This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batsworth, Professor Joseph Ellis. His new book is The Cause,

the American Revolution and its discontents, 1773 to 1783. 1774 passes with the Continental

Congress and into 75. And there are three men who represent the different views of this

disorder between mother country, which is what the region calls it, mother country. George

the Third, he uses that term before and after the conflict, mother country and the colonies.

And the three men require a revelation of one in particular, the conservative John Dickinson.

Professor, what was John Dickinson in 74.75 to the cause? He was the single most

uh listen to voice. He was the most prominent figure. He was only 28 years old. He was

educated at King's College at now Columbia in New York and it spent some time in the middle

temple in London, very well educated young man. But he's a kind of creature who would have

simply never appeared in history if there weren't for this crisis. Prices create leaders

or create opportunities for it. And he's called, he has series of essays under the title

The Farmer, a letter from The Farmer, which live, which frame out the American constitutional

position. You cannot tax us, you cannot legislate for us and and and our rights, our rights as

Englishman. He is temperamentally conservative. He really doesn't want to prick in any kind of

precipitous way. Lead the Americans of over the abyss into the war. And he is his most

recent biographer who has somewhat rescued him from oblivion. Although there is a criminal

college named after him in New York, John Dickinson says he's a man who does the right thing

rightly. And in that moment in 75, the right thing is to declare our position but not push it

to a military conflict to resist until the very end, any eventual decision to become independent.

And when that moment does come in July of 76, as viewers of the play 1776, we'll remember

Dickinson refused us to sign the document. He does then go off to serve in the militia,

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