A Seat at the (Dining Room) Table

Mercy Otis Warren's Revolutionary history

Mercy Otis Warren, by John Singleton Copley, ca. 1763

In our day, it’s not uncommon to encounter a woman’s historian—either a historian of women or a historian who happens to be a woman. And in some fields, like the Revolution and the Early Republic, there has been a notably impressive cluster of very impressive ones in the last generation, among them Linda Kerber, Mary Beth Norton, Pauline Maier, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Carol Berkin. But back during the early republic, a woman’s historian was very rare. Which is one of the many things that makes Mercy Otis Warren notable.

Warren (1728-1814) was not the first person to write a history of the American Revolution—that honor probably belongs to South Carolinian David Ramsay, whose two-volume History of the American Revolution was published in 1789 (the same year the U.S. Constitution was ratified). She’s not even the first woman to write about the Revolution; Hannah Adams, a distant cousin of John, included a discussion of the conflict in her Summary History of New England (1798). Warren’s three-volume History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (1805) nevertheless remains a landmark work—in large measure because Warren had a seat at the (dining room) table in witnessing much of it.

Mercy Otis was the daughter of a wealthy attorney who married James Warren, the son of her father’s client. Her older brother, James Otis, Jr., was an active force at outset of the Revolution; his phrase “No taxation without representation!” became a rallying cry throughout the thirteen colonies. James Warren was also an important figure in the conflict, including a role as the paymaster for the Continental Army when George Washington was based in in Massachusetts. Warren, who was a relatively old Founding Father, turned down a series of other appointments, including selection to serve in the Continental Congress. But he remained active in Massachusetts politics until the end of the eighteenth century.

Mercy Otis Warren spent much of her life at the family homestead in Plymouth, on Cape Cod. But the Warrens purchased the home of their enemy, Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson—whom she satirized in a series of plays—after Hutchinson fled the colony. She had a front-row seat, and her homes were the setting of many meetings for the leading figures of the period, from the Boston Tea Party through the Battles of Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, and Dorchester. It was around this time she began collecting documents for the history of the conflict she one day hoped to write. The Warrens were particularly close with the Adams family, with whom they corresponded and visited for decades. (They also particularly disliked John Hancock, though Warren wrote a letter of sympathy to his wife when she lost a child.)

Warren raised five sons, only two who outlived her, and experienced struggles with her mental and physical health. But she nevertheless became an important woman of letters who wrote poetry as well as plays and eventually focused her energies on her history of the Revolution. By the time she did so, Adams was president, and she found herself increasingly at odds with him, since he was a Federalist and she hewed closer to the Democratic-Republican line hewed by Thomas Jefferson. Warren’s critique of the U.S. Constitution focused on the lack of civil rights, and her advocacy on the issue helped bring about the Bill of Rights. Jefferson bought multiple copies of her History for all department heads in his administration. She and Adams exchanged a series of heated letters before she finally made her peace with him after Adams retired back to Massachusetts.

I can’t say much more about Mercy Otis Warren because I haven’t delved into her oeuvre yet—she’s one of the figures to be included in my book about women in early Massachusetts. To be honest, I’m not going into this thinking she’s going to be one of my favorite subjects or even one of my favorite women writers (I’ve already drafted chapters on Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley for the project, both of whom I’m very fond). Warren was very much an elite figure—a bluestocking, in the lingo of the time—and even her resistance to centralized government has the air of the abstract progressive whose emphasis on democracy doesn’t necessarily jive with the lived experience of those who can ill afford the danger of anarchy, something that was always on the edge of breaking out in Revolutionary era. But there’s no question she’s important, and there’s also no question that she was a fully human person who knew she was living in a transformational moment and did everything she could to soak it up and record it for posterity. Any account of the kind I’m attempting here must include her. I’m game for making the trip.