As the United States prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this Saturday, one long-time scholar is marking the occasion with a decades-long mission few have joined: reasserting the critical, underrecognized role of founding father John Dickinson, the statesman and lawyer most popularly remembered for refusing to sign the Declaration of Independence.
For 25 years, Jane Calvert, a former associate professor at the University of Kentucky and founder of the John Dickinson Writings Project, which works to digitize and widely disseminate Dickinson’s complete body of work, has waged a steady campaign to rewrite the pervasive misperceptions that have shrouded the founding father for generations. “It has been a constant struggle,” Calvert says of her work to restore Dickinson’s reputation.
A native of Maryland who built his public life across Delaware and Pennsylvania, Dickinson was once counted among the most influential and revered leaders of the Revolutionary generation. In the 1760s, his *Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania* — a collection of 12 incisive essays arguing against British Parliament’s claim to the right to levy taxes on the American colonies — was widely circulated across the 13 colonies, helping unify disparate colonists around a shared political identity and collective goal. He also penned the lyrics to *The Liberty Song*, one of the new nation’s earliest and most enduring patriotic anthems, earning him the nickname “the Penman of the Revolution” among his contemporary admirers.
Yet Dickinson clung to hopes for peaceful reconciliation with Britain long after the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired at Lexington and Concord. In July 1775, he helped draft the Olive Branch Petition, a final appeal to King George III to avoid all-out war that the monarch ultimately rejected outright. When the Continental Congress cast its historic vote in favor of declaring independence in 1776, Dickinson and fellow Pennsylvania delegate Robert Morris abstained from the final vote. While Morris ultimately added his signature to the document, Dickinson chose to withhold his.
Contrary to popular framing of his choice as an act of disloyalty or opposition to independence itself, Calvert explains that Dickinson favored gradual, bloodless independence rather than immediate armed separation. He argued the young colonies were wildly unprepared for war: they lacked a standing army, a governing framework, established foreign alliances, and a domestic manufacturing base, and public opinion on independence was far from unified. Most pressing for Dickinson, Calvert says, was the absence of clear legal protections for America’s most vulnerable communities, particularly religious dissenters like the Quakers that formed a large community in his home state of Pennsylvania.
Despite his outsized early contributions to the independence movement, Dickinson’s reputation has been systematically diminished in mainstream historical and popular narratives, framed as a man of words too timid to commit to revolutionary action. At Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center, his statue stands isolated in a corner of Signers’ Hall, cast in a pensive, detached pose. Mainstream storytellers of the American Revolution, from documentary filmmaker Ken Burns to *Hamilton* creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, have largely omitted Dickinson from their retellings. When he does appear, he is often misrepresented: in the 1969 musical *1776*, he is portrayed as a smug Anglophile, while the 2008 HBO miniseries *John Adams* casts him as a weak-willed compromiser to contrast with John Adams’ uncompromising, fiery commitment to independence.
Calvert argues these portrayals are far removed from the historical record. “It’s pretty egregious,” she 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 popular media to make him appear aristocratic.”
After independence was formally declared, Dickinson never abandoned public service or aligned with British loyalists. He served in both the Pennsylvania and Delaware militias, led the drafting of the Articles of Confederation — the United States’ first governing framework after the Revolution — acted as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention where he supported the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, and held the office of president in both Delaware and Pennsylvania. Dickinson and his wife Mary also lent their name to Dickinson College, the first college chartered after U.S. independence, founded in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. When he died in 1808, then-President Thomas Jefferson eulogized him as “one of the great worthies of the revolution.”
Calvert’s advocacy has shifted some historical perspectives. Thomas Donnelly, lead scholar at the National Constitution Center, notes that Calvert’s work has deepened his own understanding of Dickinson’s contributions, speculating that the center’s isolated statue was intended to honor Dickinson’s thoughtful, scholarly approach to politics rather than sidelining him. Calvert herself argues that Dickinson deserves to be counted alongside the most celebrated founding fathers, including Adams and Jefferson, for his contributions before and after independence.
Not all historians agree with this top-tier ranking, even as they acknowledge Dickinson’s importance. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis, author of *Founding Brothers*, credits Dickinson as the leading voice of colonial resistance in the decade leading up to 1776, but argues his refusal to sign the Declaration remains a consequential mark on his legacy. Fellow Pulitzer winner Jack Rakove describes Dickinson’s 1776 position as “a quirk of his conscientious political personality” that should not overshadow his other achievements, but still places him in the second tier of founders, alongside figures like Benjamin Rush and John Jay. “Perhaps his qualms of conscience in 1776 have affected his reputation,” Rakove observes.
Dickinson himself recognized that his opposition to immediate independence had delivered a “finishing blow” to his “diminished popularity.” John Adams was among his most prominent contemporary detractors, dismissing him as a “piddling genius whose fame has been trumpeted so loudly.” By the 1840s, influential historian George Bancroft cemented his negative legacy, condemning Dickinson for how he “dulled the resentment of the people, and paralyzed the manly impulse of self-sacrificing courage,” Calvert notes.
Calvert is not alone in her defense of Dickinson. Other advocates include the late conservative commentator William Murchison, who drew on Calvert’s research for his 2013 Dickinson biography, as well as fellow historians and editors of the John Dickinson Writings Project, Ian Iverson and Nathan R. Kozuskanich. Unexpectedly, Calvert even counts the creators of the hit animated comedy *South Park* among the few popular storytellers who have portrayed Dickinson accurately. In a 2003 episode set amid the Iraq War, main character Eric Cartman travels back to 1776 to witness the independence debate, and frames Dickinson’s principled opposition to founding a nation through war as a parallel to contemporary anti-war protests. “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. 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!”