Henry Drinker (256)

Henry Drinker (21 February 1734–26 June 1809) was a merchant, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election to the American Society. Married at twenty-three and widowed by childbirth at twenty-four, Drinker redoubled his focus on his business partnership with his former mentor George James and his son Abel, who helped Drinker rise to prominence as a leading merchant. Although he doubted the efficacy of non-importation, his firm signed onto the 1765 and 1769 Agreements, and he did, albeit reluctantly, send back a shipment of tea that arrived in Philadelphia in 1773. Indeed, prior to the Revolution, Drinker’s stature in the civil life of Philadelphia only grew: he was an adamant supporter of the Silk Society and himself an experimenter: records indicate he received from friends at least twenty five mulberry trees and some 21,400 cocoons by 1770. Like peers, he was a member of the Library Company, generously supported the Pennsylvania Hospital, and served as the Treasurer for the Corporation for the Relief of the Poor for a time. But just days before Howe defeated Washington at the Battle of the Brandywine to take Philadelphia in September 1777, the Supreme Council ordered Drinker and more than forty others to take the oath of allegiance, which Drinker’s Quakerism forbade. A slow, embarrassing, but otherwise comfortable march to Virginia, and confinement until April 1778, became the definitive turning point in Drinker’s life. A variety of rebel confiscations did not soften his hardline stance: an irreparable divide now stood between martyrs like himself and supposed Friends who collaborated. His mercantile business asunder, Drinker rose from the ashes to invest in iron works and maple sugaring ventures and charted a new course to civic prominence. He redoubled his service to the Meeting of Friends, joined the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture (1785), the Prison Society (1787) and was even elected to the Philadelphia Common Council (1789). His beloved wife Elizabeth passed in 1807, two years before he. (PI)