Introduction
On April 6, 1784, in the county courthouse in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the Board of Trustees of the fledgling Dickinson College met and asked two of its members, John Dickinson and Benjamin Rush, to devise a seal for the college.1 Dickinson was president of the Board, and it had been Rush’s idea to found an undergraduate college in Carlisle bearing Dickinson’s name. Two days later, the committee of two reported their design.
According to a letter from Rush to Charles Nisbet, a Presbyterian minister recruited from Scotland to be the college’s first principal, or president, Rush chose the symbols, an open Bible, a telescope, and a liberty cap, while Dickinson composed the Latin motto, Pietate et doctrina tuta libertas.2 The motto could be translated into English as “Liberty is protected by piety and learning.” Another translation would be, “Liberty is secured by religion and education.”
When editing Rush’s letters, L. H. Butterfield noted that “The symbolism is utterly characteristic of BR Benjamin Rush, and the motto of Dickinson.”3 Indeed, Rush’s account corresponds to each man’s career and interests: Rush, a medical doctor, would likely have thought of scientific instruments; Dickinson, a lawyer, for fun and edification read works written in Latin. Both men believed in liberty based on law, ultimately on divine law. Rush’s symbols and Dickinson’s words complement one another: Rush’s liberty cap sits atop, and is supported by, the telescope and the Bible, symbols of investigation and revelation, reason and faith. The motto of Dickinson College reflects the political views of John Dickinson, and interpreting that motto requires a look at his political writings and their historical context. Part of the wider context is a long tradition of Latin mottoes.
Latin Mottoes
At least from the twelfth century Latin mottoes were featured in heraldry, and they were still common in the latter half of the eighteenth century, words from Vergil’s Aeneid and Georgics, for example, gracing the Great Seal of the United States.4 From the mid-1750s in Philadelphia, where John Dickinson lived and worked, the College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania) had a Latin motto, Leges sine moribus vanae. That sentiment, that laws without morals are useless, came from Horace’s Odes (3.24).5 On a more local level, the Dickinson family had a coat of arms with a Latin motto. That motto, Esse quam videri, “To be rather than to seem,” came from Cicero and Sallust. To be more precise, it came from Cicero’s dialogue on friendship, De Amicitia (98), and from Sallust’s history of the Conspiracy of Catiline (4.6).6
Well within that tradition of Latin mottoes that were taken from ancient Roman poetry and prose, the motto of Dickinson College echoes a line from Aetna, a comparatively short poem often attributed to Vergil.7 The full text in question is found near the end of the poem, in lines 632-633: O maxima rerum/Et merito pietas homini tutissima virtus, “Oh greatest of things, and by right the piety of men is the surest virtue.” It seems an unlikely source, an obscure poem about a volcano, and yet from the early modern period onward, these words had been favored as a motto by northern European aristocrats and artisans.
Beginning in the mid-1500s, words similar to these lines from Vergil’s (or pseudo-Vergil’s) Aetna served as the mottoes of six Germanic noblemen. Pietas tutissima virtus, “Piety is the surest virtue,” accompanied the coats of arms of Christoph, Duke of Mecklenburg (1537-1592), Friedrich Wilhelm I, Duke of Saxony-Weimar (1562-1602), Magnus, Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg (1577-1632), August, Duke of Saxony (1589-1615), Friedrich Wilhelm II, Duke of Saxony-Altenburg (1603-1669), and Georg Friedrich, Margrave of Brandenburg-Anspach (1678-1703).8 This Teutonic roll call gives a cultural setting for mottoes echoing words from the Aetna.
Moreover, the phrasing appealed to artisans and entrepreneurs as well. Martin Nutius, a Flemish printer in Antwerp, used as his motto, Pietas homini tutissima virtus, a direct quotation from those lines in the Aetna. Beginning in 1540, Nutius (1515-1558) published books and placed this motto, along with the image of a stork feeding its young in the nest, on the title page of each book he published. His widow and then his son, Philip, succeeded him in the business and continued using the imagery of the storks and the motto from the Aetna.9
In 1565, Philip Nutius published an edition of Erasmus of Rotterdam’s book on how to write letters, Opus de Conscribendis Epistolis. Erasmus (c. 1466-1536) had begun the book in 1499, and he issued the final version of it in 1522.10 George Tilson (1672-1738), of Trinity College, Cambridge, acquired a copy of this edition by Nutius, and that volume then came into the hands of Isaac Norris the Younger.11 Norris owned one other book published by Nutius, a work on military jurisprudence.12
Wealthy and well-connected, Norris (1701-1766) served as Speaker of the House in Pennsylvania. He was also a bibliophile, steadily accumulating a private library of more than a thousand books, most of them in Latin and most of them old even then. His daughter, Mary, married John Dickinson, and Dickinson (1732-1808), an avid reader, inherited his father-in-law’s books. When in 1783 Rush founded a college in Carlisle and named it in honor of John Dickinson, Dickinson donated the Norris books to the new college in order to give a substantial beginning to its library.13
Piety, Virtue, and Liberty
Thus from the sixteenth century into the eighteenth, part of the intellectual environment in northern Europe and in the British hegemony was a line paraphrasing or quoting from Vergil (so it was thought) about piety securing virtue. From ancient poetry and into the late Renaissance and then into the Enlightenment, this wisdom had become something like a proverb and perhaps even a cliché. This proverbial wisdom, recommended by the patina of great age, fit in well with the outlook of the founding generation. In April, 1784, as he was addressing his fellow trustees of Dickinson College, John Dickinson reminded his colleagues that they were “forming an establishment for advancing the interests of religion, virtue, freedom, and literature,” and that the advantages of education were important “to the character of the man, the citizen, and the Christian.”14
This belief that education ought to concern itself not only with literature, but also with religion, virtue, and citizenship reflected the layers of meaning in the Latin words virtus and pietas. Dickinson was a Protestant Christian, and the quiet fervor of his faith, with its emphasis on austere and disciplined standards regulating one’s relationship with God and one’s neighbor, informed his attraction to ancient Roman ideals expressed by those two Latin words. Like most of the Founding Fathers, Dickinson had been trained in the ancient classics, primarily in Latin, and so for him and his peers “virtue” called to mind ancient Rome, the English word coming from the Latin virtus, manliness, or being a man, being a man of steadfast character. Over time, the four qualities defining a good man, namely prudence, courage, temperance, and justice, came to be called simply the virtues.15
While the English word “piety” derives from the Latin pietas, several other English words could convey its significance. For the ancient Roman, the word meant, wrote Russell Kirk, “something larger than church-going or correctness toward one’s parents,” that is to say, it connoted “humility before the gods, a love of one’s country, and a sense of duties that are not adequately expressed by any English word.”16
The college’s motto suggested balance, and as Jaroslav Pelikan pointed out, “liberty is not safe with either pietas or doctrina alone.”17 With a desire to amplify Pelikan’s observation, Philip N. Lockhart underscored the Roman roots of the motto of Dickinson College. Pelikan had cited Vergil’s pius Aeneas (Aeneid 1.378), and Lockhart recalled that Aeneas’ escape from the fallen city of Troy was not a solitary flight but included his son, Ascanius, and his father, Anchises. Lockhart said that Aeneas’ pietas was thus “one that looks to the future as well as to the past.”18
That sense of balance, of the present bridging the past and the future, along with harnessing together faith and reason, represented John Dickinson’s temperament and how it helped him face a chaotic political situation. Amidst turmoil impelled by political passions given free rein, Dickinson believed that what threatened liberty was irrational and impious behavior. A dignified, methodical man brought up in a genteel Quaker culture, Dickinson always sought to understand all sides of a problem and then to look for an equable solution.19 In the spring of 1784, a trip from Philadelphia, across the Susquehanna, and on to Carlisle for a meeting of a college’s board of trustees offered a long break from seemingly endless tensions and troubles in the capital.
In 1784 Dickinson was President of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania. As the title implies, he presided over a committee, one comprising men with competing ambitions and egos. Elected in 1782, Dickinson already had dealt with a mutiny of soldiers, a boundary dispute involving Connecticut’s claim to part of northeastern Pennsylvania, and anonymous libel in the newspapers, vicious attacks on his reputation, the author’s identity unknown to this day. Meanwhile, factions within Pennsylvania divided over whether to revise or replace the new state’s constitution, and as President, Dickinson was caught up in that controversy as well.20
After the colonies had declared their independence from the British king and parliament, each colony became a state, and these states adopted republican constitutions and appropriate symbols. For its symbols, Pennsylvania exchanged the coat of arms used by William Penn for a new seal and coat of arms. Penn’s heraldic bars and roundels gave way to images of a ship, a plough, and three sheaves of wheat. The old motto of the Penn family, Dum clavum teneam, “While I hold the rudder,” asserted solitary confidence and command, calling to mind William Penn’s father, an admiral who had been knighted by the king. Festooned below the new seal and the new coat of arms was a new motto, “Virtue, Liberty, and Independence.”21
Given the preference at the time for Latin mottoes, this one in English stood out. Roman themes such as virtus and pietas went hand in hand, and so “Virtue, Liberty, and Independence” shared ideals with Pietate et doctrina tuta libertas, as well as with what was then seen as Vergils’ own pietas homini tutissima virtus, along with its variation pietas tutissima virtus. For the likes of Dickinson and his peers, the abstract concepts of virtue, piety, and liberty were intimately linked together.
