FFQF: Mercy Warren

See what’s up with today’s FFQF at Meet the Founders blog

Last week Jean had a quote from Abigail Adams, so I feel at liberty to post a quote by Mercy Warren, another great lady of early American history.

Mercy Otis Warren was the daughter of James Otis (a contemporary of Sam Adams) and the wife of James Warren, an early Massachusetts legislator and one of the members of the Sons of Liberty (a group that promoted American independence very early on). But Mercy Warren did more than rest in the shadows of her great men. She was herself extremely influential and productive.

Mercy Warren was also one of the first American playwrights. She was a poet and author (she wrote a 3-volume history of the American Revolution that was owned and admired by Thomas Jefferson; it’s published online here). She also served as political advisor and confidante for the Big Dogs like George Washington, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, Jefferson, John Hancock, and John Adams. John Adams wrote to her husband James about her: “Tell your wife that God Almighty has entrusted her with the Powers for the good of the World, which, in the cause of his Providence, He bestows on few of the human race. That instead of being a fault to use them, it would be criminal to neglect them.”

So, Mercy Otis Warren was as much a founder as any of the trouser-wearing patriots. Finally, in 2002, she was inducted in the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, NY. What took them so long?!

Mercy was of many Massachusetts leaders who realizeed that religious and civil liberty was the underlying cause for the independence from Britain. Of the new American and his duty toward preserving liberty, she wrote:

It is necessary for every American, with becoming energy, to endeavor to stop the dissemination of principles evidently destructive of the cause for which they have bled. It must be the combined virtue of the rulers and of the people to do this, and to rescue and save their civil and religious rights from the outstretched arm of tyranny, which may appear under any mode or form of government. –History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, 1805

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.