Letters From A Farmer In Pennsylvania

Why People Still Try to Find and Read the Letters From A Farmer In Pennsylvania

If you are digging into colonial American history, you will eventually hit the Letters From A Farmer In Pennsylvania. They are a series of essays written by John Dickinson in 1767 and 1768, originally published in the Pennsylvania Gazette and other newspapers. They argued against the Townshend Acts and became one of the most widely read and reprinted pieces of political writing before the Revolutionary War. I have spent more time than I care to admit trying to get clean copies of these, tracking down which newspaper printed what version, and figuring out where the digital archives actually line up with the original text. The text itself is public domain, which means it shows up everywhere. The problem is that everywhere means it also shows up in inconsistent, fragmented, or poorly edited forms. If you want something clean, the best place to start is the Library of Congress or the Avalon Project at Yale. Both host the complete letters with the dates and contexts roughly correct. The standard collection runs through eleven letters, with some editions splitting them differently. I prefer the Avalon Project version because the pagination lines up with most academic citations, which matters if you are writing a paper or preparing materials for a class. Project Gutenberg has the text too, but I have found their edition sometimes mashes letters together or skips transitional notes that appear in the original newspaper publication. It works fine for casual reading. If you need anything cited properly, go straight to the academic sources.

What the Letters Are Actually Arguing

Dickinson built his case around a single constitutional question: could the British Parliament tax the colonies without their consent through representative bodies? His answer was no, and he spent the majority of the eleven letters laying out why the Townshend Duties violated established British constitutional principles. He did not argue for separation. He argued that the colonies were loyal subjects whose rights as Englishmen were being stripped away through a legal fiction. One thing most beginners miss is that Dickinson was deliberately borrowing from the English radical Whig tradition, especially the writings of John Locke and the observations of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke. He was not inventing a new political theory. He was reframing existing arguments to fit the colonial situation. That is why the rhetoric sounds familiar if you have read any Eighteenth Century English political philosophy. It was supposed to.

The Practical Problem I Ran Into

When I was putting together study materials a few years ago, I needed to verify the exact order and dating of each letter against the original newspaper issues. The online collections sometimes list them in numerical order, but the actual publication sequence in the Gazette and the Boston Evening-Post did not always match. Letter IV, for instance, appeared in the Boston paper before Letter III in some printings, and the dates shifted depending on which city you looked at. I solved it by pulling the original scans from the Early American Newspapers database through my university library access. It took about two hours to cross-reference every date, but it saved me from citing the wrong sequence in my notes. If you do not have library access, the Avalon Project includes a helpful chronological appendix that flags the publication variations. These letters are long. Each one runs several thousand words in Eighteenth Century prose. The structure is repetitive by design because Dickinson was trying to reach multiple audiences at once. He repeated core arguments across different letters so that a reader in Georgia and a reader in New Hampshire would both grasp the same point even if they skipped around. Start with Letter I and Letter II. Those two establish his entire framework about the relationship between the colonies and Parliament. Once you understand that foundation, the later letters are just applications of it to specific provisions of the Townshend Acts. Pay attention to Letter VII. That is where Dickinson makes the most forceful argument about the right to petition, and it became a direct reference point for colonial petitions in 1774. It is short, it is dense, and it is the one most people quote when they reference Dickinson.

Common Mistakes People Make With These Letters

The biggest one is assuming Dickinson was a revolutionary in 1768. He was not. He was a moderate who wanted reconciliation within the British constitutional framework. He spent the next decade trying to prevent exactly the war that his letters helped set in motion. Reading him as a proto-revolutionary gives you the wrong picture of what he was trying to accomplish. He was trying to keep the empire intact while forcing Parliament to back down on taxation. The second mistake is treating the Letters From A Farmer In Pennsylvania as purely American writing. Dickinson was writing in a distinctly British rhetorical tradition. The phrases, the sentence structures, the appeals to precedent — they all come from English legal and political discourse. If you judge the style by modern standards, it reads as slow and circular. It is not. It was crafted for an audience that expected legal argumentation to unfold step by step with citations woven into the prose.

When These Letters Do Not Help You

If you are looking for evidence of unified colonial opinion in 1767, these letters overstate it. Dickinson himself was careful not to claim he spoke for all the colonies. He wrote as a Pennsylvania farmer, and the pen name was partly chosen to give the letters broader credibility across regional lines. But the Massachusetts and Virginia responses to the Townshend Acts developed along somewhat different tracks. The Letters were influential, yes, but they were one voice in a much larger conversation. If you need a comprehensive view of colonial thought, you will need to supplement with letters from Samuel Adams, the Virginia House of Burgesses resolutions, and the correspondence between merchants in different ports. Letter I — Introduction to the constitutional argument, published November 1767
Letter II — Parliament's authority does not extend to internal colonial governance
Letter III — The distinction between trade regulation and revenue taxation
Letter IV — The danger of allowing Parliament to tax without consent
Letter V — Why the colonial assemblies are the proper taxing bodies
Letter VI — The hypocrisy of claiming Parliament has unlimited power
Letter VII — The right to petition and the role of popular resistance
Letter VIII — Economic arguments against the duties
Letter IX — The practical consequences of compliance
Letter X — Warnings about standing armies and civil liberty
Letter XI — Final appeals to British justice and colonial unity Some editions merge or split letters differently, so the numbering can shift by one in certain printings. Always check the opening line to confirm which letter you are reading rather than relying on the number alone.

Bottom Line

The Letters From A Farmer In Pennsylvania remain one of the most important colonial texts for understanding how the American resistance to British taxation was intellectually constructed. They are not flashy. They are not dramatic. They are careful, deliberate arguments that built the constitutional case for independence before anyone was talking about independence. If you want to understand the intellectual path from the Stamp Act crisis to the Declaration of Independence, you have to read them. Start with a clean edition, read the first two letters slowly, and then move through the rest at a pace that lets you track Dickinson's reasoning. The prose is dense but fair, and the ideas still matter.