were
aided by the complicity and courage of soft-spoken Governor Francis
Fauquier.

Enforcing the Stamp Act depended upon having a law to enforce, a
commissioner to administer it, and stamps to attach to the documents.
Colonel George Mercer, prominent planter who had won the commissioner's
post from Richard Henry Lee, arrived in Williamsburg from London on
October 30, 1765. The law was to take effect on November 1. As Mercer's
ill-luck would have it, the Virginia General Court was in session and
hundreds of citizens were in town, many of them the leading gentry and
lawyers. Hearing that Mercer had arrived, a crowd quickly gathered and
moved on the Mercer family residence. Learning of their coming, Mercer
set out to meet them. At once they demanded to know whether or not he
would resign his post. Mercer pleaded for time and promised an answer
before the law would become effective. With that he went to what is now
Mrs. Christiana Campbell's coffee house where the governor was eating.
The crowd followed. After talking with Mercer briefly, the governor
invited him to the palace and walked unescorted with Mercer through the
assembled hundreds. Privately to the Board of Trade, Fauquier remarked
that he would have called the crowd a "mob, did I (not) know that it
was chiefly if not altogether composed of Gentlemen of property in the
Colony, some of them at the Head of their Respective counties, and
Merchants of the Country, whether English, Scotch, or Virginia."
Mercer, after talking with the governor, returned to his father's house
and discussed the situation with his brothers. The next morning he
found 2,000 Virginians assembled and awaiting his answer. Concluding it
was "an Impossibility to execute the Act" and "being obliged to submit
to Numbers", he resigned as commissioner and wrote Fauquier that he had
no stamps with which to execute the act. With that the crowd carried
him off in triumph to the coffee house.

Virginia developed a clever legal stratagem to allow the tobacco fleet
to sail without the required stamps. Here the agreement of governor,
gentry, merchants, and ship captains was essential. Once Mercer had
resigned and stated he had no stamps for the customs office, Councilor
Peter Randolph, in his capacity of Surveyor General of His Majesty's
Customs, declared the ships could sail for England with the stamps on
the ships' manifests. Governor Fauquier then followed with sealed
certificates for each ship capta