I cannot wish to see the sword put up quietly in the scabbard, until justice is done to America.
—Mercy Otis Warren
She did not fight on the battlefield or sign the Declaration of Independence. Still, Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814), a Massachusetts housewife, has been called the “conscience of the American Revolution” and a Founding Mother for her proindependence essays, poems, and plays, which she published anonymously in colonial newspapers to support the patriot cause.
Her passion for the revolution was so great that John Adams (1735–1826), the second president and a family friend, suggested that she write a history of the conflict. Her three-volume History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, completed in 1805, was one of the first published chronicles of the war.
But Warren, a mother of five, also witnessed the personal toll that the war took on her own family. Her husband was an officer in the Continental forces and fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill, and her oldest son lost a leg while serving in the Continental Navy.
Warren was born on Cape Cod at a time when the educational opportunities available to women were extremely limited. She learned to read at home and married James Warren (1726–1808), a Plymouth, Massachusetts, lawyer and distant cousin, in 1754. They had five children between 1757 and 1766.
Like many other Massachusetts residents, both of the Warrens became ardent critics of the British in the 1760s as a result of a series of taxes imposed on the colonies. The Sons of Liberty and the Committees of Correspondence, two underground patriot groups, met in the parlor of the couple’s Plymouth home in the 1770s. Her plays, thinly veiled satires of the British, were circulated in New York and Philadelphia and, according to Adams, helped inspire support for the cause.
After the war, Warren published poetry under her own name and began working on the history Adams had urged her to write. When it was finally released, however, the book portrayed her old friend in an unflattering light, causing him to cut off all contact with her. After reconciling with Adams in 1812, Warren died in Plymouth two years later, at age eighty-six.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Warren wrote five plays—an especially impressive achievement because theaters were banned in Massachusetts under Puritan-era blue laws. The plays were written not to be performed, but simply to be read.
- Both Warren and her husband were descendants of passengers on the Mayflower.
- Warren’s younger brother was James Otis (1725–1783), the Massachusetts patriot who coined the famous slogan “Taxation without representation is tyranny.”
