THE FORGOTTEN PATRIOT

Bunny Smedley visits the grave of one

of her forebears, the American loyalist Joseph Galloway

ON a bright, cold day last month, I went to Watford to lay an armful of lilies on the anonymous grave of a nearly forgotten fig- ure. Having lived here for 13 years — born in North Carolina but married to an Englishman — it had taken me this long to pay a call on my distant, long-dead cousin, Joseph Galloway.

That lack of urgency is typical, some- how, of the shabby way in which Galloway has been treated by posterity. American landowner, politician, loyalist exile, inde- fatigable constructor of constitutional plans and certified historical dead-end, Galloway finally came to rest in the churchyard of St Mary's, Watford, in August 1803. And then came oblivion. George Washington's statue, trimly com- placent, scans the imperial landscape of Trafalgar Square; Galloway, ruined in the defence of that empire, has no memorial.

St Mary's is a handsome, sprawling, expansive structure, where 13th-century stonework melds easily into the unobtru- sive church hall, circa 1979; the churchyard is a dark-green island in the midst of mod- em shopping streets. I knew that in his will Galloway had asked to be buried 'without pomp' (born a Quaker, he died an Angli- can friend of the Wesley brothers) in Wat- ford churchyard, under a table-tomb sur- rounded by iron railings. Cradling the lilies uneasily, I wandered among the tombs, peering at names and dates. Few of the inscriptions were wholly legible; most had more or less vanished. Crowds of shoppers hurried by a few feet away from me, indif- ferent to these throngs of the anonymous and now unknowable dead.

The outlines of Joseph Galloway's life, at least, are clear enough. He was born around 1731 in Maryland into a prominent landowning family. Marriage to an heiress brought the young lawyer wealth and a piv- otal role in Philadelphia politics. By his thirties he was speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, a friend and confidant of Ben- jamin Franklin.

He was also, like most Americans at that time, a loyal, if critical, British subject. His proposal before the First Continental Congress in September 1774 was an important one: he advocated a revised plan of union, in which Parliament would devolve a limited measure of authority on to a confederate colonial assembly. Congress debated the plan at length before deciding, six colonies against five, to shelve it. Instead, they adopted more confrontational, less statesmanlike tactics, which escalated into open rebellion and the Declaration of Independence.

The historical alchemy which converted a localised tax revolt into a superpower's cre- ation myth has led many to believe that the outcome was inevitable. It wasn't. For one thing, the rebels were by no means a majority. Yet commentators at the time were confident that, averaged out over the 13 colonies, about a third of the population were rebels, about a third loyal, while another third simply went on with their business, avoiding conflict where they could and hoping for better times.

The loyalists were a diverse group, encompassing artisans, hill-farmers and freed slaves, Quakers and Methodists and Anglicans, gentlemen and civil servants. In some places — New York City, New Jer- sey, the Chesapeake Bay area, Charleston in South Carolina — they formed a majori- ty, but even where they were least abun- dant they were significant. More than 19,000 men (out of a population of some- thing like two million white colonists) served in loyalist units in the British army; irregulars and casual sympathisers arc impossible to quantify. Why, then, do rep- utable history books still tell a story in which 'Americans' fight 'the British', as if any coincidence between the two was freakish and exceptional?

Nor were the rebels always what they seemed. As in all civil wars, bands of local thugs — in this case, the elegantly named Sons of Liberty — forced waverers into compliance when not pursuing older grievances unconnected with the broader conflict. Those who resisted might be tarred and feathered, resulting in disfiguring or fatal bums; others had their property confis- cated, or were driven away. Colonel Charles Lynch, a Virginian rebel officer who subject- ed prominent loyalists to summary floggings, is responsible for the phrase 'lynch law'. The noose was a later addition; the concept of mob violence tacitly sanctioned by civil authorities was there from the start. Though hardly Terror on the scale of later revolutions — no tumbrils, no guillo- tine — this was more than many could bear. As hopes of victory evaporated, up to 100,000 loyalists left the colonies for Britain, Canada, or the West Indies. My own Gal- loway ancestors, like so many Americans, went west — across the Appalachians, to the Ohio Valley and Kentucky, where loyal- ist connections would not prove a hin- drance. But this mass diaspora of the defeated is hardly the stuff of which patriot- ic legends are made, or the language in which eventual victors justify their actions, past or present.

Joseph Galloway, a high-profile loyalist, was forced off his Pennsylvania estates by a mob. Joining up with the loyal forces, he served for a while as civilian administrator for Philadelphia before it was retaken by rebel forces in June 1778. Had he remained in the city, he would have been killed. As it was, he left for London with his young daughter. His wife stayed on in a doomed attempt to save at least £40,000 worth of property from confiscation by the rebels. The two never met again.

Had military victory restored British rule, and Galloway's plan (or one like it) been adopted, Galloway might have been remem- bered among the Founding Fathers of a very different American union. Today, when the non-existence of the United States is almost literally unimaginable, this sounds fanciful; in 1778 it was, at the very least, a real possibility.

In London, amid the minor humiliations of refugee life, Galloway had not given up hope. He busied himself as unofficial spokesman for the interests of other loyal- ist exiles. He wrote pamphlets: more plans for union between Great Britain and her various colonies, more attacks on those he held responsible for Britain's military fail- ure. He lobbied and gave evidence before official inquiries. In 1790 the British gov- ernment awarded him an annual pension of £500.

Now it is almost as if he had never lived. The names of men he knew — Franklin, Washington, Jefferson — are familiar far beyond American shores; Galloway's name is remembered, if at all, in unread doctoral dissertations. Certainly, it doesn't feature on his tomb.

I must have spent an hour drifting dis- consolately among the graves in Watford churchyard. Eventually, through the pro- cess of elimination (wrong date here, wrong arms there), I narrowed down the options to a single, tall, dignified table- tomb. The vicar, busy but kind, showed me an old photograph indicating that the tomb had once had railings around it, as Gal- loway had requested. I imagine they were melted down during the last war. The sin- gle slate panel, which had presumably once borne an inscription, was now nothing but a granulated, grey, inarticulate surface.

If nothing else, it would do as a decent cenotaph for Joseph Galloway. Laying the lilies on the step of the tomb, I stood back a moment. Having had such rotten luck with his earthly inheritance, I could only hope he had been happier in his heavenly one.