Douglas R. Egerton. Charles Fenton Mercer and the Trial of National Conservatism. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1989.
This is the only full-length biography of 19th century Virginia politician Charles Fenton Mercer. Born in 1778, Mercer was a younger generation Federalist-turned-Whig who represented Loudoun County in the House of Delegates and then a northern Virginia district including Loudoun and surrounding counties in the US House of Representatives from 1817 through 1839. He was an important political figure at the time, and Egerton notes that he had an impressive legislative record given that he spent most of his career as a member of a minority party who was usually at odds with majority sentiment in his home state.
Egerton argues that Mercer was an exemplary Whig, perhaps truer to the core principles of the party than more famous figures such as Henry Clay. This was partly due to his ideological and political integrity, and partly to the fact that he represented a "safe" district and could afford to go against the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian majority. His understanding of what would become the American System was nuanced and refined--he saw internal improvements, central banking, a protective tariff, public education, and the colonization of free African-Americans not as disparate economic or reform agendas but as complementary aspects of a comprehensive system.
This system, Egerton argues, was fundamentally conservative. He argues that the modern reinterpretation of the Whigs as optimistic proto-liberals is deeply flawed, and he uses this study of the life and career of this deeply pessimistic, even fatalistic, man to make that argument. Largely, he succeeds--Mercer's statist conservatism accommodated democracy and the "common man" in rhetoric but not in substance. Egerton notes that Mercer's interest in education was as a form of social control of the lower classes--Mercer sensed the social changes that industrialization would bring, and he feared them. Likewise, African colonization of free blacks was not in any way an exercise in nascent abolitionism (no matter what Mercer's often vicious Southern critics often charged), but rather an attempt to rather crudely purge the black "lower class" from American society.
Mercer's political career is noteworthy in Virginia history for his role in the creation of the Fund for Internal Improvements and the Board of Public Works, and nationally for the creation of the American Colonization Society. He fought many losing battles, and seemingly died feeling himself a failure, but in this book Egerton largely succeeds in extracting a larger story about the way in which American conservatism survived the collapse of Federalism and adjusted to the democratic realities of the first half of the nineteenth century.
