Benjamin Galloway (1752–1831), an attorney and planter who had been educated in England, represented his native Anne Arundel County in the Maryland House of Delegates in 1777 and served briefly as the state’s attorney general the following year. In the 1780s he served as a county justice. About 1796 Galloway moved to what soon became Hagerstown in Washington County, and he later sat on the county court. He returned to the House of Delegates in 1822 for one term and was an outspoken Republican throughout his adulthood. At the time of his death Galloway owned about 1,300 acres in Washington County, 1,000 in Anne Arundel, and seven lots in Hagerstown (BDML description begins Edward C. Papenfuse and others, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature, 1635–1789, 1979–85, 2 vols. description ends , 1:338–9; PTJ description begins Julian P. Boyd, Charles T. Cullen, John Catanzariti, Barbara B. Oberg, and others, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1950– , 31 vols. description ends , 29:566–7; Papenfuse, Maryland Public Officials description begins Edward C. Papenfuse and others, eds., An Historical List of Public Officials of Maryland, 1990– , 1 vol. description ends , 1:265; Thomas J. C. Williams, A History of Washington County Maryland [1906; repr. 1968], 169–70, 198–200; Maryland Herald, and Hagers-Town Weekly Advertiser, 11 July, 16 Nov. 1804; Hagers-Town Gazette, 29 Aug. 1809, 18 Sept. 1810; Washington Daily National Intelligencer, 23 Aug. 1831).

The inclosed papers probably included two letters written by a steady patriot and printed in the Hagers-Town Gazette on 25 June and 2 July 1811, as well as Galloway’s response published in the Maryland Herald, and Hagers-Town Weekly Advertiser on 26 June 1811. “Steady Patriot” argued that it was “more consistent with nature’s laws, that the Americans should feel a greater regard for them [Great Britain] than for any other nation”; defended Britain’s policy of impressment but not its excesses; condemned Napoleon’s Berlin and Milan decrees; decried the pro-French course taken by the American government; and urged readers to “animadvert upon the general deportment of the present administration,” which was leading the United States toward an “abyss,” and to support Federalists in the upcoming senatorial election. Galloway’s rebuttal, dated Hagerstown, 25 June 1811, and issued under the nom de plume of “July 4th, 1776,” suggested that his opponent had “deliberately promulgated doctrines so fundamentally, so totally repugnant to, so altogether at war, with all that is praise worthy, and valuable in the estimation of a steady patriot,” that he should henceforth publish as a “Steady (British) Patriot.”