Mercy Otis Warren

Mercy Otis Warren, circa 1763, Oil on canvas by John Singleton Copley

Mercy Otis Warren (September 14, 1728 – October 19, 1814) was an American writer, poet and playwright. She was known as the "Conscience of the American Revolution." Mercy Otis was America's first female playwright, having written unbylined anti-British and anti-Loyalist propaganda plays from 1772 to 1775, and was the first woman to create a Jeffersonian (anti-Federalist) interpretation of the Revolution, entitled History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, published in three volumes in 1805.

Early life

Mercy Otis was the third child of thirteen born to Colonel James Otis (1702-1778) and Mary Allyne Otis (1702-1774) in Barnstable, Massachusetts. Mary Allyne was a descendant of Mayflower passenger Edward Doty. James Otis, Sr., was a farmer, merchant, and attorney, who served as a judge for the Barnstable County Court of Common Pleas and later won election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1745. He was an outspoken opponent and leader against British rule and against the appointed colonial governor, Thomas Hutchinson. The Warren children were "raised in the midst of revolutionary ideals." Although Mercy had no formal education, she studied with the Reverend Jonathan Russell while he tutored her brothers in preparation for college. Mercy loved history—especially political history—invective, and wit; Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World (1614) became a lifelong model for her. She studied literature, including Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope, and became an able writer and rhetorician. One of her brothers was the noted patriot and lawyer James Otis, who is credited with the quote "taxation without representation is tyranny," the principal slogan of the American Revolution. She was no doubt involved in the conversations of her father and her older brother James.

Marriage

In 1754, Mercy Otis married James Warren, a prosperous merchant and farmer from Plymouth, Massachusetts when she was 24 years old, an indication of her independent character. He was a Harvard graduate and colleague of her brother. He was a descendant of the Mayflower passenger Richard Warren. They settled in Plymouth just a few miles north from her home and had five sons, James (1757-1821), Winslow (1759-1791), Charles (1762-1784), Henry (1764-1828), and George (1766-1800).

James Warren circa 1763 Oil on canvas by John Singleton Copley

Her husband James had a very distinguished political career. In 1765 he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, eventually he became speaker of the House and President of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. He also served as paymaster to George Washington's army, for a time, during the Revolutionary War. Mercy Warren actively participated in the political life of her husband. The Warrens became increasingly involved in the conflict between the American colonies and the British Government. Their home became a focal point of local politics where they hosted protest and strategy meetings for the Sons of Liberty, among whom was their friend, John Adams. Like Mercy's father and brothers, the first patriots disliked the colonial governor. Mercy accordingly became a strong political voice with views on liberty, democracy and independence for the American colonies. She wrote, "every domestic enjoyment depends on the impaired possession of civil and religious liberty." Mercy's husband James encouraged her to write, fondly referring to her as the "scribbler" and she became his chief correspondent and sounding board.

Revolutionary writings and politics

Abigail Adams, Warren's friend and confidant

Martha Washington

Warren formed a strong circle of friends with whom she regularly corresponded, including Abigail Adams, Martha Washington and Hannah Winthrop. In a letter to Catherine Macaulay she wrote: "America stands armed with resolution and virtue; but she still recoils at the idea of drawing the sword against the nation from whence she derived her origin. Yet Britain, like an unnatural parent, is ready to plunge her dagger into the bosom of her affectionate offspring." Through their correspondence they increased the awareness of women's issues, were supportive, and influenced the course of events to further Americas cause.

She became a correspondent and adviser to many political leaders, including Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and especially John Adams, who became her literary mentor in the years leading to the Revolution. In a letter to James Warren, Adams wrote, "Tell your wife that God Almighty has entrusted her with the Powers for the good of the World, which, in the cause of his Providence, he bestows on few of the human race. That instead of being a fault to use them, it would be criminal to neglect them."

Prior to the American Revolution, in 1772, during a political meeting at the Warren's home, they formed the Committees of Correspondence along with Samuel Adams. Warren wrote "no single step contributed so much to cement the union of the colonies." Since Warren knew most of the leaders of the Revolution personally, she was continually at or near the center of events from 1765 to 1789. She combined her vantage point with a talent for writing to become both a poet and a historian of the Revolutionary era. All Mercy Otis Warren’s work was published anonymously until 1790. When the colonies began to rebel against English rule, Mercy Otis Warren became perhaps the most important of Revolutionary War women. She like the men of her family, was among those ready to throw out the colonial governor. She wrote several plays, including the satiric The Adulateur (1772), directed against Governor Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts, the play foretold the War of Revolution.

In 1773, she wrote The Defeat, also featuring the character based on Hutchinson, and in 1775 Warren published The Group, a satire conjecturing what would happen if the British king abrogated the Massachusetts charter of rights. The anonymously published The Blockheads (1776) and The Motley Assembly (1779) are also attributed to her. In 1788 she published Observations on the New Constitution, whose ratification she opposed as an Anti-Federalist.

