John Drinker (275)

Elected to the American Society.

John Drinker (1733–27 July 1800) was a hatter and merchant, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election to the American Society. Born to Henry Drinker the elder and wife Mary in Philadelphia, John Drinker learned hatmaking but by 1759 pivoted into a general retail partnership. He established his own firm in 1763, dutifully signed the 1765 Non-Importation Agreement, and by the Revolution counted among the city’s prosperous Quaker merchants. But after he refused to accept Continental bills of credit in early 1776, the Committee of Observation declared him among the “ENEMIES to their Country” with whom no citizens could conduct commerce: they demanded his account books and ordered his buildings locked and barred from the outside. Drinker resisted. The Committee of Safety took the books by force. In 1779, a mob seized him for his continued resistance to the rebel cause and jailed him for nine days, ostensibly—or realistically—for his own protection. After Washington finished Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781, Drinker refused to illuminate his windows; the mob broke them for good measure, before looting his store and assailing him. His principled Quakerism also appeared in various memorials and petitions airing the sect’s many grievances. Between 1756 and the Revolution, his civic-mindedness extended to many of the common concerns of other APS Members: he supported or served the Pennsylvania Hospital, the Silk Society, the Corporation for the Relief and Employment of the Poor, and was chosen a director of the Library Company of Philadelphia (1770). He left a substantial estate to his four children; his wife outlived him by twenty-two years. (PI)