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 assistance," 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 assisting 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.
Passage 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 entitled "Prophecy from the East." Occupying
all the space 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 principal, if not the only
assassin 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 scrape 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 attitude towards the Stamp Act there can be no
question. On November 1, 1765, he noted in his journal, "The damned
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.