by Edward Cline
George Mercer was feted that night. Townsmen appeared with French horns, fiddles, and drums to play in honor of the man who said he would not take advantage of “an office so odious to his country.” And on the following evening of the day the Stamp Act was to go into effect, a great ball was held in his honor at the Raleigh Tavern. From Queen Anne County only Reece Vishonn, Henry Otway, and Jock Frazer attended it. They liked a good party, where a good table, good drink, and good cheer were to be had for the mere price of being present.
* * *
George Mercer became a master of the art of duplicity.
When the General Court opened the next morning, presided over by Lieutenant-Governor Fauquier as chief justice and members of his Council as fellow justices, the sumptuous, imposing, well-appointed courtroom beneath the Council chambers in the Capitol was empty but for the justices and the Court’s functionaries. No one sat in the public place. Attorneys were not present, nor their clients, nor any defendants. The Governor heard men talking and moving about outside. Twice he ordered the bailiff to ring his bell on the Capitol steps to announce the opening of the Court.
Not a single soul came through the great doors of the courtroom. The chamber remained ominously empty. The Governor asked George Mercer, who sat on the side with the chief clerk, if he could provide stamps in order to proceed with business. Mercer replied that he could not. The Governor next asked the chief clerk if he could proceed with business without stamps. The chief clerk replied that he would not, for he did not wish to risk a penalty by approving such an action. George Mercer then offered his resignation from the office of stamp distributor. Fauquier refused to accept it, replying that he must submit his resignation to those who granted him the commission.
The Lieutenant-Governor sighed and ordered the Court adjourned. He had expected this to happen, but could not quite believe in the possibility until it did happen. “Madness,” he muttered to himself as he led a procession of nonplussed Council members out of the courtroom to the chambers upstairs.
The next day, in a written statement to the Governor and the Council, George Mercer “declined acting” as the appointed stamp distributor before he received further orders, and denied that he brought any stamps with him, “or was ever charged by the Commissioners of the Customs in England with the care of any stamps.” The stamps just happened to have been on the same vessel that brought him back to Virginia. Fauquier and Mercer arranged for the temporary disposition of the stamps.
A few days later, the Governor ordered the printing of certificates that stated that stamps were not available and sent them to Captain Sterling on the Rainbow, saying in his letter that the certificates could be used until the “proper stamps came into the country”; that is, until the stamps that were transferred from the Leeds to the warship could be safely landed and transported to Williamsburg and other venues where they could be employed. He took this action on the advice of Peter Randolph, Surveyor-General of the customs for the Middle District and a member of the Council, in order to placate merchants who had vessels waiting to leave for other ports. The stamps intended for North Carolina and Maryland were sent by Captain Sterling on sloops-of-war to Wilmington and Annapolis.
George Mercer lied — to the Lieutenant-Governor, to his family, to his fellow Virginians. Fauquier never learned of the ruse to bring in the stamps, for neither Mercer nor Captain Sterling ever informed him of it. To the Governor, he represented that it was too dangerous to bring the stamps to Williamsburg; to the crowd, he represented that he did not have the stamps and would not introduce them without the approval of the General Assembly.
He neglected to mention to anyone that he had been promised the commission in early April of that year, and that it was dated August 2nd, which commission would not have been made out unless he had tentatively accepted it beforehand. He never really resigned from the office, but signed a power-of-attorney that gave his brother James the responsibility for the stamps. Nor did he mention to the crowd that he had gone to England two years before not only as the Ohio Company’s agent to lobby for the salvaging of that enterprise’s interests — damaged by the Proclamation of 1763 — but also to seek a reward for his services during the late war, which meant, in those days, a lucrative Crown appointment of one kind or another. He also pleaded ignorance of the constitutional and economic consequences of the Stamp Act, and professed little knowledge of its intent and scope.
The Stamp Act and growing reports of its often violent opposition in the colonies were reported in personal and official correspondence and in the British press months before Mercer boarded the Leeds for the voyage home. It occurred to no one, however, that Mercer had possibly accepted the commission in hopes that a grateful ministry would express its gratitude by conceding some of his Ohio Company’s claims on land west of the Alleghenies in exception to the Proclamation of 1763.
