Thomas Wharton Jr. (43)

Thomas Wharton, Jr. (1735–23 May 1778) was a merchant and politician and a member of the Young Junto, elected in 1761. Born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, he was a successful businessman and a subscriber to the Silk Society, a contributor to the Pennsylvania Hospital, a manager of the Society for Inoculating the Poor, and a member of the Library Company of Philadelphia. While Wharton was a member of the Society of the Sons of Saint Tammany and signed the Non-Importation Agreement and other petitions against the Stamp and Townshend Acts, he otherwise played a minor role in the American independence movement before 1774. Beginning that year, however, he served on a number of revolutionary committees in Philadelphia, including the Committee of Safety, Pennsylvania’s wartime executive body. When that committee was superseded by the Council of Safety in 1776, he became its president. Though he had some reservations about it, he championed the state’s radical new constitution, which dissolved the legislative assembly’s upper house and replaced the office of governor with an executive council. Wharton’s moderate support for this democratization earned him election as president of the executive council in 1777—and earned him the ire of more conservative patriots like Robert Morris and John Dickinson in the bargain. Following a lavish inauguration ceremony, Pennsylvania President Wharton continued to work with George Washington on military defense and exiled suspected Loyalists and pacifist Quakers, including his own cousin Thomas Wharton, Sr. As commander-in-chief of the Pennsylvania militia, Wharton organized resistance to Sir William Howe’s 1777 march on Philadelphia. He died in 1778 after relocating the executive council to Lancaster in the wake of Howe’s attack. (PI, ANB, DAB)