John Dickinson Quotes
With hearts fortified with these animating reflections, we most solemnly, before God and the world, declare, that, exerting the utmost energy of those powers, which our beneficent Creator hath graciously bestowed upon us, the arms we have compelled by our enemies to assume, we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverance employ for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved to die freemen rather than to live as slaves.
Dickinson, John, and Thomas Jefferson. A Declaration by the Representatives of the United Colonies of North-America, Now Met in General Congress at Philadelphia, Setting Forth the Causes and Necessity of Their Taking Up Arms. William and Thomas Bradford, 1775, p. 13.
Lafayette was so engrossed with fighting in the Revolution that he really did not have a true picture of the total American attitude on slavery. He had fallen in love with the American idea and ideal based on the writings of intellectuals like Paine and Jefferson. Most of his time in America was spent with George Washington. The few American leaders he talked with were Northerners and/or intellectuals who were not rabid enthusiasts for slavery or were opposed. Slavery was so contradictory to the Declaration of Independence, Lafayette assumed that after the war was won and America was independent, the Americans would surely abolish slavery. After the Constitutional Convention many people were disappointed that the delegates had given in to the Southern slavery bloc. None more so than Lafayette.
John Dickinson, a Founding Father of the United States, was a solicitor and politician from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington, Delaware, known as the "Penman of the Revolution" for his twelve Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, published individually in 1767 and 1768. As a member of the First Continental Congress, where he was a signee to the Continental Association, Dickinson drafted most of the 1774 Petition to the King, and then, as a member of the Second Continental Congress, wrote the 1775 Olive Branch Petition. When these two attempts to negotiate with King George III of Great Britain failed, Dickinson reworked Thomas Jefferson's language and wrote the final draft of the 1775 Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms. When Congress then decided to seek independence from Great Britain, Dickinson served on the committee that wrote the Model Treaty, and then wrote the first draft of the 1776–1777 Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.