George Mercer was either clueless and witless, or a liar and dissembler of the second rank. Suspecting that he had permanently blotted his reputation as a loyal Virginian and sullied the esteem in which his fellow Virginians had held him, he left Virginia for England on 28 November 1765, never to return. He continued to represent, in the end fruitlessly, the claims of the Ohio Company, and testified of his experience in Williamsburg before the Commons.
Hugh Kenrick, Jack Frake, and John Proudlocks returned to Caxton the morning after George Mercer’s apparent capitulation. Proudlocks that day went to the fields with the other Morland tenants to help bring in the harvest of wheat. Jack Frake met with John Ramshaw to arrange for hogsheads of tobacco to be loaded onto the Sparrowhawk and to claim a consignment of farming implements and seeds from England that he wished to experiment with. Hugh also saw to some of his plantation tasks, and made time to write his father, Dogmael Jones, and Otis Talbot about the events of the last few days.
And in the back of his mind for the last forty-eight hours was the woman he had seen in Hampton. The brief glimpse of her skewed his thoughts and scuttled his focus despite his best efforts. He struggled against a tenacious distraction, knowing it was not a distraction at all, but a desperate need.
And he would not know it for months, but the day before, when George Mercer made a show of resigning before a tense and expectant crowd, the man to whom Hugh had neglected to bow so many years ago died. William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, now obese, nearly blind, asthmatic, and suffering from leg abscesses, succumbed at his residence of Cumberland House to a heart attack hours before the arrival of Lord Rockingham and his ministers to decide on a policy and plan to deal with the rebellious colonies. Cumberland was a soldier; consequently some of the ministers had wished to persuade the Duke of the necessity of using the Army to enforce submission to the Stamp Act.
Lord Rockingham, Secretary of State Henry Conway, and the Earl of Northington, together with other high ministers were abruptly left without a rock to cling to, and flailed desperately in the roiling waters of impotent vacillation and fulminating indecision until the stark reality of the crisis forced them to think hard and decide quickly, lest they squander a portion of a hard-won empire and lose it.
Hugh Kenrick, some three thousand miles away, exerted his best self-discipline not to succumb to the temptation to return to Hampton, and thence to Norfolk, to regain something he thought he had lost. To his staff he became an austere, tight-lipped, enigmatic presence. They wondered in private about the monkish reticence of their otherwise generous and vivacious master.
* * *
Chapter 12: The Assessment
“The true source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think.… Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.… Let it be known that British liberties are not the grants of princes or parliaments.…”
So wrote Massachusetts lawyer John Adams in a pamphlet Hugh had bought in New York, “A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law.” Hugh bought five copies of it: one each for himself, Jack Frake, Thomas Reisdale, his father, and Dogmael Jones. Adams’s call to aggressive
colonial self-edification was the leitmotif of all the other literature he bought multiple copies of, including Maryland lawyer Daniel Dulany’s Considerations on the Propriety of imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, for the Purpose of raising a Revenue. He had to purchase a second travel bag to carry all the literature he found. He had been dumbstruck by the quantity and quality of it available in the bookshops of New York; dumbstruck, and then sated, for he consumed it like a starving man.
Most of it asserted the rights of British-Americans, distinguished between Parliament’s regulatory imposts on trade and internal taxation, and disputed the legal and moral power of Parliament to legislate laws within the colonies. He spent many sleepless nights in his New York billet, reading by candlelight, and many more in the company of delegates to the congress, debating the liberties, questioning Parliamentary power, and arguing the pros and cons of colonial representation in the Commons. He talked himself to passionate hoarseness on those occasions, as did his fellow debaters.
