The Woman Who Wrote the Revolution Down — Mercy Otis Warren

The pamphlets pass hand to hand in Boston. The colony has banned the stage, so the plays are printed instead of performed, and people read them by candlelight. Every loyalist in them is real. Everyone knows the faces. No author is named on the page.

It is 1772.

She does not just write satire. She names the loyalists of Massachusetts in print and lets the whole colony laugh them into the open.

She does not just keep up a correspondence. She trades letters with John Adams, Samuel Adams, and Abigail Adams while the argument for independence is still being built.

She does not just read the new Constitution. She publishes a warning that it guards no individual liberty, and she makes the case for what becomes the Bill of Rights.

She does not just live through the Revolution. She sits at a desk and writes its first full history, three volumes, set down by someone who was there.

Her Spark of Liberty was authorship. The conviction that whoever writes a thing down decides what it will mean, and that the right to hold the pen belonged to her as much as to any man in the room.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life”

She wrote anonymously when the times demanded it and under her own name when she could. Her 1788 pamphlet, Observations on the New Constitution, was credited to a man named Elbridge Gerry for nearly two centuries. She wrote it. Her three-volume history of the Revolution cost her the friendship of John Adams, and the two of them mended it before the end. She died in Massachusetts on October 19, 1814, at the age of eighty-six.

Her name was Mercy Otis Warren.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

Some names keep the watch while the world sleeps. Night Watch is a wordsearch collection built for quiet hands and long evenings: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H35V5JDM

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