Mercy Otis Warren

American writer

• Born: September 25, 1728
• Birthplace: Barnstable, Massachusetts Colony
• Died: October 19, 1814
• Place of death: Plymouth, Massachusetts

Warren, who was close to many critical figures of the American revolutionary period, wrote plays and poetry that supported and justified the American Revolution. She also wrote a history of the revolution that casts a great deal of light on the roles played by many of the New England patriots, and her long correspondence with John Adams and Abigail Adams remains a guide to early American political controversies.

Early Life

Mercy Otis Warren was the third child of James Otis and Mary Allyne Otis. She was born in a farming and seafaring community on Cape Cod. Her parents were descended from the earliest Pilgrim settlers of Massachusetts. Indeed, her mother traced her ancestry to the Mayflower landing in 1620. Both the Allynes and Otises were well to do, the owners of large and prosperous farms.

Mercy’s father had been denied the opportunity to attend college as a youth, and so was largely self-educated. Determined to provide his sons with the formal education he had missed, he engaged excellent tutors for them, and he did not prevent Mercy, his oldest daughter, from attaching herself to the lessons provided to her brothers. Her father does not appear to have shared his era’s objection to women’s education.

Mercy began to read widely at an early age, and later, her reading was guided to some extent by the suggestions of her eldest brother, James; he was soon to leave for Harvard College. Mercy is known to have read the works of Alexander Pope, John Dryden, John Milton, and, above all—for what was to follow in her life—John Locke’s Essays on Government.

Mercy attended her brother’s commencement exercises at Harvard in 1744, where it is believed she met her brother’s classmate and close friend, James Warren, for the first time. James Warren was from Plymouth; he too had ancestors who had arrived in the New World on the Mayflower. Mercy and James were married in November, 1754, after a long courtship, and they settled in Plymouth.

Life’s Work

During the 1760’s, Mercy Otis Warren’s brother, James Otis, became the leading colonial proponent of independence from England. The Warrens, Abigail and John Adams, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and others became convinced that James Otis was right about the need for independence. Meetings and discussions were held at the Warrens’ home in Plymouth. In 1769, partly as a result of a terrible beating Otis received from Loyalist officers, he became insane and was forced to retire permanently to the family home in Barnstable. Mercy and James Warren felt that they should continue Otis’s political work.

At a meeting at the Warrens’ in October, 1772, the plan for establishing colonial committees of correspondence was first put forward. Most historians believe that the scheme was suggested in the first instance by the Warrens. The promotion of these committees, which were to be effectuated by Samuel Adams, was the crucial first step in organizing the American colonies for revolution. Indeed, when the revolution actually began, in 1775, British power disappeared and most of the actual governing was taken over by the local committees of correspondence.

In addition to her political work, Warren had begun to write poetry. In the early years her main themes were religion, philosophy, nature, and friendship. As time went by and her political activities increased in the aftermath of her brother’s disability, she found that she had a talent for satirical writing. Shortly after the Boston Tea Party, John Adams urged her to write a poem about the uprising. The result was “The Squabble of the Sea Nymphs,” a long work published in the Boston Gazette three months later that delighted its readers. Warren suddenly found herself famous.

She next turned her talents to the writing of political satire in the form of stage plays. In all she wrote six plays, published between 1772 and 1779. This was a remarkable feat for a woman who, although she had read the plays of Molière and William Shakespeare, had never seen a play actually performed. Her plays encouraged the American patriots, cast scorn on the royal governor Thomas Hutchinson, and prophesied American success in the war and the ultimate exile of Hutchinson. Warren’s work was perhaps as influential as Thomas Paine’s in promoting and justifying the revolution.

After the war she continued her political activity. In 1788 she opposed ratification of the proposed Constitution in her work Observations on the New Constitution, and on the Federal and State Conventions. She was later to change her mind about the Constitution and became one of its supporters sometime after the adoption of the Bill of Rights in December, 1791.

In 1805 she published the three-volume History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution: Interspersed with Biographical, Political, and Moral Observations. Few people were in a better position to write this history. She had been one of its progenitors, present at its creation. Even when the revolutionary movement had gone beyond her immediate circle, she had been able to keep up with political and military events through her extensive correspondence with Abigail Adams and with her own husband, James, who had become an American general.

Warren’s book was bitterly resented by John Adams, who felt that she had represented him as favoring a monarchical government. Adams may still have been feeling stung by his reelection defeat by Thomas Jefferson in 1800. The Warren-Adams friendship was interrupted by an exchange of disputatious and occasionally angry letters in 1807. For a time their social relations ceased, but friends of both interposed themselves, and in 1812 a mutual friend, politician Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, mediated the quarrel to the satisfaction of both Adams and Warren. Their friendship resumed and they corresponded warmly with one another until Mercy’s death in 1814.

Significance

Mercy Otis Warren’s accomplishments are numerous, but they have been mostly forgotten. As an early proponent and literary supporter of the American Revolution, her role may have been indispensable. In her own time her works were widely circulated and discussed. Her immediate circle did not believe that private political discussion was limited to men, and her participation and contribution was encouraged. Of course, in those times, public participation by women—other than literary—was considered improper, leading to limited public roles for Warren, Abigail Adams, and many other women. Nevertheless, Warren’s contemporaries believed she was a genius, especially significant given that she had no formal education.

Her history of the revolution is an insider’s account, and it is particularly valuable because Warren herself did not—could not—take a public role either in the war or in political leadership. Consequently, she had no political or military record to protect and was able to provide a disinterested account. Her descriptions of the revolution’s leading figures are judicious and generous without being fulsome. Indeed, her book is the starting point for much historical research on the revolution’s early development. Moreover, her correspondence with the Adamses—finally published in 1878 by the Adamses’ grandson, Charles Francis Adams—casts additional light on the developing ideas of the founding generation.

Feminist historiography has led to some revived interest in Warren’s life and work. Her accomplishments, which would have been notable in any age, seem especially significant in the light of the limited role permitted women in her time. Warren and Abigail Adams agreed early on that the subordination of women in their era was the result of limited opportunity rather than limited talent. The revolution’s history would be better understood were more people familiar with Warren’s work and the work of other women of the period.

Bibliography

Adams, Charles F., ed. Correspondence Between John Adams and Mercy Warren. 1878. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1972. A reprinted edition of correspondence detailing the heated dispute between John Adams and Mercy Otis Warren.

Anthony, Katherine. First Lady of the Revolution: The Life of Mercy Otis Warren. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958. A well-written biography and literary appreciation of Warren.

Brown, Alice. Mercy Warren. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903. A biography that focuses primarily on Warren’s plays and her history of the revolution.

Fritz, Jean. Cast for a Revolution: Some American Friends and Enemies, 1728-1814. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. A study of the relations among the Warrens, Adamses, Otises, Hutchinsons, and Hancocks during and after the revolution.

Schloesser, Pauline. White Women and Racial Patriarchy in the Early American Republic. New York: New York University Press, 2002. A feminist analysis of the revolution, focusing primarily on Warren and on Abigail Adams.

Warren, Mercy Otis. History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution: Interspersed with Biographical, Political, and Moral Observations. Edited by Lester H. Cohen. 2 vols. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1994. A reprinted edition, with annotations, of Warren’s history. Includes bibliographical references and an index.