Was Joseph Reed Disloyal

A NEW element in the more than century-old controversy concerning the loyalty of Reed of Pennsylvania to the patriot cause in the American Revolution was added in I942 by Ellsworth Eliot, Jr. in a brief monograph entitled The Patriotism of Therein revealed for the first time was a British protection form of I777 signed by an aide-de-camp of General Howe's which was made out in the name of a Joseph Reed. If this token of submission to royal authority was actually obtained by the Reed who was, at various times during the Revolution, secretary to General Washington, AdjutantGeneral of the Continental Army, member of Congress and chief executive of Pennsylvania, then the strident voices which had intermittently been raised in denunciation of his patriotism would at last be vindicated. But a close analysis of the Eliot document and a reappraisal of Reed's relations with the British throughout the Revolutionary period has resulted, rather, in the contrary conclusion that Reed was a true patriot, a loyal supporter of the revolutionary cause. Reed's many personal ties with England and with English friends were undoubtedly productive of much of the suspicion against him. In I763, at the age of twenty-two, Reed went to England to continue at the famous Middle Temple the law studies he had begun under the tutelage of Richard Stockton after his graduation from the College of New Jersey.' His interest in politics and imperial affairs was heightened by the two years he spent in London, but of even greater significance were the personal contacts he made, particularly with the family of Dennys DeBerdt, a merchant with whom Andrew Reed, Joseph's father, had long done business. Reed made the DeBerdt town house in Artillery Court his home in England and a romance soon blossomed between him and DeBerdt's daughter Esther. In the spring of I765, however, soon after the pair had

Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics