Independence

by John Ferling

  The Assembly Party managed Pennsylvania’s war efforts during the French and Indian War, and as hostilities died down after 1759, it turned its attention to making the province a royal colony. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the principal impetus for the party’s campaign was Franklin’s hope of becoming the royal governor of Pennsylvania and Galloway’s longing to climb the political ladder, perhaps starting as a Crown-appointed magistrate and ending who-knew-where. For Galloway, his single-minded focus on royalization, together with his personal and political shortcomings, would in the long run prove to be a toxic mix.19

  By the time word of the Stamp Act reached Philadelphia in 1765, Galloway, cheerily optimistic as always, was convinced that Pennsylvania soon would be a royal province and that Franklin’s appointment as governor was imminent. To assure success, he believed that he had to keep Pennsylvania in “every way moderate.” He could not prevent Philadelphia’s fiery protests against the Stamp Act, but with Dickinson’s Proprietary Party leading the opposition to parliamentary taxation, Galloway unwisely made the Assembly Party into a cheerleader for Britain’s new policies. Spokesmen for the party aspired “to state the Conduct of the Mother Country in a true Light” and to demonstrate the “reasonableness of being Taxed.” Galloway himself portrayed the foes of the Stamp Act as “wretches” and “Villains,” and he publicly defended Britain’s “Good Disposition towards America.” At the very moment that Franklin was testifying before the House of Commons on behalf of repealing the Stamp Act, Galloway wrote to him boasting that the Assembly Party had been “the only Loyal Part of the People.” It alone had “oppose[d] the Torrent” and sought to “discredit” those who denounced the law.20

  With Franklin dropping hints from London that Hillsborough and others in the ministry were favorably disposed toward Pennsylvania’s royalization, Galloway and the Assembly Party stood foursquare behind the Townshend Duties in 1769 and 1770. Even as the colony embraced a trade embargo and Franklin surreptitiously attacked the new taxes in London newspapers, Galloway told his political partner that he was working to assure Pennsylvania’s “Dutiful Behaviour during these Times of American Confusion.” Galloway’s actions were tantamount to political suicide. By October 1770, when the annual assembly election was held, the Assembly Party was anathema in Philadelphia. Galloway, who had been elected to one of the city’s eight seats in the assembly for fifteen years, had to run in rural Bucks County to win reelection.21

  Despite its collapse in Philadelphia, the Assembly Party remained in control of the assembly until 1774. It survived because it remained the overwhelmingly dominant faction in rural eastern Pennsylvania, a region with 50 percent of the colony’s population but nearly three quarters of the allotted seats in the assembly, and Galloway continued in his post of speaker. Though hardly powerless, his loss of popularity in Philadelphia weighed on Galloway, and for a time in the early 1770s he contemplated abandoning politics.22 During the same period, perhaps concluding that his troubles had mounted because of his naive trust in Franklin, Galloway drifted away from his old partner. While Franklin wrote to him several times each year, Galloway answered with only three letters in the forty-eight months after January 1771.

  Galloway remained politically active, but he changed course after 1771. Among other things, he abandoned his open defense of parliamentary taxation, emphasizing instead the benefits that the colonists derived from their connection with Great Britain. Galloway and others among the most conservative Americans increasingly stressed that the colonies were an extension of British civilization, nourished and protected by the mother country. They asserted that the British and the Americans not only were the freest people on the planet both politically and religiously but that the colonies also prospered from imperial trade. Pointing to the vast quantities of British manufactured goods that were consumed annually by Americans, they portrayed the Anglo-American union as “a commercial Kingdom.” However, it was not only material plenty that made the empire desirable. The existence of a strong, central imperial government assured stability and the rule of law in America. The many benefits of empire had made the colonists “the happiest People … under the Sun.” But, conservatives warned, all was threatened by the colonial dissidents.23 If the American radicals pushed the imperial crisis to the point of American independence, social revolution would be the result. Even conservatives who resisted parliamentary taxation and the extension of British hegemony shared this view. For instance, New York’s Gouverneur Morris—who would support the Revolution and ultimately sit in the Constitutional Convention in 1787—warned in the early 1770s that “the mobility [the upwardly mobile patriots] grow dangerous to the gentry.” It was in the interest of the most affluent Americans, Morris added, “to seek for reunion with the parent State.”24

