest significance, certain essays which began to make their appearance in a Philadelphia newspaper in the latter part of the year 1767. These essays very soon became celebrated, on both sides of the Atlantic, under the short title of the _Farmer’s Letters_. Their full title was _Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies_. Though published without the author’s name, they were instantly recognised as the work of John Dickinson; and their appearance may perhaps fairly be described as constituting, upon the whole, the most brilliant event in the literary history of the Revolution. One distinction attaching to them is that they were written by a man who shared in the general excitement over the new attack upon colonial rights, but who desired to compose it rather than to increase it, and especially to persuade his countrymen so to bear their part in the new dispute as to save their rights as men, without losing their happiness as British subjects. Here was a man of powerful and cultivated intellect, with all his interests and all his tastes on the side of order, conservatism, and peace, if only with these could be had political safety and honour. No other serious political essays of the Revolutionary era quite equalled the _Farmer’s Letters_ in literary merit, including in that term the merit of substance as well as of form; and, excepting the political essays of Thomas Paine, which did not begin to appear until nine years later, none equalled the _Farmer’s Letters_ in immediate celebrity, and in direct power upon events. As they first came forth, from week to week, in the Philadelphia newspaper that originally published them, they were welcomed by the delighted interest and sympathy of multitudes of readers in that neighbourhood, and were instantly reproduced in all the twenty-five newspapers then published in America, with but four known exceptions. Within less than four weeks after the last letter had made its appearance, they were all collected and issued as a pamphlet, of which at least eight editions were published in different parts of America. On both sides of the Atlantic, the _Farmer’s Letters_ gained universal attention among the people interested in the rising American dispute. The name of John Dickinson became a name of literary renown surpassing that of any other American, excepting Benjamin Franklin. On the continent of Europe, these essays of the Pennsylvania Farmer became, for a time, the fashion: they were talked of in the salons of Paris; the Farmer himself was likened to Cicero; and almost the highest distinction then possible for any man was bestowed upon him through the notice and applause of Voltaire. Even in England, the success of these writings was remarkable, and was shown quite as much in the censures as in the praises which were lavished upon them. Among the English admirers of the _Farmer’s Letters_ was Edmund Burke, who gave his sanction to their principle. In America, the admiration and the gratitude of the people were expressed in almost every conceivable form. Thanks were voted to the Farmer by political associations, by town-meetings, by grand juries. The College of New Jersey conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Laws. He became the favourite toast at public banquets. He was offered the membership of the choicest social clubs. On his entrance, one day, into a court-room, whither business called him, the proceedings were stopped in order to recognise his presence, and to make acknowledgment of the greatness and splendour of his services to the country. Songs were written in his praise.

The last of the _Farmer’s Letters_ was published in February, 1768. In the following May, the new commissioners of customs arrived at Boston; in June, these commissioners, attempting to execute their odious office on John Hancock’s sloop, _Liberty_, were fiercely assaulted by the populace of Boston, and were driven for refuge to Castle William in Boston Harbour; whereupon Governor Bernard summoned thither General Gage with his troops from Halifax. Of these most ominous events in Boston, John Dickinson was an observer from his distant home on the Delaware; and even he, with all his deep loyalty and conscientious hesitation, was so stirred by them as then to utter what seems almost a ringing war-cry. Taking for his model Garrick’s _Hearts of Oak_--the air of which was then so familiar to every one--he wrote the stanzas which he christened _A Song for American Freedom_,--a bit of versification obviously the work of a man neither born nor bred to that business; yet being quickly caught up into universal favour under the endearing name of the _Liberty Song_, its manly lines soon resounded over all the land; and thenceforward, for several years, it remained the most popular political song among us.

