Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor

by Richard R. Beeman

  honour and safety of your country, and, as you wish to avoid a war with Great-Britain, which must terminate, at all events, in the ruin of America, not to rely on a denial of the authority of Parliament, a refusal to be represented, and on a non-importation agreement; because whatever protestations, in that case, may be made to the contrary, it will prove to the world that we intend to throw off our allegiance to the State, and to involve the two countries in all the horrors of Civil War.7

  Galloway probably arranged in advance for James Duane to speak in support of his proposal. Now the New Yorker rose with a carefully prepared speech. Duane, the son of a prosperous merchant, was one of New York’s most successful lawyers. From the onset of the constitutional conflict between Great Britain and the colonies, Duane had counseled moderation. In November 1765, during the protests over the Stamp Act, a New York mob lashed out at Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden, breaking into his coach house, destroying his chariot and, later, hanging him in effigy. Duane took the extraordinarily unpopular step of attempting to recruit a group of sailors to counter the actions of the mob. Duane believed that the imposition of the Townshend Duties in 1768 was unwise and half-heartedly supported the informal agreement among merchants in the principal port cities to refuse to import British goods in protest against the act. But, unlike most of the lawyers in most of the colonies, he remained an outspoken critic of anyone or anything he considered disloyal to the Crown. In 1770, he was the lead prosecutor of Alexander McDougall, one of the principal leaders of the New York Sons of Liberty, who had been charged with sedition and libel for writing incendiary pamphlets denouncing Lieutenant Governor Colden and the Tory-leaning De-Lancy family. Writing to his father-in-law, the fabulously wealthy upstate New York manor lord Robert Livingston, Jr., Duane vented his contempt for men like McDougall and the mobs McDougall so frequently employed. “You have once experienced,” Duane wrote, “the Rage of the people at your Home. Here we have been terrified with it repeatedly. Every good man wishes to see Order restored, and the government resume its due weight.”

  The particular “rage” to which Duane referred was a small, ineffectual 1767 riot among tenants and their supporters on Livingston’s manor in the Hudson Valley. During it, some 500 “levelers” marched toward the manor house, threatening to “murder the Lord of the Manor and level his house” unless he signed leases more agreeable to them. In that instance too Duane had used his legal skills to lead the effort to prosecute the perpetrators. Indeed, Duane was instrumental in seeing to it that the supposed leader of the abortive uprising, William Prendergast, was convicted of high treason and condemned to death. In the end, George III pardoned Prendergast, but the whole affair made Duane’s revulsion toward extra-legal protests all too clear.8

  Duane’s concern was a common theme among many of those who worried about the excesses that sometimes occurred during the popular resistance to British policies. Indeed, although John Adams may have seemed like a fiery radical to Duane, in fact, the Bostonian had also worried about some of those same excesses. But for men like Duane and many of his New York and Pennsylvania colleagues in the Congress, their concern led them toward distinctly different solutions than those being espoused by Adams.

  Duane, Galloway, John Jay and several others in the New York and Pennsylvania delegations had stood by and watched with dismay as the coalition of New Englanders and Virginians moved many of the members of other colonial delegations toward what they considered a dangerously radical course. Galloway’s Plan of Union offered them an opportunity to counterattack. In seconding Galloway’s proposal, Duane recollected the reasons for calling the Congress in the first place—to discuss measures that might provide relief for Boston and Massachusetts but, equally important, “to lay a Plan for a lasting Accomodation with Great Britain.” Alas, Duane commented, up to this point, the Congress had done little to achieve that second goal. Galloway’s plan was a step in the right direction, but for it to succeed, Duane insisted, it was essential that “we should expressly ceed to Parliament the Right of regulating Trade.”9

  The New Englanders were infuriated by Galloway’s counterattack. They were so close to getting the Congress to agree on a thoroughgoing boycott of all trade with Great Britain—a huge step, they believed, in creating a united opposition to British policies that would have real teeth. In their eyes, Galloway’s plan was not only an unacceptable acquiescence to British authority in key areas of taxation and legislation, but also a move designed to persuade the Congress to reverse course altogether. But they bit their tongues, leaving it to the delegates from Virginia to take the lead in opposing the plan. Richard Henry Lee sought to block it by temporizing, remarking that the “plan will make such changes in the Legislatures of the Colonies that I could not agree to it, without consulting my Constituents.” Patrick Henry’s attack was more direct. Asserting that the colonial legislatures had always enjoyed an independence and autonomy that current British policies were denying them, he noted that Galloway’s Grand Council, while “liberat[ing] our Constituents from a corrupt House of Commons,” would have the effect of throwing Americans into the “arms of an American Legislature that may be bribed by that Nation which avows in the Face of the World, that Bribery is a Part of her System of Government.” For Henry, Galloway’s solution was no solution at all: it denied Americans the fundamental right of no taxation without representation and would in the end “lead to war.” In Henry’s view, if one were to face the prospect of war, it was preferable to do it in the cause of liberty than out of submission to a corrupt English government.10