  After 1770, Galloway’s mission was to save the Anglo-American union, but even he understood that it could not endure in a relationship in which Parliament claimed the right to legislate for the colonists in all cases whatsoever. Accordingly, Galloway denounced Britain’s dissolution of the New York assembly and asserted that only the colonial assemblies could tax the colonists. There can be no “Union either of Affection or Interest between G. Britain and America until … there is a full Restoration of its [America’s] Liberties,” he proclaimed. Inching toward some sort of compromise solution to the imperial woes, he also excoriated the colonists’ growing distrust of Great Britain as “mad.”25

  In 1773, Galloway neither defended the Tea Act nor made an effort to have the cargo aboard the Polly, the tea ship bound for Philadelphia, unloaded and sold. When London answered the Boston Tea Party with the Intolerable Acts, Galloway immediately understood that American resistance meant war. However, his response was not politically adroit. Once Paul Revere’s sweaty mount galloped into Philadelphia in May 1774 carrying Boston’s appeal for a national boycott of British trade, Galloway led the fight against another trade embargo. He did so as much from the fear that an embargo would lead to war as from the hope of saving Philadelphia’s merchants from additional grievous losses. Galloway was swiftly outmaneuvered. The city’s radicals organized a mass rally that called for both a boycott and a continental congress. Galloway at first opposed both steps and refused to convene the assembly, which ultimately would have to decide Pennsylvania’s response to Boston’s entreaty. In mid-June the radicals struck with yet another outdoor meeting attended by thousands in downtown Philadelphia. The gathering endorsed the idea of summoning an extralegal assembly into session, seemingly the only means by which Pennsylvania might be represented in a continental congress. Faced with the prospect of a revolutionary body—one that would surely give proper representation to the western counties that long had been underrepresented in the Pennsylvania assembly, and which would supplant the colony’s legitimate legislature—Galloway caved in.26

  He called the assembly into a special session. By the time it met, Galloway knew not only that a continental congress was inevitable but also that New York’s conservatives had agreed to such a meeting in the hope of restraining New England’s firebrands. Galloway suddenly saw an opportunity to act in concert with other delegates from the mid-Atlantic region, and perhaps elsewhere. Thus, when the Pennsylvania assembly met, it agreed, under the guidance of Galloway, to a continental congress and proposed that it be held in centrally located Philadelphia early in September. The assembly also elected seven delegates to the congress, all conservatives and moderates. Galloway was included in the delegation, and he saw to it that his old rival Dickinson, next to Franklin the most popular Pennsylvanian, was not chosen. The assembly instructed its delegates to “establish a political union between the two countries,” Great Britain and its American colonies.27 A day or two later, one of Pennsylvania’s delegates, Thomas Mifflin, a Philadelphia merchant, informed Samuel Adams that his colony would vote to boycott British trade only if “some previous Step” was taken by the congress to peacefully resolve the crisis.28

  Neither Samuel Ada
ms nor Joseph Galloway had initially desired a continental congress, but in the end both accepted it. For Adams, a national congress offered the only hope of obtaining a national boycott of British trade and, perhaps, of preparing for war. For Galloway, if it acted with what he called “Temper and Moderation,” a national congress that spoke for America would subsume “the illegal conventions, committees, town meetings, and … subservient mobs” that Adams and his ilk had controlled.29 Moreover, as the heat-blistered summer of 1774 set in, Galloway had come to believe that an intercolonial congress offered the best hope, if not the only hope, of preventing war.