Examples from John Dickinson’s Writings
For John Dickinson, liberty was connected to piety because in his worldview liberty came from God. Seventeen years before providing the motto for his new college, Dickinson had written twelve newspaper essays against the Townsend Acts. Those essays first appeared in November, 1767, in the weekly Pennsylvania Chronicle and Universal Advertiser, and after they had been reprinted in newspapers in other colonies, Dickinson collected the essays in a book under the title Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. Throughout the Farmer’s Letters, as they were often called, Dickinson offered examples from Roman history as well as from British history, often quoting Scripture to buttress his argument. Here Dickinson himself was showing pietas and doctrina in defense of libertas. Two passages from the Farmer’s Letters shed light on the formulating of the college’s motto.
In Letter 5, Dickinson wrote that freedom meant being secure in one’s hearth and home, and in English law that basic right to such security meant that people’s “property, acquired with so much pain and hazard, should be disposed of by none but themselves—or, to use the beautiful and emphatic language of the sacred scripture, ‘that they should sit every man under his vine, and under his fig tree, and none should make them afraid’.”22 He was quoting the King James Version of the Bible, Micah 4:4.
In Letter 7, Dickinson wrote, “The love of liberty is so natural to the human heart, that unfeeling tyrants think themselves obliged to accommodate their schemes as much as they can to the appearance of justice and reason.”23 He then turned to a scene from Roman history, citing Book 13 of the Annals of Tacitus. There Tacitus had described how in the late 50s A. D. the emperor, Nero, seeking to win the favor of the people, had decreed a waiver of the sales tax for citizens who were buying slaves, but since the seller still had to pay the tax, the tax then became part of the overall cost passed on to the buyer. Dickinson’s point was that the Roman people, uneducated and emotional, were fooled by the ploy.
Four years after coming up with the college’s motto, Dickinson again expressed the same idea of how liberty is defended. He did so in another series of essays for a local newspaper, The Delaware Gazette. To support ratification of the federal Constitution that had been completed in September of 1787, early in 1788 Dickinson wrote nine essays in the form of letters, all under the pseudonym of Fabius. In 1797 he made another appearance in print as Fabius, this time in fifteen essays in a Philadelphia newspaper called the New World, on diplomatic awkwardness between the United States and the new republic in France, and then he published both sets of letters in a book.
The 1788 series of the Letters of Fabius is less famous than the newspaper essays written around the same time and for the same purpose by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, writing under the name of Publius and later known as The Federalist Papers. As with all Dickinson’s writings, the Letters of Fabius are succinct and eloquent, and they considered legal and historical precedent. Those appeals to history echoed the sentiment encapsulated in his motto for his college, as two passages indicate.
In Letter 4, Dickinson argued that bills of rights and other legal documents could not preserve “trial by jury and the dependence of taxation upon representation, those corner stones of liberty,” but instead, rights and liberty were preserved “by soundness of sense and honesty of heart.”24 Sound sense (or reason) and an honest heart (or spirit) were parallel to doctrina and pietas.
In Letter 7, Dickinson addressed an objection made by critics of the new Constitution, namely that by uniting together, each state would lose its liberty. “Amidst the mutabilities of terrestrial things,” Dickinson conceded, “the liberty of United America may be destroyed,” but he asserted that the safeguard against that loss would be “to implore the protection of our most gracious maker” and to strive to do God’s will, “diligently exercising our reason in fulfilling the purposes for which that and our existence were given to us.”25 Once again, Dickinson saw reason and religion combining to defend liberty.
Conclusion
From the Farmer’s Letters to the Letters of Fabius and the college motto in between, a consistent intellectual and ethical angle of vision marked John Dickinson’s written work. It was a perspective that permeated his political opinions and had developed over many years and after much study and reflection. From his boyhood on a plantation in rural Delaware, Dickinson had loved the Bible and the ancient classics, especially Roman historians and poets.26 By the time he served as President of Pennsylvania, Dickinson had established a name for himself as a cultured Christian gentleman. As Benjamin Rush described him to Charles Nisbet, “our worthy governor, Mr. Dickinson, a gentleman who unites with the finest accomplishments of the man and the patriot a sacred regard to the doctrines and precepts of Christianity.”27 Even allowing for the fact that Rush was writing to a Presbyterian minister, one finds no hyperbole in that assessment.
