Most Americans don’t have to strain too hard to name at least a couple of our Founding Fathers, but what about our Founding Mothers? Some might say Abigail Adams or Dolley Madison, but they’re far less likely to identify the woman who wrote a comprehensive history of the American Revolution: Mercy Otis Warren.

Few women in the late 1700s were expected to even think about politics, let alone write about them, but she was more than up to the task. A member of two prominent Massachusetts political families, Warren was a scholar and thinker in her own right—a poetess, playwright, historian, and patriot of considerable renown.

She began her public service by anonymously publishing pro-republican plays and poems that adorned the front pages of newspapers. Some of these were included in her Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous, a compilation Alexander Hamilton found so impressive that he wrote: “In the career of dramatic composition at least, female genius in the United States has outstripped the Male.”

Her “Observations on the New Constitution,” appearing under the pseudonym A Columbia Patriot, and long thought to have been written by Constitutional Convention delegate Elbridge Gerry, details her critiques of the Constitution.

Warren’s final work was her three-volume History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, which is kept in publication today by Liberty Fund, and was recently profiled in Law & Liberty by Kirstin Anderson Birkhaug. It was one of the first and most comprehensive American histories of its kind and the only Anti-Federalist account of the War of Independence.

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Mercy Otis Warren surrounded herself with interesting people and interesting books. Most particularly, she was a student of the ancients, but she was also acquainted with the likes of Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Hume—Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World was a favorite. Her father served as a delegate to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, her brother James was a prominent early Revolutionary, and her husband became the speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. The Warren home in Plymouth has been deemed a “breeding place” for the American Revolution, as the Sons of Liberty passed in and out to plot and plan their resistance.

Apart from her own family, Warren seemed to be in correspondence and acquainted with just about everyone, including Martha and George Washington, first female historian Catherine Macaulay, and Abigail and John Adams. On her way to visit her husband during the war, Warren would sometimes stop at the Adams’s farm in Braintree to converse with Abigail. John Adams initially supported Warren’s writing, on occasion working to ensure her compositions appeared in the newspapers.

Unfortunately, Warren’s relationship with John Adams was later strained and experienced a break, both for personal and political reasons. Warren was a staunch republican (at times radically so) and believed “His Rotundity” became enthralled with monarchy and the British Constitution. He also declined to assist her favorite son in securing a political appointment and reacted quite badly to Warren writing in her History that his “prejudices and his passions were sometimes too strong for his sagacity and judgement.” Rather true to form, Adams sent her ten blistering letters, not always waiting for a response between postings. But, to his credit, Adams later reconciled with Warren at the urging of mutual friend Elbridge Gerry.

Warren knew many of the central cast members of the American Revolution, and, as a Massachusetts resident, often found herself at center stage. Leading up to the Revolution, she responded by depicting and commenting on, in a rather “on the nose” fashion, what she was witnessing through pro-republican plays and poems, before later writing her History.

The Adulateur pitted the Machiavellian loyalist Governor Thomas Hutchinson against the noble Massachusetts patriots (some of whom just so happen to be Warren’s friends and relatives) and peaked with the Boston Massacre. The Defeat followed the publication of the Hutchinson-Oliver letters in which Hutchinson, writing to his lieutenant governor, suggested that, “an abridgement of English liberties in colonial administration” might be appropriate. And The Group centered on those greedy and traitorous counselors who had accepted royal appointments rather than, consistent with the principle of consent of the governed, be elected by the lower colonial house.

While they are generally categorized as plays, a modern reader might not recognize Warren’s dramatic works as such. They are short in length, character development, and plotlines, as they were never intended to be a source of entertainment (the performance of plays was banned under Boston law). Their purpose was more akin to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense: pamphlets meant to influence the developing political conversation, and are replete with lines like, “That man dies well who sheds his blood for freedom.”

