Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire.. Maya Jasanoff
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was the mounting pressure of revolutionary events: threats, violence, the imposition of oaths, and ultimately war. By 1776, the patriots renounced the king’s authority, and developed fresh political and philosophical justifications for doing so—whereas loyalists wanted to remain British subjects, and wanted the thirteen colonies to remain part of the British Empire. On these fundamental points, loyalists could largely agree. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think loyalists were ideologically uniform—or that they simply wanted to preserve the status quo. In fact, many leading loyalists sought to reform the imperial relationship. They resisted the prospect of authoritarian rule, and were quick to defend their rights to representation. Indeed, during the colonial protests of the 1760s and 1770s, future loyalists and patriots alike spoke out in unison against perceived British tyranny. They tended to share provincial perspectives on rights and liberties, and a common language of grievance against the abuse of imperial authority. This would have important repercussions in the postwar years, when loyalist refugees found their expectations as British subjects to be at odds with those of their metropolitan British rulers.
The troubles in the colonies all started, strangely enough, with Britain’s greatest imperial victory. Triumph in the Seven Years’ War in 1763 brought the empire French Canada, Spanish Florida, valuable Caribbean islands, and an important foothold in India. But Britain had also racked up an enormous debt. To offset the costs, Parliament passed a series of measures in the colonies designed to promote imperial security and prosperity. Instead, it unintentionally provoked colonial resistance. Most notoriously, the Stamp Act of 1765, a seemingly innocuous tax on paper products, spectacularly backfired when Americans (and many Britons) denounced it as an abuse of imperial power, imposed by a parliament that did not adequately represent colonists. Many future loyalists were vocal opponents of the Stamp Act, though these protests also saw the first systematic attacks against American “tories,” suspected of wanting to enhance royal and aristocratic power. Street gangs like the self-described Sons of Liberty smashed property and assaulted individuals—most vividly by tarring and feathering, a new hallmark of patriot justice.10
Violence was a familiar colonial phenomenon by the time a 1773 tax on tea touched off the worst trouble yet. One December night, Boston’s Sons of Liberty, their faces streaked to resemble Indian warriors, stormed onto British tea ships anchored in Boston harbor and tipped the valuable cargo overboard. Parliament responded by passing the so-called Coercive Acts, closing the port of Boston and demanding repayment for the tea. Americans swiftly branded these the “Intolerable Acts.” Delegates from around the thirteen colonies decided to convene a continental congress in Philadelphia and develop a coordinated response.
A few congressmen arrived in Philadelphia in September 1774 already primed for war. They must have cheered enthusiastically at a congressional dinner when the radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine—who had recently arrived from England to throw his support behind the patriot cause—raised a toast, declaring, “May the collision of British Flint and American Steel produce that spark of liberty which shall illumine . . . posterity”! But the majority of delegates would have cheered more comfortably when the company drank to the “Union of Britain and the Colonies on a constitutional foundation.”11 The prospect of war seemed to most congressmen an unnecessary, not to say suicidal, extreme. Far preferable was finding a way to assert colonial rights and liberties while remaining within the imperial fold.
The speaker of the Pennsylvania assembly, Joseph Galloway, offered Congress a compelling plan to achieve this.12 Galloway agreed with most of his colleagues that the colonies—while they held “in abhorrence the idea of being considered independent”—could not adequately “be represented in the Parliament of Great Britain.” Instead, Galloway suggested that America have a parliament of its own: a “Grand Council,” to be headed by a president general. Made up of representatives from each colony, this American parliament would “hold and exercise all the legislative rights, powers, and authorities” required for running colonial affairs. It would also have the power to veto any legislation bearing on America produced by the British parliament. The colonies would thereby enjoy domestic self-government while retaining the benefits of imperial trade and protection. Such a “Plan of Union,” Galloway argued, was the only way forward if the colonies wanted to stave off “all the horrors of a civil war” and the inevitable “ruin of America.”13
Galloway’s plan was the most significant colonial reform project on the eve of the revolution, though it did not come out of a vacuum. Galloway’s mentor Benjamin Franklin had proposed a very similar idea himself twenty years earlier (developed with the governor of Massachusetts Thomas Hutchinson, later reviled as a “tory”), the Albany Plan of Union of 1754.14 “Join, or Die,” Franklin had inscribed under a memorable political cartoon showing the colonies as segments of a cut-up serpent—indicating the importance of continental union to American prosperity.15 Galloway sent his own plan of union to Franklin, then living in London, who circulated the scheme among high-ranking British officials; Franklin’s only objection was that it might embroil America in too many British imperial wars. Franklin’s son William, the governor of New Jersey, wholeheartedly endorsed it. After all, it had much to commend it to American sensibilities. By granting the colonies control over virtually everything but the ability to go to war, Galloway’s plan proposed a greater degree of autonomy for the American colonies than any other British domain enjoyed, including Scotland. His proposed American legislature would have fewer constraints than the Irish parliament, too. Most important, Galloway argued, his plan would aid the development of America itself. If the colonies were going to continue to grow and flourish, there had to be some overarching authority binding them together, in the spirit of Franklin’s “Join, or Die”; perhaps, he suggested, an “American constitution.”16
For one long late-September day in 1774, Congress debated Galloway’s plan of union. The New York delegation was particularly well disposed toward it, with the respected lawyer John Jay speaking out clearly in its favor. It was “almost a perfect plan,” declared an upstanding young South Carolina planter. Galloway congratulated himself that “all the men of property, and many of the ablest speakers, supported the motion.” But not all his colleagues were convinced. “We are not to consent by the representatives of representatives,” insisted Patrick Henry of Virginia.17 Samuel Adams, the founder of the Sons of Liberty, believed the colonies would do better by withdrawing from the British Empire altogether. When Galloway’s plan came to a vote, five colonies voted in its favor versus six against—and the plan was tabled.18 Instead of moving toward closer union with Britain, Congress issued a set of resolutions asserting Americans’ entitlement to “all the rights, liberties, and immunities” of British subjects, in terms anticipating those of the Declaration of Independence.19
The closeness of the vote on Galloway’s plan poses an intriguing “what if ” for historians. What if one vote had gone the other way? What would have happened to the thirteen colonies if Galloway’s scheme had been adopted? Ireland might provide one answer: following a series of reforms in 1782, the Irish parliament received something of the legislative freedom Galloway sought for America. In 1800, Ireland would be united with Great Britain outright and its parliament absorbed by Westminster. But a better answer would take shape in North America itself, in 1867, when the provinces of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia united to become a federal, self-governing dominion within the British Empire. Canada—as this confederation was called—was the first example of “home rule” (autonomy over domestic policy) in the empire, and provided a template for self-government movements in later-nineteenth-century Ireland and India. In 1774 Philadelphia, Galloway advanced a model of imperial reform that anticipated home rule by generations. It was a prime example of how loyalists possessed dynamic political visions of their own.