  The delegates eventually rejected Galloway’s Plan of Union, but the sequence of events leading to that outcome is obscure. At the end of the day on September 28, the delegates declined to take action on the proposal, voting, with six colonies in favor, five opposed, to allow the proposal to “lye upon the table,” to be taken up at a later date. Galloway interpreted the action as a positive response to his proposal, and, in fact, at least at that moment, he may have been right. Although he may not have won over a majority of delegations, it does appear that several of them—not only Pennsylvania and New York, but probably New Jersey, South Carolina and either Maryland or Delaware—were sympathetic to his proposal.11

  More than three weeks later, on October 22, after the Congress had moved forward to adopt more sweeping measures to oppose British policies, the delegates would formally reject a motion to reconsider Galloway’s plan. The circumstances of that rejection evoked a wrathful reaction from Galloway. Charles Thomson, the Congress’s secretary, did not formally enter Galloway’s plan into the minutes on September 28, the day on which he first introduced it, an omission that probably owed less to a deliberate slighting of his political rival’s plan than to the general slovenliness that marked his note-taking throughout his service as the Congress’s secretary. And on October 22, when Congress declined to take up Galloway’s plan again, Thomson made no note of that rejection. The only direct confirmation we have of any action that day is a brief diary entry from Rhode Island delegate Samuel Ward, who simply noted that the Congress “met, [and] dismissed the Plan for a Union.” Whether Galloway had over-optimistically misread the decision to table his proposal on September 28, or whether the opponents of the proposal had been successful in mobilizing opposition to it by October 22 is not clear, but by that latter date Galloway could clearly recognize that his Plan of Union had suffered an ignominious defeat.12 Galloway would be sufficiently enraged by the rejection of his plan that he would later engage in an impassioned pamphlet war both to defend it and to rebuke his adversaries. In a long-winded pamphlet entitled A Candid Examination of the Mutual Claims of Great Britain and the Colonies; with a Plan of Accommodation, on Constitutional Principles, published in New York in February 1775, Galloway described the battles that had occurred in the First Continental Congress between “two parties.” One, in which he included himself, came to the Congress intending “candidly and clearly” to define American rights and then to
humbly petition the king and Parliament for a redress of their grievances. The other party, he claimed, was composed of a group of hotheads whose purpose from the very beginning of their opposition to the Stamp Act had been to “throw off all subordination and connexion” with Great Britain. He accused the other party of using every “fiction, falsehood and fraud” to mislead the people and to “incite the ignorant and vulgar to arms,” all with the goal, he claimed, of leading Americans down the dangerous path toward independence. The chief culprit, in Galloway’s view, was Sam Adams—“a man, who though by no means remarkable for brilliant abilities, yet is equal to most men in popular intrigue and the management of faction. He eats little, drinks little, sleeps little, thinks much, and is most indefatigable in the pursuit of his objects.” It was Sam Adams, Galloway believed, who was at the head of the conspiracy to lead America into revolt against their mother state.13

  In his “Candid Examination,” Galloway claimed that during the debate in Congress on September 28, “all the men of property, and most of the ablest speakers,” supported his proposal. He had at that time interpreted the decision to defer a vote on the plan to a later date as a positive sign, and, with that optimistic interpretation in his head, he had not only consented to allow the delegates to resume their discussions of the boycott of trade with Great Britain, but had, in the hopes that some kind of deal could be reached with his more radical congressional adversaries, added his tepid endorsement to the proposal for non-importation of British goods, a measure he had earlier opposed. But, of course, he was to be bitterly disappointed. “The men of independence and sedition were soon after preferred to those of harmony and liberty,” with the final result being that the plan was not only never again discussed, but was, in his view of things, purposely expunged from the minutes.14

  Convention secretary Charles Thomson and John Dickinson, who had belatedly been elected by the Pennsylvania Assembly to join the proceedings as a delegate on October 15 (Dickinson officially joined the delegation on October 17), had a decidedly different take on the reception given Galloway’s plan. According to them, most of the delegates, when they first heard Galloway’s proposal, regarded it “with horror—as an idle, dangerous, whimsical, ministerial plan.” Dickinson and Thomson interpreted the vote to table the Galloway’s plan as an implicit rejection of it, not, as Galloway claimed, tacit approval of its general principles. Thomson admitted that when he went about the task of revising his minutes in the days immediately preceding the adjournment of the Congress, he omitted the details of Galloway’s plan, but not, as a deliberate attempt to prevent others from seeing its merits, as Galloway had charged, but because the “majority were of opinion, that the inserting it on their Journal would be disgraceful and injurious [and that] they unquestionably had a right to reject it.”15

  History has not treated either Joseph Galloway or his Plan of Union kindly. Galloway’s biographer, John Ferling, concedes that some of the wounds suffered by Galloway in his own time and in subsequent eras were self-inflicted. His passionate defense of his proposal at the time he introduced it and his intemperate attack on his opponents in the months after its defeat served to diminish, not increase, his support in Congress. And Galloway’s personal manner—overbearing, haughty, sometimes arrogant—won him few friends among those delegates who had previously been unacquainted with him. Moreover, unlike such men as John and Sam Adams, who went out of their way to acquaint themselves with delegates from other colonies who may have been initially suspicious of their reputation for radicalism, Galloway remained largely aloof from those social occasions in which he might, by graciousness, tact and diplomacy, have won over skeptical delegates to his side. Indeed, for all of his intellectual attainments, Galloway was nearly altogether lacking in those personal qualities that might have enhanced his influence among the delegates.16