  From the southern low-country to northern New England, the delegates to what became known as the First Continental Congress—fifty-five men in all—descended on Philadelphia in August and early September. Most traveled by carriage and in the company of other delegates. The four congressmen from Massachusetts, together with their four servants, met on August 10 at Thomas Cushing’s residence in Boston and set out from there. Three weeks later Patrick Henry and Edmund Pendleton stopped at Mount Vernon to pick up George Washington. Accompanied by slaves, they started the long, dusty journey to Pennsylvania on a day that Washington described as “Exceeding hot.”30

  The Virginians completed the trip in five days, but the delegates from Massachusetts were on the road for three weeks. The congressmen from South Carolina and Rhode Island were the first to reach Philadelphia. Those from North Carolina arrived last, not entering the city until nearly the last week in September, some twenty days after Congress had begun.31

  The journey of the Massachusetts congressmen was time-consuming in part because the delegates refused to travel on the Sabbath. But they also paused in nearly every town along the way to meet with noteworthy locals, hoping to demonstrate that they were not militant incendiaries. Furthermore, as most had never been outside Massachusetts, they spent considerable time sightseeing. They inspected gardens, toured the campuses of Yale and the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), and once in New York—where they lingered for a week—the deputies gawked at public buildings, fortifications, statues, the prison and hospital, churches, cemeteries, King’s College (now Columbia), and climbed into a tall church steeple for a panoramic view of the city.32

  As the Massachusetts delegates neared Philadelphia in the muted light of sunset on August 29, they were greeted by several congressmen from Pennsylvania and Delaware, who in turn were accompanied by a dozen or so leading citizens of the city. Forming a small caravan, the Yankees were escorted into Philadelphia and welcomed along the way by a scrum of well-wishers who waved happily. Though “dirty, dusty, and fatigued”—they had been on the road for more than eight hours that day alone—the rumpled Massachusetts congressmen were taken to the City Tavern on second street above Walnut for drinks and dinner, a long, festive session that extended past eleven P.M.33

  City Tavern of Philadelphia as depicted in an early twentieth-century color lithograph. Many congressmen resided at the City Tavern. Congress held its initial meeting here in September 1775 to decide on a site for its sessions. (Library of Congress)

  Most congressmen found lodgings in private homes. The entire Massachusetts delegation rented rooms in the home of Jane Port on Arch Street. Washington and Richard Henry Lee lived at the home of Dr. William Shippen, Philadelphia’s most esteemed physician and Lee’s brother-in-law. Others were scattered here and there, including in taverns, the hotels of the day.34

  Probably many of the delegates were apprehensive that they might not measure up to the most talented congressmen from other colonies. John Adams imagined that Congress would be “an assembly of the wisest Men upon the Continent,” a gathering that would be a far cry from the caliber of the “sordid, venal Herd” ordinarily sitting in the Massachusetts legislature. He was not particularly confident that he would be adequate to the challenge. He knew law but fretted whether he was “fit for the Times,” that is, up to the great challenge that he would face. “I feel unutterable Anxiety,” he confided to his diary, adding, “God grant us Wisdom, and Fortitude” so that this congress would not in the end submit to British tyranny. “God forbid! Death in any Form is less terrible,” he declared.35

  As Congress was not scheduled to meet until Monday, September 5, the delegates who arrived early whiled away the time looking over the city. Several climbed the steep, narrow ladder into Christ Church’s tall steeple for what one deputy said was a “full View of the Whole City and of [the] Delaware River.” Most delegates were intrigued by Philadelphia. Many were unaccustomed to a large city, while those from Boston, New York, and Charleston were eager to see how the Pennsylvania metropolis compared with their own. A New Englander was amazed to find that “Wheat Fields crowd into the very Squares of the City,” by which he apparently meant that farms abutted the edge of Philadelphia. John Adams was struck by the “Regularity and Elegance of this City,” for unlike Boston, Philadelphia was a planned city that had been laid out in an uncomplicated gridiron pattern. The streets “are all equally wide, straight and parallel to each other,” Adams marveled. If in that respect Philadelphia differed from its counterparts, it was a typical walking city, quite similar to every American city of that day. More than six thousand houses and close to forty thousand inhabitants were squeezed inside a space that was only twelve blocks wide and some twenty-five blocks long. In an age before automobiles and mass transit, cities had to be compact so that the residents could daily get from their dwelling to their place of work, and back home again, by foot. Philadelphia was also typical of other cities—and quite unlike today’s American cities—in that neighborhoods were hardly segregated along social and economic lines. The small houses and shops of artisans frequently stood next to the fashionable homes of the affluent.36

