The exiles who passed through Pottsgrove
Torn from their lives in Philadelphia, group of Quakers travels through region as involuntary displacement unfolds in 1777
As pacifists, Philadelphia Quakers were suspected of British sympathies during the Revolution.
Henry Drinker, a 27-year-old widower married 26-yearold Elisabeth Sandwith in 1761 at the Quaker Meeting in Philadelphia. The marriage was a good one that became stronger over the years just as their material life, spurred by the success of Henry’s mercantile business, also prospered.
By the summer of 1777, the Drinkers were respected members of Philadelphia’s Quaker community who, with their five children, lived comfortably in a three-story brick mansion on Front Street near Race in Philadelphia.
Their lives were comfortable, but this feeling of well-being must have sizzled away as quickly as water on a hot stove on that morning of Sept. 4 when three men barged into their home, arrested Henry and confined him — along with about 35 other men from Philadelphia — in the Masonic Hall on Second Street, just north of the City Tavern.
The crime? The Continental Congress and Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council had identified Drinker and the others as “disaffected to the American cause” and therefore “inclined to communicate intelligence to the enemy.”
In April of 1775, a long-standing feud between Great Britain and her 13 colonies in North America flamed up into a full-blown war. The colonies banded together to fight for their independence from their mother country and by the summer of 1777 there were more than 30,000 British and German mercenary troops in this country trying to subdue the rebellion.
Those who actively supported it had no illusions about their fate if it failed: their property would be confiscated and they would be imprisoned and probably hung as traitors. They were playing a high-stakes poker game without really good cards and, at this point in time, it was going badly for them.
A British army under Gen. Johnny Burgoyne had captured Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York, a very important point in the colonies’ defense, and Gen. William Howe, in command of large army, was now marching toward Philadelphia, the new country’s capital and its largest and most important city.
It is understandable that members of the Continental Congress, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council, and Whigs in the area, active supporters of the rebellion, were very nervous as the British approached their target.
Because the Quakers were pacifists, the vast majority did not support the war for independence. In fact, many of the wealthy and influential Quakers in Philadelphia actively wrote and spoke out against it.
For instance, in January 1775 the city’s Quaker Meeting officially proclaimed, “We have by repeated admonitions used our endeavors to dissuade the members of our religious society from joining in the public resolutions prompted and entered into by some people.”
Maintaining that “from our past experience of the clemency of the King…decent and public addresses would avail…in restoring the public tranquility.”
Many people doubted their sincerity and felt that their true motives for opposition to the revolution were preservation of their political power and their fortunes. Even the great John Adams felt “…the majority of them are friends to nobody but themselves.”
With British troops nearing Philadelphia, the new government was very touchy and in no mood to tolerate antiwar pronouncements made by one of the most powerful components of Philadelphia society, and thus Henry Drinker and many of his friends were arrested.
There were no arrest warrants, no official charges, or trials; in addition to being illegal, the whole process was frightening. Even the normally stoic Elisabeth Drinker admitted in her journal on Sept. 5 what “a great day of distress it has been to me.”
There were no arrest warrants, no official charges, or trials; in addition to being illegal, the whole process was frightening. Even the normally stoic Elisabeth Drinker admitted in her journal on Sept. 5 what “a great day of distress it has been to me.” It was eventually decided that prisoners who would sign an oath of allegiance to the government would be released, and those who refused would be sent to Virginia in exile so they couldn’t collaborate with the British.
It was eventually decided that prisoners who would sign an oath of allegiance to the government would be released, and those who refused would be sent to Virginia in exile so they couldn’t collaborate with the British.
About half the men signed the oath. About 5 p.m. on Sept. 11, with the distant sound of cannon fire from the Brandywine battlefield booming in the background, the rest “were compelled, some by actual force, to take seats in a number of wagons to begin the long trek into exile in Virginia.”
Fifty-four-year-old James Pemberton, one of the exiles, noted, “We were drawn through Third street to the upper part of the city…a spectacle to the people.”
For the most part, the crowd “by their countenances expressed the grief they felt,” but after they crossed Vine Street “a rabble consisting for the most part of boys threw some stones at one or two of the hindermost carriages.”
They stopped that night at the Falls of the Schuylkill. The inn there was too small to accommodate the party, so some of them were taken into the private homes of Friends who lived nearby.
The next day, Sept. 12, the procession struggled over the execrable Great Road through Barren Hill. Despite swift currents swelled by heavy rain of days before, they forded Skippack and Perkiomen Creeks, and that evening reached the Widow Lloyd’s Inn, which stood at the intersection of the Great Road (present-day Ridge Pike) and Swamp Pike. Because Lloyd’s was full they were forced to plod on another eight miles to Pottsgrove (present-day Pottstown).
