A Woman's Dilemma

Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution

Rosemarie Zagarri

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118774816
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

The second edition of A Woman's Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution updates Rosemarie Zagarri's biography of one of the most accomplished women of the Revolutionary era. The work places Warren into the social and political context in which she lived and examines the impact of Warren's writings on Revolutionary politics and the status of women in early America.

• Presents readers with an engaging and accessible historical biography of an accomplished literary and political figure of the Revolutionary era
• Provides an incisive narrative of the social and intellectual forces that contributed to the coming of the American Revolution
• Features a variety of updates, including an in-depth Bibliographical Essay, multiple illustrations, a timeline of Warren's life, and chapter-end study questions
• Includes expanded coverage of women during the Revolutionary Era and the Early American Republic

Chapter One
The First Friends of Her Heart

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Key terms and ideas

puritanism; patriarchy; female literacy; female education; companionate marriage

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Fourteen-year-old Mercy Otis had dreamed for months about her brother James's upcoming graduation from Harvard. Never before had she ventured more than a few miles from her childhood home in the Cape Cod town of Barnstable, Massachusetts. The local church, an uncle's library, and the Great Salt Marshes had marked the confines of her daily existence. In her mind, she had traveled far beyond – to ancient Greece and Rome, to Elizabethan England, and to fabulous places that existed only in her imagination. But the upcoming trip to Cambridge was to be her first real entrée to the outside world. As a young woman, she would never be allowed to attend college. Still, the Harvard commencement would expose her to learned men and great ideas, abstract disquisitions, and intense debates. For a short while she would be able to share – if only vicariously – her brother's role in that world.

In her enthusiasm for learning, Mercy was unlike most of her female contemporaries. Educated by a tutor along with James, she had consumed the classics of literature, mythology, and history – and begged for more. She had learned to write, and, with her brother's encouragement, she had begun to compose poetry. When he had left for college a few years earlier, she had been heartsick. He was her best friend and closest intellectual companion. Though he had written and visited home often, she missed his daily encouragement and constant companionship. Now, in 1743, she would see the happy results of their painful separation.

The Harvard commencement promised to offer great excitement to the entire Otis clan. Her father James, Sr, was as eager as Mercy to behold this day. Although locally successful as a lawyer, merchant, and farmer, he had not attended college. His son's graduation would affirm his own growing status and prominence in the community. The event itself would be enjoyable and memorable. Indeed, in a colony whose ancestors were called “Puritans,” public days of celebration were few and far between. As one of the largest and grandest holidays, commencement provided a rare occasion when the normally self-restrained colonists tolerated merrymaking. On commencement day itself, and intermittently for many days afterward, Cambridge was the site of a raucous revelry that still had a slightly forbidden air around it. People flocked to the town from all parts of New England. Tents were set up along the roads leading to and from the college. Before and after the solemn graduation exercises, graduates and guests indulged in all sorts of festivities – feasting, drinking, wrestling, card playing, and dancing. In a tightly controlled society, commencement also offered one of the few opportunities for young men and women to socialize freely. As a 1718 commencement poem put it, “Amorous Lads to shady Groves resort,/And under Venus with their Misses sport.”

Mercy, too, had thoughts about “amorous lads.” As unconventional as she was in some ways, she was in many respects a typical eighteenth-century adolescent girl. And like most women her age, she envisioned her future as a wife and a mother. For better or worse, she had few other choices. She knew that a woman's happiness hinged on her judicious selection of a companionable and financially secure mate. In every sense, her spouse's fate would become her own. It was thus not too early for Mercy to begin thinking about what kind of husband she wanted. And at James's graduation, she would encounter a variety of potential marital prospects.

As fate would have it, Mercy did indeed meet her future husband on one of those hot July days in Cambridge. Sandy-haired James Warren of Plymouth had become acquainted with James Otis when they both were undergraduates at Harvard. Sharing a lively wit and a mutual passion for politics, they had quickly become friends. It is likely that Otis introduced Warren to his favorite sister at one of the many post-commencement parties. Although it took eleven years for their acquaintance to blossom into marriage, Mercy remembered that James had appealed to her from the very start. He was, she said, a “powerful magnet, the center of my early wishes and the star which attracts my attention.” She apparently never entertained any other serious suitor.

