This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchel with 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 III, 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 listened to voice.

He was the most prominent figure, and he was only 28 years old.

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

Middle Temple in London, very well-educated young man.

But he's the kind of creature

who would have simply never appeared in history if there weren't for this crisis.

Crisis create leadership or create the opportunities for it.

And he's called, he has a series of essays under the title of The Farmer, a letter from

the farmer, which lay, which frame out the American constitutional position.

You cannot tax us,

you cannot legislate for us,

and our rights as Englishmen.

He is temperamentally conservative.

He really doesn't want to, in any kind of precipitous way, lead Americans over the abyss into the war.

And he is his most recent biography who has somewhat rescued him from oblivion, although there is a criminal

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