Another example of Warren’s
republican bona fides, though slightly more oblique than those discussed
already, can be found in section eighteen of her Observations. In spite of various elements of the proposed
constitution that she considered to be blatantly monarchical (more on that
later), and in spite of the fact that as she wrote Observations the document in question was on its way to being
ratified, Warren contended that her fellow countrymen were not prepared to
erect a monarchy of their own in place of the federal government that then
existed. Her fellow Americans, she wrote, “Are not yet generally prepared with
the ungrateful Israelites to ask a King, nor are their spirits sufficiently
broken to yield the best of their olive grounds to his servants, and to see
their sons appointed to run before his chariots.” This reference to the
Israelites, olive grounds, and chariots is worth taking note of, both because
it presents a rare occasion of Warren making use of an explicitly Biblical
example, and because it connects her to the writings of another advocate for
republicanism who worked from within the American context.
In the first case, it bears
explaining that the story she attempted to relate is a much-abridged fragment
of the Old Testament Books of Samuel. Therein the Israelites, seeking security
in response to being surrounded by strong and aggressive neighbors (like the
Philistines and the Amalekites), requested that the Prophet Samuel anoint
a king so that they might gain strength through the centralization of political
authority, and be “like other nations.” Samuel initially viewed this as a
rejection of his abilities as a leader, and attempted to dissuade the
Israelites in no uncertain terms from seeking to interpose a monarch between
themselves and their God. Though Samuel eventually bowed to the desires of his
people, and via divine revelation chose Saul, of the Tribe of Benjamin, to
reign over the Israelites, it was from among the prophet’s arguments against
monarchy that Warren drew her example in Observations.
Considering her upbringing in
Puritan-inflected Massachusetts, and the fact that her childhood tutor was a
Congregationalist minister, it is perhaps not so surprising that Mercy Otis
Warren was familiar with the Bible and could draw from it when the occasion
called. Still, understanding the Bible as a moral exemplar and reading it as a
political treatise would seem to require two different frames of mind. The
story of Samuel as king-maker is most obviously interpreted as reinforcing the
obedience the Israelites owed to God. Samuel did not agree to anoint a king
until God revealed that he had chosen Saul, and Saul’s downfall came as a
result of first slighting the role of Samuel as a priest and then refusing to
obey God’s wishes in dealing with the defeated Amalekites. Taking Samuel’s
initial rejection of monarchy as a tacit, Biblical endorsement for
republicanism would have required a somewhat unconventional understanding of
the significance of the Old Testament. That Warren felt this was an apt
interpretation, and that putting it to use amidst an argument against what she
viewed as a monarchical level of political centralization in America would help
convince her audience, says something about her sensibilities as well as those
she perceived in her fellow Americans. Perhaps she, like certain other
essayists in the American tradition, believed that widespread, class-spanning
knowledge of the Bible made it an ideal vehicle through which to impart a
political or philosophical statement. Or perhaps she assumed that making
reference to such a hallowed text, even in passing, added a moral weight to the
case she was trying to make which discussions of Don Quixote, Spanish history,
and French philosophy couldn’t manage. The fact that Warren made no other
Biblical references in the entirety of Observations
makes the thing rather difficult to account for. Yet, for it being an
exception, it would surely be a mistake to dismiss it out of hand.
While it perhaps cannot
definitively account for the presence of a brief paraphrase from the Old
Testament in Warren’s Observations,
it is at the very least something of a curiosity that the same retelling of the
Israelites’ first foray into kingship also appeared in Thomas Paine’s ardently
republican Common Sense. In light of
the fact that numerous detailed and thoroughly readable discussions of Paine’s
seminal text do exist and are readily available (*loud throat-clearing noise*),
it will suffice here to simply say that Common
Sense argued in favor of the independence of the American colonies,
specifically in accordance with the principles of 18th century
republicanism. Among the assertions that Paine brought to bear on that count,
which in their multitude included references to warlords, prostitution, and the
untrustworthiness of heredity, quotations and/or paraphrases of the Old Testament
were very much in evidence. Of the latter, the story of Samuel and the
Israelites’ plea for monarchy was the most thoroughly fleshed-out. Paine, as it
happened, seized upon Samuel’s rejection of kingship, with perhaps more glee
than was really healthy, and described at length the ills that the prophet
believed his people were preparing to call upon themselves. These included, in
the ninth paragraph of the second section of Common Sense, the assertion on Samuel’s part that a king, “Will
take your sons and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his
horsemen, and some shall run before his chariots [,]” and that, “He will take
your fields and your olive yards, even the best of them, and give them to his
servants [.]” Though greater in length and more elaborately phrased, Paine’s
invocation of the story of Samuel contains two very specific elements in common
with Warren’s (the aforementioned olive grounds and running before chariots).
In addition, both Warren and Paine echoed Samuel’s denunciation of kingship
from within the same fundamental philosophical context; that is, the rejection
of a voluntary submission to arbitrary authority.
