NEW YORK — For a quarter century, Jane Calvert has been on a mission shared by few scholars of the Revolutionary War era. She has championed a founder mostly remembered, when remembered at all, as the man who wouldn't sign the Declaration of Independence — the lawyer and statesman John Dickinson.
“It has been a constant struggle,” says Calvert, a former associate professor at the University of Kentucky who has written often about Dickinson and is the founder of the John Dickinson Writings Project, which aims to make his works widely available.
For much of the country, the 250th anniversary of independence on Saturday is a time for celebrating and debating the country's birth. But for Calvert and others, it's also a moment to challenge the lingering image of a man who at times has been ignored, ridiculed or literally cast aside.
He was the Revolution's ‘penman’
Dickinson, a Maryland native who spent much of his life in Delaware and Pennsylvania, was once regarded as among the most important and inspiring founders. His “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” a dozen missives published in the 1760s, were widely read attacks against Britain's right to tax the colonies that helped give Americans a shared sense of identity and purpose. He even wrote the words to one of the country’s first patriotic anthems, “The Liberty Song.”
Admirers would call him the “Penman of the Revolution.”
But Dickinson also sought peace with Britain well after the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. In July 1775, he helped compose the Olive Branch Petition, a call for reconciliation that King George III essentially ignored. When the Continental Congress voted for independence in July 1776, Dickinson and fellow Pennsylvanian Robert Morris abstained. While Morris later signed the Declaration, Dickinson withheld his name.
“He wasn’t opposed to independence per se, but he thought it should happen gradually and without bloodshed,” Calvert says.
“America wasn’t prepared in any sense, including militarily, and there was no constitution, no foreign allies, and no domestic manufacturing. Neither was there was unanimity on the independence question,” Calvert adds. “But as critical as all these things were, Dickinson’s main concern was that there were no legal protections for the most vulnerable Americans. He was most worried about religious dissenters, particularly the Quakers in Pennsylvania.”
History downgraded him
Dickinson's reputation as a man more of words than of action has long outlasted him.
At the Signers' Hall exhibit in Philadelphia's National Constitution Center, the Dickinson statue is placed apart in a corner, sculpted in a contemplative pose. Popular storytellers of the American Revolution, whether documentary maker Ken Burns or "Hamilton" playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, tend to leave Dickinson out of the narrative. He is otherwise a smug Anglophile in the musical "1776," and, in the 2008 HBO miniseries about John Adams, he is portrayed as the compromising foil to Adams' militant righteousness.
“It’s pretty egregious,” Calvert says. “He is depicted as a scowling and sunken-eyed naysayer of the Patriot cause. We know that he was a compelling and charismatic figure, well-liked among his colleagues and seen as a devoted Patriot leader. He did not wear a wig, don fancy clothes, walk with a cane or speak with a Scottish brogue — all things added in the show to make him appear aristocratic.”
Once independence was declared, Dickinson did not retire from public life or side with the British, but served in the Pennsylvania and Delaware militias. He helped draft the June 1776 Articles of Confederation, supported the U.S. Constitution as a Delaware delegate and served as the president of Delaware and of Pennsylvania. Dickinson and his wife, Mary, were the namesakes for the first college — based in Carlisle, Pennsylvania — chartered after the founding of the United States. When he died, in 1808, then-President Thomas Jefferson called him "one of the great worthies of the revolution."
Praising his contributions both before and after independence, Calvert believes Dickinson should be placed alongside Adams, Jefferson and others among the elite of founders. Thomas Donnelly, lead scholar at the Constitution Center, is among those who say Calvert has broadened his understanding of Dickinson (he speculates that the center's Dickinson statue was meant as a tribute to his “scholarly nature”).
Some historians see it differently. Joseph Ellis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Founding Brothers,” credits Dickinson as the leading voice of resistance in the decade leading up to 1776 but laments his decision not “to take the last step.” Fellow Pulitzer winner Jack Rakove says that Dickinson’s thinking in 1776 was a “quirk of his conscientious political personality” that shouldn't diminish his other achievements.
But he still wouldn't rank him in the first tier. Instead, he places Dickinson just below, alongside such figures as Benjamin Rush and John Jay. Says Rakove: “Perhaps his qualms of conscience in 1776 have affected his reputation.”
Thank you, ‘South Park’
Dickinson himself would lament that his opposition to the Declaration was a “finishing blow” to his “diminished popularity.”
Adams was among his detractors, dismissing him as a “piddling genius whose fame has been trumpeted so loudly.” In the 1840s, Calvert says, historian George Bancroft helped seal Dickinson's legacy by condemning him for how he “dulled the resentment of the people, and paralyzed the manly impulse of self-sacrificing courage.”
Calvert has not been alone in defending Dickinson. His other advocates range from the late conservative commentator William Murchison, author of a 2013 biography that cites Calvert's research, to such historians-Dickinson Project editors as Ian Iverson and Nathan R. Kozuskanich. Calvert even praises the creators of “South Park” for an episode aired in 2003, during the Iraq War. As supporters and protesters clash, Cartman travels back to 1776, witnesses the independence debate and finds parallels to the present.
“It’s the only pop culture representation of Dickinson I’ve seen that portrays him as being motivated by principle — that we shouldn’t found a country based on war,” Calvert says.
“Here Dickinson is the forefather of those antiwar protesters,” Calvert says. “Whether he would have gone so far as to say that the reasons for the Revolution were trumped up, I don’t know. Maybe. In any case, there is a lot to like!”
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The story has been updated to correct that Dickinson helped draft the June 1776 Articles of Confederation, not the post-independence Articles of Confederation.
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