It may be confidently asserted that the great majority of the American Loyalists, in fact, did not approve of the course pursued by the British government between 1765 and 1774. They did not deny its legality; but they doubted as a rule either its wisdom or its justice. Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts, one of the most famous and most hated of the Loyalists, went to England, if we are to believe his private letters, with the secret ambition of obtaining the repeal of the act which closed Boston harbour. Joseph Galloway, another of the Loyalist leaders, and the author of the last serious attempt at conciliation, actually sat in the first Continental Congress, which was called with the object of obtaining the redress of what Galloway himself described as ‘the grievances justly complained of.’ Still more instructive is the case of Daniel Dulany of Maryland. Dulany, one of the most distinguished lawyers of his time, was after the Declaration of Independence denounced as a Tory; his property was confiscated, and the safety of his person imperilled. Yet at the beginning of the Revolution he had been found in the ranks of the Whig pamphleteers; and no more damaging attack was ever made on the policy of the British government than that contained in his _Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies_. When the elder Pitt attacked the Stamp Act in the House of Commons in January 1766, he borrowed most of his argument from this pamphlet, which had appeared three months before. This difficulty which many of the Loyalists felt with regard to the justice of the position taken up by the British government greatly weakened the hands of the Loyalist party in the early stages of the Revolution. It was only as the Revolution gained momentum that the party grew in vigour and numbers. A variety of factors contributed to this result. In the first place there were the excesses of the revolutionary mob. When the mob took to sacking private houses, driving clergymen out of their pulpits, and tarring and feathering respectable citizens, there were doubtless many law-abiding people who became Tories in spite of themselves. Later on, the methods of the inquisitorial communities possibly made Tories out of some who were the victims of their attentions. The outbreak of armed rebellion must have shocked many into a reactionary attitude. It was of these that a Whig satirist wrote, quoting: This word, Rebellion, hath frozen them up, Like fish in a pond.