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Illustrated Episode · Volume III, chapter 25 · 30 October 1765

The mob wore good coats

In a wide sandy street at dusk a dusty, pale man stands alone with one hand raised, hat in the other, ringed by gentlemen in good coats and wigs who lean in to press him, with a long brick building at the end of the street.
Williamsburg, October 1765. George Mercer, home from England as Virginia's stamp master, is stopped in the street by a crowd of gentlemen from across the colony who demand his resignation. Rothbard notes that almost all the leading merchants and gentlemen of property stood among them. The next day Mercer gave in. Chapter 25 of Conceived in Liberty.

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Adapted from Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Mises Institute, 2011), CC BY 3.0.

What happened

George Mercer was a Virginia planter and a former aide of George Washington. In London he accepted the post of stamp distributor for Virginia, he said, on the recommendation of the colony's own burgesses, unasked for, and on 30 October 1765, two days before the Stamp Act took effect, he came ashore in a colony in uproar. He had been burned in effigy on the Northern Neck, and country justices were resigning in protest. As he walked up the street to the Governor's house, a crowd of gentlemen from every part of Virginia stopped him. Rothbard stresses who they were: almost all the leading merchants and "gentlemen of property." The General Court was sitting and the merchants were in town, so the men who ran the colony were all in one street. Mercer asked for time, Governor Fauquier greeted him warmly, and the crowd rumbled that Friday was too late. Mercer agreed to answer by the next day. On 31 October, he promised that he would never, directly or indirectly, help enforce the Act. The crowd carried him around Williamsburg in triumph. Washington called the resistance "ill-judged," and it made no difference.

Sources

  1. Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Mises Institute, 2011 single-volume ed.), vol. III, ch. 25, 'Response in Virginia', pp. 880-881. CC BY 3.0. Rothbard
  2. 'Account of Col. George Mercer's Arrival in Virginia, and his Resignation of the Office of Stamp Distributor' (31 October 1765), Encyclopedia Virginia primary document (read 2026-09-30 through a fetch summary; the account was first printed in the Virginia Gazette and reprinted in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography in 1878). Primary source
  3. Cengage, Ayers primary sources: 'Account of Col. George Mercer's Resignation as Stamp Distributor, 1765' (the same account, with Mercer's statement that he would not 'directly or indirectly, by myself or deputies, proceed in the execution of the act'), read 2026-09-30 through a fetch summary. Primary source
  4. Colonial Williamsburg and Encyclopedia Virginia, the General Court in session and the merchants meeting at the exchange near the Capitol in late October 1765, read through search summaries on 2026-09-30. Secondary source
  5. American Planning Association, 'Duke of Gloucester Street: Williamsburg, Virginia' (a 99-foot-wide street joining the College to the Capitol), read through a search summary on 2026-09-30. Secondary source