Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania is a series of essays written by the Pennsylvania lawyer and legislator John Dickinson (1732–1808) and published under the pseudonym "A Farmer" from 1767 to 1768.
Great for fans of legal dramas, Sarah Vogel’s The Farmer’s Lawyer will leave readers inspired as she details their fight for truth, justice and family farms in the 1980s.” “The struggle for justice for farmers is as old as the American story. No one has written a braver or better chapter than Sarah Vogel.
“The Farmer’s Lawyer, both an exquisitely written American saga and a trove of lived research, might serve as the definitive document of the 1980s farm crisis that in some ways never ended. Sarah Vogel’s heroic battle on behalf of family farmers was historic–and has never been more relevant.”
The success of the letters earned Dickinson considerable fame. The twelve letters are written in the voice of a fictional farmer, who is described as modest but learned, an American Cincinnatus, and the text is laid out in a highly organized pattern "along the lines of ancient rhetoric".
1767–68 as the author of Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies, which appeared in many colonial newspapers. The letters helped turn opinion against the Townshend Acts (1767), under which new duties were collected to pay the salaries of royal officials in the colonies.…
John DickinsonThis is the first of twelve letters from John Dickinson, a keen legal scholar and self-described “Farmer in Pennsylvania”. It has been republished in a Boston paper at the end of 1767. Dickinson had been a delegate to the Stamp Act Congress that convened in New York City in 1765.
Dickinson wrote the Farmer letters in response to the British Parliament's Townshend Acts (1767). (The Townshend Acts imposed duties on goods imported to America.) They explained why the Townshend duties were improper and how and why Americans should resist them. The Farmer letters took America by storm.
In twelve essays widely read in colonial newspapers in 1767 and 1768 and soon printed as a pamphlet, John Dickinson makes a case for American resistance to Britain's attempt to increase its control over the colonies.
In a series of fourteen letters widely published in late 1767 and early 1768, John Dickinson counsels leaders on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean on the economic folly and unconstitutionality of new British revenue laws that ignore the rights of Englishmen living in the American Colonies.
These letters, all signed “A Farmer,” laid out a case against the acts. Dickinson argued that the British parliament had the right to regulate trade with the colonies within the imperial system, but that the colonies were sovereign to regulate their own internal matters. This included raising revenue.
Dickinson was one of the delegates from Pennsylvania to the First Continental Congress in 1774 and the Second Continental Congress in 1775 and 1776. In support of the cause, he continued to contribute declarations in the name of the Congress.
According to Dickinson, Parliament was justified in imposing the Stamp Act on the colonies. Why did he object to the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts? Dickinson objected to the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts because he did not have the authority to levy taxes.
Why did John Dickinson, writing as "A Farmer", argue that even though the Townshend Duties did not cost much, they were still unjust? He argued that even though the Townshend Duties didn't cost much, they were still unjust because any duty on goods was a tax.
Dickinson argued that the Townshend Acts were illegal because they were intended to raise revenue, a power held only by the colonial assemblies. His arguments were a collection of ideas that were written in a clear and concise manner which the general population could understand.
John Dickinson helped guide American public opinion in the years before the American Revolution. He opposed British taxation of the colonies but also opposed the use of force against mother England.
The Farmer’s Lawyer : Sarah M. Vogel. “The Farmer’s Lawyer, both an exquisitely written American saga and a trove of lived research, might serve as the definitive document of the 1980s farm crisis that in some ways never ended.
Desperate, they called Sarah Vogel in North Dakota.
In a David and Goliath legal battle reminiscent of A Civil Action or Erin Brockovich, Sarah brought a national class action lawsuit, which pitted her against the Reagan administration’s Department of Justice, in her fight for family farmers’ Constitutional rights. It was her first case.
Philadelphia Lawyer is a term to describe a lawyer who knows the most detailed and minute points of law or is an exceptionally competent lawyer. Its first known usage dates… Read More
Philadelphia Lawyer is a term to describe a lawyer who knows the most detailed and minute points of law or is an exceptionally competent lawyer. Its first known usage dates back to 1788. Alternatively, a usage dating to the second half of the 20th century denotes “the ultimate in crooked lawyers”.