William and Mary Goddard, Printers and Public Servants

The Pennsylvania Chronicle began its life as the chosen organ of the Junta,
that anti-Proprietary organization which Franklin had brought into being
years before, and in which Galloway and Wharton were among his promi-
nent associates. These gentlemen and their friends of the opposition were its
principal contributors; Franklin himself sent from England for its columns
many of those essays which served to mould the political thought of the
time. Some of the friends of the Chronicle, while sincere enough in their ab-
horrence of the Proprietary, yet were only lukewarm on the larger question
of opposition to the measures of the Crown in its administration of the colo-
nies. Among these, unfortunately for Goddard, who was a patriot of another
stripe, were his partners, Messrs. Galloway and Wharton, the first of whom
already had begun to lose standing with the more zealous by his perfunc-
tory opposition to the Stamp Act in 1765. He resented Goddard's action in
beginning in the Chronicle, on December 3, 1767, the publication of John
Dickinson's "Letters from a Farmer,"¹ a series of political essays wherein
the broader question of American rights was discussed in a manner which
influenced the increasing anti-British sentiment of the colonies. On his part
Goddard resented no less bitterly the necessity which he was under of as-
sailing on every occasion the Proprietary government of Pennsylvania, a pol-
icy for the prosecution of which his newspaper had been established, but
of which he had wearied early in the campaign. It has been said, to put the
result of the disagreement briefly, that "The obstinate Goddard refused to
conduct the paper according to the wishes of the dictatorial Galloway, and
the Chronicle, instead of supporting the Assembly party, became a bitter
opponent of its former patron."² It is probable that this desertion of the
cause of the Pennsylvania Assembly by Goddard provided the basis for the
accusation of Toryism brought against him in later years, but it should be
observed again that at the outbreak of the Revolution it was Galloway and
Wharton who joined the British while Goddard remained in the American
camp, and that it was this so-called "Tory," who after having labored with
all of his strength in the service of the colonies in a civilian capacity, strove
to secure an appointment from the Congress as a field officer in its army.

In the year 1769 Galloway and Wharton withdrew from partnership with
the unmanageable Goddard, who affirmed afterwards that before the dis-
solution they had compelled him to take as a partner their "spy," Benja-
min Towne, a journeyman printer of the establishment. Towne asserted

¹This was the initial publication of Dickinson's "Letters." Newspapers throughout the colonies immediately
began to reprint them as they appeared in Goddard's journal.

² See Joseph Galloway, the Loyalist Politician, by Ernest H. Baldwin, in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History,
26:161-191, 289-321, 417-442.

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