Mercy's Revenge

by
Hugh J. Schwartzberg

Delivered, in shorter form, to
The Chicago Literary Club
March 19, 2001

At the outset, an apology. Some years ago, I told you that James Wilson was written out of our history. You and I both believed that I was speaking in metaphors. We were both mistaken. There was at least one deliberate act, by an interested party.

America's first woman historian, Mercy Otis Warren, decided to erase James Wilson, the inventor of the American form of democracy, from our collective memory, or at least from her History. She also rubbed out our memory of Francis Hopkinson, the man who designed the American flag.

Women are at long last being admitted into the higher ranks of academia, at least in the soft sciences. The wonderful and necessary search for long-lost peers continues. "Gender studies" are still a growth industry. All this has led to a re-examination of the life and works of Mercy Otis Warren. Several biographies of Mrs. Warren have already appeared. At least one additional portrait is in preparation. Her work, we are told by one contemporary historian, is being taken seriously once more. So it may now be possible for Mrs. Warren to confuse American history all over again.

Mrs. Warren's principal work was entitled "History of the Rise, Progress, And Termination of the American Revolution interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations." It was first published in 1805, in three volumes.

Mercy Otis Warren fought hard against that Constitution under which we still thrive, more than 200 years later. She made real enemies in the process. She had reason to believe that these political enemies had savaged her in an attempt to secure ratification. The other side won, for which we should all be grateful, but like the able historian she was, she took her vengeance with her pen by leaving certain people out of her history, and muddying up others. This is the story of Mercy's Revenge.

You will search her History in vain for the names of either Francis Hopkinson or James Wilson. Hopkinson was not only the man who designed the American Flag, but was also the Revolution's great propagandist.

James Wilson was the man who invented the American Presidency, as well as being the principal advocate of democracy (as we know it) among the founding fathers.

Time constraints prevent my explaining why I believe that James Wilson is one of the most important figures in our history. Obviously, it is not possible to repeat my earlier address on our most important founding father. The Club's archives contain my telling of how Wilson was the principal author of United States Constitution, and was the principal figure in securing its ratification. He was the first Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and it was James Wilson and not John Marshall who wrote the first opinion of that Court declaring judicial supremacy by virtue of the written Constitution, in part because Marshall was added to the Court ten years after Wilson joined it.

Even this tiny portion of the James Wilson story may provide some idea of the rather remarkable nature of Mercy Otis Warren's decision to keep his name out of her history.

In the debate on ratification, Francis Hopkinson held that Constitution's opponents (which included Mrs. Warren herself ) up to ridicule, while praising James Wilson. In retaliation, Mrs. Warren seems to have tried to erase both Mr. Hopkinson and Mr. Wilson from public memory, along with several others responsible for the new Constitution. She certainly could have had motive enough to keep Francis Hopkinson's name out of her history.

To erase Francis Hopkinson from American history meant the loss of one of our more interesting characters. Like Wilson, Hopkinson was both lawyer and Judge (as Hopkinson's father had been before him, and as his son would be after him). In addition to being America's first composer of secular music, Francis was also a chemist, a mathematician, a translator, an inventor, an artist, and a student of mechanics and astral navigation. Like Mercy Otis Warren herself, he was a poet, a playwright, a satirist, a songwriter, and above all else, a master of the art of propaganda.

To understand the depth of Mrs. Warren's reaction to Hopkinson, we should understand what he was not. He was not a New Englander. He did not come from one the old colonial families. He was not one of the earliest revolutionaries. Hopkinson's parents were born in England. He was a very small person. John Adams once noted that he had a head not bigger than a large apple, but Frank Hopkinson wooed and won a Borden girl from Bordentown, New Jersey, the heiress of that town's founder.

George III ascended the throne in 1760. During the early 1760s, Hopkinson was helping to introduce a few people in the New World to the great composers of the 18th-century, to Bach and Corelli, Handel and Vivaldi, but also to Scarlatti, Stamitz, Boyce, Orne and Gemigniani, and others who were rediscovered only much later in our musical history. He wrote America's first secular art song, and its first non-comic opera, although it was a short one. During the early 1760's, Hopkinson was noted for his command of the harpsichord and the Forte piano. After the Revolution, when Hopkinson invented a new means of quilling the harpsichord, all the harpsichords in Philadelphia were re-quilled.

But during the early 1760's, Hopkinson was also writing odes to George III, setting them to music, and reciting them at commencement exercises. During that same period, Mercy Otis Warren's brother, James Otis Jr. was making a Revolution happen.

Francis Hopkinson had been one of the founders, along with Benjamin Franklin, of what they called the College of Philadelphia, and what we call the University of Pennsylvania. Hopkinson received Penn's very first diploma. He eventually held an A.B. degree, a Masters degree, and an Ll. D.

One of Hopkinson's gems included:

George shall gain immortal Praise And Britain! George is thine.

"...... celebrate in Notes divine The British Monarch's Praise."

These words were reprinted in the three volumes of his collected works which Hopkinson prepared shortly before his death. He played fair with history.

Initially, as a young bachelor, he was not successful as a lawyer. For a while, he went into the dry goods business. He wasn't successful there either. In 1763, Hopkinson became the Customs Collector in Salem, New Jersey. (In Massachusetts, James Otis, Jr. had already resigned as the King's Advocate General, two years earlier.)

Still later, in 1766 and 1767, Hopkinson spent almost two years in England, in part as a guest of his great-uncle, the Bishop of Worcester. Hopkinson could be viewed as a socially acceptable English gentleman, and a man of some connections. Lord North invited him to dinner. He accepted. In January of 1770, Lord North became Prime Minister. The Boston Massacre was only two months later.

As late as 1772, Hopkinson still held office under the Crown, so for Hopkinson, the turning point came sometime after that.

By 1774, Hopkinson had chosen the side of the revolutionaries, as evidenced by a pamphlet which appeared under the pseudonym of Peter Grievous, Esq., A. B. C. D. E. These letters were presumably a play on the alphabet soup of his university degrees. The pamphlet was titled, "A Pretty Story", and was also known as "The Old Farm and The New Farm." It was a humorous parable, attacking King and Parliament. Hopkinson had found his cause and his metier. 1774 was also the year that Hopkinson became a member of the Governing Council in New Jersey.

The very next year, 1775, was the year the hot war began, the year the real shooting started. In 1776, prior to the Declaration, Hopkinson wrote a piece called "Prophecy," in which he prophesied American independence.

In 1776, New Jersey replaced its delegates to the Second Continental Congress with new faces committed to independence, including Francis Hopkinson. They arrived just in time to vote on the issue of independence. They didn't want to miss all the fun, so they asked that the arguments be repeated for their benefit. The Congress humored them; John Adams rose to the occasion; and they voted "yes" for independence.

Hopkinson was a trifle bored by the Congress. He drew caricatures of other delegates.

In 1777, Hopkinson became chairman of the Continental Navy Board of Philadelphia. That same year Hopkinson wrote a piece treating the break between Britain and America as if it were an anatomy demonstration, including such lines as:

"My true love's bones I boiled."

It was also in 1777 that Hopkinson was asked to design a new flag for a new country. Francis Hopkinson designed the Stars & Stripes. The flag we salute today is only a minor modification. Francis Hopkinson designed not only the Great Seal of the State of New Jersey, but also the Great Seal of the United States.

Except for Hopkinson's service on various war boards, the American Revolution was, for both Mercy Otis Warren and Hopkinson, primarily a battle fought with words. They both wrote doggerel; they both wrote some of the most popular songs for our side.

During the period of the American revolution, Hopkinson was considered one of the country's great "wits," perhaps its greatest. John Adams described him as a "pretty, serious, ingenious" little man and said that his pen had "irresistible influence." I repeat, "Irresistible influence." The little man's most powerful weapon was satire. Let me give you one example.