Post-Revolutionary writings

In 1790 (age 62), she published Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous, the first work bearing her name ("Mrs. M. Warren") evidenced her clear, analytical mind. The book contains eighteen political poems and two plays. The two dramas, The Sack of Rome and The Ladies of Castille, deal with liberty, social and moral values that were necessary to the success of the new republic. Both of these plays showed republics undermined from within by the loss of civic virtue. And although she found it difficult to write of the battlefield, she forged ahead beyond her "trembling hand" to do so, revealing a woman's heroism where her strong mind triumphs over her weak body. A woman's body might be weaker than a man's, she holds; but her mind is not.

Other, more personal poetry, she kept unpublished until almost two centuries after her death. Her letters to hundreds of contemporaries (including Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Abigail Adams and her husband John—with whom Warren quarreled as John Adams grew increasingly conservative) have been published and utilized for historical insight into the time. Although she was excluded from direct involvement in the development of the revolution because of her gender, she nonetheless did bring much influence on the men who worked at the center of the activities and at times acted as their conscience, spurring them to action.

During the French Revolution she wrote that revolutions are "permitted by providence, to remind mankind of their natural equality." She saw the greater significance of the American Revolution, how it would permanently shift Western ideology. She was a pioneer among both men and women, where most people thought democracy as an impossible idea sought by the ignorant masses. She understood that the "natural rights philosophy" exhibited in the Declaration of Independence would lead to democracy and egalitarianism for everyone. Her radical beliefs, held by a minority, even led her to oppose the ratification of the Constitution in the late 1780s.

President Thomas Jefferson eagerly awaited the publication of Mercy Otis Warren's History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution

Almost at the onset of the revolution, Warren began her three-decade-long history of the American revolution. It was finally published, in 1805, when she was seventy-seven, as a three volume work entitled, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution. President Thomas Jefferson ordered subscriptions for himself and his cabinet and noted his "anticipation of her truthful account of the last thirty years that will furnish a more instructive lesson to mankind than any equal period known in history."

In it she failed to recognize John Adam's remarkable diplomatic achievements in France and the Netherlands, and instead criticized him for his supposed "partiality in favor of monarchic government." The book's sharp comments on John Adams led to a heated correspondence and a breach in her friendship with the Adamses (that was already shaky due to differing opinions on the proposed Constitution) that lasted until 1812. Not only did she offer a timeless insider's view into the revolution and the cast of characters that brought it to fruition, but she also opened the way for women to be respected as professional historians and writers.

Death and legacy

She was bitter and resentful of the restrictions imposed upon women. In her later years she focused on educational reform. She criticized women having to do needlework while men learned Latin, Greek, history and politics. She argued against the artificial limits on women's achievements and that these harmed both men and women and violated the natural rights philosophy at the heart of the Revolution. Yet, just ten years after her death, the first serious educational institution for women, Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary, proved that some did indeed understand her message.

In recent times she has been studied by feminists as a pioneer of her age. Her writings offer little to support her role as a modern feminist, nonetheless, she was a subtle feminist of her own era who did much to begin the process of change in the acceptable role of women within the greater society.

Mercy Otis Warren died in October, 1814, at the age of 86. She is buried at Old Burial Hill, Plymouth, Massachusetts. The SS Mercy Warren, a World War II Liberty ship launched in 1943, was named in her honor. In 2002, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Anthony, Susan. First Lady of the Revolution: The Life of Mercy Otis Warren, 1958.
• Baym, Nina. "Between Enlightenment and Victorian: Towards a Narrative of American Women Writing History," Critical Inquiry, Autumn 18(1) 1991.
• Davies, Kate. Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: The Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Friedman, Lawrence J. and Shaffer, Arthur H. "Mercy Otis Warren and the Politics of Historical Nationalism." New England Quarterly 1975 48(2): 194-215. ISSN 00284866
• Gelles, Edith B. "Bonds of Friendship: the Correspondence of Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren" Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 1996 108: 35-71. ISSN 00764981
• Lane, Larry M. and Lane, Judith J. "The Columbian Patriot: Mercy Otis Warren and the Constitution." Women & Politics 1990 10(2): 17-32. ISSN 01957732
• Oreovicz, Cheryl Z. "Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814)" in Legacy 1996. ISSN 07484321
• Richards, Jeffrey H. Mercy Otis Warren. (Twayne's United States Authors Series, no. 618.) Twayne, 1995.
• Stuart, Rubin, Nancy. The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation. Beacon Press, 2008.
• Warren, Mercy Otis, and Cohen, Lester H. ed. The Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, Interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations. Liberty Classics, 1988 (modern reprint of orig. 1804 edition).
• Zagarri, Rosemarie. A Woman's Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution. Harlan Davidson, 1995.

External links

All links retrieved December 21, 2008.

• Mass. Foundation for the Humanities
• Overview of Warren's life
• Full Text of "History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution"(1805)
• Works of Mercy Otis Warren by Richard Seltzer
• Mercy Otis Warren's Gendered Melodrama of Revolution by Nina Baym
• Encyclopedia of World Biography on Mercy Otis Warren
• Massachusetts Historical Society (Mercy Otis Warren Papers)
• Ellet, Elizabeth F. The Women of the American Revolution
• American Treasures of the Library of congress: "Historian of the American Revolution"
• Mass. Moments

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