We Are Not Descended From Fearful Women, Either
(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post)
Mrs. Warren was quite fed up. It was November of 1775, and the city of Boston was under siege. Its port was closed. British warships made the entire city a clear field of fire. It was seven months since the battles of Lexington and Concord. It was five months since the British army had driven the stubborn American defenders off Bunker Hill. The Second Continental Congress had been meeting since May and, by her lights, had done nothing to indicate that its members realized that a war already was underway. Her husband, James Warren, was the president of the Massachusetts provincial congress and, one day, he sat down to write a letter to a friend of theirs who was sitting in the Congress in Philadelphia, an obstreperous Boston lawyer named John Adams.
"Your Congress can be no longer in any doubts and hesitancy about taking capital and effectual strokes,” James Warren wrote. His wife, finding even these sentiments in adequate to the events at hand, jumped in and added her own thoughts to the letter.
“You should no longer piddle at the threshold. It is time to leap into the theatre to unlock the bars, and open every gate that impedes the rise and growth of the American republic.”
As we have mentioned before, Mercy Otis Warren is one of the several avatars of this shebeen—a gifted writer and a true rebel. (It was her thwacking attacks on the proposed Constitution that partly helped change James Madison's mind on the advisability of a Bill of Rights.) She was second only to Tom Paine in her uncompromising devotion to the cause of American independence and American liberty, and she was a close second at that. Where Abigail Adams, another friend of the Warrens, reproved her husband to "remember the ladies" while forming the new republic, Mercy Otis Warren cudgeled her way to an honored place in the intellectual ferment that produced what we celebrate today. She was a proper Bostonian woman, for sure, but she was not civil, not by a long shot.
She would have had no patience with what the celebration of American independence has become, and she would have seen El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago for what he is: a rapacious brigand, a thief of freedom and a vandal in the storehouse of ideals. She left warnings to posterity about people like him, because she had taken up her pen to fight against those people in her own time, and she knew that they do not change as the years pass by.
“It is necessary for every American, with becoming energy to endeavor to stop the dissemination of principles evidently destructive of the cause for which they have bled. It must be the combined virtue of the rulers and of the people to do this, and to rescue and save their civil and religious rights from the outstretched arm of tyranny, which may appear under any mode or form of government.”
"We are not descended from fearful men," as Edward R. Murrow said at the conclusion of his broadcast takedown of Joe McCarthy. "Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular."
We are not descended from fearful women, either. Ms. Warren was fed up, and an empire came down. She wrote:
By the Declaration of Independence, dreaded by the foes and for a time doubtfully viewed by many of the friends of America, everything stood on a new and more respectable footing, both with regard to the operations of war or negotiations with foreign powers.
Happy Fourth!
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