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John Dickinson Quotes

John Dickinson , a Founding Father of the United States, was an attorney and politician from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington, Delaware. Dickinson was known as the "Penman of the Revolution" for his twelve Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, published individually in 1767 and 1768, and he also wrote "The Liberty Song" in 1768.

As a member of the First Continental Congress, where he signed the Continental Association, Dickinson drafted most of the 1774 Petition to the King, and then, as a member of the Second Continental Congress, he wrote the 1775 Olive Branch Petition. Both of these attempts to negotiate with King George III of Great Britain failed. Dickinson also reworked Thomas Jefferson's language to write the final draft of the 1775 Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms.

While in Congress, Dickinson served on the committee that wrote the Model Treaty, a template for seeking alliances with foreign countries, but he opposed independence from Great Britain. He either abstained or was absent from the vote on the Declaration of Independence and refused to sign the document after its passage. Nevertheless, Dickinson wrote the first draft of the 1776–1777 Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union and served as a militia officer during the Revolution. He later was elected president of the 1786 Annapolis Convention, which called for the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and as a delegate from Delaware, he signed the United States Constitution.

One of the wealthiest men in the British American colonies, Dickinson served as president of Delaware and president of Pennsylvania . Upon Dickinson's death, President Thomas Jefferson referred to Dickinson as, "mong the first of the advocates for the rights of his country when assailed by Great Britain" and called him "one of the great worthies of the revolution."Together with his wife Mary Norris Dickinson, he is the namesake of Dickinson College, Penn State Dickinson Law, and the Dickinson Complex at the University of Delaware. John Dickinson High School in Wilmington, Delaware was dedicated in his honor in 1959. Wikipedia  

✵ 8. November 1732 – 14. February 1808
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John Dickinson: 10 quotes0 likes

Famous John Dickinson Quotes

“With hearts fortified with these animating reflections, we most solemnly, before God and the world, declare that, exerting the utmost energy of those powers, which our beneficent Creator hath graciously bestowed upon us, the arms we have been compelled by our enemies to assume, we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverance employ for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved to die freemen rather than to live as slaves.”

John Dickinson

From The Declaration upon taking up Arms, before Congress, July 6th, 1775: as cited in A Conspectus of American Biography, Volume 1, ed. George Derby, J. T. White (1906), p. 239

“Kings or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness, as you confess those invaded by the Stamp Act to be. We claim them from a higher source—from the King of kings, and Lord of all the earth. They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals. They are created in us by the decrees of Providence which establish the laws of our nature. They are born with us; exist with us; and cannot be taken from us by any human power, without taking our lives.”

John Dickinson

From An Address to the Committee of Correspondence in Barbados (1766), ‘Of the Right to Freedom: and of Traitors’, as contained in A Library of American Literature: Literature of the revolutionary period, 1765-1787, ed. Edmund Clarence Stedman, C. L. Webster (1888), p. 176

“Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all!
By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall.”

John Dickinson

The Liberty Song (1768).

“Honor, justice and humanity call upon us to hold and to transmit to our posterity, that liberty, which we received from our ancestors. It is not our duty to leave wealth to our children; but it is our duty to leave liberty to them. No infamy, iniquity, or cruelty can exceed our own if we, born and educated in a country of freedom, entitled to its blessings and knowing their value, pusillanimously deserting the post assigned us by Divine Providence, surrender succeeding generations to a condition of wretchedness from which no human efforts, in all probability, will be sufficient to extricate them; the experience of all states mournfully demonstrating to us that when arbitrary power has been established over them, even the wisest and bravest nations that ever flourished have, in a few years, degenerated into abject and wretched vassals.”

John Dickinson

From ‘A Duty to Posterity’, as contained in A Library of American Literature From the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, Volume 3, ed. Edmund Clarence Stedman, C. L. Webster (1892), pp. 177-178

“It is inseparably essential to the freedom of a people that no taxes be imposed on them but with their own consent, given personally or by their representatives.”

John Dickinson

From the first draft of the Declaration of Rights and Grievances passed October 19, 1765 by The First Congress of the American Colonies, also known as the Stamp Act Congress; as cited in John Dickinson and the Revolution in Pennsylvania, 1764-1776, David Louis Jacobson, University of California Press (1965), p. 32

“We are reduced to the alternative of choosing an unconditional submission to the tyranny of irritated ministers or resistance by force. The latter is our choice. We have counted the cost of this contest, and find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery. Honour, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us.”

John Dickinson

From Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Causes_and_Necessity_of_Taking_Up_Arms, adopted by the Second Continental Congress (1775)

John Dickinson Quotes

“Let us take care of our rights, and we therein take care of our property. 'Slavery is ever preceded by sleep.”

John Dickinson

From Letters from a Farmer, in Pennsylvania, to the inhabitants of the British Colonies, Letter XII, Dickinson, Philadelphia

“If it was possible for men who exercise their reason, to believe that the divine Author of our existence intended a part of the human race to hold an absolute property in, and an unbounded power over others, marked out by his infinite goodness and wisdom, as the objects of a legal domination never rightfully resistible, however severe and oppressive, the inhabitants of these Colonies might at least require from the Parliament of Great Britain some evidence, that this dreadful authority over them has been granted to that body. But a reverence for our great Creator, principles of humanity, and the dictates of common sense, must convince all those who reflect upon the subject, that Government was instituted to promote the welfare of mankind, and ought to be administered for the attainment of that end.”

John Dickinson

Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms (6 July 1775)

“Our cause is just, our union is perfect.”

John Dickinson

Declaration on taking up Arms in 1775. From the original manuscript draft in Dickinson's handwriting, which has given rise to the belief that he, not Jefferson (as formerly claimed), is the real author of this sentence.

“If it was possible for men who exercise their reason, to believe that the divine Author of our existence intended a part of the human race to hold an absolute property in, and an unbounded power over others, marked out by his infinite goodness and wisdom, as the objects of a legal domination never rightfully resistible, however severe and oppressive, the inhabitants of these Colonies might at least require from the Parliament of Great Britain some evidence, that this dreadful authority over them has been granted to that body.”

John Dickinson

But a reverence for our great Creator, principles of humanity, and the dictates of common sense, must convince all those who reflect upon the subject, that Government was instituted to promote the welfare of mankind, and ought to be administered for the attainment of that end.
Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms (6 July 1775)

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