The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson, vol. 1 inaugurates a multivolume documentary edition that will, for the first time ever, provide the complete collection of everything Dickinson published on public affairs over the course of his life. The documents include essays, articles, broadsides, resolutions, petitions, declarations, constitutions, regulations, legislation, proclamations, songs and odes. Among them are many of the seminal state papers produced by the first national congresses and conventions. Also included are correspondences between Dickinson and some of the key figures of his era. This edition should raise Dickinson to his rightful place among America’s founding fathers, rivaled in reputation only by Benjamin Franklin before 1776. Dickinson was celebrated throughout the colonies, as well as in England and France, as the great American spokesman for liberty, and the documents in this edition evidence his tireless political work and unmatched corpus. Distributed for the University of Delaware Press
During the years 1764 through 1766, John Dickinson became a leading figure in the Pennsylvania Assembly and in the growing American resistance to unjust British taxation. The documents in this volume show that, in both roles, he sought to protect the fundamental rights of ordinary Americans. In the 1764 Assembly, after working to punish those responsible for the slaughter of peaceful Indians, Dickinson challenged Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Galloway in their plan to abolish Pennsylvania’s unique Quaker constitution that secured liberty of conscience and place the colony under the control of the Crown. Then, in 1765, he served as primary draftsman at the Stamp Act Congress in New York, producing the first official American documents of the Revolutionary Era. In his private capacity, Dickinson continued to write through 1765 and 1766, publishing, among other documents, the first practical advice to Americans on how to resist Great Britain. The present volume also contains draft legislation, fascinating case notes from his legal practice, and personal correspondence.
John Dickinson’s entry into public life in Delaware and Pennsylvania is a highlight of the ninety-eight documents written over four years printed in Volume Two of The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson. The volume opens with Dickinson’s legal notes as he established himself as one of the most prominent and learned lawyers in colonial British North America. His cases dealt with, among other issues, interpretation of wills, disputes over land, sailors suing for wages, a fine on a Quaker who refused military service, and a notorious murder in a prominent Philadelphia family. It concludes with Dickinson offering thoughtful advice to a young man who was considering the arduous work in becoming a lawyer. “I think,” he wrote, “those must be infinitely the most happy, whose fatigues are softend by a conscious Benevolence of mind wishing & endeavouring to [pro]mote the Happiness of others as well as their own.” Dickinson’s hard work on behalf of his clients brought him success in other areas of his public life. In October 1759, he was elected to his first public position as a representative for Kent County, Del., the following year he was elevated to the position of speaker, and in 1762, he became a representative for Philadelphia County, Pa. As a legislator in two colonies, learning his craft as a global war unfolded, he contributed to bills on military and defense, Indian relations, infrastructure improvements and city management, and served on various committees. The death of George II occasioned debates over laws and judges, in which Dickinson participated. This era concludes with Dickinson playing a central role in managing the unfolding Paxton Riots, in which frontiersmen massacred peaceful Indians and threatened the Quaker leadership of Pennsylvania. In private, Dickinson lost the two most prominent male figures in his life in 1760, his father, Samuel, and soon thereafter, his mentor, colleague, and friend, John Moland. In honor of Moland, Dickinson published a poem and became a proxy head to Moland’s large family. Though his extant correspondence during this period is small, he exchanged letters with Mary Cadwalader Dickinson, Israel Pemberton, William Allason, George Read, Thomas McKean, and others. Perhaps most significant, he wrote a lengthy, unpublished essay on the flag-of-truce trade and also maintained commonplace books as he considered his place within the British Empire, opening up the next phase in Dickinson’s life as a leader of the resistance against Britain. Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
The 1760s were a period of great agitation in the American colonies. The policies implemented by the British resulted in an outcry from the Americans that inaugurated the radical ideas leading to the Revolution in 1775. John Dickinson led the way in the "war of ink" between America and Britain, which saw over 1,000 pamphlets and essays written both for and against British policy. King George III, the new British monarch, wrote extensively on the role of Britain in the colonial world and sought to find a middle way between the quickly rising feelings on both sides of the debate. This book tells the story of this radical decade as it occurred in writing, drawing from primary sources and rarely seen exchanges.
The 19th–century American poet’s uncensored and breathtaking letters, poems, and letter-poems to her sister-in-law and childhood friend. For the first time, selections from Emily Dickinson’s thirty-six year correspondence with her childhood friend, neighbor, and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, are compiled in a single volume. Open Me Carefully invites a dramatic new understanding of Emily Dickinson’s life and work, overcoming a century of censorship and misinterpretation. For the millions of readers who love Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Open Me Carefully brings new light to the meaning of the poet’s life and work. Gone is Emily as lonely spinster; here is Dickinson in her own words, passionate and fully alive. Praise for Open Me Carefully “With spare commentary, Smith . . . and Hart . . . let these letters speak for themselves. Most important, unlike previous editors who altered line breaks to fit their sense of what is poetry or prose, Hart and Smith offer faithful reproductions of the letters’ genre-defying form as the words unravel spectacularly down the original page.” —Renee Tursi, The New York Times Book Review
In The Writings of Warner Mifflin: Forgotten Quaker Abolitionist of the Revolutionary Era Gary B. Nash and Michael R. McDowell present the correspondence, petitions and memorials to state and federal legislative bodies, semi-autobiographical essays, and other materials of the key figure in the U.S. abolitionist movement between the end of the American Revolution and the Jefferson presidency. Virtually unknown to Americans—schoolbooks ignore him, academic historians barely nod at him; the public knows him not at all--Mifflin has been brought to life in Gary B. Nash’s recent biography, Warner Mifflin: Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist (2017). This volume provides an array of insights into the mind of a conscience-bound pacifist Quaker who became instrumental in making Kent County, Delaware a bastion of free blacks liberated from slavery and a seedbed of a reparationist doctrine that insisted that enslavers owed “restitution” to manumitted Africans and their descendants. Mifflin's writings also show how he became the most skilled lobbyist of the antislavery campaigners who haunted the legislative chambers of North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania as well as the halls of the Continental Congress and the First and Second Federal Congresses. An opening introduction and introductions to each of the five chronologically arranged parts of the book provide context for the documents and a narrative of the life of this remarkable American.
"Early November on the Eastern Shore of Maryland is a fine time of year. The breezes off the Chesapeake Bay are sufficiently cool to turn the leaves vibrant but still mild enough to give hope for an Indian summer. In the 18th century fishermen could catch blue crab for a few more weeks; enslaved people, indentured servants, and farmers sowed the winter wheat; and women poured candles to see them through the impending winter. Although planters had long grown tobacco here, by 1732, the year John Dickinson was born, grains were more profitable as tobacco prices stagnated. Public tobacco houses still dotted the landscape, and the acrid smell of the drying weed seeped from black barns and mingled with the pungent scent of the Bay"--
