Galloway, Joseph

GALLOWAY, JOSEPH. (1731–1803). Prominent Loyalist. Maryland. A leading Philadelphia lawyer and vice president of the American Philosophical Society (1769–1775), he was a close friend of Franklin, who left his papers and letter books with him for protection when he went to England in 1764. Galloway sat in the Pennsylvania assembly from 1757 to 1774 and was speaker from 1766 to 1774. Galloway was an able colonial politician, and he never failed to advance the interests of his province and his class, that of the aristocratic merchants. He was in favor of changing the colonial government from the proprietary to the royal form and was an active Tory in the early part of the war. While in the first Continental Congress in 1774, he wrote a Plan of a Proposed Union between Great Britain and the Colonies. It was first accepted but later rejected. Galloway refused to be a delegate for the second Congress in 1775. That year he wrote A Candid Examination of the Mutual Claims of Great Britain and the Colonies: With a Plan of Accommodation on Constitutional Principles, in which he castigated the Continental Congress. His essentially conservative stand coupled with a rather cold and unsympathetic nature made him extremely unpopular and, fearful of the Philadelphia mob, he retired to his country home, where Franklin tried unsuccessfully to change his Loyalist views.

Galloway joined Howe in the British advance through New Jersey in December 1776. Subsequently, he served with consummate skill as overlord of civil government in Philadelphia and southeastern Pennsylvania during the British occupation from the autumn of 1777 to the early summer of 1778. He withdrew with the British and the next year went to England, where he remained for the rest of his life. In 1779 he was examined by the House of Commons on the British conduct of the war, and he charged Lord Howe with incompetence. He also published pamphlets on this subject. He continued to explore the possibilities of a reconciliation of the colonies with the crown based on a written constitution and believed that America would be better off with a continued connection with the mother country. The Pennsylvania assembly in 1788 charged Galloway with high treason and ordered the sale of his estates. His petition to return in 1793 was rejected. He wrote a number of books and pamphlets, among them Letters to a Nobleman, on the Conduct of the War in the Middle Colonies, 1779 (1779), Historical and Political Reflections on the American Rebellion (1780), and Cool Thoughts on the Consequences to Great Britain of American Independence. (1780).

As an exile in London, he brought all of his vengeful pettiness to the campaign to saddle Sir William Howe with blame for the British failure to crush the Revolution. Galloway thereby help ensconce in power a North ministry increasingly dependent on a false appraisal of the conflict in North America.

SEE ALSO Galloway's Plan of Union.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Calhoon, Robert. The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1781. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.

Ferling, John E. The Loyalist Mind: Joseph Galloway and the American Revolution. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977.

??????. A Leap in the Dark : The Struggle to Create the American Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

                        revised by Robert M. Calhoon