If we attempt to estimate the practical effects of John Dickinson’s work as a political writer during the American Revolution, we shall find it not easy to disentangle and to separate them from the practical effects of his work as a politician. The two lines of power were closely interwoven; each, in the main, helped the other, as each was liable, in its turn, to be hindered by the other. At any rate, just as the politico-literary influence of James Otis was, upon the whole, predominant in America from 1764 until 1767, so, from the latter date until some months after the outbreak of hostilities in 1775, was the politico-literary influence of John Dickinson predominant here. Moreover, as he succeeded to James Otis in the development of Revolutionary thought, so was he, at last, succeeded by Thomas Paine, who held sway among us, as the chief writer of political essays, from the early part of 1776 until the close of the Revolution itself. The prodigious decline in the influence of John Dickinson, at the approach of the issue of independence, is a thing not hard to explain; it was due in part to his personal characteristics, in part to the nature of his opinions. From the beginning of the troubles until some months after the first shedding of blood, in 1775, public opinion in America had set strongly in favour of making demand--even armed demand--for our political rights, but without any rupture of the colonial tie. It was, therefore, a period calling for clear and resolute statements of our claims, but with loyalty, urbanity, and tact. To be the chief literary exponent of such a period, John Dickinson was in every way fitted by talent, by temperament, by training. A man of wealth, cultivation, and elegant surroundings, practically versed in the law and in politics, considerate, cautious, disinclined to violent measures and to stormy scenes, actuated by a passion for the unity and the greatness of the English race and for peace among all men, it was his sincere desire that the dispute with the mother country should be so conducted as to end, at last, in the perfect establishment of American constitutional rights within the empire, but without any hurt or dishonour to England, and without any permanent failure in respect and kindness between her and ourselves. Nevertheless, in 1775, events occurred which gave a different aspect to the whole dispute, and swept an apparent majority of the American people quite beyond the sphere of such ideas and methods. John Dickinson’s concession to Parliament of a legislative authority over us, even to a limited extent, was roughly discarded; instead of which was enthroned among us the unhistoric and makeshift doctrine that American allegiance was due not at all to Parliament, but to the Crown only. Moreover, the moderation of tone, the urbane speech, the civility in conduct, exemplified by Dickinson in all this dispute with England, then became an anachronism and an offence. We were plunged at last into civil war--we had actually reached the stage of revolution; and the robust men who then ruled the scene were disposed, with no little contempt, to brush aside the moderate, conservative, and courteous Dickinson, who, either for advice or for conduct, seemed to them to have no further function to perform in the American world. His _Farmer’s Letters_ were declared by Jefferson to have been “really an ‘ignis fatuus,’ misleading us from true principles.” Even Edward Rutledge, who, in June, 1776, agreed with Dickinson in his opposition to the plan for independence, nevertheless expressed some impatience with his intellectual fastidiousness and nicety,--declaring that the “vice of all his productions, to a considerable degree,” was “the vice of refining too much.”

_Alexander Hamilton._--Within two or three weeks from the day on which the Congress announced its grand scheme for an agreement among the American colonists not to import or to consume the chief materials of the English carrying-trade, nor to export the chief products of their own farms, there came from the press of New York a pamphlet--_Free Thoughts on the Proceedings of the Continental Congress_--ostensibly written by a farmer, and addressed to farmers, and from the level of their particular interests subjecting the proposal of Congress to a sort of criticism that was well fitted to arouse against it the bitterest and most unrelenting opposition of the great agricultural class. The writer of this pamphlet--Samuel Seabury, a Loyalist clergyman--professed to be a “Westchester Farmer,”--a signature which at once became the target for vast applause and for vast execration. The first pamphlet was dated November 16, 1774. Twelve days from that date came his second one--as keen, as fiery, as powerful as the first. In less than four weeks from the day of his second pamphlet, the undaunted farmer was ready with a third one. No sooner was this pamphlet off his hands, than the “Westchester Farmer” seems to have set to work upon his fourth pamphlet.

