Mercy Otis Warren’s Revolutionary Letters

Abstract This chapter examines what Edith Gelles has termed the ‘domestic patriotism’ of wartime New England.1 This idiom (perhaps conservative in origin yet nonetheless suggestive of women’s understanding of their own political legitimacy) can be traced in the revolutionary correspondence of Mercy Otis Warren and her female friends. It has been usual to treat Warren as an eighteenth-century American exception: a woman with enough extraordinary acumen and ambition to dare to enter the ‘public’ sphere of print.2 Yet here I am more interested in the literary form that made her a conventional figure among the women of her politics and position in revolutionary New England: the familiar letter.