James's graduation, then, was nearly as significant in his sister's life as it was in his own. It also, however, reflected a powerful image of the dynamics that shaped Mercy's life. On that July day, Mercy was surrounded by the three most important influences in her life: her father, her brother, and her future husband. In an era in which women had no legal existence apart from their fathers or husbands, it is not surprising that three men should be pivotal to the young woman's development. But what made Mercy different from most other women of her generation was the way the men in her life treated her. Her father supported his daughter's wish for a highly unorthodox education, one more appropriate for a boy than a girl. Her brother cultivated his sister's native intellect, promoting her continuing self-education and eventually giving her access, through his own activities, to the world of politics. Her future husband James was perhaps the most unusual of all. He not only tolerated but actually encouraged his wife's “unfeminine” interests in politics and writing. Ironically, Mercy Otis Warren came to be who she was because the men in her life allowed her to violate the established boundaries of womanhood. She could express her talents because they gave her the sanction to do so. Few other women of her time received such liberal dispensations.

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A major part of Mercy's life was spent in the shadow of wars – wars that shaped the course of her personal development. During the first half of the century, the English and the French, aided by their Indian allies, struggled for control of the North American continent. Resolution of the struggle took many years. Although Queen Anne's War ended in a virtual stalemate in 1713, armed confrontation resumed in 1739 with the coming of King George's War. The peace, concluded in 1748, was brief. By 1754, the antagonists were at it again, this time in the climactic conflict known as the French and Indian War. During one of the few lulls in the fighting, on September 25, 1728, Mercy was born.

War also shaped some of her most outstanding childhood memories. An event occurring during King George's War proved to be particularly noteworthy. At 1.00 o'clock on the morning of July 3, 1745, bells in the West Barnstable meeting-house pealed. As residents rushed out of their houses to hear the news, they learned that the alarm was not a warning of an imminent attack by their papist enemies, but word of a great victory. Over a month before, more than three thousand Massachusetts inhabitants had launched an assault on Fort Louisbourg, the mightiest fortress in French Canada, indeed in all of North America. Fighting largely unaided by the mother country, often attacking from mere fishing boats, the colonists had vanquished the “Gibraltar of the New World.” Providence, it seemed, had aided the godliest, most determined side. As it would later turn out, the colonists' mammoth effort had been for naught. Under the terms of the treaty ending the war, British negotiators returned the fort to the French. From that time on, some Americans began to wonder where Britain's interests truly lay.

It would be many more years, however, before the Otises harbored such suspicions. Mercy's family was proud of their English identity and heritage. Their history recapitulated the prototypical tale of the colony's early settlement and development. On both sides, Mercy traced her ancestors back to some of the region's earliest settlers, the Puritans. As dissenters from the Church of England, the Puritans fled to the New World seeking an opportunity to associate with like-minded people and create a godly commonwealth on earth. Her mother's family found its roots in Edward Dotey, one of the signers of the Mayflower Compact and a founder of the Plymouth Colony. Over time, as the colony grew more crowded, Mercy's maternal grandfather decided to seek out better opportunities on the Connecticut frontier. He relocated the family to Wethersfield, where Mercy's mother was born. Her father's ancestors, on the other hand, had settled in Hingham, a town in the original Massachusetts Bay Colony. Arriving in 1631 as part of the Great Migration, the first Otises quickly accumulated substantial amounts of land and property. Seeking to expand his holdings, Mercy's paternal grandfather moved in 1683 to Barnstable, where he soon gained prominence as a leading merchant and politician. Her father James, born in 1702, capitalized on his father's substantial legacy. For the first generations of Puritans, the drive for economic self-improvement reinforced their religious zeal; worldly ambitions coexisted with divine aspirations.

By the time Mercy's parents were born, the tenor of life in Massachusetts had already changed considerably. In 1684, Britain revoked the Massachusetts Bay charter, a document that had given colonists great freedom to enforce their religious ideals through the mechanisms of the civil government. Under the new charter, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were joined into a single colony under royal jurisdiction. In the new government, the church possessed much less civil power and legal authority. Although Congregationalists, as the Puritans came to be known, still received preferential treatment, they now had to share their commonwealth with other religious groups, such as Quakers and Baptists. They no longer could dream of erecting a pure city on a hill, a model for the rest of the world to follow. By the turn of the century, although the colonists were not necessarily less spiritual than their ancestors, they no longer exhibited the singleness of purpose or sense of religious unity that had characterized the earlier settlement.

