The Cultural History of Marlborough, Virginia Part 13

In 1758 George Mason ran for the office of burgess from both Stafford and Fairfax. On July 11, Mercer went to the Stafford elections, where "Lee & Mason" were chosen. On the 15th, he went "to M^r Selden's & home by water to see M^r Mason," who evidently had come to Marlborough for a visit. Four days later, he traveled to Alexandria for the elections there and saw "Johnston & Mason" elected.

In the fall of 1758 he went, as usual, to Williamsburg. His route this time was long and devious, taking him to both Caroline and King William County courthouses on the way, for a total of 121 miles in five days. We learn of one of the hazards of protracted journeys in the 18th century from a notation repeated daily in his journal for four days following his arrival: "at Williamsburg Confined to Bed with the Piles."

On November 15, soon after his return to Marlborough, Mercer was sworn to the new commission of Stafford justices. Five days previously his son Catesby had been buried, but, as usually happened, new life came to take the place of that which had survived so briefly. On May 17, 1759, Mercer recorded, "Son John Francis born at 7 in the Evening." John Francis evidently was given an auspicious start in life by a christening of more than ordinary formality: "May 28. to Col^o Harrison's with the Gov^r Son christened."

During 1759 the second edition of the _Abridgment_ was published in Glasgow, Scotland, this time with neither public notice nor recrimination.[132] On November 25, Mercer met the growing problem of his indebtedness by deeding equal shares of some of his properties, as well as whole amounts of others, to George and James Mercer, Marlborough and a few other small holdings excepted. Fifty Negroes were included in the transaction. This action was followed immediately by the release of the properties under their new t.i.tles to Colonel John Tayloe and Colonel Presley Thornton for a year, thus providing cash by which George and James could pay 3000 of John Mercer's debts.[133]

The Ohio Company was experiencing its difficulties also. Mercer's importance in it was demonstrated by his appointment to "draw up a full State of the Company's Case setting forth the Hardships We labour under and the Reasons why the Lands have not been settled and the Fort finished according to Royal Instructions...."[134] This was his most responsible a.s.signment during his activity in the company.

Indebtedness throughout these years lurked constantly in the background, now and then breaking through acutely. In 1760, for example, William Tooke, a London merchant, brought suit to collect 331 1s. 6d. which Mercer owed him. Two years later Capel Hanbury sued Mercer for 31 10s.[135]

In 1761 George Washington and George Mercer ran for burgesses from Frederick County in the Shenandoah Valley, and both were elected. John Mercer, evidently anxious to be present for the election, undertook the arduous journey to Winchester, leaving Marlborough on May 15. His itinerary was as follows:

May 15 to Fredericksburg 15 16 to Nevill's Ordinary 37 17 to Ashby's Combe's & Winchester 32 18 at Winchester (Frederick Election) (Geo Washington and Geo Mercer elected) 19 to M^r d.i.c.k's Quarter 18 20 to Pike's M^r Wormley's Quarter 12 21 to Snickers's Little River Quarters & Nevill's 60 22 to Fallmouth & home 50

In the previous year Anna had been born, and now, on December 14, 1761, Maria arrived. Between the 8th and the 20th of August, 1762, entries were made that suggest that there was an epidemic of sorts at Marlborough: "Cupid died // Tom (Poll's) died // Daughter Elinor died // Miss B. Roy died." In his long letter to George, written in 1768, he reflected on the fact that, although through the years 98 Negroes had been born at Marlborough, he, at that time, had fewer than the total of all he had ever bought. "Your sister Selden," he wrote "attributes it to the unhealthiness of Patomack Neck, which there may be something in....

I thank G.o.d, however, that my own family has been generally as healthy as other people's."[136]

FOOTNOTES:

[129] John Mercer's Land Book, loc. cit. (footnote 12).

[130] Purdie & Dixon's _Virginia Gazette_, September 26, 1766.

[131] John Clement Fitzpatrick, ed., _The Writings of George Washington_ (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1931), vol. 1, p. 318.

[132] "Journals of the Council of Virginia in Executive Sessions, 1737-1763," _VHM_ (Richmond, 1907), vol. 14, p. 232 (footnote).

[133] _The George Mercer Papers_, op. cit. (footnote 51), p.

190.

[134] Ibid., p. 179.

[135] "Proceedings of the Virginia Committee of Correspondence 1759-67," _VHM_ (Richmond, 1905), vol. 12, p.

4.

[136] _The George Mercer Papers_, op. cit. (footnote 51), p.

213.

THE END OF THE WAR AND THE STAMP ACT

The year 1763 marked the end of the war. It also signaled a turning point in the colonies' relations with England. In a royal proclamation the King prohibited the colonies from expanding westward past the Appalachian ridge, in effect nullifying the Ohio Company's claims and objectives. George Mercer was appointed agent of the company and was dispatched to England to plead its cause.