Though the immediate and obvious
conclusion to these similarities would likely be that Warren had read Common Sense and endorsed Paine’s
characterization of Samuel’s story, it is entirely possible that their shared
invocation of a specific incident from the Old Testament was purely
coincidental. In fairness, Mercy Otis Warren and Thomas Paine did not reference
the Prophet Samuel’s disdain for monarchy in quite the same way. Paine, writing
in late 1775, seemed intent on demonstrating to his audience that God had
always scorned monarchy by drawing attention to the dialogue between the
Israelites, Samuel, and God himself. His hope, no doubt, was to leverage the
moral weight of the Bible in favor of republicanism by showing his American
audience how innately hostile to monarchy their own religion truly was. Warren,
writing at some point early in 1788, deployed her reference to Samuel and the
Israelites’ request for a king with far less emphasis. Her fellow Americans,
she wrote, were not like the ancient Israelites because they had chosen to reject the prospect of monarchy, in
spite of the, “Discord and civil convulsions” they may have suffered as a
result. Paine had also referenced the Israelites’ acceptance of the costs of
monarchy in a negative sense, thereby exhorting his fellow Americans not to
repeat the same error, but his attention was mainly focused on the passion with
which Samuel had attacked the idea of kingship. Warren did not even mention
Samuel’s name, though she was clearly referencing the same Old Testament source
material. It therefore may have been the case that Warren came to the story of
Samuel entirely independent of Paine, though her own reading of the Biblical
text, and sought to incorporate a reference to the Israelites as a form of
shorthand, owing to how widely the Bible was read in 18th century
America.
Then again,
considering how well-read Warren is known to have been, it would seem rather
odd for her not to have read Paine’s Common
Sense. It was, and remains, one of the most popular documents ever printed
in the United States, certain estimates placing its first year publication
numbers as high as 500,000 copies. In light of how involved Warren was with
revolutionary politics in her native Massachusetts, as well as her
correspondence with numerous other members of the Founding Generation (man of
whom, it is known for a fact, did read Common
Sense), for her to have missed perhaps the most seminal piece of
pro-independence literature would constitute an almost entirely inexplicable
hole in her otherwise thorough and wide-ranging personal knowledge. It thus seems
perhaps a little more than likely that Warren did read Common Sense, and as a consequence her invocation of Samuel’s
ancient critique of monarchy takes on an added significance. Specifically, it
implies some kind of affinity on Warren’s part for Paine’s writing, or perhaps
represents a gesture of ideological sympathy. Because, again, Common Sense and Observations do not regard the story of Samuel as kingmaker with
same emphasis, it is doubtful that Warren was attempting simply to repeat
something she had read and agreed with. It rather seems more likely that, by
choosing to repeat certain specific phrases that figured into Paine’s retelling
of Samuel’s rebuke, she was attempting to nod in the direction of Common Sense, thereby alerting her
audience to her familiarity with the document and her sympathy with its aims.
As with the possibility of a coincidence, this hypothesis is essentially
impossible to prove or disprove. That being said, it at least accounts for
Warren’s far-ranging knowledge and her active participation in the events of
the Revolution, and it certainly aligns with her demonstrated affinity for
republican philosophy.
Taking this
affinity into account, along with the clear examples that can be found in Observations of her regard for transparency
in government and freedom of the press, and her dislike for monarchy and the
principle of standing armies, a reasonably clear political portrait of Mercy
Otis Warren fairly emerges. She was certainly not a Federalist, as her critique
of the proposed constitution makes rather plain. Her demonstrated suspicion of
centralized authority, with a keen understanding of history at its core,
doubtless precluded her from regarding the new federal charter and the
government it proposed as anything more than a resurgence of the tried and
tested methods of tyranny that man had suffered under for centuries, and which
her countrymen had lately defeated in a long and bloody struggle. At the same
time, her regard for public service, belief in self-sacrifice, and desire to
promote accountability in government seemed to incline her toward supporting
the existing federal arrangement under the Articles of Confederation.
She demonstrated,
for instance, a preference for imposing measures like term limits on elected
offices. This doubtless disposed her toward strengthening the existing state
governments, many of which enshrined the rotation of offices in their
constitutions, and the Confederation Congress, which likewise recognized the
importance of disallowing extended mandates. Because the proposed constitution
placed no term limits on the offices it outlined, would have scrapped the
Articles of Confederation entirely, and appeared (to some people) as though it
was designed with the intention of weakening the states, it is not difficult to
understand why someone of Warren’s political character would have rejected its
ratification as strongly as she did. Describing her as an Anti-Federalist,
however, would do her a disservice; the term is rather nebulous, and was
initially intended as a pejorative. It would rather seem more accurate to
identify her, loosely, as a Whig. This was the label applied to critics of
absolute monarchy in 17th century England, adopted by early American
supporters of resistance to British parliamentary overreach, and cherished by
those who subsequently participated in the Revolution and came to regard with
passion and reverence the various republican principles for which they believed
it had been waged. Warren was certainly passionate about, and reverent of, the
Revolution, its significance, and legacy, as Observations makes quite plain, Thinking of her in 1788 as a Whig
on the old model, therefore, seems a reasonably fair assessment.