Among the throng of replies which burst forth from the press in opposition to the tremendous pamphlets of the “Westchester Farmer,” were two which immediately towered into chief prominence: _A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress_, and _The Farmer Refuted_. The extraordinary ability of these two pamphlets--their fulness in constitutional learning, their acumen, their affluence in statement, their cleverness in controversial repartee, their apparent wealth in the fruits of an actual acquaintance with public business--led both the “Westchester Farmer” and the public in general to attribute them to some American writer of mature years and of ripe experience--to some member of the late Congress, for example--particularly to John Jay or to William Livingston. It is not easy to overstate the astonishment and the incredulity with which the public soon heard the rumour that these elaborate and shattering literary assaults on the argumentative position of the Loyalists were, in reality, the work of a writer who was then both a stripling in years and a stranger in the country--one Alexander Hamilton, a West Indian by birth, a Franco-Scotsman by parentage, an undergraduate of King’s College by occupation, a resident within the Thirteen Colonies but little more than two years, and at the time of the publication of his first pamphlet only seventeen years of age. In the exposition of his views touching the several vast fields of thought here brought under consideration,--constitutional law, municipal law, the long line of colonial charters, colonial laws and precedents, international polity as affecting the chief nations of Christendom, justice in the abstract and justice in the concrete, human rights both natural and conventional, the physical and metaphysical conditions underlying the great conflict then impending,--it must be confessed that this beardless philosopher, this statesman not yet out of school, this military strategist scarcely rid of his roundabout, exhibits a range and precision of knowledge, a ripeness of judgment, a serenity, a justice, a massiveness both of thought and of style, which would perhaps make incredible the theory of his authorship of these pamphlets, were not this theory confirmed by his undoubted exhibition in other ways, at about the same period of his life, of the same astonishing qualities.

_Thomas Paine._--As the bitter events of 1775 rapidly unfolded themselves, not a few Americans became convinced that there was no true solution of the trouble except in that very independence which they had but a short time before dreaded and denounced. Of such Americans, Thomas Paine was one; and towards the end of the year, through incessant communication with the foremost minds in America, he had filled his own mind with the great decisive elements of the case, and was prepared to utter his thought thereon. Early in January, 1776, he did utter it, in the form of a pamphlet, published at Philadelphia, and entitled _Common Sense_,--the first open and unqualified argument in championship of the doctrine of American independence. During the first ten or twelve years of the Revolution, in just one sentiment all persons, Tories and Whigs, seemed perfectly to agree; namely, in abhorrence of the project of separation from the empire. Suddenly, however, and within a period of less than six months, the majority of the Whigs turned completely around, and openly declared for independence, which, before that time, they had so vehemently repudiated. Among the facts necessary to enable us to account for this almost unrivalled political somersault, is that of the appearance of _Common Sense_. This pamphlet was happily named: it undertook to apply common sense to a technical, complex, but most urgent and feverish, problem of constitutional law. In fact, on any other ground than that of common sense, the author of that pamphlet was incompetent to deal with the problem at all; since of law, of political science, and even of English and American history, he was ludicrously ignorant. But for the effective treatment of any question whatsoever that was capable of being dealt with under the light of the broad and rugged intellectual instincts of mankind,--man’s natural sense of truth, of congruity, of fair-play,--perhaps no other man in America, excepting Franklin, was a match for this ill-taught, heady, and slashing English stranger. From the tribunal of technical law, therefore, he carried the case to the tribunal of common sense; and in his plea before that tribunal, he never for a moment missed his point, or forgot his method. The one thing just then to be done was to convince the average American colonist of the period that it would be ridiculous for him any longer to remain an American colonist; that the time had come for him to be an American citizen; that nothing stood in the way of his being so, but the trash of a few pedants respecting the authority of certain bedizened animals called kings; and that, whether he would or no, the alternative was at last thrust into his face upon the point of a bayonet,--either to declare for national independence, and a wide-spaced and resplendent national destiny, or to accept, along with subserviency to England, the bitterness and the infamy of national annihilation. With all its crudities of thought, its superficiality, and its rashness of assertion, _Common Sense_ is a masterly pamphlet; for in the elements of its strength it was precisely fitted to the hour, to the spot, and to the passions of men. Even its smattering of historical lore, and its cheap display of statistics, and its clumsy attempts at some sort of political philosophy, did not diminish the homage with which it was read by the mass of the community, who were even less learned and less philosophical than Paine, and who, at any rate, cared much more just then for their imperilled rights, than they did either for philosophy or for learning. The immediate practical effects of this pamphlet in America, and the celebrity which it soon acquired in Europe as well as in America, are a significant part of its history as a potential literary document of the period. In every impassioned popular discussion there is likely to spring up a leader, who with pen or voice strikes in, at just the right moment, with just the right word, so skilfully, so powerfully, that thenceforward the intellectual battle seems to be raging and surging around him and around the fiery word which he has sent shrilling through the air. So far as the popular discussion of American independence is concerned, precisely this was the case, between January and July, 1776, with Thomas Paine and his pamphlet _Common Sense_. Within three months from the date of its first issue, at least 120,000 copies of it were sold in America alone. By that time, the pamphlet seemed to be in every one’s hand and the theme of every one’s talk.

