Independence (26 page)

Within a week of landing, but before Congress assembled, Franklin used a carriage provided by Galloway to ride to Trevose, north of the city, to see his old political partner for the first time in more than a decade. Franklin’s purpose was to persuade Galloway not to retire from public affairs. “[Y]our Abilities are so much wanted,” Franklin told him in a note that he sent a day or two prior to his visit. Franklin remained at Galloway’s estate overnight, and the two men discussed the Anglo-American crisis into the wee hours of the morning. Franklin tried to convince Galloway that reconciliation with the mother country was impossible, save on London’s terms, and as proof he read to his younger associate from the journal he had kept during his discussions in December and January with the surrogates of Lord Dartmouth. Galloway was unmoved. His health had been ruined by his public service, he said, and indeed he was gaunt and looked considerably older than age forty-five. Galloway had other, better, reasons for remaining detached from public life. While he wanted no part of a war against the mother country, he also realized that his public attacks on Congress and his published revelations of what had occurred in the First Congress’s secret sessions had burned his bridges. He could never again be a power in the Continental Congress. Sullied with the taint of Toryism, he knew all too well that he was “despised and Contemned by all,” as a New England congressman in fact remarked in private that very week. Two days after Congress was gaveled into session, Galloway formally submitted his resignation. Franklin did not give up easily. On two other occasions during the ensuing months, he met with Galloway and pleaded with him to rejoin Congress. He also urged Galloway to support the war. Galloway was not swayed. He would remain neutral, loyal neither to Congress nor to Great Britain, he said.
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By the time Congress reconvened, the delegates were aware that Parliament had spurned Chatham’s early-winter peace proposal. Every member believed that North’s government wished the total subjugation of the colonies. General Gage’s dispatch of his regulars on April 19 only confirmed in their minds that the ministry was unwilling to back down. Every delegate to the Second Congress was committed to waging war.

Even so, there were divisions among these delegates. The first difference to surface would be the greatest of all. In the initial days of this congress, South Carolina’s John Rutledge asked his colleagues what America was fighting for: “do We aim at independency? or do We only ask for a Restoration of Rights & putting of Us on Our old footing?”
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A wide-ranging debate followed, in the course of which it was evident that the overwhelming majority remained committed to reconciliation. But it was just as plain that the delegates were divided over what steps to take, if any, beyond the use of force and the ongoing boycott to restore harmony with London.

The previous congress had been splintered, and the question of how to seek reconciliation with the mother country likewise split this congress into two factions. The more moderate faction was led by John Dickinson.

Dickinson, who was forty-three in 1775, was tall and slender and “pale as ashes,” so sickly looking that some of his fellow delegates at first thought “he could not live a Month.” The cause of his chronic health problems is unknown, though by this time his physical woes were exacerbated by gout, perhaps the reason that his gait was noticeably stiff and awkward. Dickinson’s backswept hair had already turned gray, and his heavily lined face was dominated by an aquiline nose and warm eyes that shone with earnest sincerity. Although he was reserved, new acquaintances invariably thought him modest, friendly, restlessly intelligent, eloquent, and persuasive.
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Dickinson was born into an affluent Quaker family in Talbot County, Maryland. His father was a lawyer, magistrate, tobacco planter, and land baron who own owned more than sixteen thousand acres. When tobacco prices collapsed in the 1740s, the Dickinsons moved to Kent, Delaware, and shifted to grain production. Most of John’s youth was spent at Poplar Hill, a handsome three thousand-acre estate not far from Philadelphia. At age eighteen, after years of study with a tutor, he moved to the city to read law with a practicing attorney, the conventional means of becoming a lawyer in the colonies. But ambitious and well-to-do, Dickinson after three years sailed for London, where in 1754 he enrolled in the Middle Temple, the only law school in the empire. If Samuel Adams was a rarity among colonists in that he earned two degrees, Dickinson was one of only a handful of eighteenth-century Americans who was awarded a formal law degree.

Dickinson was also one of the few native-born colonists who had experienced life in the mother country. He crossed the Atlantic alive with excitement at the prospect of living in the imperial capital. At first, he admitted his “awe & reverence” at nearly every thing he encountered, but soon Dickinson grew jaded. Early in his three-year stay, he exclaimed that the English “nobility in general are the most ordinary men I ever faced.” Their prominence, he concluded, was attributable more “to fortune than to their worth.” In due time he came to believe that England was in the throes of decadence. Traditional religion was on the wane. The gentility “despised” their social inferiors. The successful colonist was “nothing” in their eyes. He came to equate English political practices with those in Rome in its last, debased days. He noted that bribery was “so common” it was a mainstay in parliamentary elections; he estimated that more than a million pounds was spent buying votes each election. “It is grown a vice here to be virtuous,” he remarked. It took Dickinson less than six months to reach the same conclusion that took the reluctant Franklin more than a decade. The “corruption of the age” had eddied into nearly every corner of English life, Dickinson thought, but the political structure in particular had become a cesspool of degeneracy. It made him yearn for his homeland. “America is, to be sure, a wilderness, & yet that wilderness to me is more pleasing” and pristine than England.
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More than anything, he hoped to keep British officials out of America, lest the venality that spawned them spread to the New World.