Whereas Dickinson read the Bible in English, he read the Roman authors in Latin. When it fell to him to choose a motto for a new college bearing his name, he instinctively turned to Latin rather than English. Whether Dickinson recalled the phrasing from the Aetna or from having seen it on the title page of an old book or from some other source, we shall never know. Dickinson’s wording of the motto, however, too closely parallels that found in the Aetna for it to have been entirely his own invention. Although he has left us no account explaining his choice of words, we can see that at the time such a combination of Latin words had long been familiar to educated people in Great Britain, northern Europe, and their diaspora.
Wherever John Dickinson found inspiration for the motto of Dickinson College, it is clear that he worked within a cultural and personal setting. Latin mottoes taken from ancient Roman authors were all around him, whether adorning the coats of arms and seals of official institutions or of his own family. Dickinson drew upon a long tradition of summing up one’s basic principles in a few well-chosen words of Latin. For a new college founded during turbulent times, the idea was for it to produce young men of faith and learning who would venture into the frontier, establish homes and families, and hand on liberty and law to their posterity.
The college’s motto conveyed the core tenets of mature men with practical experience in politics, men who valued a classical education, when combined with instruction in some variety of the Christian faith, as the best means of living a good life in an ordered and just society. From those classical ideals, men such as Rush and Dickinson, as well as their fellow trustees, developed the belief that enjoying life safely under one’s own vine and fig tree required balance between pious virtue and intellectual curiosity. The hope was that in the new college faith and reason would join to make solid citizens fit for a free republic.
[1] Dickinson College Board of Trustee Minutes, April 6, 1784, Record Group 1/1, Board of Trustees (1783-1833), Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA. For the description of the seal, see Trustee Minutes, entry for April 8, 1784. See also James Henry Morgan, Dickinson College (Carlisle, PA: Dickinson College, 1933), 26; Charles Coleman Sellers, Dickinson College: A History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 67.
[2] Benjamin Rush to Charles Nisbet, May 15, 1784, Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 1:335. See also Donald J. D’Elia, “Benjamin Rush: Philosopher of the American Revolution,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, 64.5 (1974): 72.
[3] Rush to Nisbet, Letters of Benjamin Rush, 1:335, n. 2.
[4] See Gordon S. Wood, “The Legacy of Rome in the American Revolution,” The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011), 75; Meyer Reinhold, “Vergil in the American Experience from Colonial Times to 1882,” Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1984), 233. For mottoes in heraldry, see: Stephen Slater, The Illustrated Book of Heraldry: An International History of Heraldry and Its Contemporary Uses (London: Hermes House, 2010), 68-69; Bruno Bernard Heim, Heraldry in the Catholic Church: Its Origin, Customs, and Laws (Gerrards Cross, UK: Van Duren, 1978), 80.
[5] See Amey A. Hutchins, University of Pennsylvania, The Campus History Series (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2004), 4; Horace Wemyss Smith, Life and Correspondence of the Rev. William Smith, D. D. (Philadelphia: Ferguson Bros. & Co., 1880), 1:21. For the vague dating of the origin of the school, see Edward Potts Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 1740-1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940), 45-52.
[6] For the Dickinson family coat of arms and motto, see the frontispiece to Charles J. Stillé, The Life and Times of John Dickinson, 1732-1808 (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1891).
[7] For Aetna, see W. V. Clausen, et al., ed., Appendix Vergiliana (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966); for doubts about its authorship, see Edward Kennard Rand, The Magical Art of Virgil (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), 51; Jasper Griffin, Virgil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 10; Charles Martindale, “Introduction: ‘The Classic of all Europe’,” in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 12. “Vergil” and “Virgil” are alternate spellings.
[8] Laurence Urdang, et al., ed., Mottoes (Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co., 1986), 577.
[9] See Miguel Martinez, “The Heroes in the World’s Marketplace: Translating and Printing Epic in Renaissance Antwerp,” in Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe, ed. José María Pérez Fernández and Edward Wilson-Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 82-83; Paul Hoftijzer, “The History of the Book in the Low Countries,” in The Book: A Global History, ed. Martin F. Suarez and H. R. Woodhuysen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 353; Andrew Pettegree, “Centre and Periphery in the European Book World,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, 18 (2008): 125; Albert M. Hyamson, A Dictionary of Universal Biography, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 454; Maurice Sabbe, et al., Histoire du Livre et de L’Imprimerie en Belgique de Origines a Nos Jours (Brussells: Musée du Livre, 1924), 3:130-131.