  Not even Philadelphia’s “Exceeding hot, Sultry” weather, which the New Englanders found nearly unbearable, kept the delegates from sightseeing. Several toured the hospital and listened to a lecture on human anatomy by Dr. Shippen. Some went for an excursion to the “Cells of the Lunaticks,” where they found the incarcerated to be “furious, some merry, some Melancholly.” To his astonishment, John Adams discovered in what passed for the insane asylum an inmate whom he had once represented. “I once saved [him] … from being whipped … for Horse stealing,” Adams recalled. Others visited the shipyards and the poorhouse, which could accommodate five hundred residents. Many were taken with the four-hundred-yard-long city market, though a Yankee deputy opined that while the meat was excellent, the fruit and vegetables were inferior to those in New England. Nearly all toured the College of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania). On Sundays, many worshipped in churches not to be found at home. Washington and John Adams, for instance, attended the local Roman Catholic Church, a first for the New Englander and probably for the Virginian as well.37

  Nearly every evening, socially prominent Philadelphians invited a delegate or two from several colonies to a sumptuous dinner party. At one affair, said a congressman, the table groaned with “Curds and Creams, Jellies, Sweet meats of various sorts, 20 sorts of Tarts, fools, Trifles, floating Islands, whipped Sillabubs &c &c—Parmesan Cheese, Punch, Wine, Porter, Beer &c &c.” On another occasion the guests had a dessert of “Melons, fine beyond description, and Pears and Peaches as excellent.” In between what John Adams referred to as the “incessant Feasts,” clusters of congressmen gathered over steaming pots of tea and cold tankards of beer to chat, and to size up one another. On September 1 the twenty-five delegates already in town spent a long evening dining together in a private room at the City Tavern. “My time is totally filled from the Moment I get out of Bed, until I return to it,” one congressman exclaimed, adding that much of each day was given over to “feast[ing] upon ten thousand Delicacies” and consuming spirits for hours on end. At times, some of the congressman drank too much. Adams said that at one party he “drank Madeira at a great rate.” He remained sober, or so he said, but he noted that Richard Henry Lee and Benjamin Harrison from Virginia go
t “very high.”38

  These festive occasions enabled the congressmen to become better acquainted. Each delegate knew the other members of his own delegation, but those from other colonies were for the most part total strangers. For a century and a half the colonists had looked across the sea toward the mother country, largely ignoring their neighboring provinces in America. Surprisingly little trade occurred between the colonies, and it, of course, was conducted by businessmen, not politicians. But businessmen often traveled and sometimes they became active in politics. For instance, Pennsylvania delegate Thomas Mifflin had met John and Samuel Adams a year earlier while on a business trip to Boston. Furthermore, some delegates had become acquainted with their soon-to-be colleagues through the committees of correspondence network. For a year or more, Samuel Adams had been exchanging numerous letters with leading political figures in several colonies, some of whom would serve in Congress.39 Thus, it was largely but not entirely true, as one congressman remarked, that this conclave brought together “Strangers” who were unacquainted “with Each others Language, Ideas, Views, Designs” and who were also “jealous … fearfull, timid, skittish” in the company of one another.40

  Sometimes, too, the delegates struggled to overcome their own biased first impressions of those from other parts of America. The Yankee John Adams, for instance, immediately concluded that every New Yorker was rude and ungentlemanly. With some irritation he declared that they “talk very loud, very fast, and alltogether. If they ask you a Question, before you can utter 3 Words of your Answer, they will break out upon you, again—and talk away.”41

  Above all, the delegates were eager to discover the political outlook of their fellow deputies. Every word uttered, every toast offered, every sign conveyed by body language could divulge something of a colleague’s sentiments. John Adams had been in town less than twenty-four hours before he uncovered “a Tribe of People here” who were identical to those in orbit around Governor Hutchinson back in Massachusetts. One was Galloway, whom Adams instantly marked as identical in his thinking to those in Boston who had defended the Stamp Act back in 1765. On the other hand, Adams was delighted with Richard Henry Lee, who confided—presumably while he was sober—that he favored the repeal of all British taxes and the Intolerable Acts, the removal of the British army from American soil, and sweeping reforms in the mother country’s regulation of colonial commerce. Adams got the impression that most in the Virginia delegation shared Lee’s convictions, leading him to pronounce that those Southerners were filled with “Sense and Fire [and] Spirit.”42