In January of 1778, the colonists attempted to blow up English battleships by filling some wooden kegs with explosives and sending those kegs drifting down the Delaware River. This was a new invention, that of the floating naval mine. Britain's General William Howe got wind of that trick, and dispatched some redcoats to sink or explode the kegs by firing on them. That British success should have provided a propaganda triumph for British intelligence, but the Chairman of our Navy Board, which is to say Francis Hopkinson, managed to turn the entire incident into a funny poem called "The Battle of the Kegs," which made Howe look very foolish. Hopkinson re-wrote history to suggest that the British had fired on the barrels because they thought American soldiers were bottled up in them. One of the uncensored versions of that poem included Hopkinson's report that Howe was occupied at the time in the bed of another man's wife. It was sung to the tune of "Yankee Doodle":

Sir William he, snug as a flea, Lay all this time a snoring, Nor dreamt of harm, as he lay warm In bed with Mrs. Loring.

"The Battle of the Kegs" became one of the colonists' favorite songs.

Also in 1778, Hopkinson became Treasurer of Loans.

In 1779, Hopkinson became Admiralty Judge. Toward the end of the next year, he was impeached by the legislators of Pennsylvania. Robert Morris voted for that impeachment. The vote to impeach was 47 to 10, on three charges. Hopkinson was then successfully defended by his lawyer, James Wilson, who secured a unanimous verdict from a judicial panel of "not guilty" on all counts.

Sometimes his sense of humor got Hopkinson into trouble. The professors at the College would not let him deliver a lecture purportedly attacking the study of "dead languages" as a means of obscuring real thought from vulgar minds, for fear that the students would take him seriously.

He published a paper on how to set up a Court of Honor as a substitute for dueling, complete with the legal forms for calling one's opponent an ignoramus.

Then, the next year, he drew up the pleadings for a fictitious case between himself and James Wilson, calling both of them all sorts of nasty names. You had to read through the whole stack of papers before you found the Latin phrase which explained that Wilson would be forgiven if he returned a book which he had borrowed. Hopkinson went to Wilson's house to "serve" the papers, but Wilson wasn't home, so he left them there. As luck would have it, unbeknownst to either of them, a local crazed individual broke in, stole the papers, and showed up at a trial in which Hopkinson was the defendant and Wilson was his lawyer. This crazed individual burst into Court, announced that he was prepared to be arrested, but that he had proof in his hand that Hopkinson was guilty. Luckily, Hopkinson recognized his pretend lawsuit against Wilson for that imaginary Court of Honor, and convinced the real Judge to make an announcement that these documents, written in Hopkinson's own hand, in which Wilson supposedly called Hopkinson a numskull, had nothing to do with the real-life case.

Francis Hopkinson continued to serve as judge in Admiralty Court until the installation of the new regime which was created by the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

The idea that the Convention was meeting in secrecy disturbed Mrs. Warren. She approved of some of the participants in that convention, but others were predisposed to a strong central government with real powers of taxation. That was not Mrs. Warren's position. She had no fondness for taxation even when it was with representation. There were some members of that convention who had supported James Wilson in his fight for a national bank. It also included several who had helped in his fight to secure adequate funds for the revolution and, in the postwar period, the fight for enough monies to meet a national budget. None of that reflected Mrs. Warren's positions. While they were still meeting, she wrote that "every man of sense is convinced a strong, efficient" government is needed. And then, somehow, she lost that thought. Wilson ended up designing the Constitution, in large part, and proceeded to lead the fight for its ratification. Mrs. Warren picked up her pen, and attempted to defeat this Constitution.

Francis Hopkinson had not been a member of the Constitutional Convention. He was, however, a member of the ratification convention held in New Jersey, where he helped lead the fight to ratify.

America, in the latter half of the 18th century was a country of pen names. Lovers, including some married folk, signed pen names to their letters to each other, pet names that were sometimes known only to the parties, and sometimes known to a somewhat broader audience. Mercy Otis Warren, for example, signed letters to her husband as "Marcia". That pseudonym was not a secret; she joked about it in her correspondence with John Adams. She signed most of her correspondence simply as "M Warren."

Both Patriots and Tories conducted their political warfare under pseudonyms. And when the Constitution was presented for ratification, that conflict was also fought under assumed names. They flailed at each other, often in the dark as to who their adversaries really were, behind verbal masks.

There was one major exception. That exception was James Wilson, who for the most part did battle under his own name, in part because he had helped publicize some of his own speeches before the Pennsylvania ratification convention, which was held earlier than almost all the others. Wilson served as a lightning rod-- [the lightning rod, by the way, was then a recent invention by Benjamin Franklin]-- Wilson served as a lightning rod for the charges hurled by those who opposed the proposed new form of government.

Mercy Otis Warren chose at least three noms de guerre. One was "The Republican Federalist." Another was "Helvidius Priscus." Still another was "The Columbian Patriot" The problem with Republican Federalist was that both factions wanted the term "federalist" for their side. (Wilson, presumably without Mercy's knowledge, had already used the term con-federalism in the still-supposedly-secret convention.) The pro side soon succeeded in calling the other side "the anti-federalists." Shifting yo a different pseudonym, Mercy struck out at Wilson by name, writing in bitter irony, of how Wilson had invented the term "Federal Republic", out of the "fertility of his genius." She apparently believed he had stolen the term from her. Her pseudonym "Helvidius Priscus" also gave her difficulty.

Mercy was enough of a reader to know that Priscus was a stoic symbol for Senatorial opposition to the Emperor (in his case, Vespasian), in the name of liberty and freedom of speech. During a later Roman period, distribuying one of the eulogies about Helvidius was grounds for a death sentence. She may not habe been enough of a scholar to know that Priscus suffered early criticism on the grounds that he had enforced a bit too rigorously the required sale of poor people's goods to meet their debts. She may not have known that he had tried to establish a committee to try and get the Roman economy under control. Both of these positions seem inconsistent with some of the arguments she was making. She may not have known or cared that Priscus himself was ultimately executed for alleged terminal rudeness. (He refused to refer to Vespasian by his official titles while speaking on the floor of the Senate.) She may also have been tempted by the fact that Priscus was the masculine form which paralleled the female form for the Roman saint, Prisca, who was beheaded by Claudius II after two lions refused to finish her off.

Mercy seems to have overlooked the fact that the Latin word "priscus," in its literal sense, meant "old" or "antique" in the sense of "old-fashioned," which could be, and was, used against her. So she became "The Columbian Patriot." This time, some of her own allies felt that her work was too complex to be effective.

In her writings, Mercy argued that the proposed Constitution was "dangerously adapted to the purposes of an immediate aristocratic tyranny; that from the difficulty, if not impracticability of its operation, must soon terminate in the most uncontrolled despotism." She wielded the Latin phrase "ultima ratio regium." She spoke of "the virtues of a Cato." She said "Every age has its Bruti and Decii, as well as its Caesars and Sejani..."

She also raised specific objections. There was no Bill of Rights. She wanted annual elections. There were no limits to the judicial power. The executive power and the legislative power were not properly separated. Mr. Wilson, and others, she reported, supported a standing army. The federal government's powers of taxation were such as would drain the resources of the state governments. There were no term limits, there was no provision for rotation in office. Trial by a jury of one's peers was not protected; trials could be brought anywhere in a big country. There weren't enough representatives. The electoral college was so small that it constituted an "aristocratic junto." The country was too big for just one legislature. The Convention had not been authorized. Ratification by less than all of the states was subversion. Direct submission to the people was an attempt to fool them. She warned of despotism.

