November 2] 1732[note 1] – February 14, 1808), a Founding Father of the United States, was an attorney and politician from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington, Delaware.

Dickinson also reworked Thomas Jefferson's language to write the final draft of the 1775 Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms.

While in Congress, Dickinson served on the committee that wrote the Model Treaty, a template for seeking alliances with foreign countries, but he opposed independence from Great Britain.

[2] He was the great-grandson of Walter Dickinson who came from England as an indentured servant to the Colony of Virginia in 1654 and, having joined the Society of Friends, came with several co-religionists to Talbot County on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay in 1659.

He also bought the Kent County property from his cousin and expanded it to about 3,000 acres (1,200 ha), stretching along the St. Jones River from Dover to the Delaware Bay.

These plantations were large, profitable agricultural enterprises worked by slave labor, until 1777 when John Dickinson freed the enslaved of Poplar Hall.

But in 1739, John Dickinson's half-sister, Betsy, was married in an Anglican church to Charles Goldsborough in what was called a "disorderly marriage" by the Meeting.

Leaving Croisadore to elder son Henry Dickinson, Samuel moved to Poplar Hall, where he had already taken a leading role in the community as judge of the Court of Common Pleas of Kent County.

[9] On July 19, 1770, Dickinson married Mary Norris, known as Polly, a prominent and well educated 30-year-old woman in Philadelphia with a substantial holding of real estate and personal property, including a 1,500 volume library, one of the largest in the colonies at the time, who had been operating her family's estate, Fair Hill, for several years by herself with some support from her sister.

[13] In 1785, following his service as president of Pennsylvania, Dickinson lived in Wilmington, Delaware, and built a mansion at the northwest corner of 8th and Market Streets in Center City Philadelphia.

At the time, he chaired the committee charged with drafting the Articles of Confederation, Dickinson was serving in the Continental Congress as a delegate from the Province of Pennsylvania.

Dickinson understood the implications of his refusal to vote saying, "My conduct this day, I expect will give the finishing blow to my once too great and, my integrity considered, now too diminished popularity.

In the Pennsylvania militia, known as the Associators, Dickinson was given the rank of brigadier general and led 10,000 soldiers to Elizabeth, New Jersey, to protect that area against British attack from Staten Island.

Beginning his term with a "Proclamation against Vice and Immorality," he sought ways to bring an end what he perceived to be the disorder of the American Revolution.

Dickinson then successfully challenged the Delaware General Assembly to address lagging militia enlistments and to properly fund the state's assessment to the Confederation government.

Recognizing the delicate negotiations then underway to end the American Revolution, Dickinson secured the Assembly's continued endorsement of the French alliance, with no agreement on a separate peace treaty with Great Britain.

The Pennsylvania General Assembly at the time was dominated by the Loyalists and moderates who, like Dickinson, did little to support the burgeoning Revolution or independence, except protest.

The Radicals took matters into their own hands, using irregular means to write the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, which by law excluded from the franchise anyone who would not swear loyalty to the document or the Christian Holy Trinity.

In 1787, Delaware sent him as one of its delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, along with Gunning Bedford Jr., Richard Bassett, George Read, and Jacob Broom.

Dickinson was elected president of this convention, and although he resigned the chair after most of the work was complete, he remained highly influential in the content of the final document.

Dickinson remained neutral in an attempt to include a prohibition of slavery in the document, believing the General Assembly was the proper place to decide that issue.

He was the Anti-Administration nominee in the 1795 United States Senate special election in Delaware, losing by one vote to congressman Henry Latimer.

[22] In his final years, he worked to further the abolition movement and donated a considerable amount of his wealth to the "relief of the unhappy".

As an intellectual, he thought that men should think for themselves,[29]: 271  and his deepening studies led him to refuse to sign the Declaration of Independence, which was subsequently unanimously adopted by the remaining delegates to the Second Continental Congress.

Dickinson did not consider it wise to plunge into immediate war; rather, he thought it best to use diplomacy to attain political ends and used the insights he gained from his historical studies to justify his caution.

It is precisely because Dickinson epitomized the philosophic tenets of the Puritan Revolution that his theories were of enormous importance in the formation of the Constitution, and have considerable meaning for us today.

[29]: 279 Dickinson incorporated his learning and religious beliefs to counteract what he considered the mischief flowing from the perversion of history and applied them to its proper use according to his understanding.

Dickinson was also good friends with Quaker feminist Susanna Wright and corresponded with Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren.

As a lawyer, Dickinson often defended poor women in court, including Rachel Francisco, a "free mollato" who had been charged with infanticide.

A joint ballot of the Pennsylvania General Assembly and the Council chose the president from among the twelve counsellors for a one-year term.