About Mercy Otis Warren
Mercy Otis Warren (September 14, 1728 – October 19, 1814) was an American poet, historian and playwright. She is known as the Conscience of the American Revolution, some historians even call her The First Lady Of The Revolution. She wrote several anti-British and anti-loyalist plays between 1772 and 1775 and was the first to give a Jeffersonian (anti-federalist) interpretation of the revolution entitled History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, published in three volumes in 1805.During the years leading up to the American Revolution, Otis Warren published poems and plays attacking royal authority in Massachusetts and urging colonists to resist British encroachments on colonial rights and freedoms. She was married to James Warren who was also very active in the independence movement. During the debate on the United States Constitution in 1788, she published a pamphlet, Observations on the New Constitution, and on the Federal and State Conventions, written under the pseudonym A Colombian Patriot, in which she opposed the ratification of the document and advocated including a bill of rights. The remarks were long thought to be the work of other writers, most notably Elbridge Gerry. It was only when her descendant Charles Warren found a reference to it in a 1787 letter to British historian Catharine Macaulay that she was credited with authorship. In 1790 she published a collection of poems and plays under her own name, which was highly unusual for a woman at the time. The work includes eighteen political poems and two plays. The two dramas, The Sack of Rome and The Ladies of Castile, deal with the freedom, social and moral values ??that were essential to the success of the young republic.
Since Warren knew most of the leaders of the revolution personally, she was constantly at the center of events from 1765 to 1789. All of Warren's works were published anonymously until 1790 when she published Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous. Accusing the then Governor of Massachusetts Thomas Hutchinson, in 1772 she published the satirical comedy The Adulateur, in which she predicted the war of independence. In 1773, she wrote The Defeat, which also features a character resembling Hutchinson, followed in 1775 by The Group, a satire imagining what would happen if the King of Great Britain repealed the Massachusetts charter of rights. The anonymous publications, The Blockheads (1776) and The Motley Assembly (1779) are also attributed to her. In 1788 she published Observations on the New Constitution, the ratification of which she opposed as an anti-federalist. Warren was one of the most persuasive patriots of the revolution and her works inspired others to become patriots. Her work earned the esteem of many prominent men of the time, including George Washington and Alexander Hamilton.
In 1805, she closed her literary career with the publication of a three-volume work, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution. President Thomas Jefferson ordered a copy for himself and for each member of his cabinet.
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