He was often asked by gentlemen from Massachusetts, New York, Georgia, and Pennsylvania why the Virginia legislature had not sent official delegates to the congress, since it was that body’s Resolves from last May that had largely emboldened other legislatures to approve of the congress. He could only report Lieutenant-Governor Fauquier’s proroguement of the General Assembly and speculate on the motive behind the gubernatorial action. “Very likely he has mistaken an assertion of our liberties and resistance to encroachment on them as a declaration of war on Westminster,” he replied just as often.
“He may very well be correct on that assessment, in the long view,” said one delegate.
Hugh had shrugged. “The assessment is incorrect. We seek only to preserve our rights and liberties from abridgement and eventual erasure. We are not guilty of declaring war.”
“It is Westminster that seems to have declared war on us, and by that action, on the Constitution itself!” protested another delegate with some worry.
“Perhaps. Perhaps not,” replied Hugh. “But Parliament may very well adopt my governor’s view, and either recognize our arguments, or dismiss them. They may act out of fear, or from contempt. Time will tell. Perhaps the new ministry will be friendlier to reason.”
“I am not acquainted with any politician who is friendly to reason, sir,” said another delegate. “That creature is as rare as elves. If we are successful in our redresses, methinks we must credit, not reason, but the influence of British merchants. A friend writes from London that our resistance to several late acts of Parliament has pinched many a purse in London and all the outports there, and tens of thousands of souls are now without employment. The euphoric industry of the late war and of the peace before it has given way to universal despondency, there as well as here. Methinks the Solons of the Commons will hark to the complaints of British traders before our protests are ever given weight.”
And while the experience gave him a strange, exhilarating kind of exhaustion, the lacuna also troubled his mind. He could not identify it. When he boarded the Morag in New York for the trip home, he slept soundly in his berth that first day out, for the first time in two weeks, oblivious to the noisy efforts of the crew, to the rocking of the schooner, to the sudden heaves as its sails caught wind and propelled the vessel forward — and the first thing he thought of when he awoke was the question of what, for all the reading, thinking, speaking, and writing, was missing.
Perhaps it was not a thing at all, but rather a perception. Or perhaps it was something present in all the rhetoric and grandiloquence.
John Ramshaw brought him mail from his father and Dogmael Jones. With Jones’s correspondence were copies of London newspapers that carried items and letters about the colonial troubles. One paper was a number of the London Weekly Journal, which carried Jones’s latest venture into political caricature, entitled “The Westminster Fair; or, a Summer Divertissement by Ye Extraordinary Salmagundi Touring Troupe for the Claque of the Commons.”
It was a larger and more biting caricature than the one Jones and Hugh’s father had put into the paper earlier in the year. It depicted some principal figures of the new ministry as members of a traveling troupe of performers in a satire on the Southwark Fair. A throng of dour, sour-faced figures, representing Lords and the Commons, watched five separate acts. Some of the spectators were vaguely recognizable as prominent members of both Houses.
George Grenville was represented as a wizard, bedecked in robes that bore strange symbols and sporting a conical hat. He stood before a pedestal that held a cracked and chipped stone, labeled “America.” The figure held a wand labeled “Stamp Act.” A balloon over the figure announced, “Watch as I strike the stone and cause it to bleed revenue.”
The Duke of Cumberland was represented as a sleeping bear, around whose mangy and scarred hulk swarmed gnats and flies. The bear was also surrounded by a pack of small dogs barking at him to rise and give the spectators a show for their money.
The Marquis of Rockingham was shown sitting astride an overly ornate rocking-horse, labeled “Fortune’s Favorite.” He wore the silks and long-billed cap of a jockey. Balloons over two spectators remarked, “It is furious action, but he goes nowhere,” and “But he is nearing the end of the course!”
Sir Henoch Pannell and Crispin Hillier were represented by two figures identified by a placard as “Mr. and Mrs. Mumpsimus,” and also as “The Undertaker of Onyxcombe” and “The Runnion of Canovan.” Hillier was portrayed as a dark-dressed undertaker proclaiming the efficacy of his elixir, while Pannell rose out of a coffin, garbed as a disreputable woman. Balloons above them read, “My potion of excises and tariffs will embalm the industry of England forever more,” and “I took the elixir twenty years ago and I am as fresh as a maid in her bloom!” Several spectators were shown with expressions of revulsion and horror as they stepped back with gesturing hands from “Mrs. Mumpsimus.” Balloons above them read, “No! She is poxed with the plague of preferences!” and “Merciful odium!! Return this fulsome creature to the cemetery!”
