Two series of letters that have been described as "the
wellsprings of nearly all ensuing debate on the limits of
governmental power in the United States" are collected in this
volume. The writings include Letters from a Farmer in
Pennsylvania-the "farmer" being the gifted and
courageous statesman John Dickinson and Letters from the Federal
Farmer-he being the redoubtable Richard Henry Lee of Virginia.
Together, Dickinson and Lee addressed the whole remarkable range of
issues provoked by the crisis of British policies in North America,
a crisis from which a new nation emerged from an overreaching
empire. Dickinson wrote his Letters in opposition to the
Townshend Acts by which the British Parliament in 1767 proposed to
reorganize colonial customs. The publication of the Letters
was, as Philip Davidson believes, "the most brilliant literary
event of the entire Revolution." Forrest McDonald adds,
"Their impact and their circulation were unapproached by any
publication of the revolutionary period except Thomas Paine's
Common Sense." Lee wrote in 1787 as an
Anti-Federalist, and his Letters gained, as Charles Warren
has noted, "much more widespread circulation and
influence" than even the heralded Federalist Papers.
Both sets of Letters deal, McDonald points out, "with
the same question: the never-ending problem of the distribution of
power in a broad and complex federal system." The Liberty Fund
second edition includes a new preface by the editor in which he
responds to research since the original edition of 1962.
Forrest McDonald is Professor of History at the University of
Alabama and author also of
E Pluribus Unum, among other works.
