Biography
Thomas Wharton, a Philadelphia merchant of the Quaker Wharton family (a kinsman of, and not to be confused with, the Patriot Thomas Wharton Jr. who served as president of Pennsylvania), was one of the "Virginia Exiles" — the roughly twenty prominent Philadelphians whom the Continental Congress and the Pennsylvania Supreme Executive Council arrested without charge in September 1777, as the British approached the city, and banished without trial to the frontier town of Winchester, Virginia. Most were Quakers seized 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.
