{{Short description|English-American merchant}} {{Infobox officeholder | name = Israel Pemberton | birth_date = 1715 | death_date = {{Death year and age|1779|1715}} | death_place = Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States | office = Member of the Pennsylvania General Assembly | occupation = Merchant, politician, abolitionist }} '''Israel Pemberton Jr.''' (1715–1779) was an English-American merchant and founding manager of the Pennsylvania Hospital.<ref>{{cite web |title=Pemberton, Israel Jr. |url=https://collections.dartmouth.edu/occom/html/ctx/personography/pers0874.ocp.html |website=Dartmouth College |accessdate=14 June 2018}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|title=Continuation of the Account of the Pennsylvania Hospital: from the First of May 1754 to the Fifth of May 1761|url=https://archive.org/details/101279691.nlm.nih.gov/|year=1761|publisher=B. Franklin & D. Hall|location=Philadelphia, PA}}</ref>
==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.<ref name=":0">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</ref>
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.<ref name=":0" /><ref>{{Cite book |last=Nash |first=Gary B. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=vFC0U14jPa0C |title=Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840 |date=1988 |publisher=Harvard University Press |isbn=978-0-674-30933-3 |pages=43 |language=en}}</ref>
Pemberton was a member of the revived American Philosophical Society, elected in 1768.<ref>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.</ref>
==Death== Pemberton died in Philadelphia in 1779.
==References== {{reflist}}
==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–.
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pemberton, Israel Jr.}} Category:1715 births Category:1779 deaths Category:Abolitionists from Pennsylvania Category:Businesspeople from Philadelphia Category:Members of the American Philosophical Society Category:Members of the Pennsylvania General Assembly Category:Quakers from Pennsylvania Category:Merchants from colonial Pennsylvania Category:18th-century American merchants