Margaret Mercer (July 1, 1791September 17, 1846) was an American abolitionist and educator. She worked to end
slavery
Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...
and freed the Maryland slaves that she inherited from her father, sending six of them to
Africa
Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...
. Mercer started a school and a chapel in
Loudoun County
Loudoun County () is in the northern part of the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. In 2020, the census returned a population of 420,959, making it Virginia's third-most populous county. Loudoun County's seat is Leesburg. Loudoun C ...
that welcomed black people and continued for a short while after her death. In 2018, a Virginia historical marker was dedicated in her honor.
Early and family Life
Margaret Mercer was born on July 1, 1791, to Maryland governor, planter and veteran politician
John Francis Mercer
John Francis Mercer (May 17, 1759 – August 30, 1821) was an American lawyer, planter, and politician from Virginia and Maryland, who served as Maryland's governor, as well as terms in the Continental Congress (representing Virginia), U.S. Hou ...
and his wife, the former Sophia Sprigg.
Mercer was their fourth child, and one of the descendants of her brother John Mercer would be
Lucy Mercer (who much later became known for her relationship with U.S. President
Franklin Roosevelt).
Her grandfather
John Mercer and uncle
James Mercer were prominent Virginia lawyers, and her father had served in the Virginia House of Delegates after his service in the American Revolutionary War and before marrying her mother and moving to her family's estates in
Anne Arundel County, Maryland
Anne Arundel County (; ), also notated as AA or A.A. County, is located in the U.S. state of Maryland. As of the 2020 United States census, its population was 588,261, an increase of just under 10% since 2010. Its county seat is Annapolis, wh ...
. Mercer grew up in the family home named
Cedar Park in
Galesville, and read widely in her father's library (which contemporaries had admired, as they had the library of her grandfather Mercer). Although her father and both grandfathers had operated their Virginia and Maryland plantations using enslaved labor, Margaret found slavery immoral. She also did not want to marry, and never did. She corresponded with her
Essex County, Virginia
Essex County is a county located in the Middle Peninsula in the U.S. state of Virginia; the peninsula is bordered by the Rappahannock River on the north and King and Queen County on the south. As of the 2020 census, the population was 10,599. ...
paternal relatives, including about the important people who visited Cedar Park, the siege of Baltimore during the War of 1812, and her brother's surviving his military service.
Career
Mercer inherited some of her father's 72 slaves upon his death in 1821, but was unable to send any of them to Africa because her father's estate was in debt, and their sale (which creditors wanted but Margaret knew would break up families) could pay off that debt. While her brother remained at the family's Anne Arundel county plantations, Mercer moved to Essex County, Virginia, where she lived with her uncle
James Mercer Garnett (a former member of Congress as well as a prominent planter), and with his daughters taught at a school nearby in
Elmwood for four years. Margaret Mercer taught classes five days a week, and also helped teach Sunday school. On Saturdays, she worked for the Virginia Colonization Society, a part of the
American Colonization Society
The American Colonization Society (ACS), initially the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America until 1837, was an American organization founded in 1816 by Robert Finley to encourage and support the migration of freebor ...
. The society advocated purchasing slaves' freedom and then settling them in Africa. In 1823, the American Colonization Society bought land on the Guinea Coast (in
West Africa
West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of Africa. The United Nations defines Western Africa as the 16 countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, M ...
), and named it
Liberia. Another of her Mercer cousins (who had helped found the American Colonization Society), was Congressman
Charles Fenton Mercer, of
Loudoun County
Loudoun County () is in the northern part of the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. In 2020, the census returned a population of 420,959, making it Virginia's third-most populous county. Loudoun County's seat is Leesburg. Loudoun C ...
, who lived on a westward road and also became known for education both education and internal improvements (like roads, canals and later railroads). She also knew architect
John H. B. Latrobe, a prominent colonization advocate in Maryland.
In 1825, Mercer returned to Maryland to start a similar school for girls at her family's Cedar Park home, and she managed to pay off the estate's debt with profits raised from the school.
Mercer then freed all of the slaves she inherited, sending six of them to Liberia.
They arrived in
Monrovia
Monrovia () is the capital city of the West African country of Liberia. Founded in 1822, it is located on Cape Mesurado on the Atlantic coast and as of the 2008 census had 1,010,970 residents, home to 29% of Liberia’s total population. As th ...
on a
schooner named ''Margaret Mercer''.
The schooner's Captain Abels remained in Liberia for 13 days and in 1832 wrote a positive letter about his experience, which colonizers published. However, three years after the freed slaves arrived in Monrovia, three had died, one moved back to the United States, and another moved further away.
he sixth freed slave's fate remains unknown Similar results for other freed slaves sent to Africa led to the colonization movement's decline.
In 1836,
Ludwell Lee, a planter and politician who had served as speaker of the Virginia Senate (1799) and also helped C.F. Mercer organize the Loudoun chapter of the American Colonization Society, died and his heirs placed
Belmont, his 1,000-plus-acre plantation for sale. Mercer returned to Virginia, bought it and opened a school there named "Belmont Academy". She intended to emphasize agricultural education and how learning about it could remove the need for slave labor. Other courses were: philosophy, ethics, the Bible, French, Latin, geography,
geology
Geology () is a branch of natural science concerned with Earth and other astronomical objects, the features or rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which they change over time. Modern geology significantly overlaps all other Ea ...
