James Webb (165)
Election date: 1768 (Elected to the American Society.)James Webb (19 November 1708–26 October 1785) merchant and public officeholder, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election to the American Society. Born to English Quakers outside Philadelphia, his adolescence is a mystery—but by the early 1730s he had married and settled in Lancaster County, where he ran a tavern and brewery, in addition to a local ferry. Webb was a founding member of the Lancaster Library Company, and while his reading tastes tilted toward law, he kept the Quaker classics and Pope’s works, too. His public offices were varied, his elections contested: while Webb’s own involvement is circumstantial, accusations of electoral fraud pocked his tenured in the Assembly (interrupted service between 1747 and 1775); less controversial was his appointment as a justice of the peace (beginning 1749). A solid proprietary man, he landed a number of lucrative posts, such as the collector of excise for Lancaster County beginning in 1756, but there, too, accusations abounded. An inquest into tax collection and potential embezzlement halted his political ascent, until the stirrings of Revolution led to his appointment to the Lancaster County Committee of Correspondence in June 1774, to the Provincial Congress in July, and to the County Committee of Observation and Correspondence by year’s end. But after 1775, when the Assembly put him in charge of preparing the Lancaster barracks, Webb disappears from the record until his death a decade later. (PI)