Time had also allowed the colony to prosper. No longer a struggling frontier community, Massachusetts was now one of the most populous of Britain's New World possessions. Although mostly composed of small farmers, the colony's inhabitants produced enough to feed themselves, often with enough left over to engage in local trade. In Boston, international trade and shipbuilding had made the city the largest urban center and most important port in the colonies. By the end of the seventeenth century, Massachusetts merchants controlled 40 percent of the carrying capacity of all colonial-owned shipping. Although economic change may have heightened disparities between the rich and the poor in the capital, it raised the standard of living for most inhabitants. By the mid-eighteenth century, the colonists enjoyed a level of comfort and material prosperity that would have stunned – and appalled – their forebears.

Despite profound changes altering the landscape of Massachusetts society, the seacoast town of Barnstable was something of a backwater, or, to put it more positively, an island in the midst of the ocean. Located about twenty-five miles southeast of Plymouth, most of Barnstable's eight hundred or so residents supported themselves through farming, and, to a lesser extent, through small-scale shipping, whaling, or trading. Stable, homogeneous, and self-contained, the community, with the exception of a few elite families, tended to look inward rather than outward. As in many Massachusetts towns, a small group of families ruled the town government with a firm hand. Men from these families – the Bacons, Bourns, Gorhams, Lothrops, Thatchers, and Mercy's own family, the Otises – tended to be elected and reelected to positions in town and colonial government. Although attentive to their constituents' needs, representatives were thought to be independent of the people; their warrant came more from God than from the voters. Massachusetts was thus more democratic in form than in substance.

The people of Barnstable, moreover, tended to be conservative economically as well as politically. In 1740, the town's electors rejected a proposal for the creation of a land bank, an institution that would have generated a paper currency and eased the plight of debtors. Whatever its potential benefits, the Barnstable town meeting concluded that the bank represented a dangerous innovation that threatened to destabilize the economy and disrupt business as usual. They preferred to grapple with the known rather than take a risk on the unknown.

Unlike many other Massachusetts towns, Barnstable was still conservative in religious matters as well. It remained virtually untouched by the Great Awakening, the great religious revival that swept through the colonies during the 1740s. Featuring new, more emotional styles of preaching, sometimes delivered by nonresident, or itinerant, ministers, the Awakening often proved to be a divisive force. Support for the Awakening often turned clergyman against clergyman, split congregations in two, or wrenched towns apart. In 1740, the most famous preacher of the revival, George Whitefield, ventured as close to Barnstable as Boston. But the Second Church in the East Parish of Barnstable remained a bulwark of orthodoxy. Congregants neither wanted nor needed outside preachers to stir them up to new heights of religious “enthusiasm” – a dirty word in those days. They preferred to practice a more traditional religion inherited from their Puritan forebears, a religion of duty, discipline, and rationality. The Barnstable of Mercy's youth, then, was a safe, predictable place where the outside world did not much intrude.

Mercy's parents were stalwart citizens of that world. In 1724, James Otis had brought Mary Allyne of Wethersfield, Connecticut, home to be his bride. They were each only twenty-two years old. In the small world of Barnstable, Mercy's family stood near the top rung of society. Her grandfather and father were prominent figures in business and local politics. Fortunately for Mercy, her father, though the youngest son, had inherited from his father substantial lands and the family homestead. Overlooking Barnstable's Great Salt Marshes, near Cape Cod Bay, the house was described at the time as a “high double house with a gambrel roof and three dormer windows.” Outside, huge buttonwood trees shaded the yard and provided firewood for the family – fifty cords would keep the fireplaces roaring through the winter. Possibly to accommodate a growing family, possibly to announce his increasing social status, James added two wings to the home. Inside, mahogany chests, elaborate mirrors, and one of the first clocks in the county graced the house. Reflecting the colonists' growing appetite for luxury goods, the Otises purchased pewter plates, engraved silver bowls, and damask tablecloths. The children slept on feather beds and ate with silverware. Despite...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Acknowledgments Second Edition
• A Partial Genealogy of the Family of Mercy Otis Warren
• Massachusetts in 1782
• Timeline: Mercy Otis Warren/The American Revolution
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The First Friends of Her Heart
• Chapter Two: Politics as a Family Affair
• Chapter Three: Her Pen as a Sword
• Chapter Four: War Widows
• Chapter Five: An Old Republican
• Chapter Six: “History is not the Province of the Ladies”
• Conclusion: The Line Beyond Her Sex
• Bibliographical Essay
• Index
• End User License Agreement