Abstract
[William Murchison] gives us a surprisingly riveting narrative, a considerable achievement in light of the relatively economical supply of facts about Dickinson, and he manages to weave into his account a great many quotations from Dickinson that give us a very concrete sense of the man's mind. Indeed, Murchison shows with especial care and poignancy how much of a loss to the American conservative intellectual tradition, and to conservative ways of reading the Declaration and the Constitution, our neglect of Dickinson has been. Surprisingly, even Russell Kirk chose not to feature Dickinson in his account of American conservatism's usable past, The Conservative Mind, preferring instead to highlight Dickinson's frequent foe, [John Adams]. Had Kirk chosen otherwise, he would have found in Dickinson an even more kindred, if perhaps less loquacious, spirit. As the historian Forrest McDonald has speculated, [John Dickinson], who was admired even more than Jefferson for the eloquence of his pen and was an older and more seasoned man, might well have been the one invited to draft the Declaration-if only he had signaled a willingness to "swallow his scruples and voted for independence." Had that happened, McDonald continued, the Declaration "would have been based upon English constitutional history rather than, as was Jefferson's, upon natural-rights theory-with vastly different implications." The traditionalist-conservative tendencies of Dickinson's mind are made especially evident in Murchison's account of his approach to the Constitution. Which provides the appropriate moment to mention the second thing for which Dickinson continues to be known: his words, uttered at the Constitutional Convention on August 13 and transcribed by Madison, that "Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us." Those words are well-known, but what is less often appreciated is the deeply historical and religious framework out of which they emerged, a framework that is perhaps most clearly visible in the Fabius letters- a text that should be added, along with the "Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer," to the canon above, to be read in conversation with the Federalist. Dickinson had high praise for "the judgement of the most enlightened among mankind, confirmed by multiplied experiments," and accordingly his arguments are not primarily theoretical but based upon historical examples, prudential wisdom, and religious conviction. Dickinson carried forward into the constitutional era a great deal of the moral concern expressed by many of the anti-Federalists, a concern grounded in classical republicanism, and he thereby provides a good example of a major debate that remained-and, one hopes, remains- contested. He did not celebrate the Constitution as a well-oiled Rube Goldberg mechanism, cleverly designed to make ambition counteract ambition and render virtue optional, but as a "plain-dealing work," designed to give "the will of the people a decisive influence over the whole, and over all the parts." He clearly linked the flourishing of political liberty with a high regard for "that perfect liberty better described in the Holy Scriptures." His sense of history, prudence, and religion all came together in these words, placed in the mouth of Fabius: "History sacred and profane tells us, that, corruption of manners sinks nations into slavery." The sole antidote to such corruption was "soundness of sense and honesty of heart."