Mercy Otis Warren
Mercy Otis Warren (
September 14,
1728 –
October 19,
1814) was born in
Barnstable, Massachusetts. She married
James Warren in
1754 and moved to
Plymouth, Massachusetts. Mercy had five sons. She felt it was her duty to participate in the
Patriot cause during the
American Revolution. Her brother was the noted patriot lawyer
James Otis, and they were descended from
Mayflower passenger
Edward Doty. Her husband James was a descendant of fellow
Mayflower passenger
Richard Warren. During the time of the Revolution, she hosted political meetings in her home, and in
1772, she published her play,
The Adulateur. After the war, in
1790, Mrs. Warren published a volume of poetry in her name. In
1805, she wrote
History of the American Revolution. She died in Plymouth in 1814.
Mercy Otis Warren was known as
The Conscience of the American Revolution.When she married James Warren, they moved to Plymouth, which means she never saw anything beyond Eastern Massachusetts for most of her 86 years. When the
Thirteen Colonies increasingly rebelled against English rule, Mercy Otis Warren became perhaps the most important of Revolutionary War women. Like the men of her family, she was among those ready to throw out the colonial governor.
In 1772 she anonymously published
The Adulateur, a satire that cast the governor as Rapatio, a
villain intent on raping the colony. Rapatio appeared again in her second play,
The Defeat (1773). She published her third,
The Group, in 1775, just as the rebellion began to be violent. All were thinly disguised attacks on specific public officials, for she unhesitatingly urged the taking of risks to achieve American independence. Much later, at the time of the
French Revolution, Warren wrote tellingly that revolutions are "permitted by providence, to remind mankind of their natural equality." More than most of the men of her era, she saw the American Revolution as having significance beyond its apparent economic and political warfare; instead, she foresaw a deep and permanent shift of Western ideology.
At a time when even most Americans still thought of democracy as an impossible notion tainted by ignorant rabble, Mercy Otis Warren understood that the natural rights philosophy inherent in the
Declaration of Independence would inevitably mean democracy and egalitarianism. Indeed, so thorough a radical was Warren that she joined the minority who opposed ratification of the
United States Constitution in the late
1780s.The Revolution was scarcely begun before Warren began recording the history of it.
During the next three decades, she worked steadily on the three volumes that were finally published as
History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (1805). Her work not only provided an insider's view of the Revolution, but also set an important precedent for women authors. Until that time, the few who existed in American did not set out to consciously publish, but instead wrote primarily for themselves (as in the case of
Anne Bradstreet and
Phyllis Wheatley). Warren thus became the first to publish books that marked her as a professional writer of nonfiction who offered her work for sale.
Bitterly resentful in her old age of the restrictions imposed upon women, Warren focused particularly on educational reform. She chafed at the memory of doing needlework while her brothers were taught Latin and Greek, and she argued that such artificial limits on achievement harmed both men and women and were a violation of the natural rights philosophy espoused in the Revolution. Though it may have appeared that few understood her message at the time, the first serious educational institution for women,
Emma Willard's
Troy Female Seminary, appeared less than a decade after her death.
Warren's thoughts on the subject may have had more influence than she knew. Mercy Otis Warren had a clear, analytical mind that brought logic even to her poetry.
Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous (1790), a collection published when she was sixty-two, was the first of her works that bore her name ("Mrs. M. Warren"), but she kept other poetry so personal that it was not published until almost two centuries after her death. Hundreds of Warren's letters to contemporaries (including
Benjamin Franklin,
Thomas Jefferson,
Alexander Hamilton, and
Abigail Adams and her husband John -- with whom Warren quarreled as
John Adams grew increasingly conservative) also have been published. They provide historians with interesting details and insightful commentary on the founding of the nation by one whose gender excluded her from the direct participation that she doubtless would have preferred.
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* Cohen, Lester H. "Mercy Otis Warren: the Politics of Language and the Aesthetics of Self."
American Quarterly 1983 35(5): 481-498. Issn: 0003-0678 Fulltext online at Jstor
* 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: 0028-4866 Fulltext online at Jstor
* 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: 0076-4981
* Lane, Larry M. and Lane, Judith J. "The Columbian Patriot: Mercy Otis Warren and the Constitution."
Women & Politics 1990 10(2): 17-32. Issn: 0195-7732
* Oreovicz, Cheryl Z. "Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814)"
Legacy 1996 13(1): 54-64. Issn: 0748-4321 Fulltext online at Swetswise
* Richards, Jeffrey H.
Mercy Otis Warren. (Twayne's United States Authors Series, no. 618.) Twayne, 1995. 195 pp.; reviewed at
William and Mary Quarterly 1997 54(3): 659-661. Fulltext of review in Jstor
* Zagarri, Rosemarie.
A Woman's Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution. Harlan Davidson, 1995. 187 pp.; reviewed at
William and Mary Quarterly 1997 54(3): 659-661. Fulltext of review in JstorWarren, Mercy Otis, The Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, Interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations, Ed. and Ann. by Lester H. Cohen (2 vols.) Liberty Classics, 1988 (modern reprint of orig. 1804 edition).
Mercy Otis Warren was the namesake of a
World War II Liberty ship, the
SS Mercy Warren, launched in 1943.
