Joseph Galloway

Joseph Galloway , c.1731-1803, American Loyalist leader, b. West River, Md. Galloway was a prominent lawyer with an interest in commerce and in speculation in Western lands. He entered the Pennsylvania assembly in 1756 and soon joined Benjamin Franklin in petitioning the king to abolish the proprietary government of the Penns. As speaker of the Pennsylvania assembly (1766-75) he attempted to conciliate between the colonies and the British government; he believed that the growing conflict could be settled by legal means, especially by a written constitution for the empire. Galloway served as a delegate to the first Continental Congress and proposed a plan for union between the colonies and Great Britain. Unable to maintain neutrality in the American Revolution, he joined Sir William Howe after the British occupied Philadelphia and acted as civil administrator during the British occupation of the city. Later (1778) Galloway went to England and became the spokesman of American Loyalists there.

Bibliography: See study by B. H. Newcomb (1972).

Galloway, Joseph (c.1731–1803), Loyalist writer and statesman of Philadelphia, attacked the policy of the English ministry toward the colonies, while opposing the extremism of radical colonists. In his Plan of a Proposed Union Between Great Britain and the Colonies (1774), he outlines a scheme for home rule that anticipated 19th‐century British policies. A Candid Examination of the Mutual Claims of Great Britain and the Colonies (1775) proposes redress through a liberal constitutional union with England. His logic could not delay the current of more violent forces, and Galloway abandoned argument to serve in the British army, later becoming an efficient adviser to the Crown.