In a private letter to her brother Sam, in 1787, she expressed the depth of her fears, while speaking of an infant niece:

"Poor girl it is said the sex are doomed to slavery, but I hope it will not be her hard fortune to be doubly so by marrying a slave. To me the present generation is fast verging to that disgraceful state for the want of principle to support the independent and honorable character of their ancestors; - this shows itself in their readiness to adopt the novelties of system makers whether they are forging fetters in the furnace of a single despot or whether they will be the still more absurd fabrication of an aristocratic junto. These are cant terms but this does not make them less the objects of horror; though the frequency of expression may in some degree lessen the terrors of apprehension."

There seems to have been no other female protagonist on either side in the Ratification Wars.

Mercy's records show that she shipped copies of the anti-federalist speeches used in the Pennsylvania ratification convention off to England, along with material by the Republican Federalist, Helvidius Priscus, and the Columbian Patriot, while making the claim that the same hand had written all of it. Since we now know that she wrote the Columbian Patriot, it appears that she also had a hand in preparing the anti-federalist propaganda used in the Pennsylvania ratification struggle. Wilson won ratification in Pennsylvania, almost single-handedly.

Mercy also attempted to stop ratification of the new Constitution in Massachusetts. For this purpose, she drafted a lengthy appeal to her fellow citizens of the Bay State, which included the following:

"It cannot be expected that the inhabitants of the Massachusetts can be easily lulled into a false security, by the declamatory effusions of gentlemen, who, contrary to the experience of all ages would persuade them there is no danger to be apprehended, from vesting discretionary powers in the hands of man, which he may, or may not abuse."

To Mercy's surprise, Sam Adams accepted a compromise by which constitutional amendments would be recommended in exchange for his supplying votes for ratification. It was a close thing. To Mercy, "recommending a few amendments" was a "trivial proposition." Having lost in Massachusetts, and while Virginia, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, the Carolinas and New York were still open to contest, Mrs. Warren revised her piece, although she forgot to remove the appeal to the citizens of Massachusetts which I have previously quoted.

A revised version of the Columbian Patriot's Observations on the Constitution was shipped out-of-state from Boston, after the Massachusetts vote favoring ratification. It was later reprinted in several states. Her essay opened with the motto: "Sic Transit Gloria Americana." The revised version did not reach print until after Hopkinson had published a devastating counter-attack against it, and against similar works.

Explaining how Hopkinson could have jumped the gun on Mercy that way became a fascinating sidelight to my research, but I don't think it's worthy of your concern. With my daughter's help, I learned that Mercy's letter- book, written in her own hand, recorded a letter purporting to send a printed pamphlet by the Columbian Patriot to England under cover of December 17, 1787. That would solve the problem easily, except that that date seems to be almost two months earlier than some of the other events discussed in that same letter. A 21-page pamphlet under the title of the Colombian Patriot's "Observations on the Constitution," (which everyone now seems to agree was written by Mercy Warren), appeared in print in Boston in February of 1788 (which matches up with the events discussed in that work). Some anti-federalists claimed that the presses of Boston were shut against them during the prior, critical period. There are many possible explanations. Among them:--- A letter may have been intercepted, or its contents leaked. A sympathetic printer may have passed an earlier draft of the document to Hopkinson (and, as elsewhere noted, internal evidence makes it clear that there was in fact an earlier draft). Or he may simply have been responding to the material which Mercy had already distributed under the Priscus name or under the Republican Federalist. However Hopkinson managed to do it, Mercy was probably quite unhappy.

The single most powerful piece of ammunition in the war for ratification may not have been The Federalist Papers or even Wilson's speeches, but rather Hopkinson's burlesque parody of the arguments against ratification. It was called "The New Roof."

"The New Roof" appeared in the Pennsylvania Packet for December 29, 1787, even before the Massachusetts vote.

In this piece, the proposed Constitution was a new roof which someone called "James the architect" was attempting to put on a broken-down building. In Hopkinson's parable, an old woman, who was called Margery, was portrayed as trying to prevent this improvement. Rather than attempting to answer any specific anti-federalist charges, Hopkinson simply and effectively ridiculed the idea that any particular changes were more important than the general question of passage. He also struck at lines of argument that cut both ways. In Hopkinson's story, for example, critics argue about whether or not the cupola on the summit of the proposed new roof would be too heavy, and therefore a dangerous burden to the building, or too light, and therefore likely to be blown away.

Hopkinson's satire was reprinted in at least five of the colonies, ranging from Vermont to New York and on down to Maryland and South Carolina. It apparently had a powerful effect. Contemporary newspapers identified several of the characters in Hopkinson's essay.

Hopkinson's piece referred to "James the architect" as "one of the surveyors of the old roof," who "had a principal hand in forming the plan of a new one." Newspapers in several colonies expressly identified the architect as James Wilson.

This was sometimes by name, and sometimes by using the initials J. W., plus asterisks for the missing letters, with an Esq. (signifying a lawyer) thrown in at the end. When Hopkinson prepared his collected papers for what proved to be posthumous publication, he confirmed that this identification of James Wilson was correct.

Perhaps out of deference to a lady, it seems that no one at that time publicly suggested that the woman who was trying to prevent the roof repairs was any particular woman, and I know of no one who has done so since then. Mercy Otis Warren is now some 186 years dead, and I have no such compunction.

Mercy Otis Warren herself certainly had reason to believe that she had been unmasked. There appears to have been little doubt, on the part of anyone, as to Mrs. Warren's position on the issues of ratification. Her role in the struggle was later remembered by some of her contemporaries with great bitterness.

(The proof of her identity as "the Colombian Patriot", however, was not made available to scholars until the 1930s.)

When John and Abigail Adams returned from England, after the ratification struggle, they made it clear to Mrs. Warren that they had heard what she had been doing, and heartily disapproved. Up until that point, Abigail and Mercy had been best friends. Now they stopped talking to each other. Years later, in 1807, John Adams attempted to remind Mrs. Warren of "all the obloquy and all the extreme unpopularity" into which General Warren had fallen in 1789, largely as a result of the Warrens' opposition to the new Constitution.

Listen to Hopkinson's words from the heart of the ratification struggle: "Now there was an old woman, known by the name of Margery, who had got a comfortable apartment in the mansion house. This woman was of an intriguing spirit, of a restless and inveterate temper, fond of tattle, and a great mischief maker. In this situation, and with these talents, she unavoidably acquired an influence in the family, by the exercise of which, according to her natural propensity, she had long kept the house in confusion, and sown discord and discontent amongst the servants. Margery, was, for many reasons, an irreconcilable enemy to the new roof, and to the architects, who had planned it; amongst these, two reasons were very obvious -- -- 1st, The mantle piece on which her cups and platters were placed, was made of a portion of the great cornice, and she boiled her pot with the shingles that blew off from the defective roof. And 2dly, it so happened that in the construction of the new roof, her apartment would be considerably lessened. No sooner, therefore, did she hear of the plan proposed by the architects, but she put on her old red cloak, and was day and night trudging amongst the tenants and servants, and crying out against the new roof and the framers of it. "

Notice please the power of Hopkinson's choice of words. You are probably listening to the origin of our use of that word "framers" for hundreds of years, and it sailed right by your ears.

Attempting to read "The New Roof" through Mrs. Warren's eyes, she would have seen it as containing at least three personal attacks. First, that she was nothing more than an inveterate trouble-maker. Second, that she was doing what she was doing in order to protect her own place in history, or that of her family. Third, that in her opposition to the ratification, she was using the help of a madman.

In the original conclusion to "The New Roof," Hopkinson describes a number of attendants who could be found near the debate on the new roof.

