Great Britain had prohibited certain manufactures in the colonies, and had prohibited the purchase of such manufactured goods except from the mother country.
“If you once admit that Great Britain may lay duties upon her exportations to us, for the purpose of levying money on us only,” he wrote, “she will then have nothing to do but to lay those duties on the articles, which she prohibits us to manufacture—and the tragedy of American liberty is finished.”
In Letter No. 3 the “Farmer” explained there were other modes of resistance to oppression than any breach of peace and deprecated, as Dickinson did ever afterward, any attempt to make the colonies independent.
“If once we are separated from our mother country,” he said, “what new form of government shall we adopt, or where shall we find another Britain to supply our loss? Torn from the body to which we are united by religion, liberty, laws, affections, relation, language and commerce, we must bleed at every vein.”
In the subsequent letters, the dangers to American liberty were expiated, objections answered and the people urged to make a stand for themselves and their posterity peaceably, prudently, firmly, jointly. “You are assigned by Divine Providence, in the appointed orders of things the protectors of unborn ages, whose fate depends upon your virtue,” he said. “Whether they shall arise the generous and indisputable heirs of the noblest patrimonies or the dastardly and hereditary drudges of imperious taskmasters, you must determine.”
The effect of the Farmer’s letters was tremendous. About this time a letter to Governor Penn arrived from the Earl of Hillsborough, dated April 21, 1768, informing him that King George III considered the circular letter from the Massachusetts Legislature, calling upon the other colonies to send commissioners to New York City to consider a united representation to the King and Parliament to be of a most dangerous and factious tendency, and that Governor Penn should exert his influence to prevail upon the Assembly of Pennsylvania to take no notice of it, and to prorogue or dissolve that body.
The Assembly, September 16, resolved that the Governor had no authority to prorogue or dissolve and that it was the undoubted right of the Assembly to correspond with any of the American colonies to obtain by decent petitions to the King and Parliament redress of any grievances.
Four days later the Assembly addressed a petition to the King, the following day one to the House of Lords and another to the House of Commons. Each of these paraphrased in softer language and adapted to Pennsylvania the latter from Massachusetts.
The petition to the King referred to the settlement of the province when it was only a wilderness with a view of enjoying that liberty, civil and religious, of which the petitioners’ ancestors were in a great measure deprived in their native land, and also to extend the British empire, increase its commerce and promote its wealth and power.
With inexpressible labor, toil and expense, and without assistance from the mother country, that wilderness had been peopled, planted and improved.