Daniel Dulany the Younger, a lawyer and placeman, is best known for his pamphlet on British taxation of its colonies and the First Citizen/Antilon letters that he exchanged with Charles Carroll of Carrollton.

Dulany was born in Annapolis, Maryland on June 28, 1722, the eldest son of Daniel Dulany (1685-1753) and his wife Rachel (ca.1695-1737), daughter of Richard Beard of Annapolis. Dulany had two brothers and four sisters, as well as three stepbrothers, three stepsisters, and two half-brothers through his father's marriage to Henrietta Maria Lloyd Chew (?-1766).

Dulany received his education in England at Eton College, Clare College (Cambridge), and the Middle Temple of the Inns of Court, where he enrolled in March 1742. He was called to the bar in June 1746, one of the few Maryland lawyers to enjoy that distinction. Dulany returned to Maryland in 1747 and soon qualified to practice in the provincial court and the courts of several counties.

On September 16, 1749, Dulany married Rebecca (1724-1822), second daughter of Benjamin Tasker (ca.1690-1768) and his wife Anne Bladen (?-1775). Rebecca's father was president of the governor's council and held numerous other offices. The marriage thus joined two powerful and wealthy families. The Dulanys had two sons and one daughter during the next decade.

Dulany represented Frederick, the county his father had helped develop, in the lower house of the Maryland General Assembly from 1751 to 1754, served a brief term as the Annapolis delegate and on the governor's council from 1757 until 1774.

In the fall of 1763, the Maryland Gazette advertised an anonymous pamphlet, Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, For the Purpose of Raising a Revenue. The author, soon known to be Dulany, argued that because colonists enjoyed no representation in Parliament, only the Maryland assembly had the right to impose internal taxes. Dulany's essay was reprinted not only in other colonies but also in London, where his arguments were used in parliamentary debates.

A decade later, Dulany took up his pen again, this time on behalf of Maryland's proprietor. In January 1773, Dulany wrote a dialogue for the Gazette debating the merits of the governor's 1770 fee proclamation. Dulany's "Second Citizen" finally convinced "First Citizen" of the proclamation's legality. In February, a new author, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, took up the pen of "First Citizen" and continued the debate with Dulany, who responded as "Antilon." "First Citizen" argued that fees were a tax that could only be enacted by the legislature. Dulany, defending the established form of government, argued that fees were not taxes and had historically been levied by various branches of government. Dulany marshaled cogent legal arguments but Carroll claimed victory in the exchange when Maryland voters returned a lower house favorable to his views rather than Dulany's.

The death of Benjamin Tasker in 1768 had deprived Dulany of a major source of his political strength, a trip to England in 1771-1772 to bolster his position with the proprietary establishment had the effect of alienating the governor, and the exchange with Carroll lost him the popular support he had earlier achieved with Considerations.

Dulany might have been able to regroup had not the movement for independence intervened. Neither Dulany's intellectual position nor his strong affiliation with England allowed him to do more than remain neutral during the ensuing Revolutionary War. He retired to his Hunting Ridge estate near Baltimore, where he lived from 1776 until 1781, when the property was confiscated along with the holdings of other loyalists. Dulany moved to Baltimore Town, where he died on March 12, 1797, and was buried in St. Paul's churchyard.

Land, Aubrey C. The Dulanys of Maryland: a Biographical Study of Daniel Dulany, the Elder (1685-1753). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1968.

Onuf, Peter, ed. Maryland and the Empire, 1773: The Antilon-First Citizen Letters and Daniel Dulany, the Younger (1722-1797). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.