"Amongst these was a half crazy fellow who was suffered to go at large because he was a harmless lunatic. Margery, however, thought he might be a serviceable engine in promoting opposition to the new roof. As people of deranged understandings are easily irritated, she exasperated this poor fellow against the architects, and fill'd him with the most terrible apprehension from the new roof... Having ... filled him with rage and terror, she let him loose among the crowd, where he roar'd and bawl'd to the annoyance of all byestanders. The original version concluded with the madman's diatribe, including this: "The new Roof! the new Roof! Oh! the new Roof! Shall demagogues, despising every sense of order and decency, frame a new roof?...... Where is that pusillanimous wretch who can submit to such contumely -- -- oh and the ultima Ratio Regium; (He got these three Latin words from Margery.) oh the ultima Ratio Regium -- oh ! the days of Nero! ah! the days of Caligula! ah! the British tyrant and his infernal junto -- -- glorious revolution -- -- awful crisis -- -- self important nabobs -- -- diabolical plots and secret machinations -- oh the architects! the architects..."

That rant (Hopkinson called it a piece of fustian) went on even further in the earliest version. It was deleted in some of the later reprints, but Hopkinson himself restored it for his collected works.

There was nothing funny about any of it if you looked at it through the eyes of Mercy Otis Warren, who had several reasons to believe it was aimed straight at her.

If Hopkinson was referring to a specific woman, there was no other obvious female suspect.

Hopkinson had his madman use the term "junto." Mercy herself had been using that term, although she admitted it was "cant."

The term ultima ratio regium was the one Latin term which Mercy herself used in this debate in her guise as the Columbian Patriot. At the very least, therefore, Hopkinson seems to be saying that Margery was intended as a stand-in for whoever was the real author of the Columbian Patriot piece, whether or not Hopkinson knew the real identity of that author.

Hopkinson specifically charged that the term ultima ratio regium had come to the madman from Margery. There seems little reason to have included that charge unless it was for the purpose of claiming that both Margery and the madman were real people, and suggests that the author of the "New Roof" had specific personal knowledge about communications between Margery and the madman. As we shall shortly see, Hopkinson did know the identity of the madman, and later publicly threatened to expose him. The New Roof's original attack might have been read as a threat that Hopkinson could or would expose both of them.

The double reference to "old" (an old woman in an old cloak) seemed to identify Margery with "Priscus," in its meaning of "old-fashioned" or "antique."

Mercy was 59 in 1787, the year of the Convention, old enough to resent being called "an old woman," but also old enough to believe that the term was directed against her.

Other named characters in the "New Roof" were the probable recipients of the anti-federalist material which Mercy had written for Pennsylvania, since these were the persons who spoke out in the debates at that state's ratification convention. (Hopkinson confirmed their last names for posthumous publication.)

In this period, pseudonyms in public discourse often preserved the initial letter of the name of the person under attack, and the M in the name Margery matched up with the M in Mercy.

Mercy herself had used "Marcia" as a pseudonym. "Marcia," with its opening letters of "m-a-r," was two additional steps closer to becoming "Margery." The final blow was probably Hopkinson's claim that an insane person was Margery's principal ally. Mercy's late brother, the great patriot James Otis, had been the victim of mental illness. Hopkinson's inclusion of this final stroke, the raving rant against ratification as presented by a person who was obviously insane, when coupled with a series of suggestions that other opponents were simply mentally ill, could have been viewed by Mercy as an unforgivable affront.

Hopkinson himself left out any identification for the Old Lady when he identified most of the other referents in footnotes provided for his own printed volumes. Perhaps he had finally come to realize that his attack upon Mercy had, whether intentionally or not, involved extraordinary and perhaps unnecessary roughness.

Once one assumes that the old woman is Mercy Otis Warren, other items fall into place. The "mansion house" could be a reference to the fact that the Warrens had acquired the house previously occupied by Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts, when that governor deserted to England.

The implied term "pot-boiler", although clearly an intended reference (Margery is described as boiling a pot), probably represents the 18th- century use of "pot-boiler" for one who is just getting by, or the political term "pot-boiler" for one who has a questionable voting address (which at that time required that one owned a pot which one had boiled at one's voting address for at least six months), rather than the early 19th-century term "pot-boiler" for one who makes a poor living by writings which are third-rate, or the products of such an author, which are of course "pot- boilers."

When I first realized that the primary meaning for "pot-boiler" in 1787 referred to one in poor financial circumstances, I thought I had managed to disprove my own thesis that Mercy would see Margery as the satirist's attack on herself. The Warrens at one point had considerable wealth. I subsequently learned that the period of the ratification debates was a very difficult one financially for the Warrens. Just after the Convention, they had to sell their dream house, and retreat back to Plymouth. Attacking Mercy as a "pot-boiler" was no longer simply an absurdity under any of the term's meanings, although it was certainly not very nice.

Accusing Mercy of putting on her old red cloak probably sounded to some like an accusation of old Tory sympathies, but to the learned this was more clearly (and truthfully) a report that she was once again using a Roman name to cloak identity, just as she had done in her plays. Use of a red cloak as a symbol of Roman activism is visible in some of the historical paintings of ancient Rome, which were all the rage in the 17th and 18th centuries. (See, for example, Jacques-Louis David's image of the "Horatii," in which the principal figure is putting on his red cloak, accompanied by a soldier in a red shirt. This was painted in 1784, and now hangs in the Louvre.) The effect of Hopkinson's red-cloak reference was to suggest that Margery was reverting to former Tory sympathies, an absurd and slanderous charge for anyone who actually knew something about Mrs. Warren, but this propaganda war would necessarily be a brief one, and afterwards Hopkinson could, if necessary, explain that he hadn't slandered anyone. He would then be free to explain that he wasn't really referring to a British red-coat, but instead to a Roman red-cloak . Meanwhile, of course, the line would have served its totally misleading purpose as directed at the man-in-the-street, and it was presumably great fun for those in the know.

All this in-depth, "new criticism," only goes to show that all this material could be read as fitting Mercy, even if no one of these secondary items seems convincing by itself. Mercy, however, could well have read all of them as confirming that she was the real subject of Hopkinson's attack. And there seems to have been too much smoke for there to have been no fire under this particular pot.

Years later, Hopkinson explained that the madman in his piece was intended as a response to Benjamin Workman, who wrote as "Philadelphiensis." Workman was an Irish immigrant who was had been serving as a tutor at Hopkinson's own College of Philadelphia. I do not know of any proof that Workman lifted his Latin from Mercy directly, nor do I know of any proof of any direct connection between Workman and Mercy Otis Warren. Workman had in fact used the term ultima ratio in his article of December 19, 1787, and he actually did have the nerve to refer to Nero and Caligula in referring to the Constitution's proponents. Hopkinson later wrote that he was upset that a man who had lived in the country for "only two years" should dare to vilify men like Washington, Franklin and others. Hopkinson was well-known as a power at the college. As "A. B.", he threatened to expose the identity of the author. Philadelphiensis stopped writing.

In his brilliant attack on Workman, Hopkinson had taken words like "contumely" directly from Workman's text. Hopkinson successfully ridiculed Workman's paper by simply heating it a few degrees hotter than its original warmth.

In a later reprint of the "New Roof," Margery became "Margery the Midwife.

This was during the first week in January (still in the period before official publication for Mercy's piece), in the "Independent Gazetteer." This same newspaper edition identified Margery as "George Bryan, the 4th Judge", a person who Mercy saw as one of her allies in her cause. This may have been an editor's error, or it may have been Hopkinson's own set-up to allow for a later plausible denial, in case the public response to direct verbal assault on a woman, if that ever did become fully public, required such a denial.

The change to "Margery the midwife" provided an opportunity for two Letters to the Editor, purportedly by women, one of which objected to the portrayal of such a contemptible figure as being a woman. Another wrote that she was "exceedingly hurt" that Margery was being linked to her occupation. Professor Bernard Bailyn, Harvard's great historian, to whom I am heavily indebted for many of the raw facts in this paper, reports that a third letter, on January 26th, accused Hopkinson of having written the first two. There is always the possibility that Hopkinson wrote all three letters as a means of keeping the public eye on "The New Roof." He was a masterful propagandist.

