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The line united we stand, divided we fall comes from the Liberty Song, a 1768 tavern tune written by John Dickinson, a wealthy, highly educated lawyer whose marriage to Mary Norris Dickinson tied him to estates such as Poplar Hall and Fair Hill. While the Sons of Liberty rioted over the Stamp Act, Dickinson helped drive the Stamp Act Congress in New York, whose October 1765 Declaration of Rights and Grievances professed loyalty to the Crown while arguing that only colonial assemblies could tax the colonies and that admiralty courts denied the right to trial by jury. After the Townshend Acts he wrote the twelve Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania in 1767 and 1768, explaining that duties meant to raise revenue were taxes no matter where they were collected.

In 1775 Dickinson drafted the Olive Branch Petition to the king while co-writing the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms with Thomas Jefferson, softening Jefferson’s draft, and serving as a brigadier general of the Pennsylvania Associators. The episode explains that seeming contradiction as his lawyer’s insistence on exhausting every remedy before war. Once independence came, he chaired the committee drafting the Articles of Confederation and sat on the Model Treaty Committee. He then served as president of Delaware from 1781 to 1783 and president of Pennsylvania from 1782 to 1785, presided over the Annapolis Convention in 1786, represented Delaware at the 1787 Constitutional Convention and helped shape Delaware’s 1792 constitution.

• Dickinson’s initial draft of the Articles of Confederation proposed a stronger central government than the one adopted.
• He owned property in both Delaware and Pennsylvania, states once governed together under the Penn family.
• During the Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783 he refused to send militia against unpaid soldiers, and Congress moved to New Jersey.
• Dickinson College and the Dickinson School of Law at Penn State bear his name.
• He appears as John Adams’s chief opponent in the musical and film 1776 and in John Adams and Sons of Liberty.