The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life

12. Mercy Otis Warren on Church and State

chapter 12 Mercy Otis Warren on Church and State Rosemarie Zagarri Among the forgotten founders, Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814) has been particularly neglected. As a woman she was never eligible to hold elected or appointed office. Yet because of the particular circumstances of her upbringing and her social position as an adult, she was one of the few women who had a public voice. Through her writings, she contributed to the public debate over independence, the controversy over the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, and the discussion of the relationship between church and state in the new nation. A Brief Biography Warren was born on September 25, 1728, in Barnstable, Massachusetts , one of thirteen children of Mary Allyne and James Otis Sr. Unlike most girls of her era, she received an extensive and rigorous education at the hands of a private tutor. Along with her brother James Otis Jr., the future patriot, she read history , philosophy, literature, and the classics of ancient Greece andRomeintranslation. Yetwhenherbrotherwentoff tocollege at Harvard, she remained at home, confined, as she once put it, 278 “to the narrow circle of domestic cares.” Like most women at the time, she saw her future in terms of her role as a wife and mother.1 In 1754, Mercy Otis married James Warren, with whom she had five sons. Even as she became a wife and mother, she remained engaged with the larger world through the men in her life. During the 1760s and 1770s, her household in Plymouth became a center of activity for the growing opposition to Britain. At various times, Warren’s father, brother, and husband all held positions of power in the Massachusetts assembly, a body that repeatedly challenged the authority of the Crown’s hated representative in the colony, Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Over time, colonial leaders such as Samuel Adams and Johns Adams made a point of stopping at Warren’s house to discuss the current political situation and plot the most effective means of resistance. It was said that the idea for creating committees of correspondence, a system for disseminating political news throughout the colony, first emerged there.2 Although Warren could not act in any official capacity, by the 1770s she did see a way that she could make her own contributions to the patriot cause. From an early age, she had displayed a gift for writing. At first she wrote poems she shared only with family members and close friends. As the conflict with Britain intensified, John Adams began to encourage her to write propaganda pieces for publication. Her first work, “The Adulateur ,” which appeared in a Boston newspaper in 1772, was a thinly disguised attack on Thomas Hutchinson and his cronies. Poems celebrating the Boston Tea Party and urging colonists to support the boycott against British goods soon followed. She then published longer satirical pieces in the form of plays, including The Defeat in 1773 and The Group in 1775. Written in blank verse and full of classical allusions, these works lampooned the treachery of British officials and railed against infringements on the colonists’ cherished rights and liberties. As war with Britain loomed, she urged her countrymen to reaffirm those virtues that would enable them to triumph over their British foes.3 Like most political writers at the time, Warren issued her works anonymously, or under a pseudonym. Nevertheless, among the close-knit circle of political leaders in Massachusetts, she was known, acknowledged , and respected as an author. John Adams praised her work, saying thatWarren’s“poeticalpen”had“noequalthatIknowof inthiscountry.” Mercy Otis Warren on Church and State | 279 After independence she continued to write about political matters. In 1788, she penned a nineteen-page pamphlet, Observations on the New Constitution , and on the Federal and State Conventions, which urged citizens to reject the proposed U.S. Constitution. In 1790, she published a volume of her collected poems and plays under her own name. Many fulsome accolades followed.4 During the war, Warren began another, even more ambitious project : a full-scale history of the American Revolution. Using her personal knowledge of many of the principals, she collected an impressive archive of private letters and official documents that informed her account and gave it great credibility. She also brought her own extensive reading of political philosophy and English history to bear. Although substantially complete by 1790, the...