JUST A MATTER OF ENFORCING MAGNA CARTA:

The institutions of the British government and the constitution were worthy of praise because they had recognized natural rights for centuries--including those of the colonists in America. Dickinson wrote, "The first principles of government are to be looked for in human nature." Part of that human nature was the principle of owning, securing, and disposing of private property. Quoting the Old Testament, he wrote "they should sit every man under his vine and, and under his fig-tree, and none should make them afraid." Property was at the core of natural rights, not speech. He called it "that great one, the foundation of all the rest."

Each person must have control over his or her own property if natural rights are secure. Losing the ability to retain one's own property is, as he says, slavery. He uses the word forcefully several times throughout the letters, including a quotation from Montesquieu: "SLAVERY IS EVER PRECEDED BY SLEEP." Dickinson owned slaves until 1777 (when he conditionally manumitted them) and then 1786 (when he unconditionally manumitted them). His close connection to the Quaker faith provided guidance when, in 1776, the Quakers of Philadelphia declared slavery unacceptable.

Even before then, however, he must have understood the implications of withholding property from human beings, let alone owning men and women as property. As a delegate to the Constitutional Convention years later, he spoke out against the evils of slavery. He understood that a slave's ownership of property--that is, the right to enjoy the fruits of his or her labors--is denied. Even a slave's own body is forfeit to those who rule over him or her. Colonists were hardly slaves in the truest sense of the word, but he understood that the point was important. If allowed to stand, the Townshend Acts would put the British in a position to rule over the colonists by usurping their right to property through unrepresentative taxation.

The Townshend Acts had already begun the process of stripping the colonists of their property. The act actually consisted of several individual acts, including the Revenue Act (1767) which placed an indirect tax on glass, lead, and paper, and the New York Restraining Act (1767), which suspended New York's legislature until it complied with the Quartering Act (1765). The unpopular Quartering Act had upset New Yorkers by allowing the British Army to house soldiers in American barracks, public houses, taverns, barns, and other privately-owned places. Dickinson understood the taxes, and Parliament's understanding of taxation in general, as "imposition[s] on the subject[s], for the sole purpose of levying money."

In his understanding, taxes are a gift from the people to the government to enact specific services--an idea as old as the Magna Carta itself. Local legislatures who knew the will of the people were the only proper body to levy taxes because they understood the local feelings, desires, and hardships of those they represented and would naturally keep taxation at a sensible level. He writes that in any free society, taxes must be "proportioned as is possible to the abilities of those who are to pay them." The Revenue Act had taken this power out of the hands of the local legislatures--who had been setting limits for years--and placed it in the hands of Parliament which had no American representation.

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