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History and Government—Congressional Biographies—VirginiaCharles Fenton MERCER
(1778-1858)
MERCER, Charles Fenton,
(cousin of Robert Selden Garnett), a Representative from Virginia;
born in Fredericksburg, Va., June 16, 1778; was graduated from
Princeton College in 1797; took a postgraduate course in the same
college and received his degree in 1800; studied law; was admitted
to the bar in 1802 and commenced practice in Aldie, Loudoun County,
Va.; member of the State house of delegates 1810-1817; during the
War of 1812 was appointed lieutenant colonel of a Virginia regiment
and then major in command at Norfolk, Va.; inspector general in
1814; aide-de-camp to Governor Barbour and brigadier general in
command of the Second Virginia Brigade; projector and first
president of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Co. 1828-1833;
delegate to the State constitutional convention in 1829; elected as
a Federalist to the Fifteenth through the Seventeenth Congresses;
reelected to the Eighteenth Congress as a Crawford Republican;
reelected to the Nineteenth and Twentieth Congresses as an Adams;
reelected as an Anti-Jacksonian to the Twenty-First through the
Twenty-fourth Congresses; reelected as a Whig to the Twenty-fifth
through Twenty-sixth Congresses and served from March 4, 1817, to
December 26, 1839, when he resigned; chairman, Committee on Roads
and Canals (Twenty-second through Twenty-fifth Congresses); was one
of the originators of the plan for establishing the Free State of
Liberia; vice president of the Virginia Colonization Society in
1836; vice president of the National Society of Agriculture in
1842; died in Howard, near Alexandria, Va., May 4, 1858; interment
in Union Cemetery, Leesburg, Loudoun County, Va.
Bibliography
Carter, Robert Allen. “Virginia Federalist in Dissent: A Life
of Charles Fenton Mercer.” Ph.D. diss., University of
Virginia, 1988; Egerton, Douglas R. Charles Fenton Mercer and
the Trial of National Conservatism. Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 1989.
Source: Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1771-Present
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