Later in the year, as "The New Roof" became popular, Hopkinson issued "The Raising: A New Song for Federal Mechanics." He signed it, as he had signed several other items, as "A. B." That was a nice reminder of the fact that he had received Penn's first diploma, and that he himself held an A. B. degree, and it was also a shorter form of his earlier pseudonym "A. B. C. D. E."

The new song kept up some of the imagery of "the New Roof", and included the following refrain:

"For our Roof we will raise, and our Song still shall be
A Government firm, and our Citizens free."

Hopkinson, great propagandist that he was, kept hammering at his argument that opposition to ratification was the product of insane minds. In September, the Pennsylvania Gazette printed his piece "Some Thoughts on the Diseases of the Mind:

"Now there are but two possible ways by which the mind can discharge its contents... by action or words. He referred to the written process as "the scribbling itch." He spoke of "Mens insane in corpore sano''.

At some point, Mercy may well have begun to read her late brother's situation into those pieces of Hopkinson's writings which played with the idea of insanity.

How else would she have read the following?

"Thus when I shall explain to your majesty the cause by which a philosopher in a fever becomes a madman, and in lethargy, a fool, you will know all the systems of spirit and matter, separate or conjoined: you will fully comprehend the cause of waking, sleeping and dreaming; you will see the source from whence the artist derives his fancy, and the poet his fire."

In the 18th Century, there was considerable fear that insanity was familial.

In the verbal wars, Hopkinson himself did not escape unscathed. "Scarcely a Day passes without my appearance in the Newspapers in every scandalous Garb that scribbling Vengeance can furnish."

Shortly after the battle for ratification was won, David Ramsay's History of the American Revolution was first published, a two-volume history of the United States, which the author had been saving for this occasion. Ramsay himself had been an active advocate for the new constitution.

Ramsay's work listed, in "nearly alphabetical" order, 22 of the most distinguished writers who had written in favor of the rights of America, along with 5 printers of newspapers, 5 major figures among the clergy, and 7 leading literary figures. James Otis appears only as one name in that list of distinguished writers, along with that of James Wilson. Neither Mercy Otis Warren nor her husband received any mention in Ramsay's work at all. But David Ramsay had this to say about Francis Hopkinson:

"As literature had in the first instance favoured the revolution, so in its turn, the revolution promoted literature... Many incidents afforded materials for the favourites of the muses, to display their talents. Even burlesquing royal proclamations, by parodies and doggerel poetry, had great effects on the minds of the people. A celebrated historian has remarked, that the song of Lillibullero forwarded the revolution of 1688 in England. It may be truly affirmed, that similar productions produced similar effects in America.

Francis Hopkinson rendered essential service to his country, by turning the artillery of wit and ridicule on the enemy."

I've seen no record of Mercy's reaction, but what could have angered her more than to have her brother treated as no more than one person in a rather long list, to have her own work overlooked, and to have her husband and herself completely ignored, while Hopkinson's writings were praised in this manner?

We do have evidence that a couple of years later, Mrs. Warren was smarting from what she perceived to have been male attacks, which she believed to have been related to her own gender. In 1790, Mrs. Warren wrote a poem addressed to another female poet and spoke of how a "sister's hand may wrest a female pen from the bold outrage of repressive men." (Obviously, she was so angry that that sentence is not quite coherent, although her sense of outrage is clear.)

Meanwhile, Mercy went back to writing or re-writing her own History.

Mercy believed that the real revolution had begun with the citizens of Massachusetts, and with her own family. In this, she was not mistaken.

Mercy was first, and above all else, an Otis. It was an old family, which claimed descent from the Mayflower., Her father, James Otis, Sr., was a man of substance, and a leading citizen. Later, Mercy and her husband held land in that first town of Plymouth. Mercy's brother and her husband were classmates at Harvard.

Please allow me here to tell you what Mercy might have told you about her brother.

Until he went to Harvard college, one of Mercy's brothers, James Otis the younger was schooled by private tutors. [For the rest of this paper, I will be referring to the son and not to the father, so I am going to drop the Jr. at this point.] Although it was somewhat unusual for that day and age, James' sister studied right alongside him. Of course, she was not allowed to accompany him to Harvard College. When her brother left for school, Mercy Otis continued to work on her own education.

James Otis was the first great voice on behalf of the American side of the revolution which produced the United States of America. In 1761, he resigned his position with the English Crown as King's Advocate General, in order to argue that Writs of Assistance were unconstitutional under Britain's unwritten constitution. George III had come to power in 1760. A new King meant that old writs had to be renewed. James Otis argued, in 1761, that a writ of assistance was unconstitutional and could not be enforced without particularly describing the property to be searched, a freedom later to be safeguarded by our Constitution's Fourth Amendment. The legal effect of Otis' argument was to frighten the Crown's Attorney, who later became the Crown's Governor, Thomas Hutchinson, who sent to England for additional precedents, thereby delaying the matter for some months. Although the case ended with a finding upholding the writ, the practical long-term effect of Otis' argument was to ignite a revolution.

John Adams, writing 56 years later, remembered his own experience of that speech, and said that Otis had been "a flame of fire." Said Adams: "Then and there the child Independence was born." Professor Charles Page Smith, another of our greatest contemporary historians, speaks of how "Otis, with his flair and fire, his magic power over men's minds and sensibilities, drew everyone's attention." He tells of how there were "three hours of eloquence". (Apparently, those ermined judges allowed longer arguments than the ones I deal with.) John Adams went home and wrote in his diary that "every man... appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance."

Three years after that speech, in 1764, Otis published a pamphlet entitled "The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted And Proved." Otis argued that as a matter of natural rights, "Nature has placed all in a state of equality and perfect freedom..." To his everlasting glory, he made it clear that he was talking about all races and both genders. "The Colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black."

In questioning any theory of "social compact" as justification for a form of government, Otis asked who spoke as guardian for women and children, and went even further to argue: "Are not women born as free as men? Would it not be infamous to assert that the ladies are all slaves by nature?" And still later in the same work: "if upon the abdication all were reduced to a state of nature, had not the Apple women and orange girls as good a right to give their respectable suffrages for a new king as the philosophers and politicians?" Otis concludes by putting all power in the people, by divine gift, with the people placing that power "in trust" with the government, subject to a requirement that they be consulted for their good, and the people's good. The People's good is the end (or purpose) of government itself. This requires a proxy or delegation from all for purposes of taxation, and there can be no taxation without representation in "the general legislature of the nation in some proportion to their number and estates," but even that would not provide the benefits of having a local legislature as well. I have summarized James Otis' thought at some length to make it obvious that he clearly married the revolution at an early date to the doctrine of the equality of all human beings, with the purpose of government being the welfare of the people, and with some degree of parliamentary representation. The Parliament, in turn, was required to be split off from the executive. Sovereignty originated in, and to some extent remained in, the people.

The initial theoretical basis for the American system of government can be said to rest on three legs. First, a theory of human equality. Second, the concept of certain rights against the state, even in the face of joint legislative and executive action, with an independent judiciary as a form of protection for those rights. And third, a democratic base, ultimately to be understood as one-man one-vote. To these, were eventually added a popularly elected and independent executive, and a popularly elected bicameral legislature.

James Otis has a fine claim to have been midwife to the first two of these initial three. And James Otis was hardly in a position to debate the niceties of specific forms of democracy very easily while George III still ruled an America which had not yet revolted.

James Otis was thus the first notable public voice in America to join the growing public discontent in the colonies to a theory of human equality. In doing so, he predates James Wilson who predates Thomas Jefferson. Otis did not create the underlying political theory, but what he accomplished was more than enough.

