History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution. Mercy Otis Warren
nor inevitable. If history revealed any consistent tendency, it was that arbitrary power, corruption, and irrationality tended to defeat enlightened principles. That was why most of the world remained enslaved. “Ambition and avarice,” she wrote, “are the leading springs” of history, whereas “virtue in the sublimest sense, has an influence only on a chosen few,” and “the guidance of reason . . . operates too little on the generality of mankind.”7 Faced with those who lusted for power and self-aggrandizement, most people in the history of the world submitted, too ignorant, cowardly, or despairing to resist.
There were, of course, exceptions to this grim scenario, the most conspicuous of which in the modern world was that of the American colonists who, according to Warren, manifested the kind of virtue and commitment to liberty only rarely witnessed in history. Warren “trembled for the events of the present commotion,” she wrote in 1774; she believed that “there must be a noble struggle to recover the existing liberties of our injured country” and that no one could predict how the struggle would turn out. In retrospect, however, she was able to conclude: “Reduced nearly to a state of nature with regard to all civil or authoritative ties, it is almost incredible, that the principles of rectitude and common justice should have been so generally influential” among the people. From the Stamp Act to the introduction of a standing army in Massachusetts, from the nonimportation agreements to the Coercive Acts, and finally from these tensions to a state of war, “it must be ascribed to the virtue of the people . . . that they did not feel the effects of anarchy in the extreme.”8 The American Revolution was a signal victory over “an ungrateful, dissipated” Britain, a nation which had fallen into “barbarism” and internal corruption and whose “republican opinions and . . . freedom . . . had been on the wane” since the first Stuart.9
Yet despite the triumph of liberty, virtue, and reason on this occasion, Warren was not confident and surely not complacent about the long-term prospects of the Revolution. On the contrary, when she drafted her History during the 1780s and ’90s, she wrote in a mood of profound concern. The new nation seemed to be manifesting the same dreaded signs of decay that had characterized the decline of all earlier republics: political partisanship that would undermine revolutionary unity; financial insolvency that threatened the continued existence of government on all levels; social rivalries that could destroy stability; and, above all, moral and political degeneration that substituted private passion for enlightened self-interest and that eventually would make a mockery of a “republican” culture.
As early as 1780, she wrote to her friend John Adams, wishing for his speedy return from Amsterdam, where he was negotiating loans and a treaty. “We need the steady influence of all the old republicans,” she wrote, “to keep the principles of the revolution in view.” “The truth is,” she added to her son Winslow, then in Europe, America has “deviated from the principles, manners, and spirit, that instigated to an opposition to Britain” and that were essential to the success of the republic. By 1786 she believed the revolutionary venture might fail entirely. Here were the new states, “emancipated from a foreign yoke,” a long and bloody war finally ended, “with the liberty of forming our own governments, framing our own laws, choosing our own magistrates, and adopting manners the most favourable to freedom and happiness, yet sorry I am to say I fear we have not virtue sufficient to avail ourselves of these superior advantages.” Instead, she wrote a year later to Catharine Macaulay, republicanism and independence “are nearly dwindled into theory.” Republicanism was “defaced by a spirit of anarchy,” while independence was “almost annihilated … by a kind of public gambling, instead of private industry.”10
Events in Warren’s personal life no doubt intensified her feelings of melancholy and heightened her sense of widespread public decline. Before her History went to press, three of the five Warren sons had died. Charles died of consumption at the age of twenty-four in 1786; the favored Winslow, seeking to avoid a lawsuit for moneys owed, joined General Arthur St. Clair’s ill-fated expedition against the Miami Indians and died in battle in Ohio in 1791 at thirty-one; and the youngest, George, died in Maine at the age of twenty-four. Her oldest son, James Jr., a naval lieutenant, returned from a mission to France in 1779, crippled for life with a shattered right knee that he suffered when the Alliance encountered two English sloops. Moreover, her husband James, distinguished for his service as speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, president of the Provincial Congress, and commissary general in the Continental Army, had, incredibly, become politically suspect to the ruling Hancock forces in Massachusetts. James’s sympathy for the Shaysites in 1786, his frequent laments about public corruption, and his moderate antifederalism placed him outside the growing federalist mainstream. Even John Adams, a long-time friend, found his views increasingly obnoxious. Though James was elected lieutenant governor in 1780 (to serve in a Hancock administration), he declined the post and sank into undeserved obscurity.
Although these private events added to Warren’s gloom, they should not be allowed to overshadow her public vision or to depreciate her broader understanding of national affairs. In her fifties and sixties when her History was taking shape, Warren was seventy-seven when it was published, and her commitment to her role as a historian had long since developed into a public as well as a personal one. At the heart of that commitment was the complex of motives that she had mentioned in her letters to Winslow and implied in her letters to John Adams and Catharine Macaulay. Writing history was less a means of edification than a mode of exhortation. Narrative was a political and ethical performance, calculated to instill in a new generation a vigilance toward their liberties and to animate responsibility for their actions. History also provided an opportunity to define the terms—literally, the vocabulary—with which people could properly discuss politics and history.11
In short, history was “philosophy teaching by examples,” as Lord Bolingbroke had written; it “inculcates images of virtue and vice,” and its proper task was to train people, especially young people, in “public and private virtue.”12 This was the eighteenth-century version of the classical “exemplary theory of history,” which swept the Revolutionary generation of historians and which accorded perfectly with Warren’s understanding of her proper role.13 If she frequently painted history in blacks and whites and with broad strokes, creating simple moral oppositions wherever possible, she did so in order to make utterly clear to the rising generation that the struggle never ended.14 She stated the lesson plainly near the end of the History. Once corruption begins among individuals, it will, left unchecked, become systemic. If that should ever happen in America, she exhorted, “let some unborn historian, in a far distant day, detail the lapse, and hold up the contrast between a simple, virtuous, and free people, and a degenerate, servile race of beings. . . .”15
But, Warren lamented, that “far distant day” already had arrived, and something had to be done to reverse the decline. While a few “old republicans” sought political or constitutional remedies for the disease ailing the body politic, Warren turned to the word, for historical narrative had the power to redeem.
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Warren’s ambition to be useful was no accident. For four generations before her birth on September 14, 1728, the Otises had served in town and colony offices, reaching as high as the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the Governor’s Council. Her father had been Speaker of the House. Mercy Otis entered the world, the third child and first daughter of James and Mary Allyne Otis, with all the family’s privileges: wealth, social prestige, and political power; she added to these intellect and energy, and she made the most of her gifts.16
When Mercy Otis married James Warren in November 1754, two of the most prominent families in provincial Massachusetts were joined. The two families had taken similar routes to fortune and prestige; were the historical record less ample, both family histories would appear to be parodies of nineteenth-century success stories. John Otis I had emigrated to Bear Cove (later Hingham) in his fiftieth year in 1630. Richard Warren had arrived on the Mayflower ten years earlier. Both quickly acquired wealth and station, the result partly of being first in time and place, partly of their ability to recognize the economic and political possibilities of the new world. By the third generation, John Otis III (d. 1727) had become the most prominent citizen in Barnstable, having