Mercy Otis Warren: The Pen That Pressed for the Bill of Rights

We trace the life and ideas of Mercy Otis Warren, the writer who helped secure a culture of liberty—and a Bill of Rights—without a seat at the Convention. From a rare classical education to salons with the Sons of Liberty, her pen shaped policy and public virtue.

• Mercy Otis Warren’s early education and family background
• Hosting and influencing the Sons of Liberty network
• Friendship with John Adams and first published poem
• Plays, poems, essays, and a pioneering Revolution history
• Anti‑Federalist critique and Observations on the New Constitution
• Locke’s influence, individual rights, and the need for a Bill of Rights
• Liberty’s dependence on civic virtue and moral restraint
• Recommended readings and biographies to go deeper
• The Otis siblings’ partnership and James Otis Jr.’s curtailed role

Check Out the Civic Literacy Curriculum!

School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership

Center for American Civics

Chapters

• 1:32 Welcome Back + Guest Intro
• 1:58 Who Was Mercy Otis Warren
• 3:05 Education Beyond Her Time
• 5:02 Sons of Liberty At Her Home
• 6:20 From Poem To Public Voice
• 7:13 Anti‑Federalist Firepower
• 8:49 Liberty, Virtue, And Bill Of Rights
• 11:34 Defining A Liberal Education
• 13:06 Locke, Liberty, And Civic Duty
• 15:54 Reading Warren: Where To Start

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:46

Welcome back to Civic In Here. We have our guest, Dr. Kristen Verhog, back with us. If you have not listened to the previous episode, please do. Dr. Verhog talks about John and Abigail Adams and how their marriage really kind of shaped his politics, the founding. It is again so interesting. All of this is so interesting. But Dr. Verhog, thank you so much for being with us again. And today we're talking about Mercy Otis Warren. And I do want to freely admit, I have heard the name Mercy Otis Warren over and over and over again, but I don't actually know a lot about this founding figure. And you know a lot. So can you tell us who is Mercy Otis Warren?

SPEAKER_00: 1:31

Mercy Otis Warren is the most important founder that so few people have ever heard of. And of course, when we think the founding fathers, we do we think fathers, right? We're generally thinking men who were in the room where it happened with the signing of the declaration or the constitutional convention or they're in state legislatures and they're important movers and shakers there. And I don't want to discount any of that. Of course, those men are supremely important. But there are also voices surrounding these conversations that in their day had immense effects on the political goings-on of the time. And Merciotis Warren is one of these voices. So Merciotis Warren is born in 1728. She's a Massachusetts and is descended from good pilgrim stock. And an interesting thing about Merciotis Warren, she has the opportunity, when she's a young child, to get an education that was generally reserved for boys. The Otis family was really well regarded. They sent a long line of their sons off to really high-ranking colleges, off to Harvard, even. And she was one of this family of boys where two of them were going to get these tutorings from a local minister to prepare them to go to Harvard. One of the brothers decided about halfway through that he was done with this, wasn't going to go to Harvard, and just dropped out of being tutored. And instead of just, you know, allowing that slot to remain open, Merciotis Warren's father actually sent her in her brother's place. So growing up, she got this really interesting, holistic, liberal education meant to prepare young men to go to really high-ranking colleges, although she never went on to college. She has this really like sturdy base in education. So she's not exactly self-taught, but she's really, really well educated. And she's a fully mature adult by the time the revolution hits. She's in her 40s. She's got five sons with James. Oh wow. Yes. James Warren would be a general in the American Revolution. And she's surrounded by the Sons of Liberty. I mentioned the Sons of Liberty a little bit in our John and Abigail Adams podcast episode. John, of course, is a really famous Son of Liberty, this group that's involved in stirring up the American Revolution and is the sort of pro-independence side of that whole thing. And the Sons of Liberty are kind of meeting in secret in the early days of the revolution, planning, writing, spreading these writings around to sort of drum up support for the cause. And as it turns out, James and Mercy Warren host a lot of these gatherings at their home. So basically, she's the landlady of the Sons of Liberty for a while. And she's really good friends with a lot of them, including John Adams. So John Adams is on record writing to Mercy Otis Warren, with whom he had a really long epistolary exchange, that I feel inferior whenever I'm around you. I feel your attainments dwarf those of most men. She was really smart and she could hang with anyone she was in a room with. And it just so happens that when the Boston Tea Party happens, she writes this poem kind of about the Boston Tea Party, and she shows it to John Adams and he says, You publish this or I will publish it for you. And she says, fine, you want to publish it, you can publish it. And he does. But this begins her sort of publishing career. She wrote poems, plays, and also political essays. And at the very end of her life, when she's in her 70s and 80s, she writes one of the first historical accounts of the American Revolution. So she has a kind of long publishing career that begins when she's in her mid-40s. And importantly, I think one of the linchpin moments of Warren's career is during the Constitutional Convention, she publishes this essay called Observations on the New Constitution. And she's opposed. She's actually a really prominent anti-federalist. She thinks there are serious problems with the Constitution as written. And in fact, people who work on the Anti-Federalists, people like Herbert Storing, who sort of literally wrote the book on the Anti-Federalists, say that she's got the most sophisticated philosophy among all of the Anti-Federalists. And that particular essay, Observations on the New Constitution, is considered sort of the linchpin in securing the Bill of Rights. That is extremely important. And she's doing that working entirely on the outside, just spreading her writings by way of newspaper. So that's a little bit about Merciotis Warren. Happy to talk about any bits of that that sound most interesting to you. Yes. So can I ask a question?

