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Prisoners of Congress

Philadelphia's Quakers in Exile, 1777-1778
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In 1777, Congress labeled Quakers who would not take up arms in support of the War of Independence as "the most Dangerous Enemies America knows" and ordered Pennsylvania and Delaware to apprehend them. In response, Keystone State officials sent twenty men-seventeen of whom were Quakers-into exile, banishing them to Virginia, where they were held for a year. Prisoners of Congress reconstructs this moment in American history through the experiences of four families: the Drinkers, the Fishers, the Pembertons, and the Gilpins. Identifying them as the new nation's first political prisoners, Norman E. Donoghue II relates how the Quakers, once the preeminent power in Pennsylvania and an integral constituency of the colonies and early republic, came to be reviled by patriots who saw refusal to fight the English as borderline sedition. Surprising, vital, and vividly told, this narrative of political and literal warfare waged by the United States against a pacifist religious group during the Revolutionary War era sheds new light on an essential aspect of American history. It will appeal to anyone interested in learning more about the nation's founding.
Norman E. Donoghue II is an independent historian of American Quakerism based in Philadelphia.
"Anybody interested in the tensions between politics and religion, a matter so urgent to us today, should read Donoghue's account of the Quaker exiles. Almost novelistic in its compelling narrative, this study marshals familiar and unfamiliar sources to recover the story of America's first political prisoners." -Scott Paul Gordon, author of The Letters of Mary Penry: A Single Moravian Woman in Early America
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