“The last Words which ever passed between Mr. Dickinson and me”?

The discovery of John Dickinson’s 28 Oct 1775 letter to David Barclay, quoted yesterday, lets us assess his thoughts on John Adams’s private criticism of him in an intercepted letter earlier that year.

As Jane E. Calvert writes in the July 2026 William & Mary Quarterly, it should also make us reassess Adams’s recollection of how he came to make that criticism. We know that other passages from Adams’s nineteenth-century memoir contradict contemporaneous sources, or at least aren’t supported by them.

According to Adams writing in 1805, the two men fell out during the Continental Congress’s debate over the Olive Branch Petition in the spring or early summer of 1775:

I was opposed to it, of course; and made an Opposition to it, in as long a Speech as I commonly made, not having ever been remarkable for very long Harrangues, in Answer to all the Arguments which had been urged. . . .

At this moment I was called out to the State house Yard, very much to my regret, to some one who had business with me. I took my hat and went out of the Door of Congress Hall: Mr. Dickinson observed me and darted out after me. He broke out upon me in a most abrupt and extraordinary manner. In as violent a passion as he was capable of feeling, and with an Air, Countenance and Gestures as rough and haughty as if I had been a School Boy and he the Master, he vociferated out, “What is the Reason Mr. Adams, that you New Englandmen oppose our Measures of Reconciliation…[?]”

I answered him very coolly. “Mr. Dickenson, there are many Things that I can very chearfully sacrifice to Harmony and even to Unanimity: but I am not to be threatened into an express Adoption or Approbation of Measures which my Judgment reprobates. Congress must judge, and if they pronounce against me, I must submit, as if they determine against You, You ought to acquiesce.”—These were the last Words which ever passed between Mr. Dickinson and me in private.

If Adams had made a firm, direct speech against the Olive Branch Petition, and Dickinson had gotten so upset about it, why would Dickinson be surprised to read Adams criticizing him weeks later? Why did Dickinson write that before the intercepted letter the Adams cousins had always “behav’d to Me…with the…greatest Marks of friendly Respect,” expressing “the most silken softness of public pretensions”?

Of course, a big part of the problem was Adams’s rude language, calling Dickinson a “piddling Genius” whose measures made the Congress appear “silly.” That went beyond a collegial disagreement over policy. Dickinson recognized the two men “differed in Sentiments” but thought they were still friendly and recognized they were all trying to solve the same problem.

Dickinson’s surprise might have been the result of John Adams’s own actions up to that point. He probably didn’t speak out as strongly as he remembered decades later. Calvert points out how Adams signed the Olive Branch Petition in July. Of course, that’s consistent with his later statement “Congress must judge, and if they pronounce against me, I must submit.” 

At the same time, I see indications that Dickinson and Adams were talking past each other on “independence” and what that really meant.

TOMORROW: Cross-purposes.

“He passed without moving his Hat, or Head or Hand”

The part of the newly released documents from John Dickinson getting the most attention, including a news story in the New York Times, is his detailed proposal to reconcile the British government and the colonies at the Continental Congress before they reached a permanent breaking point.

But of course I’m drawn to the juicy interpersonal gossip. Dickinson wrote the second of those letters after John Adams’s nasty private comment about him had leaked. That letter reveals Dickinson’s feelings about that slight as well as his perspective on what led up to it.

The July 2026 issue of the William & Mary Quarterly contains an essay by Dr. Jane E. Calvert about this episode. She points out that historians have relied on Adams’s recounting of the event in his memoir, even while acknowledging those recollections can’t be confirmed and flatter Adams in consistent ways. (Calvert and Jonathan Gienapp’s article about the Dickinson documents offers an accessible précis of her essay.)

I wrote about Adams’s indiscreet remark back in 2014. In short, Adams gave the young lawyer Benjamin Hichborn two letters to carry home to Massachusetts. Hichborn let those papers fall into British hands. Gen. Thomas Gage had the texts published in Margaret Draper’s Boston News-Letter on 17 Aug 1775.

Adams’s 24 July letter to James Warren included these lines:

In Confidence,—I am determined to write freely to you this Time.—A certain great Fortune and piddling Genius whose Fame has been trumpeted so loudly, has given a silly Cast to our whole Doings…

Those lines made their way back to Philadelphia. No delegate to the Congress had more money and fame combined than Dickinson. (Benjamin Franklin was more famous but not as wealthy; a few men may have commanded bigger estates, but none had gained more respect as a political writer than Dickinson the “Farmer.”) So everyone knew who Adams was referring to.

On 16 September, Adams wrote in his diary:

Walking to the Statehouse this Morning, I met Mr. Dickinson, on Foot in Chesnut Street. We met, and passed near enough to touch Elbows. He passed without moving his Hat, or Head or Hand. I bowed and pulled off my Hat. He passed hautily by. The Cause of his Offence, is the Letter no doubt which Gage has printed in Drapers Paper.

That was a “cut direct.” It showed Dickinson was upset, but he was making that clear by not saying anything.