[10] See J. K. Sowards, ed., Literary and Educational Writings 3, Collected Works of Erasmus 25 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 1-9; text, 10-25; see also Margaret Mann Phillips, Erasmus and the Northern Renaissance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1949), xvii-xix; James McConica, Erasmus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 19 and 39.
[11] Marie Elena Korey, The Books of Isaac Norris (1701-1766) at Dickinson College (Carlisle, PA: Dickinson College, 1976), 117. For Tilson, see ibid., 314.
[12] Balthasar de Ayala, De Iure et Officiis Bellicis et Disciplina Militari (Antwerp: Ex Officina Martini Nutii, 1597): see Korey, The Books of Isaac Norris, 42.
[13] Every biography of John Dickinson and history of Dickinson College mentions this donation, but see in particular James W. Phillips, “The Sources of the Original Dickinson College Library,” Pennsylvania History 14 (April, 1947): 108-117; reprinted in Bulwark of Liberty: Early Years at Dickinson (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1950), 102-114.
[14] Dickinson College Board of Trustee Minutes, 6 April, 1784, Dickinson College Archives.
[15] Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 3rd ed. (Washington, D. C.: Regnery Gateway, 1991), 99; Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 65-70; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 23-26.
[16] Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 116.
[17] “On Making 20th-century Sense of Dickinson’s Latin Motto: The 1986 Baccalaureate Address,” Dickinson Today (August, 1986): 2.
[18] Philip N. Lockhart, “Pietas: None Dare Call It ‘Loyalty’,” Dickinson Today (September, 1986): 4.
[19] Regarding the role of religion in Dickinson’s life, most promising is recent research by Jane E. Calvert, Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Jane E. Calvert, “Liberty without Tumult: Understanding the Politics of John Dickinson,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 131 (July, 2007): 233-262.
[20] See J. H. Powell, “John Dickinson as President of Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History 28 (July, 1961): 254-267; Harry Marlin Tinkcom, The Republicans and Federalists in Pennsylvania, 1790-1801 (Harrisburg, PA: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1950), 4-6; Robert L. Brunhouse, The Counter-Revolution in Pennsylvania, 1776-1790 (Harrisburg, PA: Pennsylvania Historical Commission, 1942), 121-127.
[21] Benjamin F. Shearer and Barbara S. Shearer, State Names, Seals, Flags, and Symbols: A Historical Guide, 3rd ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 22 and 42; “Notes and Queries,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 6.4 (1882), 485-486.
[22] Forrest McDonald, ed., Empire and Nation: Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, John Dickinson, and Letters from the Federal Farmer, Richard Henry Lee (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 28. See M. E. Bradford, “A Better Guide than Reason: The Politics of John Dickinson,” Modern Age 21 (Winter, 1977): 39-49.
[23] McDonald, ed., Empire and Nation, 41.
[24] [John Dickinson], The Letters of Fabius in 1788, on the Federal Constitution, and in 1797, on the Present Situation of Public Affairs (Wilmington, DE: W. C. Smyth, 1797), 34. See M. Susan Power, “John Dickinson after 1776: The Fabius Letters,” Modern Age 16 (Fall, 1972): 387-397.
[25] [Dickinson], The Letters of Fabius, 55.
[26] See William Murchison, The Cost of Liberty: The Life of John Dickinson (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2013), 15 and 214; David Lefer, The Founding Conservatives: How a Group of Unsung Heroes Saved the American Revolution (New York: Sentinel, 2013), 20-24; Milton E. Flower, John Dickinson: Conservative Revolutionary (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 10; H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 107-119; Richard M. Gummere, “John Dickinson: The Classical Penman of the Revolution,” The Classical Journal 52 (November, 1956): 81-88.
[27] Rush to Nisbet, Letters of Benjamin Rush, 1:335.
It was an early summer day in 1792, and a gloomy man was in a bad mood. Charles Nisbet, a Presbyterian minister in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, wrote a letter to his bookseller, William Young, in Philadelphia. The two had been corresponding about twice a year since 1790; Nisbet was beginning his sixth letter to Young.
Charles Nisbet (21 January, 1736-18 January, 1804), was born near Haddington, Scotland, and died in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Educated at the University of Edinburgh, he was a Presbyterian minister and formidable scholar, known to contemporaries as a walking library. From 1785 to 1804 he served as the first principal (president) of Dickinson College.