John Mercer | Biography

A political and legal theorist as well as a belletristic writer, John Mercer was born in Dublin, the namesake of his Anglo-Irish merchant father. Mercer claimed to have attended Trinity College, but since records do not show a graduation date, he apparently never completed a degree. He came to Virginia in 1720 and read his way into a legal profession; in Stafford County he built Marlborough, one of the most elaborate and original houses in colonial America.

For more than forty years, Mercer was a prominent and vocal attorney, who sustained a series of reprimands and reinstatements to the bar. Yet his abridgment of Virginia laws, modeled after Edmund Wingate's abridgment of English statutes (1655), was indispensable to court justices soon after its publication in 1737. The first digested code printed in Virginia, the work made the laws as intelligible as possible and included punishments and fines for public and private acts from stealing hogs to refusing to baptize children. The abridgment also indicated which laws were obsolete, expired, repealed, or annulled and covered such items as standard weights and measures and descriptions of the architecture of towns and buildings. Mercer added to and altered the work in 1739 and 1759, always with the intent to make the laws more understandable.

Known also as a literary man among his contemporaries, Mercer is the most probable author for the "Dinwiddianae," a series of poems and letters written from 4 November 1754-3 May 1757, satirizing Governor Robert Dinwiddie, General Edward Braddock, and other favorites of the governor. The documents contain poems, prose glossaries, and quasi-dialectal letters dealing with such matters as taxation, settlement of western lands, and the Jacobites.

As a whole, the work documents the widespread literary opposition to the Royalist policies. The satirist at work was clearly conscious of popular forms of satire, including the works of Pope and the Hudibrastic verse of Samuel Butler. In the "Dinwiddianae" the author employs mock heroic, burlesque, pun, and direct invective. The roughness in rhyme and meter may be intentional, the marginal annotations a device to enhance the satire.

Although several candidates for authorship have been suggested, most of the evidence points to Mercer. He would have been familiar with the activities of Dinwiddie since he was frequently in Williamsburg. Mercer is known to have been a writer, and his papers contain poems similar to those in the "Dinwiddianae." Furthermore, although primarily devoted to law books, Mercer's library, one of the largest and finest in colonial America, contained works on the arts and sciences, the classics, divinity, history, and gardening--books the satirist used extensively. Sometimes exhibiting more political than literary merit, the "Dinwiddianae" is representative of the early political resentment of British authority.

Also a successful man of business, Mercer served as secretary and general counsel of the Ohio Company of Virginia, speculating in western lands. Yet he had difficulty securing payment from clients as early as 1745, and after he retired in 1765, he attempted to recoup his fortune by establishing a brewery at Marlborough. The beer was barely drinkable, and Mercer died in debt at his home on 14 October 1768.

Mercer's writings reveal much about the times. His abridgments, as well as his account book (1725-1732) and diary (1 January 1740-31 March 1768), provide information about law practice in the eighteenth century. Parts of his poems compare favorably with those of his British counterparts, and the "Dinwiddianae" reveals much about the wit, the creativity, the artistic and intellectual pursuits of American colonials.