Mercy Otis Warren was a Revolutionary propagandist and its sharpest critic. Her pamphlets and satire were the fuel that rallied the colonies. Yet, she remains a victim of a historical misogyny that wants women to be the supporting cast, even when they were standing right on center stage.
She started with a pen name. In 1788, she published a scathing warning that a government without a Bill of Rights would become a tyranny. She signed it “A Columbian Patriot.” For the next hundred years, historians insisted a man wrote it. They literally couldn’t conceive that a woman from Plymouth had the brainpower to outthink the men in the room. It took a century for her descendants to dig through her letters and prove the “patriot” was a woman.
Warren’s backbone was forged in the Plymouth tradition of grit and self-governance. To her, liberty wasn’t a suggestion – it was a moral duty. But the “Great Men” of her time couldn’t handle her honesty.
When she published a history of the war that didn’t worship him, her old friend John Adams turned into a total ass. Rather than engaging in debate, he attacked her character. He sent her nasty letters, essentially telling her to stay in her lane because history “wasn’t for ladies.” He couldn’t stand that a woman he once called “accomplished” was now his intellectual equal or even superior.
By calling her a “female contemporary” instead of a Founding Architect, we’re silencing her by omission, exactly what the men of 1776 did. We are clinging to a sanitized, male-only version of America that never actually existed.
It’s time to stop treating Mercy Otis Warren like a footnote. She was the conscience of the Revolution. It’s time we give the “Columbian Patriot” her due.
– Patrice Minton