William P. Murchison

This entry in the "Lives of the Founders" aka Forgotten Founders series is less forgotten than some of the others, but as the author repeatedly protests, Dickinson is popularly remembered chifly for his opposition to the Declaration of Independence, as dramatized in the musical "1776" and the TV series on John Adams. Murchison argues rather heatedly that Dickinson (unlike his sometime Pennsylvania political rival Joseph Galloway) was not against independence --he simply felt July 2, 1776 was show more not the right time for declaring it, given that the colonies were not yet well organized to fight and France was not yet willig to help tem (as the agonizing wait of the next 2 years proved).
Serious scholars know him better as author of the "Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer" which played a major role in making the American case against British tax policy before the revolution and creating the climate which led to the revolution.
After the crisis over the declaration, Dickinson served briefly in the American army in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, then was governor of both Delaware and Pennsylvania (briefly simultaneously, though mostly earlier for Delaware an later for Pennsylvania), took a role in the Constitutional Convention (chiefly defending the power of the states in selecting the US Senate), but was lss active then and thereafter due to declining health, though he lived long enough to become, rather oddly for on who had supported the wealthier side in Pennsylvania politics, a strong partisan of France and an enthusiastic Jeffersonian Democratic Republican, enthusiastically hailing Jefferson's election as president. In this he was quite different from most of the others in this series who tended to be Federalists. show less

We are coarsening our culture--cheapening it, wearing it out. This will be news, no doubt, to the television moguls.