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Israel Pemberton Jr. (1715–1779) was an English-American merchant and founding manager of the Pennsylvania Hospital.

Biography

A grandson of a Quaker settler who migrated to the New World with William Penn in 1682, Pemberton profited from trade during King George's War. He ultimately was involved with funding Quaker schools and was a prominent proponent of Indian diplomacy, especially during the Seven Years' War. Notably, he funded Philadelphia's first fire company. In 1750, he was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly.

In the mid-1770s, Pemberton and Thomas Harrison, a Quaker tailor, filed a lawsuit on behalf of Dinah Nevill, a woman of African and Native American descent, who had been brought to Pennsylvania as a slave from Virginia and who sought her and her three children's freedom under a Pennsylvania law prohibiting the enslavement of Indians. Nevill lost the court case, but Harrison stepped in to purchase her and her children and manumit them in 1781.

Pemberton was a member of the revived American Philosophical Society, elected in 1768.

Death

Pemberton died in Philadelphia in 1779.

References

1. "Pemberton, Israel Jr". Dartmouth College. Retrieved 14 June 2018.
2. Continuation of the Account of the Pennsylvania Hospital: from the First of May 1754 to the Fifth of May 1761. Philadelphia, PA: B. Franklin & D. Hall. 1761.
3. ^ Hershey, Larry Brent. Peace through conversation: William Penn, Israel Pemberton and the shaping of Quaker-Indian relations, 1681–1757. The University of Iowa, 2008. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution cited in The AntiSlavery Debate, ed. Thomas Bender pg 29
4. Nash, Gary B. (1988). Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840. Harvard University Press. p. 43. ISBN 978-0-674-30933-3.
5. Bell, Whitfield J., and Charles Greifenstein, Jr. Patriot-Improvers: Biographical Sketches of Members of the American Philosophical Society. 3 vols. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1997, Ill: 90—95, 153, 361, 369, 374, 471,544, 501.

Further reading

• John W. Jordan (2004). Colonial And Revolutionary Families Of Pennsylvania. Genealogical Publishing Com. pp. 288–. ISBN 978-0-8063-5239-8.
• Mary Ellen Snodgrass (8 April 2015). Civil Disobedience: An Encyclopedic History of Dissidence in the United States: An Encyclopedic History of Dissidence in the United States. Routledge. pp. 331–. ISBN 978-1-317-47441-8.
• Thompson Westcott (1877). The Historic Mansions and Buildings of Philadelphia: With Some Notice of Their Owners and Occupants. Porter & Coates. pp. 498–.

• 1715 births
• 1779 deaths
• 19th-century American businesspeople
• American abolitionists
• Abolitionists from Pennsylvania
• Businesspeople from Philadelphia
• Members of the American Philosophical Society
• Members of the Pennsylvania General Assembly
• Quakers from Pennsylvania
• Merchants from colonial Pennsylvania
• 18th-century American merchants