The Loyalist

Fists banged on Grace Galloway’s front door early on the morning of Thursday, August 20, 1778. From the entryway where she and a servant had been awaiting unwanted visitors to her stately home at Market and Sixth Streets, a block from the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) in Philadelphia, Galloway shouted that she would not be admitting anyone. Her callers, all male, circled the house trying every door, finding each locked. Using a scrubbing brush, the men stove in the kitchen door. Red-faced and short of breath, the intruders rushed to where Galloway stood. First among the raiders was Charles Willson Peale, an artist and fervent American Patriot who that day was acting in his official role as a commissioner in charge of confiscating property from foes of the Revolution. Peale and companions had come to evict the Galloway family.

The city’s so-called commissioners for forfeited estates really were out to punish Grace’s husband Joseph, a prominent politician who had aided the British army during its recent occupation of Philadelphia. When in recent months the army pulled up stakes, Joseph had fled. Peale had warned Grace on Wednesday that he would be coming to take possession of the Galloways’ Philadelphia home. Face to face with Peale and his men, Galloway declared that “nothing but force should get me out of my house,” she wrote later in her diary. One interloper said he knew how to deal with that: They would throw her clothes into the street. Onlookers, including friends of Galloway’s, appeared. After