Galloway, Joseph (1731-1803)

Joseph Galloway (1731-1803)

Sources

Pennsylvania loyalist

Career. Joseph Galloway was a born politician. By the 1760s he was perhaps the most powerful man in Pennsylvania after the proprietors, against whom Galloway made a direct attack. Though this failed, Galloway was speaker of the colonial assembly from 1766 to 1775, and in 1774 he was elected a member of the first Continental Congress. Galloway had too much faith that the disagreement between England and the colonies could be reconciled; in 1776 he broke with the patriot movement and joined British forces in New York. He returned to Philadelphia when British forces occupied the city, and he supervised the police and the port during the British occupation. When Philadelphia fell to the Patriots, Galloway fled with the British and lived the rest of his life in exile.

Background. Joseph Galloway’s father, Peter Galloway, was a wealthy Maryland merchant and farmer. A young boy when his father died, Joseph went to Philadelphia to be trained as a lawyer. By the 1750s he had acquired such a bright legal reputation that he was elected to the colonial assembly, and he married the daughter of the assembly’s speaker, Lawrence Growden, one of Pennsylvania’s wealthiest men. In the assembly Galloway joined with Benjamin Franklin and with the Quaker party in opposing the interests of the Penn family. With Franklin he pushed to have the Penn estates taxed, and he also called for Pennsylvania to become a royal colony, stripping the Penn family of their proprietary title. The assembly approved the bill, over the objections of John Dickinson, who did not defend the Penns but thought the British crown might not be the best protector of colonial liberty. The assembly’s proposal was ignored in the midst of the Stamp Act controversy. Galloway and Franklin also proposed a bill to punish whites who murdered Indians, in the wake of the Paxton riots. The assembly killed the bill, and Galloway and Franklin were both defeated for reelection.

Quarrel with Dickinson. Galloway was not out of the assembly for long. He was reelected in 1765 and would serve as speaker for the next nine years. As the crisis with England worsened, Galloway became a voice of restraint. Though he was zealous in protecting Pennsylvania’s liberties, he acknowledged Parliament’s power to tax the colonies. He disagreed with John Dickinson, who argued in his “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies” (1767) that Parliament could not tax the colonies; Galloway insisted that Parliament had this power, but he believed colonial leaders such as himself could convince the British ministry not to exercise these powers. Dickinson became the more prominent leader in the growing Whig movement though when Pennsylvania chose delegates to a Continental Congress in 1774, Galloway made sure he, and not Dickinson, was sent.

First Continental Congress. Galloway believed that the growing rift with England could be mended if the colonies and mother country replaced the unwritten system under which they were governed with a written constitution. On 28 September 1774 he introduced into the Congress a “Plan of Union,” which would guarantee to the colonists the “first and most excellent privileges of Englishmen,” the right to representation in Parliament and to consent to the laws under which they lived. Galloway’s plan would have created an American legislature, chosen by the colonial assemblies for three-year terms. The king would appoint a president general to administer the colonies and execute the laws. No law would take effect for the colonies without the approval of both Parliament and the American legislature; in this way the American colonists could protect their rights, and Parliament could continue to reign supreme in the British empire. Though Galloway believed this system would preserve both colonial liberty and the British empire, it did not receive wide support. “I stand here almost alone,” he wrote to an English friend. By a vote of six states to five, Congress postponed consideration of Galloway’s plan, endorsing instead the more militant Suffolk Resolves, which denied Parliament’s power to tax the colonies and called for a boycott of British goods. In October, Dickinson was elected to Pennsylvania’s assembly; Galloway was removed as speaker; and Dickinson was chosen to represent Pennsylvania in the Congress.

Break with Congress. Congress voted to expunge Galloway’s plan from the journal, so he published it himself in 1775, chastising his readers and Congress for ignoring his correct analysis of Parliament’s powers and colonial rights. “I have... deduced your rights,... and explained your duties,” he wrote, and Congress should follow the line of conduct he laid down. But by 1775 resistance to Parliamentary authority had grown; with it, the idea grew that it was not for men such as Galloway to instruct the people in their proper conduct or in the limits of their rights; it was for the people to instruct their elected officials in these things. Galloway became disenchanted with the new mood of the Whig movement; though he signed the nonimportation agreement, by 1776 he had broken with Congress and moved out of Philadelphia. He hoped he could remain neutral, but he also believed that only he could repair the breach and rescue the impetuous Americans from their instinct for independence.

Occupied Philadelphia. Galloway went to New York to offer his services to the British army, commanded by Gen. Sir William Howe. On 26 September 1777 Howe’s army occupied Philadelphia. Confident that Galloway could help restore order in the city and perhaps reconcile the second largest city in the empire to the British crown, Howe put Galloway in charge of policing the city, and of imports and exports. Galloway’s real task was to prevent goods from reaching Washington’s army and to suppress revolutionary activity. He hired spies and magistrates to root out disloyalty, but he also created an efficient and organized government for Philadelphia. Galloway believed that four out of every five Americans would prefer to remain loyal to the Crown if only they were given an effective government that could lead them to loyalty. He hoped that with an efficient system of government, Philadelphia could be a model for disaffected Americans of what they risked by rejecting British rule. Trade increased under his administration, and his troops prevented provisions from reaching Washington’s camp at Valley Forge. But General Howe would not give Galloway a free hand, rejecting Galloway’s proposal that British and loyalist forces kidnap New Jersey’s governor and council. When the British decided abruptly to abandon Philadelphia in June 1778, they rejected Galloway’s request to negotiate directly with Washington. The British knew that most of their soldiers in New York were Americans; if the Philadelphia loyalists made a separate peace with Washington, New York also might be lost.

Exile. With his daughter, Galloway fled Philadelphia for England in 1778. He would never return. In London he became a spokesman for other American exiles, continuing to argue for reconciliation based on his constitutional plans. The peace treaty in 1783 was a bitter shock, and the victorious patriots siezed Galloway’s property in Pennsylvania. He became dependent on a British pension, and he argued that the British government, which had failed to heed the advice of Galloway and other Americans, and in ignoring them had lost their best chance to hold on to the colonies, should support the exiles. Some loyalists and British distrusted Galloway, who had early on supported the Whigs and been an ally of Franklin and Adams. He was rejected when he applied for a civil position in Nova Scotia, and in 1793 the Pennsylvania government rejected his petition to be allowed to return home. In his later years he wrote less about politics, more about religion. He died on 29 August 1803 and is buried in Watford, Hertfordshire.

Sources

Robert M. Calhoon, The Loyalists in Revolutionary America 1760–1781 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanavich, 1965);

Mary Beth Norton, The British Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972);

Lorenzo Sabine, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution, 2 volumes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1864).