News of their coming obviously preceded them. When they arrived at the Red Lion Inn on High Street (located on the south side of High Street very near the Manatawny Creek), members of the Potts family were there to greet them and to take the worn out travelers into their homes for the evening.
John Pemberton, a brother of James, described their arrival. “We reached this place (Pottstown) about 8 o’clock last evening & were…kindly rec’d By the Senr Branches of the Pott’s & have been courteously entertained.”
Because the baggage wagons had not caught up, the men were permitted to stay an additional night in Pottstown, and on the morning of Sept. 14 began the long ride to Reading.
When they reached the city, a large hostile crowd cursed them and threw an occasional stone as they trundled through the streets.
When they reached their place of confinement, the Widow Withington’s Inn (located at Fifth and Washington streets and owned by the widow of Peter Withington, a captain in the 12th Pennsylvania Regiment on the Continental Line who had just died on May 11), the men were visited by Isaac Zane and James Starr, Friends from the area.
According to Israel Pemberton, “some of the Mob, whose passions had been inflamed…by our wicked bailiff, violently laid hold of them both and hauled them away striking & driving them with great fury.”
Luckily, the exiles’ guards soon quelled the disturbance and dispersed the mob, so “we were left in quiet & after drinking tea & Supper we had warm good lodgings & a comfortable night’s rest.”
After several days in Reading, they were again on their way. Inching along through Womelsdorf, Lebanon, and to Harris’s Ferry (present-day Harrisburg).
On Sept, 25, according to Thomas Gilpin, the entire party was able to ford the almost-mile-wide Susquehanna River “the water being only about 3 foot deep.” It must have been a strange looking procession with four baggage wagons, two one-horse chairs, men on horseback and some in canoes.”
From there they moved on to Carlisle, then southwest to Shippensburg, and down the Cumberland Valley through Maryland into Virginia. It wasn’t until Nov. 11 that their excursion into exile ended in Winchester. They had been on the road for two months, traveling under what would be for modern people intolerable conditions.
Fifteen days after they left Philadelphia, on Sept. 26, a part of the British army occupied the city. Elisabeth Drinker’s journal entry divulges how the Quakers felt about this event.
“Well, here they are in earnest, about 2 or 3,000, came in, through second street…what a satisfaction it would be to our dear absent Friends could they be but informed of it.”
The “dear absent Friends” were never really out of touch with events. Many letters and packages reached them, carried by visitors. At the same time, the exiles tirelessly wrote memorials and petitions to the Continental Congress, now based in York, and the Pennsylvania government in Lancaster, protesting their illegal arrest and detainment and demanding their release.
At the same time, Friends in Philadelphia also worked hard to win the exiles’ freedom. Elisabeth Drinker and the wives of three others rented a four-horse coach, with a driver and two men as postilions and set out for Lancaster on April 5, 1778, where they planned to make a presentation to the Pennsylvania Assembly.
On April 6, this redoubtable quartet even gained an audience with George Washington. Drinker’s group “set with his Wife (a sociable pretty kind of Woman) until he came in… it was not long before GW came over and discoursed with us freely.”
That evening members of the group were Washington’s guests at “an elegant dinner” but the real goal of their visit eluded them when “GW told us he could do nothing further in our business than granting us a pass to Lancaster.”
They reached Lancaster on April 10 to find out that the captives were to be set free. On April 25 Elisabeth saw her “Dear Henry” for the first time since in seven months. Always circumspect in her journal, she wrote “HD much heartier than I expected. He looks fat and well.”
By the end of April, the ordeal was over. All the men, except two who died in Virginia, were making their way back to their homes in Philadelphia. In many cases disaster and ruin awaited them.
Israel Pemberton, probably the most powerful and wealthy of the group, found that the British had destroyed his estates outside of Philadelphia. Gen. Howe had even confiscated his wife’s coach for his personal use, and runaway inflation had eaten up most of his wealth.
Seventy-year-old Joshua Fisher, his three sons and his son-in-law, Thomas Gilpin, had all been exiled. Gilpin died in Virginia and when the Fishers returned to Philadelphia they found that goods from all their warehouses had been confiscated by the government of Pennsylvania for use in the war.
Henry and Elisabeth Drinker survived the ordeal and lived long and prosperous lives. Their marriage of 46 years ended with her death in 1807.
There is no doubt that these men and their families were ill-used by the nascent federal and state governments, but both sides, as is true in every war, were guilty of excesses. These were extraordinary times and events in which men were risking their lives on the outcome, so it is understandable if their judgment and conduct sometimes appears faulty when viewed from a vantage point that is more than two centuries removed the action.