James Mercer

James Mercer (February 26, 1736 – October 31, 1793), was an Virginia lawyer, military officer, planter, jurist and politician. Early and family life Mercer was born in Stafford County, Virginia at his family's Marlborough plantation on February 26, 1736. His mother, the former Catherine Mason, was the youngest daughter of George Mason II, a prominent planter and his second wife Elizabeth Waugh, daughter of Rev. John Waugh (1630-1706). His father John Mercer had emigrated from Ireland and become a prominent lawyer, planter and land speculator. He married twice, although most of his children died before reaching legal age. James' mother Catherine bore ten children before her death in 1750 (when James was 14) and his stepmother Ann Roy (daughter of Dr. Mungo Roy of Essex County) bore nine children and survived her husband by two years. Thus James Mercer was born into the First Families of Virginia and received a private education suitable to his class, as well as access to his father's library, if not the best, then one of the best in the area. At the time, Virginia had a primogeniture law so that landed estates passed to the firstborn son, clearly not James, as he knew in particular because his father was the guardian of and responsible for the education of his cousin George Mason, the firstborn son of George Mason III, who had died in a ferry accident. In 1753, John Mercer provided for James' future by apprenticing him to a master carpenter and builder, William Waite, and also bound with him four enslaved young Black men, so that at the end of the apprenticeship, Mercer would be able to build houses, churches, courthouses and other buildings in the region. Although Virginia did not abolish primogeniture until 1785, either the apprenticeship changed James' career path or his father reconsidered, for soon (like his two elder brothers who survived infancy and are discussed below), he traveled to Williamsburg for higher education under prominent lawyer George Wythe and others, and graduated from the College of William and Mary about 1755. His eldest brother to reach adulthood, George Mercer, would become a planter, politician, soldier (in the French and Indian War) and speculator in western lands, before traveling to England as a representative of the Ohio Company (as well as Loyalist in the American Revolutionary War), and marrying but dying childless.