Mercy Otis Warren

Mercy Otis Warren held no office. She signed no document. She wrote three political plays before the Revolution that circulated in manuscript and in print, satirizing British authority by name. She published her Observations on the New Constitution in 1788 under a pseudonym. In 1805 she published a three-volume history of the American Revolution that John Adams disputed in a correspondence that lasted two years. The letters from that dispute are in the archive.

The Adulateur appeared in 1772 in the Massachusetts Spy. The Defeat appeared in 1773. The Group appeared in January 1775, weeks before Lexington and Concord. All three were published anonymously. They satirized specific figures in Massachusetts colonial politics by thinly veiled name: Governor Thomas Hutchinson appeared as Rapatio, a tyrant; the loyalist judges and officials were named and characterized. The plays circulated in print and manuscript and were widely read in Massachusetts.

Warren did not claim authorship publicly during her lifetime. Attribution was established by scholars through correspondence and circumstantial evidence. Her correspondence with John Adams, Abigail Adams, and Samuel Adams from this period establishes her political views and her awareness of public events.

Observations on the New Constitution, and on the Federal and State Conventions appeared in 1788, published under the pseudonym "a Columbian Patriot." It argued against ratification on grounds including the absence of a Bill of Rights, the structure of the Senate, the scope of congressional power, and the executive's lack of a council. The pamphlet is in the Ford collection and has historically been attributed to both Warren and Elbridge Gerry. Paul Leicester Ford, in his 1888 edition, attributed it to Gerry. Modern scholarship, including Lester Cohen's work, attributes it to Warren. The archive cites it as Warren's with the attribution history noted.

History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution appeared in three volumes in 1805. Warren was 77 years old. The history drew on decades of correspondence with participants in the founding and on her own direct knowledge of events in Massachusetts. John Adams read it and found her characterization of him unfair. He wrote to her. She responded. The correspondence that followed ran to multiple letters on each side through 1814.

The Warren-Adams exchange of 1807 is documented at the Massachusetts Historical Society and in the published Warren-Adams Letters. It is a primary source record of how two participants in the founding understood their own history, and where they disagreed about what had happened and what it meant.