By this time Britain was beginning to apply the other allegedly oppressive measures which preceded the Revolution. Antismuggling laws were enforced, implemented by "writs of a.s.sistance," thus increasing colonial burdens which had been avoided previously by widespread smuggling. The South was particularly hard hit by parliamentary orders forbidding the colonies the use of paper money as legal tender for payment of debts. In a part of the world where a credit economy and chronic indebtedness made a flexible currency essential, this measure was a disastrous matter.

Despite the ominousness of the times, Mercer continued with the daily routine, the minutiae of which filled his journal. He noted on January 9, 1763, that he went to Potomac Church--"Neither Minister or clerk there." On February 21 he went a mile--probably up Potomac Creek--to watch "John Waugh's halling the Saine & home." On March 1 his merchant friend John Champe was buried. After the funeral Mercer went directly to Selden's for an Ohio Company meeting.

From December 10 until March 1765, Mercer was sick. Of this interval, he wrote George in 1768 that "My business had latterly so much encreased, together with my slowness in writing, & Rogers, tho a tolerable good clerk, was so incapable of a.s.sisting me out of the common road, that when you saw me at Williamsburg, I was reduced by my fatigue, to a very valetudinary state."[137] Indebtedness, overwork, advancing age, and the reverses of the times had evidently caused a crisis.

Pa.s.sage of the Stamp Act in 1765, to raise revenues to support an army of occupation in the colonies, struck close to John Mercer, for George, while in England, had been designated stamp officer for Virginia. George returned to Williamsburg, little expecting the hostile greeting he was to receive from a crowd of angry planters. Quickly disavowing his new office, he returned the stamps the following day.

Many made the most of George's tactical blunder in accepting the stamp-officer appointment. Indeed, the Mercers seem to have been made the scapegoats for the frustrations and turmoil into which the mother country's actions had plunged the colony. George Mercer was hanged in effigy at Westmoreland courthouse, and James Mercer took to the _Gazettes_ to defend him. There were counterattacks on James while he was absent in Frederick County, and Mercer himself rushed in with a lengthy satirical diatribe ent.i.tled "Prophecy from the East." Occupying all the s.p.a.ce normally devoted to foreign news in Purdie & Dixon's _Virginia Gazette_ for September 26, 1766, this struck out at anonymous attackers whom Mercer scathingly nicknamed Gibbet, Scandal, Pillory, and Clysterpipe. He later explained to George that James' "antagonist was backed by so many anonymous scoundrels, that I was drawn in during his abscence at the springs in Frederick to answer I did not know whom tho it since appears D^r Arthur Lee was the princ.i.p.al, if not the only a.s.sa.s.sin under different vizors, & he was so regardless of truth that he invented & published the most infamous lies as indisputable facts: on your brother's return I got out of the sc.r.a.pe but from a paper war it turned to a challenge, which produced a skirmish, in which your bro.

without receiving any damage broke the Doctors head, & closed his eyes in such a manner as obliged him to keep his house sometime...."[138]

Of John Mercer's own att.i.tude towards the Stamp Act there can be no question. On November 1, 1765, he noted in his journal, "The d.a.m.ned Stamp Act was to have taken place this day but was proved initially disappointed." He is said to have written a tract against the Stamp Act, although no copy has survived.

FOOTNOTES:

[137] Ibid., p. 187.

[138] Ibid.

THE CLOSING YEARS[139]

The elements of tragedy mark Mercer's final years--the tragedy of John Mercer and Marlborough interwoven with the epic failures of the colonial experiment. Prompted by his illness, he quit his legal practice in the courts in 1765. In the same year he "gave notice to the members of the Ohio Company, that my health & business would not longer allow me to concern myself in their affairs which they had entirely flung upon my hands." He also "on account of my deafness, refused to act as a justice, which I should not have done otherwise, as I have the satisfaction to know that I have done my country some service in this station."

Heavily in debt, disillusioned and embittered by the dwindling results of his struggles, he wrote that "I have attended the bar thirty-six years, through a perpetual hurry and uneasiness, and have been more truly a slave than any one I am, or ever was, master of; yet have not been able, since the first day of last January, to command ten pounds, out of near ten thousand due me." Recoiling from his situation, he desperately sought a way out and a means to recover his losses. With self-deceptive optimism he seized upon the idea of establishing a brewery at Marlborough, since "our Ordinaries abound & daily increase (for drinking will continue longer than anything but eating)."

Accordingly, he built a brewhouse and a malthouse, each 100 feet long, of brick and stone, together with "Cellars, Cooper's house & all the buildings, copper & utensils whatever, used about the brewery." He depended at first on his windmill for grinding the malt, but to avoid delays on windless days, "I have now a hand-mill fixed in my brewhouse loft that will grind 50 bushels of malt (my coppers complement) every morning they brew."

