For the next several years, as resistance turned to rebellion, these four came together frequently and wrote to each other incessantly, their friendship part-and-parcel of the dramatic events unfolding around them. By 1769, even Otis’s protégé John Adams admitted that the patriots’ hero had become “raving mad.” Strangely, James Otis’s insanity strengthened the emerging bond between the Adams family (John and his wife, Abigail) and the family of Otis’s sister (Mercy Otis Warren and her husband, James). The turning point coincided with the mental and emotional unhinging of brother James. It would not be long, however, before Mercy Warren succumbed to the warring passions and joined the dismal train. Warren, Esqr./ An Invitation to retirement,” she urged him to “Come leave the noisy smoky town/ Where vice and folly reign./ The vain pursuits of busy men/ We wisely will disdain.” Warren produced a sweeping condemnation of political involvement, with its “dismal train of warring passions” and “endless strife.” In a poem she titled “To J. Consulting her religion and her muse, Mrs. At least for her menfolk, the times were politically charged.Īt first Mercy Warren tried to resist the pull of politics. Four years later, during the Stamp Act crisis of 1765, her husband, James Warren, entered the fray as well. Warren’s older brother James Otis had argued in the Superior Court of Massachusetts that blanket search warrants, called “writs of assistance,” should be declared null and void because they violated natural law. Perhaps, in normal times, the ideas of the Enlightenment would have produced no more than minor diversions from the straight and narrow, but this was no ordinary epoch. With a passion her brothers lacked, she devoured world history, English literature, Enlightenment philosophy, and everything else that came her way, filtering it all through a Calvinist lens to heighten its moral tone and didactic purpose. As a child, when her two older brothers studied with a private tutor so they might attend Harvard, she convinced her father to let her crash the course. But try as she must to submit, two things challenged her resolve: education and politics. She learned early on that her supreme duty, and the supreme duty of all women, was to submit to the will of God. She was true-blue Puritan, a Mayflower descendent who lived a mere stone’s throw from Plymouth Rock. Mercy Otis Warren had not always been so brazen. Then and there she composed some verse, “extempore”:Īt leisure then may Gge his reign review, It is time to leap into the theatre, to unlock the bars, and open every gate that impedes the rise and growth of the American republic, and then let the giddy potentate send forth his puerile proclamations to France, to Spain and all the commercial world who may be united in building up an Empire which he can’t prevent. She sits at the table with me, will have a paragraph of her own says you “should no longer piddle at the threshold. On November 15, 1775, as her husband James penned a letter to the Warrens’ close friend John Adams, a delegate to Congress, Mercy suddenly interrupted: Their caution bothered Mercy Otis Warren, and she, for one, was ready to take the next step. Seven months after British Regulars marched on Lexington and Concord, three months after King George III declared the colonies in a state of rebellion, and a month after British artillery leveled the town of Falmouth (now Portland, Maine), even the most radical delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia did not dare utter the “I” word: independence.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |