Three Men in Colonial Pennsylvania

One of the themes John Ferling establishes in A Leap in the Dark, his history of America's political evolution from 1754-1801, is that during this period there was a constantly recurring cycle of friction between the more radical elements willing to push into uncharted waters and those supporting the status quo:

The title of this book was taken from a line in a newspaper essay written in 1776 by a Pennsylvanian who opposed American independence. To separate from the mother country, he cautioned, was to make "a leap in the dark," to jump into an uncertain future. Time and again in the course of the half century spanned by this book, political activists confronted the reality that their actions would catapult them onto amorphous terrain. In every instance, there were those who were ready to take the chance. Always, too, there were those who resisted approaching the abyss that would be ushered in by breaking with the past.

Especially interesting is that amidst this series of "leaps in the dark" that Ferling describes, it was often the very same people who stood at the revolutionary vanguard at one such moment, only to lead the conservation reaction at the next (or vice versa). Three men closely connected to each other in colonial Pennsylvania politics provide a nice illustration: Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, and Joseph Galloway.

After retiring as an enormously successful businessman, Franklin had turned his attention to politics. In particular, he became a strong opponent of the proprietors who ran the Pennsylvania colony, and he wanted the English crown to convert Pennsylvania into a crown charter and rule it directly. He was joined in this movement, dubbed the Assembly Party, by Galloway, who rose to become Speaker of the Pennsylvania House from 1766-1774. As a result, they sought royal favor even amidst growing rumblings of colonial discontent after the passage of the Townshend Acts:

Continuing to adhere to the quest for royalization, the Assembly Party immediately took essentially the same stance it had taken two years before: Pennsylvanians should shoulder a portion of the empire's economic burden, Parliament's taxes would be slight, and if they proved to be onerous, London would happily accede to the province's "dutiful remonstrance" to reduce the level of taxation. Once again, too, Galloway and his party sought to block Philadelphia's participation in a trade embargo.

Dickinson had been leading the opposition to royalization as head of the Proprietary Party, and he was also amongst the first to rail against Parliament's efforts to tax the colonies. As early as the winter of 1768, he was publishing newspaper articles articulating the radical argument that Parliament lacked the constitutional power to impose any tax whatsoever upon the colonies. In the wake of the Townshend Acts, Dickinson and his party "won acclaim as the fervent defenders of American Rights" and "the Assembly Party suffered heavy losses in its urban working-class base."

Flash forward a few years. Unlike Galloway, Franklin had seen the writing on the wall in time and signaled his support for the embargo before he could be forever tarnished as a Loyalist. From his perch in London, he attempted to reach compromises on behalf of the colonies, but eventually he perceived that the growing breach between the colonies and the mother country was irreparable and he returned home. Meanwhile, Galloway attended the First Continental Congress and proposed a Plan of Union involving an American Parliament that would share a mutual veto with its British counterpart; the plan was only narrowly defeated by a vote of six colonies to five, the high water mark for Loyalists in the Congress.

A last-second addition to Pennsylvania's delegation at the Second Continental Congress, Franklin was among the earliest convinced that war and independence were inevitable. Dickinson, the early agitator, was now leading the conciliatory wing of the Congress; he was convinced that the colonies' dispute was with Parliament, not the British Crown. It was he who wrote the last-ditch Olive Branch Petition, appealing to King George to intervene and mediate the dispute. He opposed the Declaration of Independence, which passed unanimously only because Dickinson and another conciliatory Pennsylvania delegate absented themselves the day of the vote. He never signed it.

Franklin, of course, served as one of America's leading lights at home and abroad. Dickinson continued to pursue conflicted positions: serving as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention for a country whose independence he had opposed; defending the Jay Treaty in 1796, but denouncing Federalist belligerence toward France in 1798. Galloway retired from politics when the war began, only to volunteer to serve as British police commissioner of occupied Philadelphia and then flee to London in 1778. He would die there in exile, informed by Pennsylvania that he would stand trial for crimes during the occupation if he returned.