Mercy Otis Warren

Mercy Otis Warren (b. 1728–d. 1814), a prolific and thoughtful correspondent, savvy propagandist, playwright, and political historian, was born into a prosperous and politically connected family in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Not formally educated, she was tutored at home, reading widely especially Pope, Dryden, Milton, Shakespeare and, a favorite, Raleigh’s History of the World. In 1754 she married local merchant James Warren and bore five sons. Warren became personally involved in Massachusetts politics when her father was denied a judgeship he had been promised and her brother, James Otis Jr., famously challenged the Writs of Assistance in 1761. Throughout these years of rising discontent, Warren participated within a circle of close friends and family who involved her as their intellectual equal, especially her husband and her brother along with Sam Adams, John Adams, and Elbridge Gerry. Nor was there a shortage of female correspondents, including Abigail Adams, Hannah Winthrop, and British historian Catharine Macaulay who looked to Warren for political commentary, advice, support, and consolation. As her brother collapsed into mental illness, Mercy began her own crusade against the Hutchinson administration in a series of “dramatic sketches” and at least one widely admired poem, which were published in the Boston newspapers. With conclusion of the war, Warren voiced concerns about the Federal constitution and her fears that virtue was giving way to vice and licentiousness. However, she claimed public authorship of a collection of poems and two new full-length tragedies in a book published in 1790. In 1805, with Jefferson’s election to the presidency, Warren published her three-volume history of the American Revolution. Throughout her life and writing, Warren maintained a consistent puritan-republican ideology. More specifically, her writing is characterized by a paranoid style and expresses her fear of power and a standing army, concern about aristocracy and excessive wealth, and a Manichean view of life as an ongoing struggle between virtue and vice. Consistent with these values, Warren created a role for herself and other women that has been termed “Republican Motherhood.” Women’s minds, she believed, were gender neutral but their social roles as women placed them in a special position to observe, comment, and teach the virtues necessary for a good and meaningful life. This is the argument from difference that has been used throughout American history to justify women’s participation in public life. It is the position from which Mercy Otis Warren built and sustained a remarkable contribution to American letters.