John Dickinson came into the world in November 1732 at Croisadore — Crosiadore, Crosia-dore; the spelling has never sat still — a tobacco plantation his people held on the Choptank near Trappe. He was the son of Samuel Dickinson and Mary Cadwalader, Samuel's second wife. Walter Dickinson, a Quaker, had taken up the land in 1659. By Samuel's time the holding ran to thousands of acres and was worked by enslaved and indentured labor. In 1740 the family moved to Kent County, near Dover, in the Lower Counties that became Delaware. John was about eight. Trappe's claim on him is the birthplace. The public life was Philadelphia's and Delaware's.

Tutors first, then the law with John Moland in Philadelphia, then four years at the Middle Temple in London. He was called to the bar in 1757 and came home one of the best-prepared lawyers in the city. He sat in both the Delaware and Pennsylvania assemblies. In 1765 he wrote the Stamp Act Congress's Declaration of Rights and Grievances.

In the winter of 1767–68 he published, in the Pennsylvania Chronicle, twelve letters signed "A Farmer in Pennsylvania." They were reprinted through the colonies and in London, Dublin, and Paris. The argument was constitutional rather than inflaming: Parliament might regulate imperial trade; it could not tax Americans who sent no members. The nickname "Penman of the Revolution" stuck to that series, not to a battlefield. He had married Mary Norris in 1770.

The scene that defines him is a refusal.

In July 1776, when the other delegates were ready to break, Dickinson would not put his name to the Declaration of Independence. He wanted a confederation framed and a last petition tried before the cut. John Adams found him cautious to the point of obstruction. The record after that vote is the part the marble leaves out. Dickinson served as a Pennsylvania colonel and, in 1777, as a private in the Delaware militia — a drop in rank that tells more about the man than a statue would. Delaware sent him back to Congress in 1779. He was the principal draftsman of the Articles of Confederation. He served as president of Delaware in 1781 and as president of Pennsylvania from 1782 to 1785.

In 1786 he chaired the Annapolis Convention. In 1787 he sat for Delaware in the Federal Convention, argued for a legislature that represented both people and states, left early from illness, and had George Read sign the Constitution in his name. That fall he wrote nine letters as "Fabius" for ratification. Late in life, after years of delay that his own papers do not flatter, he freed the people he still held. He died in Wilmington on February 14, 1808, and is buried in the Friends ground there.

Samuel Stevens Jr., born at Trappe in 1778 and later governor of Maryland, is the tighter local career. Dickinson is the larger American one. The birthplace is still in the fields above the Choptank. He did not stay.

Sources: National Constitution Center signer biography; Biographical Directory of Congress; John Dickinson Writings Project / Jane Calvert. The birth day is not agreed. Congress gives November 13. Maryland's old county chronology gives November 2. The American National Biography gives November 8. Calvert's documentary edition uses the 13th.