John Dickinson by Charles Wilson Peale, 1770. Dickinson led the faction in Congress that sought reconciliation with Great Britain. He supported the war but refused to vote for independence. (Independence National Historical Park Collection, Philadelphia)

Dickinson was disillusioned with the mother country when he returned home in 1758, but he was not a revolutionary. He plunged into his legal practice in Philadelphia, which flourished immediately. Rapidly rising to the top of his profession, he surpassed other prominent lawyers, among them Galloway, who had been practicing law for the better part of a decade before Dickinson embarked on his legal career. Like Galloway, Dickinson became a member of several prestigious Philadelphia clubs and quickly entered politics. He served first in the Delaware assembly before being elected to Pennsylvania’s legislature in 1762. He entered it together with Franklin, who had just returned from his initial long stay in London seeking to alter proprietary practices.

During his first year in the assembly, Dickinson sided with Franklin and Galloway on most issues. In fact, Dickinson’s background was so remarkably similar to Galloway’s that the two initially got along well enough. Only two years separated them, and both hailed from Quaker families that had moved in the same year from the same part of Maryland to Kent, Delaware. However, in 1764, when Galloway was thirty-four and Dickinson was thirty-two, politics turned them into bitter enemies. The break came when the Assembly Party petitioned the king to strip the proprietors of all authority and transform Pennsylvania into a royal colony.

Dickinson was appalled by the thought of royalization. He was close to the Penns, so close that while he was in England, Thomas Penn, the proprietor of Pennsylvania, had taken him to St. James’s Palace for George II’s birthday reception. Even more, after witnessing what he thought was the dissolution throughout English society and politics, Dickinson had no wish to see the reach of the mother country extended any deeper into the affairs of the colonies. He particularly feared that the Pennsylvania assembly, which he saw as the “guardian of the public liberties” enjoyed by Pennsylvanians, would be fatally weakened should the proprietary governor be replaced by a Crown-appointed chief executive.
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During 1764, Dickinson joined what came to be known as the Proprietary Party, or New Ticket, a faction that was strongest in the western counties, whose inhabitants felt exploited by the dominant eastern counties in matters of taxation and services.

Eloquent, sophisticated, and probably the best-educated public official in the province, Dickinson almost immediately assumed the lead in the fight against Franklin and Galloway. In hot and intemperate assembly debates, Dickinson’s conservative stance presaged the position he would often take later in Congress. To Dickinson, change—almost any change—was inadvisable. He seldom wished to run the risk that accompanied making even the slightest transformation. As to royalization, Dickinson cautioned that the gamble was too great. The change might lead to the loss of those bountiful guarantees of religious freedom that Pennsylvanians had enjoyed since William Penn established the colony seventy-five years before. Freedom had been lost in ancient Rome and, more recently, in Denmark by a “neglect of … prudence,” which had resulted in the surrender of “liberties to their king,” he warned. Wariness must be the watchword of Pennsylvanians. “Power is like the
ocean
, not easily admitting limits to be fixed in it,” he asserted. In the torrid daily debates that ensued, Dickinson came close to charging that the Assembly Party’s campaign for royalization was a thinly disguised endeavor to fulfill Galloway’s and Franklin’s insatiable ambition to hold loftier offices and gain ever more power.
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Galloway responded that the Crown “shews its Limits; they are known and confined.” Only rarely, he added gingerly, has any monarch made “any Attempts … to extend them.” But an air of fatalism permeated Galloway’s retort. The Crown and Parliament were sovereign over the colonies and could do as they wished. All Americans, he said, were at the mercy of what “Our Superiors think … convenient.”
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As Franklin’s and Galloway’s Assembly Party was in the majority, the legislature adopted the petition to the king in May. Thereafter, both Galloway and Dickinson published the speeches they had delivered in the legislative battle. Both carefully excised the ill-tempered remarks they had made in the floor debate.
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As was so often the case, however, Franklin stirred the pot. In a preface to Galloway’s tract, Franklin sarcastically attacked “Mr. Dickenson”—likely deliberately misspelling his name—whom he portrayed as a parvenu who passed himself off as “a
Sage
in the Law, and an
Oracle
in Matters relating to our Constitution.”
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Dickinson responded with a second pamphlet. Though he shrank from rebuking the more popular Franklin, he went after Galloway, and in a petty and vituperative manner. He assailed Galloway’s want of “humanity and
decency
,” his “cruel” rhetoric, lack of understanding of history, faulty reasoning, “falsehoods,” and penchant for “calumnies and
conspiracies
.” Dickinson even alluded to Galloway’s allegedly “continual breaches of the rules of grammar; his utter ignorance of the English language; the
pompous obscurity
and
sputtering prolixity
reigning through every part of his piece; and his innumerable and feeble tautologies.”
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Dickinson had declared war on Galloway.

Galloway gave as good as he got, at one point portraying Dickinson as driven by a “restless thirst after promotion.”
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The acrimonious charges and countercharges brought things to the breaking point. The two squared off in a fistfight in the yard outside the Pennsylvania State House. Galloway appears to have gotten the best of it. Toward the end of the battle, he was flaying Dickinson with his cane when bystanders intervened to halt the brawl. Dickinson immediately challenged his foe to a duel, though cooler heads prevailed and further violence was averted.
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Each man thereafter refrained from further publications that defamed the other. But a combustible environment had been created, and party members on both sides joined the fray during the fall election campaign. Some who were bolder than Dickinson lashed out at Franklin, calling him a libertine devoid of moral principles, even breaking the news to the world that young William Franklin was his father’s illegitimate child. Astoundingly, when the balloting was completed in October 1764, Dickinson was reelected and both Galloway and Franklin were defeated, although their Assembly Party retained control of the legislature.
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The losers complained of election fraud, though Franklin candidly acknowledged that he and his partner had been injured among German-American voters by anti-German comments he had made. Primarily, however, Franklin and Galloway had gone down to defeat because many voters shared Dickinson’s apprehension about converting Pennsylvania into a royal colony.
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