Mercy Otis Warren is not on the Declaration. She is not on the Constitution. She held no office and cast no vote in any government body. She is in the founding record anyway, because she wrote the words that moved the men who did sign, and because eighty years before women could vote, she wrote the first comprehensive history of the American Revolution from the inside.
Mercy Otis was born September 25, 1728, in Barnstable, Massachusetts, the third of thirteen children and the oldest daughter of James and Mary Otis. Her younger brother James Otis Jr. became one of the earliest and most forceful colonial voices against British taxation -- his 1761 argument against writs of assistance in Boston is widely cited as among the opening shots of revolutionary argument in America. Mercy grew up in a household where that argument was dinner conversation. She married James Warren of Plymouth in 1754, a merchant and eventual general of the Massachusetts militia. Their home became a regular meeting place for Massachusetts patriot leaders, including John and Abigail Adams, who became Mercy's lifelong friends and correspondents.
Before the Revolution had a name, Warren was writing it. She published political satires anonymously in Massachusetts newspapers -- "The Adulateur" in 1773, followed by "The Defeat" and "The Group" -- thinly veiled dramatic attacks on royal officials and Loyalist sympathizers in Massachusetts, designed to be read aloud and circulated as propaganda for the Patriot cause. The plays were not great literature by her own later admission. They were effective. They were published under no name at all, then under pseudonyms, because a woman publishing political opinion under her own name in the 1770s risked her reputation and her husband's standing.
John Adams, who became her literary mentor and most consistent correspondent through this period, encouraged the work directly and used his own influence to see it published and circulated.
[T]here is a certain supineness which generally overspreads the multitude, and disposes mankind to submit quietly to any form of government, rather than to be at the expense and hazard of resistance.
When the Constitutional Convention finished its work in September 1787, Warren read the result and was alarmed. Like George Mason, like Patrick Henry, like a substantial bloc of revolutionary-era patriots, she believed the new federal government concentrated too much power with too few enumerated limits. In 1788 she published "Observations on the New Constitution, and on the Federal and State Conventions" under the pseudonym "A Columbian Patriot." The pamphlet argued forcefully that the Constitution needed a bill of rights before it could be safely ratified -- that liberty required the protections to be written down, not assumed.
For nearly two centuries the pamphlet was misattributed to Elbridge Gerry. Modern scholarship, cross-referencing style, argument, and Warren's known correspondence, has firmly established her authorship. She made the Anti-Federalist case in print, under a man's name, and the argument she made is substantially the argument that produced the Bill of Rights two years later.
In 1805, at age seventy-seven, Warren published History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution -- three volumes, 1,317 pages, one of the first comprehensive histories of the Revolution written by anyone, and the first written by someone who had lived inside the political circles that produced it. She had corresponded for decades with Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. Her marriage to General James Warren gave her direct access to military and political deliberation most historians of any era would never have.
[Her history] will furnish a more instructive lesson to mankind than any equal period known in history.
Jefferson was an original subscriber. The book did not flatter everyone -- her account of John Adams's later political conduct was sharp enough that it ended their friendship for several years. They reconciled by 1812, in correspondence brokered partly through mutual friends, restoring one of the longest intellectual partnerships of the founding era before both died within two years of each other.
Mercy Otis Warren held no office, signed no founding document, and cast no vote in any legislature. She is in the founding record because the founding record is not only the names on the parchment. It is also the woman who wrote the propaganda that built public will for resistance before resistance was safe to admit, the pamphleteer who made the Anti-Federalist case under a borrowed name, and the historian who got the first full account of the Revolution into print while the people who lived it were still alive to read it -- or argue with it. She died October 19, 1814, in Plymouth, Massachusetts, having outlived nearly every figure she wrote about.