Revolutionary Histories: Contemporary Narratives of the American Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980), and in “Creating a Useable Future: The Revolutionary Historians and the National Past,” in Jack P. Greene, ed., The American Revolution: The Unfinished Agenda (New York: forthcoming, 1987). I have treated Warren’s historical theory in its ideological context in “Explaining the Revolution: Ideology and Ethics in Mercy Otis Warren’s Historical Theory,” WMQ, third series, 37 (April 1980), pp. 200–218.
Warren’s plays and poetry are usually discussed in passing—ordinarily in the context of eighteenth-century American satire or poetry generally. Moses Coit Tyler’s The Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763–1783 (2 vols.; New York, 1896) remains useful. Everett Emerson, ed., American Literature, 1764–1789: The Revolutionary Years is a good collection of essays, including Calhoun Winton’s “The Theatre and Drama,” pp. 87–104. Bruce Ingram Granger, Political Satire in the American Revolution, 1763–1783 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1960) provides a good overview of an important topic. I learned much about American playwrights from Walter J. Meserve, An Emerging Entertainment: The Drama of the American People to 1828 (Bloomington, Ind., 1977). Gerald Weales, “ ‘The Adulateur’ and How It Grew,” Library Chronicles, 43 (1979), pp. 103–133 is the most insightful essay on Warren’s play specifically and on Warren as a playwright in general. Weales’s “The Quality of Mercy, or, Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” Georgia Review, 33 (Winter 1979), pp. 881–894 is entertaining as well as instructive. Benjamin Franklin V provides an introduction to his compilation of Warren’s poems and plays. Edmund M. Hayes has published an authoritative edition of Warren’s “The Defeat,” NEQ, 49 (September 1976), pp. 440–458, and hitherto unpublished poems, “The Private Poems of Mercy Otis Warren,” NEQ, 54 (June 1981), pp. 199–224. Cheryl Z. Oreovicz treats the corpus of Warren’s writings in “Mercy Warren and ‘Freedom’s Genius,’ ” University of Mississippi Studies in English, new series, 5 (August 1987). Emily Stipes Watts, The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 (Austin, Tex., 1977) is the best discussion of its subject. Patti Cowell, ed., Women Poets in Pre-Revolutionary America, 1650–1775: An Anthology (Troy, N.Y., 1981) provides an introduction and well-chosen selections.
The two best books on eighteenth-century American women, both of which deal with Warren, are Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, 1980) and Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston, 1980). Joan Hoff Wilson and Sharon Bollinger discuss Warren’s contributions to drama, poetry, and history in “Mercy Otis Warren: Playwright, Poet, and Historian of the American Revolution,” in J. R. Brink, ed., Female Scholars: A Tradition of Learned Women Before 1800 (Montreal, 1980). I have tried to show the relationship between Warren’s roles as political thinker, artist, and woman in “Mercy Otis Warren: The Politics of Language and the Aesthetics of Self,” AQ, 35 (Winter 1983), pp. 481–498.
This edition of Mercy Otis Warren’s History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution. Interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations reprints the first edition of the work published in Boston by Manning and Loring in 1805. To produce a new edition of the text, designed for general readers as well as scholars, we have made several concessions to modernity.
First, and most important, whereas the History originally appeared in three volumes, the present edition is in two. To help the reader make an easy correspondence between this edition and the first, we have used three devices: we have noted the original volume number in the running head; we have (following Manning and Loring’s original) numbered the chapters consecutively through the volumes and (again like Manning and Loring) placed the chapter number in the margin of each page; and we have inserted the original page numbers in brackets in the text to mark page breaks. By noting the volume, chapter, and page numbers of the original edition on each page of this one, the reader can tell at a glance exactly how the two correspond. Dates in the margins, intended to remind the reader which year is being discussed, are also preserved from the original.
Second, Manning and Loring’s typography has been modernized. The long “s” has been replaced by the less elegant but more readable standard “s.” Also, where Manning and Loring placed quotation marks down the left margin as well as at the end of lengthy quotations, we have opted to place quotation marks only immediately before and after all quoted passages, except when they were best displayed as extracts, according to standard modern practice, without the marks. We have, in addition, silently corrected obvious misprints. We thought it unnecessary to announce such corrections—inserting a missing “i” in “reconciliation,” for example—when reproducing the original typographical error would bear no significance to a modern reader.
We have not, however, altered Warren’s orthography. We have preserved, for example, such spellings as “manoeuvre” and “connexion,” and such abbreviations as the military title “gen.” or the clerical title “rev.” More important, Warren herself abandoned the “u” in “all words of Latin origin, such as honor, error &c. and [chose] to retain it only in words of Saxon origin, such as endeavour.”1 She rejected the extraneous “u” deliberately to repudiate a symbol of English cultural dominance and to announce that her work was American. Noah Webster, lexicographer, historian, and commentator on culture, called for precisely such a change in orthography in a ringing plea for an American national culture based upon a national language.2
Third, Warren’s “Notes,” contained in appendices at the end of each of her three volumes, have been divided for the sake of convenience. This division affects only the notes appearing in the original volume II, over half of which now appear at the end of the present first volume, the remainder falling at the end of the present second volume. The notes are keyed to the pages in both the original and the present edition.
Warren’s original index, corresponding to the pagination of the 1805 edition, is reprinted here in facsimile. A new index, designed to support modern inquiries, is also provided.
Warren’s References
Warren read widely all her life. Rev. Jonathan Russell introduced her to Sir Walter Raleigh’s The History of the World (1614) when she was a youth, and she continued to read history avidly. She knew her native New England through the works of Cotton Mather and Thomas Prince as well as those of later writers, and she was knowledgeable about the history of the other colonies as well. Though she was perfectly placed, as an Otis and a Warren, to have firsthand information about the most recent events, she also scoured the newspapers and magazines. She was familiar with the Massachusetts Historical Society and its recent Collections.
Nor did she confine her readings to America and its affairs. Her footnotes evidence her familiarity with such general works as William Belsham’s Memoirs of the Reign of George III and the Modern Universal History, as well as Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. She kept abreast of English periodicals such as The Annual Register and The Remembrancer, and she maintained a lively interest in Parliamentary debates. She was also remarkably up-to-date on new publications, particularly those concerned with politics and contemporary history and those that contained documents relating to recent events. Her interest in the French Revolution, about which she read in Edmund Burke, Catharine Macaulay, and James Mackintosh, among others, is a case in point.
Citations in the History and references in her letters show a strong familiarity not only with books and writers she admired—the Bible, of course, numerous classical authors, William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison (especially his play “Cato”), William Paley, John Locke, Adam Smith, Mackintosh, Macaulay, and Burke (except on the French Revolution)—but also with those whom she deplored—David Hume (because he was a skeptic),
