letters from a farmer in pennsylvania · dickinson

John Dickinson's twelve letters of 1767 and 1768, the most widely read American argument before the Revolution, answered the Townshend Acts by distinguishing Parliament's power to regulate trade from a power to tax for revenue, which the colonies had never granted. Letter V presses the point that a people taxed without consent are slaves, in the measured voice of a loyal subject.

Read Letter V, with the Edenton Tea Party resolves and the print of the Society of Patriotic Ladies (1774 and 1775), Phillis Wheatley's poem to Washington and their correspondence (1775), and Abigail and John Adams's 'Remember the Ladies' letters (1776), in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.