Joseph Bringhurst (212)

Joseph Bringhurst (20 March 1733–c. 8 August 1811) was a Quaker mechanic, merchant, and ultimately, gentleman, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election to the American Society. Born in Philadelphia, he followed his father into the cooper’s trade before graduating to a profitable mercantile business. He was an active member of the Society of Friends, signing a remonstrance against the incarceration of Quakers suspected of Loyalism in 1777 and serving as clerk of the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting and as overseer of the Friends School. During the American Revolution, he maintained his Quaker pacifism and withstood the temptations of wartime profiteering that beset some of his fellow Friends. After the war, he was active in the early temperance movement, calling on the U.S. government to discontinue the practice of providing liquor at treaty signings with Native Americans. By 1791, the Philadelphia Directory listed Bringhurst as a “gentleman.” He spent much of the next two decades in Wilmington, Delaware, formally relocating there in 1808. Scholars sometimes attribute a pair of verse satires of Wilmington politicians to him. (PI)