Margaret Mercer

Margaret Mercer (July 1, 1791September 17, 1846) was an American abolitionist and educator. She worked to end slavery and freed the Maryland slaves that she inherited from her father, sending six of them to Africa. Mercer started a school and a chapel in Loudoun County 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 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. 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 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.