Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 1, Colonial and Revolutionary Literature: Early National Literature: Part I
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[138] for themselves or for their author. It was as a hard-working member of the Continental Congress, and not as a writer or political philosopher, that Adams made his worthiest contribution to the American cause.

To a different class belong the numerous writings of Joseph Galloway, a delegate from Pennsylvania to the first Continental Congress. Already prominent in the politics of his colony, Galloway submitted to the Congress a Plan of a proposed union between great Britain and the colonies. Read in the light of the present day, the scheme seems like a suggestive anticipation of later British colonial policy; but the Congress, after debating it at length, and rejecting it by the narrow majority of a single vote, trampled it under foot, and ordered all reference to it expunged from the printed journal. Galloway later published the plan in A Candid Examination of the Mutual Claims of Great Britain and the Colonies (New York, 1775). In 1778, after two years spent with the British forces, Galloway went to England, where he was thought sufficiently important to be examined before the House of Commons, and where he continued to publish pamphlets on America until the end of the war.

Another New York loyalist, President Myles Cooper of King's College (now Columbia), gifted with wit and sarcasm above most of his fellows, entered the lists in 1774 with two anonymous pamphlets-The American Querist: or, Some Questions Proposed relative to the Present Disputes between Great Britain and her American Colonies, and A friendly address to all Reasonable Americans. In August, 1775, a mob stripped and mutilated him, but he contrived to escape to a British ship-of-war, and thence to England, where he obtained ecclesiastical preferment. Charles Lee, soon to be numbered among the renegades and traitors, but at the moment in the enjoyment of a repute as a military expert which he had done little to earn, replied to Cooper with some cleverness in Strictures on a pamphlet, entitled a Friendly address to all Reasonable Americans (1775)-the only contribution of Lee's to the patriot cause for which he may be appreciatively remembered.

Although not published until 1797, by which time the author had been for more than twenty years resident in England, Jonathan Boucher's A View of the Causes and Consequences