Jesse Mercer was an American pioneer preacher and philanthropist.
Background
Jesse Mercer was born on December 16, 1769, in Halifax County, North Carolina. He was the great-grandson of a Scotch emigrant who settled in Virginia about the end of the seventeenth century. His father Silas Mercer was reared a devout Episcopalian, but shortly after his removal from North Carolina to Wilkes County, Georgia, about 1775, he became a Baptist and later a minister, the founder and pastor of several prominent churches of the original Georgia Association, constituted probably in 1784.
Education
Jesse, the eldest of eight children, was brought up on the frontier with scant opportunity for an education in books, but after he began to preach he was able to go back to school from time to time.
Career
After passing through a depressing religious struggle of some twelve years, Jesse was baptized in 1787 by his father. In 1789, he was ordained a Baptist minister in Phillips' Mill Church. In 1788, Jesse went to be pastor at Sardis in Wilkes County and, on his father's death in 1796, succeeded to his place as pastor of the churches at Phillips' Mill in Wilkes County, at Bethesda in Greene County, at Powelton in Hancock County, and later he became pastor at Eatonton in Putnam County. On his marriage to his second wife he removed to Washington, Georgia, to minister to a newly organized church there. He purchased the Christian Index and, having transferred it from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Washington, was its editor from 1833 to 1840, when he resigned and donated it to the Baptist State Convention. In Georgia he was a kind of bishop, without the prerogatives of that office, over a body that by 1840 had grown to number 30, 000 members. For almost the whole period from 1795 to 1816 he was clerk of the Georgia Baptist Association, and, becoming moderator of the body in 1816, he served in the office until 1839. In 1838 he published A History of the Georgia Baptist Association. He was for eleven years a member of the board of managers of the Baptist general convention for missionary purposes, a national body organized in 1814. When, in 1822, a general state association was formed as the General Baptist Association of the State of Georgia, later the Baptist Convention of the State of Georgia, he became the first moderator and served until 1841. He died in Butts County, Georgia.
Achievements
Jesse Mercer has been listed as a noteworthy clergyman by Marquis Who's Who.
Views
His leadership was owing to his frank democracy, modesty, and devotion to the support of benevolent enterprises, especially foreign missions and higher education. In meeting dissension in churches and associations he practised conciliation and tact. He was reluctant to participate in politics unless what he considered the fundamental Christian principles lying at the base of the government were threatened.
Personality
In his youth, Mercer was a tall, slender youth, rather unprepossessing in appearance, mainly on account of his oddly shaped head with an unusually high crown and slanting forehead. He was not a scholar, but his writings show simple strength and beauty. He was exceptionally cogent in expounding matters of church discipline and doctrine. His own efforts to obtain an education lasted throughout his lifetime, and he contributed largely to making possible an education for others. Very early in his life he began to give his time to teaching, in his own home, young men too poor to afford other means of advancing their education.
Connections
On January 31, 1788, Mercer was married to Sabrina Chivers, a member of the church in which he was ordained. She bore him two daughters and died in 1826. On December 11, 1827, he was married to Nancy Simonds, a wealthy widow of Washington, Georgia, formerly Nancy Mills of Virginia. It was through the wise management of her properties that he was able to give generously to benevolent causes.
