History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution. Mercy Otis Warren

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СКАЧАТЬ Washington, Abiel Holmes’s Annals of America, and other historical works were announced, reviewed, and even excerpted in some of these periodicals, Warren’s was announced twice and reviewed only once. The reviewer for The Panoplist criticized Warren’s style, but it is difficult not to conclude that this criticism masked a less worthy agenda. He noted that, though authors should have a free hand in drawing characters, Warren sometimes exercised that freedom “in some instances which a gentleman would not, perhaps, have thought prudent.” The reviewer also observed that all members of society “have our ‘appropriate duties’ . . . even aged women’ have a sphere of usefulness. . . .”²⁶ But if the History was long neglected because of Warren’s politics or because she was a woman or because it prompted some powerful people (including her old friend John Adams) to personal outrage, it has properly become the subject of study in recent years.²⁷

      The History has attracted the attention of modern readers neither, principally, because it is the most complete account we have of the Revolution, nor because it satisfies a modern urge for narrative history. If anything, we know more about the Revolution than Warren could have hoped to know, and her style will seem quaint to some and florid to others. Instead, its appeal today lies in its simultaneous presentation of history and author, an appeal which is enhanced because the History is “interspersed with biographical, political and moral observations.” Modern scholars have begun to take seriously Thoreau’s notion that all literature, no matter how “documentary,” is written in the first person—from some standpoint that is both here and now. As a result, we do not simply read through Warren’s History to the historical world to which it points. We read Warren in her History, constantly aware of the narrative voice that presents the world beyond the words. In doing so, we gain a purchase on the political, ethical, and philosophical assumptions that lie behind the language. Historical narrative thus becomes less a window than a mirror—a mirror that reflects its author’s values and expectations, and, if we read carefully, our own as well.

      Lester H. Cohen

      Lester H. Cohen is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana.

Bibliography

      The Writings of Mercy Otis Warren

      MANUSCRIPTS AND COLLECTIONS

      Mercy Warren Papers, MHS (Boston)

      Otis Papers, MHS

      Warren-Adams Manuscripts, MHS

      Knight-Gerry Papers, MHS

      Warren-Winthrop Letters, MHS

      Elbridge Gerry Papers, MHS

      Warren Family Letters and Papers, Pilgrim Museum (Plymouth)

      Gay-Otis Papers, Butler Library (Columbia University)

      Otis Family Manuscripts, Butler Library

      Manuscript History, Houghton Library (Harvard University)

      PUBLISHED COLLECTIONS

      Charles Francis Adams, ed., Correspondence Between John Adams and Mercy Warren, Relating to the “History of the American Revolution,” MHS, Collections, fifth series, IV (Boston, 1878)

      L.H. Butterfield, ed., Adams Family Correspondence (4 vols.; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963–1973)

      C. Harvey Gardiner, ed., A Study in Dissent: The Warren-Gerry Correspondence, 1776–1792 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968)

      Warren-Adams Letters: Being Chiefly a Correspondence Among John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren, MHS, Collections, vols. 72, 73 (1917, 1925)

      WARREN’S PUBLICATIONS

      “The Adulateur,” Massachusetts Spy, March 26 and April 23, 1772 Boston, 1773 (pamphlet) Magazine of History, 16 (1917–18), pp. 227–259

      “The Defeat,” Boston Gazette, May 24 and July 19, 1773 Edmund M. Hayes, ed., NEQ, 49 (September 1976), pp. 440–458

      “The Group,” Boston Gazette, January 23, 1775 Massachusetts Spy, January 26, 1775 Boston: Edes and Gill, 1775 New York: John Anderson, 1775 (The Group, A Farce)

      Jamaica, printed; Philadelphia, reprint: James Humphreys, Jr., 1775. (The Group, A Farce) (No copy of the Jamaica edition is available.)

      “Observations on the New Constitution and on the Federal and State Conventions. By A Columbian Patriot” (Boston, 1788)

      Reprinted in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States, Published During Its Discussion by the People, 1787–1788 (Brooklyn, 1888): 1–23, where it is erroneously attributed to Elbridge Gerry.

      Reprinted in Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Complete Anti-Federalist (7 vols.; Chicago, 1981), 4: 270–287

      Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous (Boston, 1790)

      (Includes two dramatic tragedies: “The Sack of Rome” and “The Ladies of Castille.”)

      Edmund M. Hayes, ed., “The Private Poems of Mercy Otis Warren,” NEQ, 54 (June 1981), pp. 199–224

      Plays and Poems of Mercy Otis Warren: Facsimile Reproductions Compiled and with an Introduction by Benjamin Franklin V (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1980)

      (Includes “The Adulateur,” “The Defeat,” and “The Group"; “The Blockheads” and “The Motley Assembly,” the authorship of which is disputed; and the 1790 Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous.)

      History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution. Interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations (Boston: Manning and Loring, 1805)

      Photo-facsimile, New York: A.M.S. Press, 1970

      Chapter XXXI reprinted in Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Complete Anti-Federalist (7 vols.; Chicago, 1981), 6: 195–249

      Secondary Sources

      The most comprehensive and complete biography of Warren is Mary Elizabeth Regan, “Pundit and Prophet of the Old Republic: The Life and Times of Mercy Otis Warren, 1728–1814” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, 1984). Jean Fritz, Cast for a Revolution: Some American Friends and Enemies, 1728–1814 (Boston, 1972) is an admirable study of Warren’s life in the context of Massachusetts politics. John J. Waters, Jr., The Otis Family in Provincial and Revolutionary Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968) is a multigenerational family history which brilliantly illuminates local Massachusetts history as well as that of the Otises.

      The best short introduction to Warren’s thought and writings is Maud Macdonald Hutcheson, “Mercy Warren, 1728–1814,” WMQ, third series, 10 (July 1953), pp. 378–402. Arthur H. Shaffer, The Politics of History: Writing the History of the American Revolution, 1783–1815 (Chicago, 1975) discusses the historical writings of the Revolutionary era, with a focus on the development of a national historiography. William Raymond Smith, History as Argument: Three Patriot Historians of the American Revolution (The СКАЧАТЬ