Biography
Israel Pemberton Jr., a wealthy Philadelphia merchant and philanthropist so influential among Friends that critics called him "the King of the Quakers," was one of the "Virginia Exiles" — about twenty prominent Philadelphia Quakers whom the Continental Congress and the Pennsylvania Supreme Executive Council arrested in September 1777, as the British approached the city, and banished without any charge or trial to the frontier town of Winchester, Virginia, for the Society of Friends' conscientious refusal to support the Revolutionary War. Held roughly seven months, the survivors were released in the spring of 1778. His health was broken by the ordeal, and he died within a year of his release.