The Duke of Bedford was paired with a representation of Britannia. The latter had dropped her shield and spear and was clinging precariously to a liberty pole, while behind her the Duke had a boot planted on her rump and strained to pull on the strings of a bodice Britannia had been fitted into. A balloon over Bedford remarked, “Liberty must be strung into a tight constraint to foil anarchy! I shall pull the laces of law until she groans in agreement!” The laces in his hands were marked “Stamp Act,” “Cider Tax,” “General Warrants,” and “The Army.” A third figure, representing Lord Northington, the Lord Chancellor, as a besotted tailor, observed the contest from the side with a pensive but bleary look. A balloon over that figure read, “But, sir, my new fashion requires the rack to ensure a perfect fit.”
Desultory remarks by the spectators expressed disappointment and boredom with the spectacle.
Hugh was amused by the caricature, and showed it over supper an evening soon after to his guests, who included Jack Frake and Etáin, Thomas Reisdale, John Proudlocks, and John Ramshaw. They, too, were amused by it. “Mr. Jones and my father are preparing for the new session in January,” said Hugh. “They expect the Stamp Act to be debated on both sides with great liveliness. Mr. Pitt may yet enter the debates. Jones has dubbed the new first minister ‘Lord Rocking-horse,’ and expects that Pitt will move him to adopt a policy.”
* * *
Reece Vishonn held his victory ball at Enderly a week after November first. To mark the day, he requested that Sheriff Tippet arrange to fire the old cannon that sat in front of his jail. Tippet agreed with alacrity. As dusk approached, the gun was fired. The field piece, captured by Queen Anne militia from the French two wars ago, had not been drafted into the confrontation between the town and the Navy; it lacked ball. The long, cresset-lit path leading to the great house of Enderly was soon busy with carriages, riding chairs, and sulkies as the evening grew darker.
The ball was as grand an occasion as t
he ball he held to celebrate Wolfe’s victory at Quebec years before. The Great Union flag was again fixed to one ballroom wall. Local musicians played on the side, and the guests participated in many gavottes and country-dances. Etáin played a program of music alone and together with the Kenny brothers.
John Proudlocks helped her set up her harp before the Great Union, and stood deferentially to the side, ready to wait on her. It was his first ball. He arrived with Etáin, her husband, Hugh Kenrick, John Ramshaw, and William Hurry.
Reece Vishonn frowned when Proudlocks followed his friends inside the house, but he could hardly object to the Indian’s presence. After all, that man had held the banner of the Sons of Liberty at the pier a week ago. He grimaced and turned to greet another guest. Arthur Stannard remarked to him later, “I didn’t know you tolerated such foreigners in your home, sir.”
“I tolerate whom I please, sir, in my own home,” replied Vishonn, some color rushing to his face. “Any friend of Mr. Frake’s is my friend. If you cannot tolerate my friends, then perhaps this is not the affair for you.”
The British agent’s eyes widened and he stammered, “My apologies, sir, for the presumption.”
Later in the evening, many men repaired to Vishonn’s game room to rest from the music, light their pipes, and exercise their minds. A lively discussion ensued on the week’s events.
“We have distinguished ourselves from those other Sons,” said Hugh at one point, “by not resorting to anarchy, destruction, and civil intimidation. We were prepared to trade volleys or grapple hand to hand with the King’s men, if they tried to proceed with their plan. We met them on the pier, and turned them away. Words cannot convey my satisfaction with that outcome.”
“We are fortunate that the obedient agents of the nascent tyrants in the government have no bottom,” remarked Reisdale. “They are confounded by their own doubts about the legitimacy and practicality of their actions.”