  One might also fault Galloway for an excessively narrow view of the conflict. By defending parliamentary sovereignty on purely legalistic grounds, he overlooked the highly emotional tone of the debates in the Congress. The delegates had gathered because Boston was in a state of siege. The circulation of rumors such as that involving the so-called Powder Alarm only heightened the sense of urgency. It’s a challenge for any leader to make an appeal to reason at such times, and it’s not surprising that the delegates weren’t persuaded by Galloway’s constitutional abstractions. Of course, it may well have been that, ultimately, Galloway was trying to find a compromise on an issue that was un-compromisable. Even in September of 1774, well before they had embraced, intellectually or psychologically, the idea of independence, the vast majority of delegates in the Congress, and the constituents whom they served, were committed to the principle that Americans needed to enjoy rights of representation on an equal footing with other Englishmen. Anything short of that was likely to be seen as unacceptable.

  As one careful historian of the First Continental Congress has concluded, “Galloway stood up in Carpenters’ Hall twenty years too late for his compatriots and almost a century too soon for the members of the British Parliament.” But Joseph Galloway’s Plan of Union nevertheless remains the single most serious effort of the period between the passage of the Stamp Act and the adoption of the Declaration of Independence at finding a means of giving Americans at least a portion of the representation that they were demanding with respect to parliamentary decisions affecting their interests.17

  With the tabling of Galloway’s Plan of Union at the end of the day on September 28, a coalition of radicals and moderates took control of the agenda, never looking back. Although Galloway remained in the Congress until it adjourned on October 26, he increasingly became an obstinately silent, disgruntled delegate. To add insult to injury, on October 14, in a clear sign that he was losing support even in the generally conservative Pennsylvania General Assembly, Galloway was replaced as Speaker of that body by Edward Biddle. Biddle was no revolutionary radical to be sure, but his views on the proper course of American resistance to British policies were closer to John Dickinson’s than Galloway’s. Galloway’s voice would by no means be stilled in the events leading up to Independence, but his political influence would be irretrievably diminished.18

  EIGHT

  GETTING ACQUAINTED IN THE CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE

  MOST OF THE delegates from twelve very different colonies didn’t know each other when they first came to Philadelphia. They were strangers in a strange city. But during the early weeks in September 1774 they moved slowly toward an identity as “Americans” engaged in common cause. Few, however, would have gone as far as Patrick Henry had in saying that “the distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers and New Englanders are no more.”

  The Massachusetts delegates’ efforts to cast off their reputation as intemperate militant radicals had been so successful that the earlier suspicions of them began to fade away. Caesar Rodney of Delaware, made note of his changing impression in a letter to his brother, observing that “the Bostonians, who . . . have been Condemned by Many for their Violence, are Moderate men.” He felt that the Virginia, South Carolina and Rhode Island delegates appeared more extreme in their views than the men of Massachusetts.1

  And of all the Bostonians, the one most reputed for his intemperate behavior, Sam Adams, had managed to change impressions most dramatically. Far more than his emotionally volatile younger cousin John, Sam Adams worked self-consciously to build a consensus among all the delegates, even those from Pennsylvania and New York. Drawing on what Joseph Galloway disparagingly termed “Adams’s art,” he took advantage of the informal sessions among the delegates at the City Tavern and other Philadelphia eating and drinking establishments to cultivate the support of the delegates from the southern and middle colonies.

  All the while, Sam Adams never lost sight of his goal, nor ever put aside his primary concern of protecting the safety of his constituents back in Massachusetts. At the same time that he was winning the respect and support of congressional delegates in Philadelphia,
he was writing passionate letters to his radical patriot lieutenants in Boston urging them on to ever more militant action. But this was all done out of sight of the delegates in Philadelphia. As he commented to Joseph Warren, to whom he had entrusted the organization of political resistance back home, “it is of the greatest importance that the American opposition should be united,” and, at least in his behavior in Philadelphia, he took pains to conduct himself in a manner that would produce that result.2

  If the congressional delegates were impressed by the moderation of the Bostonians, they were similarly struck by the surprisingly firm and purposeful manner of many of the Southerners who made the trip to Philadelphia. The prevailing view of life on Southern plantations was one of opulent leisure, if not outright laziness and dissipation. For some—in particular some of the delegates from New England—the fact was that much of the opulence so enjoyed by the southerners—whether in their avid consumption of the latest English fashions, their near obsession with fancy dress balls or their patronage of horse races and cockfights—was made possible by the exploitation of slaves from Africa. This realization only heightened the perception that the southern delegates were unlikely to share the values of austerity and virtue that would be necessary if an agreement banning the importation of English goods were to be strictly enforced.