e 8th of November 1732. He removed
with his father to Kent county, Delaware, in 1740, studied under private
tutors, read law, and in 1753 entered the Middle Temple, London.
Returning to America in 1757, he began the practice of law in
Philadelphia, was speaker of the Delaware assembly in 1760, and was a
member of the Pennsylvania assembly in 1762-1765 and again in
1770-1776.[1] He represented Pennsylvania in the Stamp Act Congress
(1765) and in the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1776, when he was
defeated owing to his opposition to the Declaration of Independence. He
then retired to Delaware, served for a time as private and later as
brigader-general in the state militia, and was again a member of the
Continental Congress (from Delaware) in 1779-1780. He was president of
the executive council, or chief executive officer, of Delaware in
1781-1782, and of Pennsylvania in 1782-1785, and was a delegate from
Delaware to the Annapolis convention of 1786 and the Federal
Constitutional convention of 1787. Dickinson has aptly been called the
"Penman of the Revolution." No other writer of the day presented
arguments so numerous, so timely and so popular. He drafted the
"Declaration of Rights" of the Stamp Act Congress, the "Petition to the
King" and the "Address to the Inhabitants of Quebec" of the Congress of
1774, and the second "Petition to the King"[2] and the "Articles of
Confederation" of the second Congress. Most influential of all, however,
were _The Letters of a Farmer in Pennsylvania_, written in 1767-1768 in
condemnation of the Townshend Acts of 1767, in which he rejected
speculative natural rights theories and appealed to the common sense of
the people through simple legal arguments. By opposing the Declaration
of Independence, he lost his popularity and was never able entirely to
regain it. As the representative of a small state, he championed the
principle of state equality in the constitutional convention, but was
one of the first to advocate the compromise, which was finally adopted,
providing for equal representation, in one house and proportional
representation in the other. He was probably influenced by Delaware
prejudice against Pennsylvania when he drafted the clause which forbids
the creation of a new state by the junction of two or more states or
parts of states without the consent of the states concerned as well as
of congress. After the adjournment of the convention he defended its
work in a series of l