The Genius of America Read Online Free PDF Page A

against these burdens. More important, in terms of the intellectual evolution of America’s ideas of government and public virtue, he lectured the colonies themselves for their poor response to these acts, particularly the Restraining Act. They had been selfish, he believed, refusing to support each other. “He certainly is not a wise man, who folds his arms, and reposes himself at home, viewing, with unconcern, the flames that have invaded his neighbor’s house.” This lack of concern of one colony for another, one group of persons for, echoed what Dickinson believed had undermined liberty in both England and in all of history’s republics. The colonies needed to be warned that selfishness, failure to stand together, and failure to display public virtue were threats to liberty.
    Dickinson’s medium was a series of letters, titled “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies.” Dickinson was a farmer in only the loosest sense. He was actually one of the largest property owners in Pennsylvania, wealth he inherited on his father’s death in 1760. But that detail did not interfere with the enormous impact of his writings.
    First published in the Pennsylvania Chronicle between December 2, 1767, and February 15, 1768, these letters proved so popular that they were quickly reprinted in all but four of the twenty-three colonial newspapers and in pamphlet form. They contained a sharp critique of British policy and the deterioration of British politics. But more, they are a brilliantly articulate record of the belief in the importance of public virtue that was taking hold among the intellectual classes of revolutionary-era America. In his letter of January 15, 1768, he described the fatal vice of the English people that most Americans believed was destroying English freedom:
    My Dear Countrymen,
    Â Â Â Â Some states have lost their liberty by particular accidents : But this calamity is generally owing to the decay of virtue . A people is traveling fast to destruction, when individuals consider their interests as distinct from those of the public. Such notions are fatal to their country, and to themselves. Yet how many are there, so weak and sordid as to think they perform all the office of life , if they earnestly endeavor to encrease their own wealth, power , and credit, without the least regard for the society, under the protection of which they live.
    A Farmer
    T HE B REAK WITH E NGLAND
    Over the next ten years, repeated efforts by Parliament in London to tax and regulate the internal relations of the colonies convinced many Americans that Dickinson was right about the decay of British political society and the threat of that decay to Americans. John Adams observed that official corruption in England was a “Cancer” that had become “too deeply rooted, and too far spread to be cured by anything short of cutting it out entire.” In fact, this notion of the corrupting influence of British politics was so strong that it helped scuttle an effort to find a middle ground to avert separation. In 1774, Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania proposed, in effect, a two-house legislative system. Parliament in London and a national legislature in America would act together on issues concerning the colonies. Parliament would continue to have authority over America, but the colonists could no longer be taxed without the consent of their own representatives as well. The compromise drew considerable support in the Continental Congress, the single house assembly of state representatives that governed America from independence through ratification of the Constitution and the establishment of the new government. But Patrick Henry rose in opposition. This solution would accomplish little, he said. “We shall liberate our Constituents from a corrupt House of Commons, but throw them into the Arms of an American Legislature that may be bribed by that Nation