James Otis' great legal argument made it clear that when we first adopted the creed that "all men" were born free and equal, the word "men" included both men and women, as well as blacks and whites. To have expressed that equality so clearly; to have argued for the unconstitutionality of the British impositions (which is to say, that there are some areas, including search-and-seizure, within which governmental authority may not act); to have grounded his argument in the popular cause of opposing the British impositions; and to have made these arguments before the shooting started, all this was surely more than sufficient to earn James Otis his great place in history. James Otis' sister, Mercy Otis Warren, was resolved to make certain that nothing would allow the American people to forget what they owed to her brother.

Her first effort on his behalf was as a playwright. Her plays were not written to be performed. At that time, a student at Yale who actually participated as an actor in a play was subject to expulsion from the school. Nevertheless, the plays of Mercy Otis Warren did circulate, and were read. In her play entitled "The Group," a satire on the Colonial revolt, her brother is portrayed as Brutus, and he and his fellows are "resolved to die or see their country free."

Otis was also portrayed as Brutus in a fragment called "The Defeat."

In the spring of 1775, John Adams called Mercy Otis Warren "an incomparable satirist," praise which she threw back in his face many years later along with a reminder of Adams' own claim that he never used flattery. She reminded him of the words he had once used to describe her, which included:

"God almighty (I use a broad style) has intrusted her with powers for the good of the world, which in the course of his Providence he bestows on very few of the human race; that instead of being a fault to use them, it would be criminal to neglect them." He also used the word "immortal," on her behalf. But that was in those early years.

Mercy wrote patriotic poems and songs for the revolution. Her "Massachusetts Song of Liberty" has been adjudged by one of our contemporaries to have been one of "the most popular patriotic songs of the time." I call your attention particularly to the following verse from that song:

Let tyrants and minions presume to despise, Encroach on our Rights, and make Freedom their prize; The fruits of their rapine they never shall keep, Their vengeance may nod, yet how short is her sleep.

At some level at least, vengeance was something that Mercy prized.

She began to grumble at an early date. In 1778, in connection with her poem "O Tempora, O Mores", she wrote about the "remarkable depravity of manners in the United States."

Mrs. Warren's 20th-century editor, Benjamin Franklin V, is not kind to Mrs. Warren. He judges her "a mediocre poet at best." Mr. Franklin is not overly enthusiastic about her plays, either. "Warren's intentions were better than her artistry, however; her plays -- -- that could never be performed -- -- lack character development, richness of plot and adequate structure." He does, however, grant that "Despite the obvious deficiencies, Warren's plays, and especially her first one are historically important." It is her history that has brought her back to the attention of scholars.

Mrs. Warren embarked upon her self-elected role as historian of the American Revolution, in full confidence that she was the rightful author. Her current editor judges her to have been "perfectly placed" and she saw herself as "consisted by nature, friendship and every social tie, with many of the first patriots, and most influential characters on the continent; in the habits of confidential and epistolary intercourse with several gentlemen employed abroad in the most distinguished states, and with other source admitted to the highest grades of rank and distinction, I had the best means of information..."

As she proceeded, others helped gather in her nets. Her friend Abigail Adams recruited her husband John Adams as a correspondent.

It was to Mercy Otis Warren that John Adams explained his new theories of government. Adams believed in a bicameral legislature, coupled with a strong executive and an independent judiciary. Mrs. Warren did not quite understand, or at least did not agree with, his position. To her, a single house for a legislature was sufficient, and she feared a single executive, as being almost "monarchial." She held this position at the outset of hostilities, and she was still arguing that position during her attempt to defeat ratification of our present Constitution. She had very little respect for those she called "system makers."

By marriage, of course, Mercy Otis Warren was a Warren. Her husband was General James Warren. He became president pro-tempore of the Massachusetts provincial Congress in 1775.

By an unlikely coincidence, he had succeeded to that office on the death of his predecessor, the martyr of Bunker Hill (or more accurately, Breed's Hill), his unrelated namesake, General Joseph Warren. Mercy wrote a poem: "To the Honourable James Warren, Esq., President of the Congress of Massachusetts on the Death of Major General Joseph Warren, Who Fell at the Battle of Bunker Hill June 17th 1775."

Mercy credits her husband with originating the idea of the Committees of Correspondence, and reports that he passed that suggestion on to Sam Adams in her own living room. Mrs. Warren's husband later became Paymaster General of the Continental Army.

Mrs. Warren's manuscript for her history of the great revolt lay dormant for some years after its substantial completion. Although first published in 1805, the text claimed that it was not intended to deal with events after 1801. Mrs. Warren was 77 at publication.

Mrs. Warren's "History" comes to two volumes and 713 pages in its current modern edition. There are some things missing from Mercy's history. It is these lacunae, these deliberate omissions, which are of particular interest.

There are two names which do not appear in the main text itself, but where the author herself has supplied a footnote, by way of an asterisk, to identify the person's name. It is as if she did not want to mention these persons' names, but in each instance thought about the matter after the books were substantially complete, and decided that she was willing to include a footnote reference to each person, but was unwilling to sully her manuscript by inscribing either of these miscreants in her book.

From our present perspective, the most remarkable of these two almost missing names is that of Alexander Hamilton. She discusses Hamilton, but his name appears only in the margin, accompanied by that asterisk.

Hamilton had been a guest in her home. In 1791, a year after publication of Mercy's "Complete Poems," Hamilton had written to Mercy Otis Warren, praising her work as a dramatist above that of any mere male. "Not being a poet myself," said Hamilton, "I am in the less danger of mortification at the idea that in the career of dramatic composition at the least, female genius in the United States has outstripped the male." Flattery got him nowhere. Mercy could hardly forget that he had been a principal defender of the United States Constitution, in his guise as an author of the Federalist papers, and otherwise, and she wanted no one to remember him.

Hamilton is referred to in the text itself, but not by name, as a "young officer of foreign extraction." He is discussed in the context of "the introduction of new projects, which were thought designed to enrich and ennoble some of the officers of the army." He is simultaneously praised and damned as "an adventurer of bold genius, active talents, and fortunate combinations." Reference is made to the change "from his birth to the exalted station to which he was listed" and she provides a passing reference to "the spirit of favoritism in American arrangements." As you can see she does not quite call him a foreign bastard who married well, and rose through favoritism. She made her antipathy to Mr. Hamilton perfectly clear, but she would not speak his name.

A major item buttressing Mrs. Warren's anti-Federalist sympathies is also clear. One of Hamilton's principal sins appears to have been advocacy of "a funding system...which never could be understood". She also inveighed against "a public debt....which was probably never intended to be paid ."

Mrs. Warren could bring herself to include Alexander Hamilton in her history, at least for the purpose of attacking him, even if she had difficulty in mentioning his moniker, outside of that footnote. She was not prepared to do either Francis Hopkinson or James Wilson the exact same discourtesy. She had other plans for them. She left Wilson and Hopkinson out of her history entirely.

Mercy's history contains a similar oddity in the case of Gouverneur Morris, who is identified in the main body of the manuscript only as the predecessor of Monroe as American representative in France, the "former Minister," without a name, who is criticized as having fed old jealousies between France and the USA. Here too, an asterisk is added after the fact, naming Gouverneur Morris, but only in the footnote. As in each of these asterisked footnotes, only the name is supplied.

It may be useful to know that the anti-Federalists seem to have considered James Wilson's principal allies to have been Gouverneur Morris and Robert Morris.

Which brings us to Robert Morris, who was the principal funder of the American revolution, and who operated in conjunction with Hyam Salomon, his broker, and James Wilson, his lawyer. Robert Morris is another one who was given the asterisk treatment by Mercy Otis Warren. In his case, Mrs. Warren also provided a mention of him in the main body of her work. But he too is present only for the purpose of being ridiculed. She mocks him as the correspondent of a man looking to bribe United States Congressmen, Mrs. Warren snidely noting that "Governor Johnstone doubtless thought he knew his men." Mrs. Warren also referred to Robert Morris as a Pennsylvania Congressman who was interested in "very profitable contracts." When she adds the footnote asterisk for Robert Morris, it is as if she had forgotten that at a different point she had already stooped to put his name in the main text, for the sole purpose of slugging him harder.

