Brenda Hafera
Most Americans don’t have to strain too hard to name at least a couple of our Founding Fathers, but what about our Founding Mothers? Some might say Abigail Adams or Dolley Madison, but they’re far less likely to identify the woman who wrote a comprehensive history of the American Revolution: Mercy Otis Warren.
Few women in the late 1700s were expected to even think about politics, let alone write about them, but she was more than up to the task. A member of two prominent Massachusetts political families, Warren was a scholar and thinker in her own right—a poetess, playwright, historian, and patriot of considerable renown.
She began her public service by anonymously publishing pro-republican plays and poems that adorned the front pages of newspapers. Some of these were included in her Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous, a compilation Alexander Hamilton found so impressive that he wrote: “In the career of dramatic composition at least, female genius in the United States has outstripped the Male.”
Her “Observations on the New Constitution,” appearing under the pseudonym A Columbia Patriot, and long thought to have been written by Constitutional Convention delegate Elbridge Gerry, details her critiques of the Constitution.
Warren’s final work was her three-volume History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, which is kept in publication today by Liberty Fund, and was recently profiled in Law & Liberty by Kirstin Anderson Birkhaug. It was one of the first and most comprehensive American histories of its kind and the only Anti-Federalist account of the War of Independence.
A Drop of “Mercy” on Thanksgiving
Mercy Otis Warren surrounded herself with interesting people and interesting books. Most particularly, she was a student of the ancients, but she was also acquainted with the likes of Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Hume—Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World was a favorite. » Read More
https://www.heritage.org/american-history/commentary/our-forgotten-founding-mother
