Joseph Galloway

Joseph Galloway (1731August 29, 1803) was an American attorney and a leading political figure in the events immediately preceding the founding of the United States in the late 1700s. As a staunch opponent of American independence, he would become one of the most prominent Loyalists in North America during the early part of the Revolutionary War.

The son of a wealthy landowner, Galloway became close friends with Benjamin Franklin through his law studies in the late 1740s. His association with Franklin and his father-in-law's relationship with the Penn family drew him into the political drama then unfolding in the American colonies. Galloway was elected to the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly in 1756 when he was just 25. He would go on to serve for 18 years, eight of them as assembly speaker.

In 1774, Galloway led the Pennsylvania delegation in the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, where as a conservative he proposed a plan for forming a union between the colonies and Great Britain. After the Congress failed to adopt his Plan of Union, he signed the Continental Association, an agreement uniting the colonies in a boycott of British goods. Unhappy with the radical directions being taken, Galloway quit the Assembly and refused election to the Second Continental Congress in May 1775. Remaining loyal to the king, he opposed the adoption of the Declaration of Independence the next year.

Three months after the Declaration's signing, Galloway fled to New York to join the British. As a top advisor to William Howe, the commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, he provided crucial intelligence, assisted in planning attacks on Continental Army troops, and personally recruited upwards of 80 spies. With the capture of Philadelphia in September 1777, Howe appointed Galloway to govern the city as Superintendent of both Police and Port.

When the British abandoned Philadelphia in June 1778, Galloway escaped to England and was convicted of high treason in absentia by the Pennsylvania Assembly; his estates were confiscated. Through the end of the war, Galloway was a leader of the loyalist cause in exile, a group of between 80,000 and 100,000 displaced colonists. He would never return to the Americas, nor again see his wife whom he had left behind in hopes of recovering his properties. Provided by Wikipedia