Forty years later, Adams insisted:

• He wrote his 24 July letter only after Dickinson had tried to browbeat him and other “New Englandmen” into not arguing against the Congress’s Olive Branch Petition, and
• He didn’t write that letter anyway. Or “not exactly.” The royal authorities had altered his words before publication.

Adams’s letter doesn’t survive, as far as anyone knows, so we can’t say for sure whether the newspaper text was edited. But we do know Adams expressed some similar sentiments in other private letters at the time. And he never specified which of the published words he hadn’t penned.

Thanks to the new documents, we now have John Dickinson’s view of the dispute, written in the year that it happened rather than decades later.

TOMORROW: The other side.

Dickinson Seeking “a happy & permanent Reconciliation”

The William & Mary Quarterly had a big Sestercentennial scoop in its July 2026 issue—so big that it made those newly discovered documents available online for a limited time ahead of publication. 

The documents are two long 1775 letters and an enclosure from Pennsylvania politician John Dickinson to David Barclay, a British merchant and banker (shown here).

In 1775 the Continental Congress assigned Dickinson the task of drafting the Olive Branch Petition. He also reworked Thomas Jefferson’s prose in the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms. The first text sought a reconciliation with the Crown in traditional fashion, the second explained publicly why the young war was justified.

Together those texts show the balancing act Dickinson was trying to pull off. He believed in the American resistance to Parliament’s new measures, in which he had played a leading role, and he also believed in the danger of splitting completely from Britain.

Dickinson dated the first of the newly surfaced letters on 5 Aug 1775. It shared his (not always accurate) description of the war so far, emphasizing how the Crown was unlikely to prevail without both sides suffering great harm. Then came his draft bill for reworking the constitutional relationship between Britain and its colonies and calming people’s “Fears & Jealousies.”

Those two documents were written out by a secretary for Dickinson’s edits and signature. The second letter, finished 28 October, is in Dickinson’s own messy, reconsidered writing. By then, though he didn’t know it, George III and the government had dismissed the Olive Branch Petition without looking at it, declared all the colonies at the Congress to be in rebellion, and promised a forceful response. Dickinson’s proposal had arrived too late to do any good.

According to the New York Times, these letters remained in the Barclay family, coming into the hands of his great-great-great-great-great-nephew, Humphrey Barclay. In 2024 he showed them to book and manuscript specialist Donovan Rees, who realized their importance. Dickinson’s initiative isn’t mentioned in any other source—both he and Barclay were working backchannels, so they kept their correspondence quiet. Dickinson even put a postscript on the first letter asking Barclay not to print it or give anyone a copy.

On behalf of the Barclay family, Rees offered to sell the three documents to the U.S. Library of Congress, but it didn’t meet the asking price. (It’s unclear when that discussion took place, but the Library of Congress has been under dire pressure at times in the last couple of years. There’s an ongoing legal dispute over whether the President’s criminal-defense lawyer and current acting U.S. Attorney General is also the acting Librarian of Congress.)

The documents were then purchased by Harvard professor Eric Nelson, author of The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding among other books. Nelson generously makes manuscripts in his collection available to researchers.

Prof. Jonathan Gienapp of Stanford and Dr. Jane E. Calvert of the John Dickinson Writings Project prepared transcripts of the documents for analysis and publication. The William & Mary Quarterly organized a forum of scholars to discuss their implications in short essays appearing in that July issue.

For a good primer on these Dickinson letters, see Calvert and Gienapp’s article “The Secret Effort to Prevent the Revolution.”

TOMORROW: Hurt feelings.

“You will be very apt to hang separately”

Before leaving the topic of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I want to address one more popular anecdote about that event. That’s the story of Benjamin Franklin saying, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

The Course of Human Events blog recently listed that story among “a number of quotations from the signing for which we have no evidence.” Richard Samuelson’s Weekly Standard article seems more certain of the tale, though without citing a reliable source.

I agree that we have no strong evidence linking this witty remark to the day of the signing, 2 Aug 1776. Nor to Franklin, much as we like to ascribe witty sayings to him.

But in 1811, retired Continental Army officer Alexander Graydon (1752-1818) wrote in his Memoirs of His Own Time about a former lieutenant governor of colonial Pennsylvania:

Mr. Richard Penn, having no official motives for reserve, was even upon terms of familiarity with some of the most thorough-going whigs, such as General [Charles] Lee and others:

An evidence of this was the pleasantry ascribed to him, on occasion of a member of Congress, one day observing to his compatriots, that at all events “they must hang together:”

“If you do not, gentlemen,” said Mr. Penn, “I can tell you that you will be very apt to hang separately.”

Graydon didn’t claim to have heard this story directly, but he was in Philadelphia in 1774 and 1775 during the early Continental Congress meetings. Penn left the city in the middle of 1775, carrying the Olive Branch Petition to Britain. He settled there and later became a Member of Parliament. In 1808 Penn returned to Philadelphia for a visit, an occasion when this story might have been repeated.

Thus, we have no contemporaneous or first-hand evidence of Penn voicing this witticism. But seeing it in print as early as 1811, when several members of the Continental Congress were still alive and able to respond, constitutes some pretty good evidence in its favor. The exchange would have had to happen before mid-1775, however, and Franklin didn’t get to deliver the punch line.