Biography
Samuel Rowland Fisher, a Philadelphia Quaker merchant, 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. Fisher continued to refuse allegiance to the new government; in 1779 he was arrested and charged as a Tory over a letter to his brother in New York, and — refusing to recognize the court's authority — was imprisoned in Philadelphia for about two years, keeping a journal of his confinement.