No doubt it seems
needlessly pedantic to attempt to determine where on the political spectrum of
Revolutionary America Mercy Otis Warren might have sat – and pointless too,
given the vagueness of the label finally arrived upon. Maybe it is, in and of
itself. Then again, because of the comparison it invites between her words and
expressions and those of her more publicised male counterparts, perhaps it
isn't such a futile exercise. Warren’s words should be compared to theirs, to
Jefferson’s, Washington’s, Hamilton’s, and Madison’s. She was one of them;
their equal in intellect, capacity for expression, and personal knowledge. As a
woman she was exiled from the halls of political power, but Warren was no less
a political being and no less capable of contributing her time, energy, and
talents to the growth and development of the American experiment. Judging from
the manner in which she referred to her male contemporaries in Observations, this was an opinion she
shared. In same way that other members of the Founding Generation cited in
their own works the efforts of their compatriots and opponents, in tones honeyed or barbed but always with a sense of familiarity, Warren praised and
castigated some of the men we've come to think of as the prime movers of the
Revolutionary Era in the text of her constitutional critique. Her husband,
James Warren, she characterized as, “An elegant writer,” while James Wilson was
sardonically praised for, “The fertility of his genius [.]” In section fourteen
she quoted James Bowdoin (1726-1790), 2nd Governor of Massachusetts,
with the preface that he was, “A gentleman of too much virtue and real probity
to suspect he has a design to deceive [,]” and in section eighteen she cited the
words of Luther Martin (1740-1826) in support of her argument against the secrecy
of the Philadelphia Convention. Her tone while invoking the names and words of
these men was not one of supplication or deference, but rather conveyed a sense
of rough camaraderie; she praised or pilloried them as they did each other.
This, among other things, seems a fair indication that she regarded herself as
belonging among the group – that she was engaged in the same political and
philosophical exercise as her male counterparts.
That being said,
the fact of Warren’s sex remains a central part of her historical identity. It
is arguably the reason she went largely ignored for most of the last 200 years,
and also why she has received so much attention in the last 40 or 50. She was a
politically active woman in an era that pre-dates feminism as we understand it
by five decades or more, and among the male-dominated pantheon of the American
founding she cannot help but stand out. Yet Warren was far from the only woman who
contributed to the creation of the United States of America. Many, as wives and
mothers, cooked for soldiers during the Revolution, served as nurses, looked
after their family’s property during their husband’s absence, and raised the
next generation of American soldiers, merchants, statesmen, and farmers. Others
– Abigail Adams most famously – provided invaluable counsel and advice to their
spouses, thereby guiding innumerable outcomes and shaping the history of the
United States in ways likely impossible to calculate. Though, as discussed at
the beginning of this series, Mrs. Adams was able to exert her influence on
public affairs only through the medium of her husband, exert it she nevertheless
did.
Other notable women,
like Deborah Sampson and Molly Corbin, even fought in the Revolutionary War,
though they were forced to hide their gender, or were allowed to serve only in
times of desperation. Mercy Otis Warren was a wife and mother, and no doubt
contributed to the course of the Revolution in both of these capacities in her
fair share. But she was also a very intelligent, knowledgeable, and politically
savvy individual, and it is through her pen that she sought to most effectively
mark her place in the world. In this she was undeniably unusual. Women in the
18th century did not customarily engage in feats of literature or
politics. But it is very important not to simply regard Warren as being
noteworthy solely because she was an exception to the rule. The fact should be marked
and acknowledged as such, but she should otherwise be understood as a member of
the Founding Generation in full and equal standing. Her writing was eloquent
and incisive, her perception keen, and her knowledge vast; fixating on the
petticoat obscures the mind at work beneath it. No doubt this was, again, one
of the reasons she so often wrote under a pseudonym. As a woman in the realm of
politics she would have been a curiosity, however well-respected by a small
group of friends and correspondents. Though we live – or perhaps only like to
think so – in a far more egalitarian era in the history of gender relations, it
still so very easy to commit this same act of well-meaning dismissal precisely
because we still persist in viewing her through the prism of the 18th century.
Mercy Otis Warren
was a political essayist.
Mercy Otis Warren
was a playwright.
Mercy Otis Warren
was a historian.
Mercy Otis Warren
was a woman.
No one of these
things should outweigh or obscure the others; all of them should be
acknowledged and celebrated. Reading the words she wrote in that fateful winter
of 1788 is a good place to start.
Observations on the
New Constitution, and on the Federal and State Conventions: http://www.samizdat.com/warren/observations.html
No comments:
Post a Comment