The Death of Hugh Mercer

Hugh Mercer had survived Culloden. He had survived Braddock's Monongahela disaster, riding away with two wounds while the army collapsed around him. He had survived twenty years of frontier medicine in a colony that was not his own, building a practice, making friends with George Washington, learning the peculiar rhythms of Virginia's planter society while remaining, at some level, always the Scotsman who had backed the wrong king at Drummossie Moor.

At Princeton on the morning of January 3, 1777, his luck ran out.

His brigade had been separated from Washington's main force in the confusion of the battle, moving through an orchard toward the British rear when his horse was shot. He was on foot and surrounded before he could form a coherent defense. The British soldiers who surrounded him thought they had Washington. When they demanded surrender, accounts differ on what Mercer said; what the records agree on is that he refused to give up his sword and was bayoneted repeatedly before he fell.

Washington found him afterward on the field, still alive. There was nothing to be done. Mercer was carried to a nearby farmhouse — the Clarke farm, now preserved — and died there nine days later. He was fifty years old.

The news reached Fredericksburg in the way all bad news traveled in the eighteenth century: slowly, by messenger and letter, then all at once when rumor became confirmation. The town had given the Revolution a physician who had turned soldier, a man who had built his entire American identity from the wreckage of a lost Scottish cause and who had died defending a new one.

He is buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, not in Fredericksburg. But the town kept him anyway. The apothecary on Caroline Street where he saw patients and mixed medicines and talked with Washington about crops and wars and the nature of British tyranny is still there, preserved. His memory became the town's most insistent Revolutionary inheritance.