In September 1774, independence was not inevitable. A plan to permanently unite the colonies with Britain came within one vote of being adopted by the First Continental Congress — and then the Congress erased the evidence that the vote had ever happened. This episode presents what survived.
The First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774. Fifty-six delegates from twelve colonies. Parliament had closed the port of Boston as punishment for the destruction of the tea. The Intolerable Acts had stripped Massachusetts of its charter government. The question before the Congress was what to do about it.
Most of the debate ran toward confrontation — non-importation, non-consumption, non-exportation. Economic pressure on Britain. But the delegates were not of one mind. The instructions many of them carried from their colonial legislatures directed them to seek a redress of grievances and a restoration of harmony — not a break. Among the delegates who took those instructions literally was Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania: Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly since 1766, one of the most experienced legislators in the colonies, and a man who believed the entire crisis was, in his words, a constitutional problem with a constitutional solution.
Galloway's idea was not new. In July 1754, at the Albany Congress, Benjamin Franklin had proposed a plan of union for the colonies — a Grand Council of colonial representatives with a President-General appointed by the Crown. The Albany Plan was designed for collective defense during the French and Indian War. It was adopted by the Albany Congress and then rejected by every colonial assembly and by the Crown. Nobody wanted to give up that much power.
The full text of the Albany Plan of Union is at the Yale Avalon Project. Franklin and Galloway were political allies and correspondents in Pennsylvania for years. Twenty years after Albany, with the empire coming apart, Galloway took Franklin's structure and rebuilt it for a larger purpose — not collective defense, but permanent constitutional union between Britain and America.
On September 28, 1774, Galloway rose in Carpenters' Hall and presented his Plan of a Proposed Union Between Great Britain and the Colonies. The plan called for an American legislature — a Grand Council chosen by the colonial assemblies, with a President-General appointed by the King. The Council would function as an American branch of the British Parliament. Acts affecting America would require the assent of both bodies. The colonies would gain the representation they had been denied; Britain would keep the empire whole.
James Duane and John Jay of New York spoke in support. Edward Rutledge of South Carolina called it almost a perfect plan. And John Adams of Massachusetts, sitting in the hall, wrote down what was said in his diary — notes that would turn out to matter more than anyone in the room knew.
The Proposal I intended to make having been opposed, I have waited to hear a more effectual one. A general Non Importation from G. Britain and Ireland has been adopted, but I think this will be too gradual in its Operation for the Relief of Boston.
Adams had also recorded Galloway rehearsing his constitutional argument in committee on September 8 — twenty days before the formal proposal. Both sets of notes are in the Adams Papers at Founders Online. They are among the only surviving records of what was said in the hall.
The motion to table Galloway's plan passed six colonies to five. One vote. Had a single delegation gone the other way, the First Continental Congress would have kept on its table a formal plan for permanent union with Great Britain — three weeks after it convened, twenty-one months before the Declaration of Independence.
The arrival of the Suffolk Resolves from Massachusetts — endorsing open resistance to the Intolerable Acts — had already shifted the room toward the radicals. On October 22, 1774, a motion to reconsider Galloway's plan was rejected. Then the Congress went further: the plan, and the entire debate over it, was expunged from the official Journal. The printed record of the First Continental Congress was published as if the closest vote of the session had never taken place.
Galloway refused to attend the Second Continental Congress in 1775. As the war began, he moved toward the Loyalist side — by 1776 he had joined the British. He served as civil administrator of Philadelphia during the British occupation of 1777–1778. When the British evacuated, Galloway sailed for England. He spent the rest of his life there as a leading voice of the American Loyalists in exile, writing pamphlets and advising the government on colonial affairs.
He was never permitted to return. Pennsylvania attainted him for treason and confiscated his estates. Joseph Galloway — Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly for eight years, delegate to the First Continental Congress, author of the last formal plan to hold the empire together — died in Watford, England on August 29, 1803. His service record is at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.