SPEAKER_01: 6:28

Because you talked that she got a liberal education. And for our viewers, can you explain what a liberal education is? Because I think when in present day people hear liberal, they they think of partisanship, things like that, but we're not talking about partisanship. Can you give us a little peek into what her education looked like?

SPEAKER_00: 6:47

Totally. So I mean, when I say liberal education, I mean a liberal education in the classical sense of the term. So originally dating all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome, the liberal education was education for liberty and literally like what it means to be a free person, but not just a free person as in you can do whatever you want. It's freedom to do what you ought to do. So a liberal education is this broad and wide-ranging education in many different subjects, meant to teach people where they belong in the world and how to understand good versus bad and how to act rightly. It's a deeply philosophical education and is meant to create people who are going to be good citizens of a political order. So when I say liberal education, that's what I'm getting at, and that's exactly the kind of education that Warren received.

SPEAKER_01: 7:43

That is amazing. And again, I did not know that she would be kind of branded an anti-federalist. Can you talk a little bit more about her political writings, these calls for liberty, and this belief in civic virtue?

SPEAKER_00: 8:00

So Warren, beyond anything else, is really inspired by the writings of John Locke. John Locke, of course, is a huge inspiration for many of our founding generation, but Warren read him. She also read him with her brother James, who was a close friend and confidant of hers. And they talked a lot about these ideas. And she came away from reading Locke with this deep appreciation for individual liberty and the understanding that individual liberty needs to be explicitly protected and preserved if it is going to continue to exist within a political society. And this is exactly what the Bill of Rights is, right? The Bill of Rights is an articulation of the individual rights of Americans. So this is her major challenge. She's concerned that in the consolidation of government at the federal level, what's going to get lost is the protection of the individual person, which is way easier to do when your governments are smaller. When you have a bigger government, it's hard to pay attention to the individual rights of the person, which is why she thinks they need to be explicitly outlined. Now, importantly, and to your point on civic virtue, Warren doesn't think that liberty is free. In fact, she believes that in order for Americans to remain free or to remain deserving of their freedom, they need to engage in behaviors that will continue to make them worthy of that freedom. She's got a lot in her history of the rise, progress, and termination of the American Revolution on this point, where she just basically says that, you know, freedom is not a new concept. There have been plenty of nations that have thought freedom is a priority, but eventually they allow freedom to decay because they don't hold up freedom with their morals and their behaviors. And she says Great Britain is exactly one of these places, right? Effectively, one of her major critiques of Britain is that it's gotten too greedy. It wants too much. It wants to like drain places of their resources, and as a result, will care very little for the freedoms of the people who live there. And that's vice overtaking the virtue of freedom. So Americans, she says, need to remain cognizant of the fact that freedom is fragile. And in order to retain their freedom, they also need to uphold certain moral standards. So civic virtue is part of the equation for her when she's talking about liberty.

SPEAKER_01: 10:37

Again, I'm like, I just I have so many questions, and I know that we have a short amount of time. So if me, because I do enjoy reading, what what books can I read? What are some? I mean, if you have biographies or even some of Mercy Otis Warren's her own writings, that you're like, this is perfect. You need to read this. What are some readings you can give us as people who want to know more about this founding mother?

SPEAKER_00: 11:07

So, Warren, I will say, her essay writing and her history, quite dense reading, even for you know, readings that are 200 odd years old at this point. So a little bit of a disclaimer there. Her rise, progress, and termination of the American Revolution is a really interesting work. It's often considered kind of a bad history, in part because she writes it from memory and she gets some of her facts wrong. And I'm on record saying that Warren is doing other things in this particular work than simply writing a history. In fact, I think the primary thing she's trying to do is communicate a political philosophy. So that work is three volumes. I usually recommend the third volume of that work, the third volume of The Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, because I think that's where the rubber meets the road for Warren in terms of her ideas about politics. And I think that's where the meat of the thing is. All of her essays and most of her poems and plays are publicly available. Some of them are really interesting reads. Her plays are all political satires. So I encourage you, if you think those are interesting, to check them out. If you want to know more about Warren herself, there are a couple of biographies I do recommend. Rosemarie Zagari's A Woman's Dilemma is a really terrific book on Warren and focuses on, I think, her unique position as someone with real political influence who also is balancing the role of womanhood in a world in which womanhood is very different from the way it's conceived today. So that is a book I would recommend. I would also recommend Nancy Rubin Stewart's The Muse of the Revolution. That's a terrific biography on Warren. And then there is a joint biography on James Otis Jr., who was Mercy Otis Warren's brother, and Mercy Otis Warren by Jeffrey Hacker, entitled Hearts and Minds, which I think is this beautiful encapsulation of the relationship between these two siblings. And a little side note on James Otis Jr., his nickname was Jemmy. Jemmy was an extremely prominent son of Liberty. He was posed to be the leader and one of the most important sort of revolutionary figures of his time. He has this really amazing, like sophisticated political theory. He is an amazing and accomplished rhetorician. John Adams is trying to be more like him all the time. And right at the outset of the American Revolution, he gets involved in a scuffle with a British officer and ends up being caned over the head, suffers a traumatic brain injury, and never recovers. So he kind of Oh my gosh. So he sort of gets silenced as a voice in the revolution relatively early. And this biography tells the story in part of how Mercy Otis Warren's ideas in many ways are the carrying on of James Otis Jr.'s ideas. So a really interesting, fascinating family history there for those two.

SPEAKER_01: 14:11

Wow. So now I'm gonna go by all of those. Dr. Percock, thank you so much. Again, I'm excited to continue the series with you. We have many more people, but thank you for your expertise on Mercy Otis War, and I look forward to our next episode. Thank you.