Neither James Wilson nor Francis Hopkinson appear anywhere in any of Mrs. Warren's three volumes. As far as Mercy Otis Warren was concerned, these two were non-persons. In order to accomplish that end, and in order to reduce Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris to mere asterisks, Mrs. Warren had to take at least one additional step. She had to exclude any listing of the names of the signers of the Declaration of Independence (which she did), and she also had to leave out the names of the signers of the Constitution of the United States (who are also missing from her history). It was especially easy for her to do so because neither James Otis nor James Warren nor Mercy Otis Warren had signed either document. So leaving out those two lists was painless; it was simple and easy, and a cheap thing to do.

She was certainly not the only factor in removing Francis Hopkinson and James Wilson from history, but Mercy Otis Warren did play her part.

After completing most of this paper, I was given an opportunity to examine Mrs. Warren's correspondence file at the Massachusetts Historical Society, courtesy of Yale University, the Newberry Library, and the efforts of my daughter. This additional information, coupled with information previously known, makes it even clearer that, as a piece of political slander, Mercy's History was brilliantly conceived and ably carried out. For example, John Hancock, who had cut her husband out of political leadership in Massachusetts, was, she privately admitted, "odious" to her. She understood that he had to be attacked in some depth, rather than simply being ignored, and she did so.

I don't think Hopkinson escaped her eye in the period after ratification. She wrote disparagingly to General Knox about being "on the dawn of an infant Empire," which was probably a comment on the attitude expressed in Hopkinson's final Ode, about which more in a moment.

George Washington was too beloved a figure for her History to even hint at Mercy's true feelings about him; she left those ideas to more private correspondence. In 1795, she wrote:

"When writing to an esteemed friend I do not check the free communication of sentiment, you must therefore excuse me if I smile at the dreams of Washington in hankering for a crown as many think he does; or if I own myself hurt that the wane of life should also be the wane of fame to the President of the United States whose character I have highly respected. He has long been the idol of the people and had it not been for his Indian war,-- his British treaty,-- his coldness in the cause of France,-- his love of adulation,-- his favoritism,-- and in many instances his injudicious appointments,-- he might have retained the idolatrous worship paid him until sickened by the fumes of flattery and sickened with the cares of state he had a second time taken his leave of public life with a solemn declaration never again to return to the arduous task."

Even in writing to her closest confidants, she usually exercised great caution. She had explained why in a letter written to Elbridge Gerry back in 1783, "I could tell you some very surprising truths relative to your state, but letters are dangerous vehicles of intelligence."

She tried to wangle an appointment for her husband and/or her so under the first two presidents, to no avail. One son died as an army volunteer in a raid on the Indians, a practice she had warned against in her writings. She blamed George Washington for his Indian wars. In 1793, she wrote that what she called "the little talent for poetry which I once possessed had been buried in the grave of my dear children."

In the same letter, she describes her vision of what the first four years of the new government had done to the country: "There is no other test of merit but what is possessed by the adroit financier, the hungry [previous word is uncertain HJS]> speculator, and him who can accumulate the most millions from banks, funds, annuities and places. But I leave them to their portion....It is a consolation that there is a better inheritance for the upright and that the good man however he may be buffeted here will reap his reward when the unjust Judge will have no voice in the decision." She underlined "adroit financier" and "speculator" and "unjust Judge" She seems to have been thinking about Hamilton and Morris and Judge Wilson. It is clear that they had not simply escaped her attention.

Mercy Otis Warren portrayed her brother as the "first martyr to American freedom." It is that picture of James Otis which some of us met up with in our childhood. A fuller version of that reality is somewhat painful.

James Otis had shown signs of bipolar disorder, almost from the beginning, and perhaps that initial glorious speech which sparked the revolution was aided by a touch of hyper-mania. Afterwards, he cycled downward. There came a time when he could no longer be trusted to run a meeting. John Adams inscribed his view that Otis' irritability had broken up a fine mind.

All this was prior to 1769, which was when Otis engaged in a public quarrel with a British Revenue Collector named John Robinson. Otis placed an advertisement asking for personal satisfaction in his quarrel, and followed that up the very next night, with a visit to a coffee house frequented by the Crown's agents. There, Robinson struck Otis with a cane. The lights went out; Otis was bludgeoned in the dark, and his head cut open. A brain injury had been added to the mental illness. By the next year, 1770, although there were times when James Otis was lucid, he could no longer serve as a legislator, and never again did so. (John Adams was his initial replacement.) Yet, early in 1771, John Adams noted with surprise that Otis seemed as "steady and social and sober as ever, and more so." Then Otis deteriorated again. He was committed to his father's family. He wandered. He was recommitted. It is said that Mercy, and only Mercy, in his last years, could calm him. One day in 1783, he was at home, leaning against the family fireplace. A bolt of lightning struck the house. It traveled down the chimney, and it electrocuted him.

Mercy's own story is colored by several tragedies, as well as the losses that mark any woman who outlives her own family, with the added pathos of blindness, dictating polemics to secretaries. Occasionally, there were good times. The Warrens had been fervent supporters of Thomas Jefferson, and to some extent came back into their own with his election. The Federalists were out of favor. Mercy was once again a respectable figure when her book came out.

Mercy Otis Warren's comments and silences about John Adams in her History so upset John Adams that he demanded she retract and correct them.

Adams knew that it was important to try to create a record contrary to Mercy's History.

There ensued a bitter correspondence between the two, consisting of hundreds of pages when printed at the end of the 19th century. Mrs. Warren refused to back down. John Adams might have forgiven the Warrens for their position on the Constitution, or their mixed sympathies with respect to Shays' Rebellion, or even been forgiven for siding with Thomas Jefferson, but Mercy's comments on John Adams were going too far. With one minor exception, Adams limited his corrections to those involving himself.

Adams offered this final judgment on the whole:

"Mrs. Warren, it is my opinion, and that of all others of any long experience that I have conversed with, that your History has been written to the taste of the 19th century, and accommodated to gratify the passions, prejudices and feelings of the party who are now predominant."

In response, Mrs. Warren claimed that she had ceased writing before Mr. Adams became President, although she admitted elsewhere in the correspondence that "I revised my history for the press, which I often did." Her principal defense, however, was that she had told the truth about what she had said. She made no mention of what she had left out.

Mr. Adams spoke of the "popular prejudices and the falsehoods and slanders which such prejudices always engender and which Mrs. Warren has manifestly countenanced, encouraged and flattered in her History." He spoke of her "envenomed satire, under the grave title of a history."

At one point, Mrs. Warren reached for her gender as a shield against his attacks, speaking of herself as "a writer... whose sex alone ought to have protected her from the grossness of your invectives." She considered herself the victim of a conspiracy, which was practicing "authoricide" against her, a "combination" to sink her into oblivion.

Much later, Abigail tried to patch things up between her husband and this woman who had once been her best friend, just as she also tried to patch things up between John and Thomas Jefferson. Somehow, with the help of Governor Gerry, one of the constitutional convention's non-signers, as a sort of mutually-agreed-upon arbiter, peace was made.

Shortly before her death, Mrs. Warren complained to Mr. Adams that someone was trying to deny her authorship of one of the anonymous plays in which she had portrayed her brother as Brutus. Adams asked to have his recollection refreshed as to the identity of the real parties in her satire. And then John Adams, at that time the man who almost never left home, trudged up the steps of the Boston Atheneum, took up a pen, and then and there inscribed (writing on the Atheneum's own copy of Mrs. Warren's play) the true identity of the satire's subjects, and his personal certification that Mrs. Warren was its author. Perhaps, at the end, he remembered that in one of those plays he had been portrayed as one of the conscientious roman senators, along with Sam Adams as Cassius. John Adams respected history too much not to try to straighten it out, his way.

