11 This Quaker elite of the Delaware Valley should not be confused with Gary Nash’s “early merchants of Philadelphia,” a different but overlapping group. Nash identifies 102 “first-generation” Philadelphia merchants, and 143 of the second generation. He finds that 111 or 112 of the second generation were not “related by birth” to the first and concludes that the “founding elite” failed to perpetuate itself. But in Nash’s analysis, “not related by birth” means not sons of first-generation merchants; a test which takes no account of other degrees of kinship. Moreover, some members of elite families moved in and out of mercantile occupations; occupational mobility was not proof of the “disintegration of an elite.” Further, many merchants (even rich merchants) in every generation were never members of Philadelphia’s elite—e.g., Jewish merchants who arrived from New York and abroad after 1711. Their appearance was not evidence of a disintegrating elite. Many of Nash’s merchants were modest traders with middling or even small estates; in the second generation, 21 left estates below £500, and 5 below £100. Altogether, Nash’s “early merchants” and the Delaware elite were like overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. Cf. Gary B. Nash, “The Early Merchants of Philadelphia: The Formation and Disintegration of a Founding Elite,” in Dunn and Dunn, eds., The World of William Penn, 337-62.
12 Many scholars distinguish between Quaker and non-Quaker elites in mid-18th-century Philadelphia. Non-Quakers had their own institutional life—the College of Philadelphia, the Mount Regale Fishing Company, the Hand-in-Hand Fire Company, and the Dancing Assembly. The leaders of the non-Quaker elite are identified by Brobeck as the Penn, Shippen, Allen, Coxe, Dickinson and other families which had originally been Quaker. Some were of different origins—Richard Peters, for example, who had fled England to escape arrest for bigamy. But these “non-Quakers” were often ex-Quakers with many kin connections to the Quaker elite; see Stephen J. Brobeck, “Changes in the Composition and Structure of Philadelphia Elite Groups” (thesis, Univ. of Pa., 1974), 123-81.
13 Tully, William Perm’s Legacy, 141.