, and
astronomy
Astronomy () is a natural science that studies celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and evolution. Objects of interest include planets, moons, stars, nebulae, g ...
. Her students were mostly daughters of southern
gentry
Gentry (from Old French ''genterie'', from ''gentil'', "high-born, noble") are "well-born, genteel and well-bred people" of high social class, especially in the past.
Word similar to gentle imple and decentfamilies
''Gentry'', in its widest c ...
and paid $250 each year for tuition. She employed seven teachers and only one of her students was a boy (
John Morris Wample was a teacher's son and later became a Confederate engineer.
In the 1840 census, 56 free white people lived on the property (of which 8 were male and 20 females of between 10 and 15 years old and 15 of between 15 and 20 years old, as well as nine enslaved Black women and girls and two free Black girls.
Because of the distance to the nearest church (difficult even on horseback), Mercer asked Latrobe to build Belmont Chapel. In 1841, the chapel opened for services and Bible study. Children of slaves and freed slaves participated with the schoolgirls at the chapel.
Death and legacy
Mercer died of
tuberculosis
Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease usually caused by '' Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can also affect other parts of the body. Most infections show no symptoms, i ...
on September 17, 1846, aged 55, at Belmont, and was buried on the estate.
Two years later, Morris Caspar published a biography of her life.
She had never married, and her executors Thomas S. Mercer and Richard S. Mercer sold the Belmont estate in 1851 to George Kephart of Frederick County, Maryland, who also bought the former
Thomas Ludwell Lee plantation called "Coton" across the Leesburg Pike. Eugenia Kephart, George Kephart's eldest daughter, operated the school and moved it by 1856 to
Oak Hill plantation, before closing in the early 1870s when the new Virginia constitution enabled free public education.
Richard S. Mercer may have used some of the sale proceeds in 1858 to erect
Parkhurst manor in
Harwood, in Anne Arundel County, nearly across the state from George Kephart's decades-long farm near
Buckeystown (which is about 28 miles away from Belmont, with a nearly direct crossing of the Potomac River along historic Route 15). George Kephart had considerable notoriety, particularly among Loudoun County Quakers at the
Goose Creek meeting (about 18 miles from Belmont), for his and his sons' slave catching activities, and 1836 had purchased the Alexandria, Virginia slave-trading firm once known as
Franklin & Armfield
The Franklin and Armfield Office, which houses the Freedom House Museum, is a historic commercial building in Alexandria, Virginia ( until 1846, the District of Columbia). Built c. 1810–20, it was first used as a private residence before bein ...
at 1315 Duke Street (about 40 miles from Belmont, or 50 miles from Buckeystown). George Kephart classified himself as a farmer in the 1850 Federal census for Maryland, and the accompanying slave census only showed him as owning 17 enslaved persons there, but two men of the same name (the other possibly his eldest son on the Maryland census) owned a total of 49 enslaved people in Alexandria. The 1860 Federal census for Loudoun County, Virginia classified George as "Merchant" and his son William as "Tradeing", but the Kephart family (now without George Junior who disappeared from the census but would be buried nearby in 1888, and to which 6 year old Julius had been added, only owned one slave, an 18 year old mulatto woman. Kephart either provided for his children who chose not to continue the business or encountered financial difficulties by 1858, when the firm's name changed to Price, Birch and Co. (which remained the name when Union authorities converted the Alexandria office in 1862 into a jail for Confederate and other prisoners) and in 1860 the Loudoun Circuit Court ordered various properties including Coton liquidated. In 1864, Virginia abolitionist
Moncure Conway
Moncure Daniel Conway (March 17, 1832 – November 15, 1907) was an American abolitionist minister and radical writer. At various times Methodist, Unitarian, and a Freethinker, he descended from patriotic and patrician families of Virginia an ...
published ''Testimonies Concerning Slavery'' and specifically criticized Kephart, who died at Belmont in 1869, about two years after his wife. His Alexandria slave trading office and jail is now also a historic site and museum.
Although much of the former Belmont estate was developed in recent years, the manor house was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, and remains today as an event venue, surrounded by the Belmont golf club and gated community developed by Toll Brothers in 1995.
Religious services continued at the Belmont chapel until 1936.
Arson destroyed it in 1967.
In 1990, St. David's Episcopal Church was built on the former Belmont Chapel site. In 2018, community leaders and politicians from Loudoun County, and Liberia visited St. David's Episcopal Church and School in Ashburn to dedicate a Virginia historical marker in Mercer's honor.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mercer, Margaret
1791 births
1846 deaths
People from Anne Arundel County, Maryland
American colonization movement
Abolitionists from Maryland
19th-century American women educators
19th-century American educators
Educators from Maryland
People from Loudoun County, Virginia
Activists from Virginia
Educators from Virginia
Tuberculosis deaths in Virginia
19th-century deaths from tuberculosis
Women civil rights activists
Abolitionists from Virginia