To get his project under way, Mercer plunged further into the depths of debt by buying 40 Negroes "to enable me to make Grain sufficient to carry on my brewery with my own hands." These cost 8000, "a large part of which was unpaid, for payment of which I depended on the Brewery itself & the great number of Debts due to me." But the external fate which was driving him closer and closer to destruction now struck with the death of John Robinson, treasurer of the colony, who, having lent public funds promiscuously to debtor friends, had left a deficiency of 100,000 in the colonial treasury. A chain reaction of suits developed, threatening James Hunter of Fredericksburg, Mercer's security for purchase of the slaves.

The brewery lumbered and stumbled. Mercer's first brewer, a young Scot named Wales, prevailed upon him to spend 100 to alter the new malthouse. On September 16, 1765, William King, evidently a master brewer, arrived. He immediately found fault with Wales' changes in the malthouse. Within three weeks, however, King died. King's nephew, named Bailey, then came unannounced with a high recommendation as a brewer from a man he had served only as a gardener. Mercer was impressed: "You may readily believe I did not hesitate to employ Bailey on such a recommendation, more especially as he agreed with King in blaming the alteration of the malt house & besides found great fault with Wales's malting." Faced with rival claims as to which could brew better beer, Mercer allowed each to brew separately. "Yet though Bailey found as much fault with Wales's brewing as he did with his malting, that brewed by Wales was the only beer I had that Season fit to drink." Wales, however, brewed only 40 worth of beer, barely enough to pay his wages, let alone maintenance for himself and his wife. Although Bailey brewed enough to send a schooner load of it to Norfolk, it was of such "bad character"

that only two casks were sold, the remainder having been stored with charges for two months, then brought back to Marlborough, where an effort to distill it failed.

In 1766 there was a similar tale. Five hundred fifty bushels of malt were produced, but much of the beer and ale was bad. In January 1766, Andrew Monroe[140] was employed as overseer. "Wales complains of my Overseer & says that he is obliged to wait for barley, coals & other things that are wanted which, if timely supplied with he could with six men & a boy manufacture 250 bushels a week which would clear 200.... My Overseer is a very good one & I believe as a planter equal to any in Virginia but you are sensible few planters are good farmers and barley is a farmer's article," Mercer wrote to George. Besides the overhead of slaves and nonproductive brewers, the establishment required the services of two coopers at 20 per year.

Purdie & Dixon's _Virginia Gazette_ for April 10, 1766, carried the advertis.e.m.e.nt of Mercer's brewery:

To be SOLD, at the MARLBOROUGH BREWERY

STRONG BEER AND PORTER at 18d. and ALE at 1s. the gallon, _Virginia_ currency, in cask, equal in goodness to any that can be imported from any part of the world, as nothing but the genuine best MALT and HOPS will be used, without any mixture or subst.i.tute whatsoever; which, if the many treaties of brewing published in _Great Britain_ did not mention to be frequently used there, the experience of those who have drunk those liquors imported from thence would point out to be the case, from their pernicious effects.

The severe treatment we have lately received from our Mother Country, would, I should think, be sufficient to recommend my undertaking (though I should not be able to come up to the English standard, which I do not question constantly to do) yet, as I am satisfied that the goodness of every commodity is its best recommendation, I princ.i.p.ally rely upon that for my success; and my own interest, having expended near 8000 l. to bring my brewery to its present state, is the best security I can give the publick to a.s.sure them of the best usage, without which such an undertaking cannot be supported with credit.

The casks to be paid for at the rate of 4s. for barrels, 5s. for those between 40 and 50 gallons, and a penny the gallon for all above 50 gallons; but if they are returned in good order, and sweet, by having been well scalded as soon as emptied, the price of them shall be returned or discounted.

Any person who sends bottles and corks may have them carefully filled and corked with beer or porter at 6s. or with ale at 4s. the dozen. I expect, in a little time, to have constant supply of bottles and corks; and if I meet the encouragement I hope for, propose setting up a gla.s.shouse for making bottles, and to provide proper vessels to deliver to such customers as favour me with their orders such liquors as they direct, at the several landings they desire, being determined to give all the satisfaction in the power of

Their most humble servant, JOHN MERCER

Foolhardy though the brewery was, a gla.s.s factory would have been the pinnacle of folly. Yet it was seriously on Mercer's mind. In his letter to George he wrote:

A Gla.s.s house to be built here must I am satisfied turn to great profit, they have some in New England & New York or the Jerseys & find by some resolves the New England men are determined to increase their number.

Despite his manifest failure, Mercer confidently attempted to persuade George of the possibilities of the brewery and even the gla.s.shouse.

Shifting from one proposal to another, he suggested that he could "rent out all my houses and conveniences at a reasonable rate," or take in a partner, although "I have so great a dislike for all partnerships, nothing but my inability to carry it on my self could induce me to enter into one."