Mercy died on October 19, 1814, at the age of 86.

Our latest historians have come to realize that Jefferson's Administration helped collect enough subscribers to ensure the original publication of Mercy's History, but some have looked to the reviews of her books, to try to gauge her influence. That's a serious mistake. Some have also looked solely at the so-called important works of history that competed with her or followed her. Another mistake. Mercy Warren had successfully broken the continuity of regard for the importance of certain people and events, and the popular hacks who followed, looking to create commercial compendiums or textbooks on American history, copied her concerns, and thereby missed some of the most important figures and events in our history. Others followed their example. Most of her omissions won out.

Besides, it seems probable that many did not read her history at publication. Most people do not read all the books they buy. Most of the women, Mercy complained, read romances.

There came a time when one of America's most esteemed authors, the poet Joel Barlow, consulted her on a history he was writing. There came a time when a new Governor of Massachusetts discovered that some of the early historical documentation in the State House had disappeared, and consulted her about recreating the lost records. Past obloquy must have been forgotten.

Sometime in the 1830s, there appeared C. B. Taylor's "A Universal History of the U.S.", a 537-page work, "designed as a family and school book." Wilson and Hopkinson are present only in the list of signers of the Declaration of Independence. They are otherwise unidentified, seemingly no more important than Button Gwinnett.

Taylor did know about Alexander Hamilton, so Hamilton is resurrected, which means we are told about the second of the nation's struggles over a national bank, with no knowledge that there ever was a first such struggle.

(That's the way I was taught about a century later, and more than half a century ago. Weren't you?) For examples, the story of the funding of the revolution by Wilson, Morris, and Salomon, et al., is missing. So is the role of the manufacturing base Wilson helped build to create the sinews of war.

Also missing is any mention of actual civilian control of the military, except for the Congressional permission for the shelling of Boston, which thankfully never had to be exercised, but did serve to chase the British out.

As to James Otis, his actions prior to 1763 have been time-shifted, to allow for Taylor's conclusion that the North American colonies' "loyalty and attachment to the interest of Britain were not in the smallest degree impaired, down to the period of the peace of Paris, in 1763." That way, no one could be accused of having been in any way disloyal to Britain during wartime, i.e. the French and Indian War.

Taylor, finding that Adams the Federalist felt that Otis was a hero, picked up without attribution Mercy Otis Warren's conclusion that Otis was "justly considered as the first martyr to American liberty." Taylor was obviously not aware of the history of Otis' mental illness. In retelling the story of Otis' bar-room brawl, his attackers have become "hired" and "assassins" (which was Mercy's own word). He bought into Mercy's fable that this attack was the original source of Otis' mental difficulties.

"James Otis, the most active, bold and influential patriot of the day, having published, under his proper signature, some severe strictures on the conduct of the officers of the crown, was assaulted in a public room, by a band of hired ruffians, with swords and bludgeons, and being covered with wounds, was left for dead. The assassins made their escape, and took refuge on board the king's ships in the harbor. Mr. Otis survived, but the lamp of his understanding, which had glowed with such effulgence, was overcast with clouds and darkness."

Thus, in less than three decades, Mercy had become a long-time winner in most of her battles with the Muse of History. It is not true that history is always written by the winners. It is often true that history is won by those who choose to write it.

In real life, Francis Hopkinson's trial by impeachment did not deter President George Washington from appointing him, and the Senate confirming him, as United States District Court Judge for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, but he was dead only two years later.

The Colombian magazine, which had published some of his early poetry, provided an unsigned obituary, which provided in part:

"The various causes which contributed to the establishment of the independence and federal government of United States, will not be fully traced, unless much is ascribed to the remarkable influence of the ridicule which he poured forth from time to time, upon the enemies of those great political events."

Hopkinson had lived long enough to organize the first great Fourth of July celebration under the new Constitution. This was held in 1788, in the nation's then Capitol, Philadelphia.

It was not a celebration formally authorized by the new government. Neither the city, nor the state, nor the federal government, issued any edict. But everyone seemed to participate. It was all done on a voluntary basis; it was all paid for out of contributions.

Hopkinson drafted a speech saying that "the people have by their valour obtained the right and the opportunity of forming a government for themselves." He wrote of a "government whose essence is the rights of the people." And then he decided, after all, to leave the speech-making to someone else.

Hopkinson did provide an Ode for the occasion which began:

"Oh! for a muse of fire! To mount the skies, and to a listening world proclaim Behold! Behold! an Empire rise!"

He arranged a great parade. It seemed as if everyone had representatives who marched. All the nabobs were included. The carpenters and the architects marched. The wheelwrights marched. The tin-plate workers, the hatters, the skinners, the tallow-spreaders, the victuallers, the stay- makers -- all of them marched. Hopkinson tells us that in the 85th rank of scheduled positions were the "clergy of the different Christian denominations, with the Rabbi of the Jews."

Mr. Hopkinson himself put on a hat with a gold anchor, and a green ribbon, and a clerk marched behind him carrying a green bag filled with rolls of parchment, marked with the word "Admiralty." Mr. Wilson also marched. He and nine others linked arms, each carrying the flag of a different state, with Wilson bearing the flag of Pennsylvania.

Hopkinson tells us that there was only time between Monday morning and Thursday evening to build the machinery for the parade.

( The final state had not ratified until June 25th, leaving only eight days to get the news, decide upon the parade, and make the preparations.)

Included in that parade's machinery was the Fair Ship Union, scudding on wheels, 33 feet in its length, demonstrating that its system of sails could be raised and lowered, and bearing 20 guns.

The printers had a float which was 9 feet square, complete with operating presses. As the parade moved, the pressmen struck off and distributed copies of Hopkinson's Ode for the great occasion.

One of the floats seems to have been Hopkinson's favorite. It was mounted on a carriage, which was drawn by white horses. On that carriage, there was a 10-foot dome, supported by 13 Corinthian pillars. It was clearly identified as "The New Roof" or "Grand Federal Edifice." The makers of that New Roof remembered who had designed the fabric for our flag. They also remembered the words from Hopkinson's song, "A government firm and our citizens free." So they punningly placed these words at the base of the structure on which the new roof rested: "In Union, the Fabric Stands Firm."

In addition to the 13 pillars (only 10 of which were complete, because three states had not yet ratified) they placed 13 stars on the frieze. And, oh yes, the Jeffersonians were remembered.

A handsome cupola was included, five feet high. And on top of that, there was a figure of Plenty, complete with cornucopia, which added another 3 and 1/2 feet, and the total structure stood 36 feet high. Later that day, when the marching was finished, that New Roof structure was placed in the middle of a 500-foot circle, and celebrated with cider and beer.

Francis Hopkinson served as the Chairman of Arrangements for that great day.

The principal address on that first Fourth of July under the new order was, of course, given by Mr. Justice James Wilson. He spoke of how "A progressive state is necessary to the happiness and perfection of man." He spoke of the "primary duty" of voting. "Let no one say that he is but a single citizen; and that his ticket will be but one in the box. That one ticket may turn the election." He said other fine things as well, but someone miscued the scheduled 13 volleys of gunfire, and much of it was drowned out.

There is a record that some years later, the Justices of the United States Supreme Court had occasion to dine at the home of Mercy Otis Warren during the time that Mr. Justice Wilson sat on that court. There seems to be no record of what anyone said that night. Mercy Otis Warren had not yet published her history.

David Ramsay's history demonstrates that he knew that the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought at Breed's Hill, but he also seemed aware that everyone was already using the wrong name and would continue to do so. Your children's children will remember Betsy Ross. They will never remember the name of Francis Hopkinson.

Mercy Otis Warren will long be remembered as the first female historian of the United States of America. As for you, please don't forget Francis Hopkinson or James Wilson on the one hand, or James Otis on the other.

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