Noble-minded and important as were the various services rendered by Paine to the American cause, on sea and land, in office and field, they could in no way be compared, as contributions to the success of the Revolution, with the work which he did during those same imperilled years merely as a writer, and especially as the writer of _The Crisis_. Between December, 1776, when the first pamphlet of that series was published, down to December, 1783, when the last one left the printer’s hands, this indomitable man produced no less than sixteen pamphlets under the same general title, adapting his message in each case to the supreme need of the hour, and accomplishing all this literary labour in a condition of actual poverty.

_Thomas Jefferson._--On June 21, 1775, Thomas Jefferson took his seat for the first time as a member of the Continental Congress. He had then but recently passed his thirty-second birthday, and was known to be the author of two or three public papers of considerable note. Early in June, 1776, Thomas Jefferson, receiving the largest number of votes, was placed at the head of the committee of illustrious men to whom was assigned the task of preparing a suitable Declaration of Independence, and thereby he became the draftsman of the one American state paper that has reached to supreme distinction in the world, and that seems likely to last as long as American civilisation lasts. Whatever authority the Declaration of Independence has acquired in the world has been due to no lack of criticism, either at the time of its first appearance or since then,--a fact which seems to tell in favour of its essential worth and strength. From the date of its original publication down to the present moment, it has been attacked again and again, either in anger or in contempt, by friends as well as by enemies of the American Revolution, by liberals in politics as well as by conservatives. It has been censured for its substance, it has been censured for its form; for its misstatements of fact, for its fallacies in reasoning, for its audacious novelties and paradoxes, for its total lack of all novelty, for its repetition of old and threadbare statements, even for its downright plagiarisms; finally, for its grandiose and vapouring style. Yet, probably no public paper ever more perfectly satisfied the immediate purposes for which it was sent forth. From one end of the country to the other, and as far as it could be spread among the people, it was greeted in public and in private with every demonstration of approval and delight. To a marvellous degree, it quickened the friends of the Revolution for their great task. Moreover, during the century and more since the close of the Revolution, the influence of this state paper on the political character and the political conduct of the American people has been great beyond all calculation.

No man can adequately explain the persistent fascination which it has had, and which it still has, for the American people, or for its undiminished power over them, without taking into account its extraordinary literary merits--its possession of the witchery of true substance wedded to perfect form:--its massiveness and incisiveness of thought, its art in the marshalling of the topics with which it deals, its symmetry, its energy, the definiteness and limpidity of its statements, its exquisite diction, at once terse, musical, and electric; and, as an essential part of this literary outfit, many of those spiritual notes which can attract and enthrall our hearts,--veneration for God, veneration for man, veneration for principle, respect for public opinion, moral earnestness, moral courage, optimism, a stately and noble pathos, finally, self-sacrificing devotion to a cause so great as to be herein identified with the happiness, not of one people only, or of one race only, but of human nature itself. We may be altogether sure that no genuine development of literary taste among the American people in any period of our future history can result in serious misfortune to this particular specimen of American literature.