In August 1776, just after Hart signed the Declaration, he departed to accept the speakership in the lower house of the New Jersey legislature. That winter, during the British invasion of the province, the redcoats wreaked havoc on his farm and mills and drove him into hiding among the hills surrounding the Sourland Mountains. When he ended his exile in the wake of the American victories at Princeton and Trenton, he discovered that his wife, ill at the time of the attack, had died and his family scattered. In 1777–78 he sat again on the council of safety, but failing health forced his retirement. He died the next year, at the age of 69, on his Hopewell farm. He is buried in the yard of the First Baptist Church at Hopewell.
Even in an age and land of such unlimited opportunities as 18th-century America, few men attained such success as merchant Joseph Hewes. He was rarely thwarted in his ambitions and enjoyed wealth and social prestige, reflected in political conservatism.
Born in 1730 at Maybury Hill, an estate on the outskirts of Princeton, N.J., Hewes was the son of a pious and well-to-do Quaker farmer. He received a strict religious upbringing, and studied at a local school. After learning trade from a Philadelphia merchant, he entered business for himself. About 1760, anxious to expand his modest fortune, he moved to the thriving seaport town of Edenton, N.C. There, where he was to reside for the rest of his life, he founded a profitable mercantile and shipping firm and gained prominence. Only one fateful event marred his life. A few days before his intended wedding date, his fiancée suddenly died. Hewes remained a bachelor for the rest of his life.
As a member of the North Carolina assembly (1766–75), the committee of correspondence (1773), and the provincial assemblies (1774–75), Hewes helped the Whigs overthrow the royal government. Elected to the Continental Congress in 1774, he vigorously supported nonimportation measures even though it meant personal financial loss. By the time of the outbreak of the War for Independence, the next year, anathema to the pacifistic Quakers, he had rejected the faith altogether—culminating a trend that had been evolving because of his love of dancing and other social pleasures, as well as his Revolutionary activities.