The First Continental Congress and the Problem of American Rights
IN OCTOBER 1774 JOSEPH GALLOWAY left the First Continental Congress frustrated and angry, sentiments he soon after expressed publicly, accusing his opponents in Philadelphia of adopting "untenable principles, and thence rearing the most wild and chimerical superstructures." He condemned what he thought were the absurd arguments and baseless assertions made by his congressional adversaries as they debated Parliament's authority over the colonies and attempted to define American liberties in a Declaration of Rights. "Even the authors themselves," he complained bitterly, "finding that they have conveyed no satisfactory idea to the intelligent mind, of either the extent of parliamentary authority, or the rights of America, have exploded them, and taken new ground, which will be found to be equally indefensible." What is worse, they were leading America down the wrong path, "bewildered among the erroneous principles upon which her advocates have attempted in vain to support her rights." The men who had dominated Congress and pushed through the Declaration of Rights were duping the people and manipulating public opinion, groaned Galloway, convinced that congressional leaders only pretended to seek reconciliation when what they really wanted was independence. Explicitly he berated them for their inconsistency; implicitly he questioned their sincerity as well. Galloway was hardly the first to impugn both the motives and the logic of those who eventually became revolutionaries. General Thomas Gage had said much the same thing six years before. Writing from his New York headquarters he advised William Barrington, the secretary at war, that those