Edward Penington (253)

Election date: 1768 (Elected to the American Society.)

Edward Penington (4 December 1726–30 September 1796) was a merchant and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election to the American Society. Born into a family well-connected to the Penns, Edward benefitted from some Quaker schooling, a bit of time in a merchant house, and an inheritance. Starting in 1751, his shop offered a variety of dry goods, and Edward began to branch out, marrying Sarah Shoemaker (mother to his ten children) and getting into the sugar refining business. His attentiveness to measurements, yields, and efficiency—a mark of his interest in the capacity of the quantitative to improve man’s qualitative—rendered his sugar and molasses business highly lucrative but also drew him into a wider circle of mid-Atlantic “improvers.” A life-long member of the Society of Friends, Penington struggled to straddle the line between non-violence and the Revolutionary moment. When war came, Penington joined his fellow Quakers in low-security confinement in the late summer of 1777 before being returned home in spring 1778. Unbowed, he complained loudly about the treatment of Friends generally; his principled refusal to illuminate his windows at the defeat of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown (1781) spurred an attack on his home by the high-spirited revelers. He returned, as did so many Friends, to business, with his son, APS Member John Penington, but remained an otherwise private person. To whatever degree his wartime stance made him an outsider, he was one of colonial and Revolutionary Philadelphia’s insiders. He left fingerprints on Quaker institutions also in public ones too, contributing to and serving as an officer in a handful of institutions, from the Philadelphia Contributionship to the Silk Society, and the Pennsylvania Hospital and the Philadelphia Dispensary. (PI)




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