As these plays demonstrate, Warren was a staunch republican, as well as an adherent of natural law and an upholder of American principles and the American national character. For example, in her “Observations,” she wrote that:

man is born free, and possessed of certain unalienable rights—that government is instituted for the protection, safety, and happiness of the people, and not for the profit, honour, or private interest of any man, family, or class of men. That the origin of all power is in the people, and that they have an incontestable right to check the creatures of their own creation, vested with certain powers to guard the life, liberty, and property of the community.

These contentions and deductions are consistent with the Declaration of Independence and the political thought of the Founding era. While she was not permitted to attend a university, Warren had read many of the philosophical texts that underlay the American system of government. She knew the arguments and furthered them herself.

Warren was particularly concerned about the creation of a class of men distinct from the general populace. In party politics, Warren was an Anti-Federalist and later supported Republicans James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who favored agriculture and widespread property ownership, over the commercial schemes of Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists. She believed the new Constitution vested too much power in the federal government; it was not republican enough, lacked a Bill of Rights and annual elections, blended branches of government, and allowed for a standing army.

Warren consistently rejected the idea of a standing army, not only because an army can impose regulations by force and infringe on the liberties of the people, as the British army had done, but because armies promote ranks and distinctions, and she was wary of anything that had the hint of aristocracy. Officers could rise above and distance themselves, in wealth and interest, from their fellow citizens. The Society of the Cincinnati was a particular object of Warren’s criticisms because it combined her fears: it was founded by officers of the Continental Army, and its membership was hereditary. Finally, through the army, Americans would interact with European peoples, who Warren viewed as having succumbed to the spirit of avarice and who were fascinated with frivolous and corrupting things like, “the baubles of ambitious spirits, scepters, diadems, and crowns,” as she wrote in her History.

Overarchingly, Warren was in favor of promoting equality in the general diffusion of property and education as well as unity in adherence to republican principles. She criticized the South for its lack of formal education and its aristocratic practices, which encouraged a spirit of superiority, and favored the North for its more equal division of education and property, which encouraged a spirit of liberty. Anti-Federalist scholar Herbert Storing, who was particularly impressed by Warren, wrote in What the Anti-Federalists Were For that they believed “republican government depends on civic virtue, on a devotion to fellow citizens and to country so deeply instilled as to be almost as automatic and powerful as the natural devotion to self-interest.”

Throughout her life and work, Warren’s belief in the importance of civic virtue manifested itself as a concern with manners and morals. In “The Sack of Rome,” for instance, she wrote, “Empire decays when virtue’s not the base.” As historian Rosemarie Zagarri writes in A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution, “Like many other eighteenth-century authors, Mercy used the term ‘manners’ not simply to refer to etiquette or social deportment, but to denote social norms or mores. … Changes in manners thus reflected changes in virtue.”

Not long after the Revolution, Warren became deeply concerned that American morals were rapidly shifting. She favored the rational and restrained virtues of the republican yeoman farmer who is willing to sacrifice personal self-interest for the sake of the common good over the avarice of commercialism and the acquisition of wealth. The latter, as she stated in her History, did not seem “very favorable to the virtue or manners of the possessors. It had a tendency to contract the mind, and led it to shrink into selfish views and indulgences, totally inconsistent with genuine republicanism.”

Greed impacts the individual, but it also has implications for the regime and encourages other vices, including ingratitude. In her History, Warren wrote that:

the hurry of spirits, that ever attends the eager pursuit of fortune and a passion for splendid enjoyment, leads to forgetfulness; and thus the inhabitants of America cease to look back with due gratitude and respect on the fortitude and virtue of their ancestors.

So caught up in the pursuit of wealth and inflated by ego, Americans could fail to consider that their prosperity is not entirely of their own making, that past generations made immeasurable sacrifices to establish a country in which individuals have the opportunity to govern themselves.

Continuing on this theme, Warren wrote that, the “ancient Persians considered ingratitude as the source of all enmities among men. They considered it ‘an indication of the vilest spirit, nor believe it possible for an ungrateful man to love the gods or even his parents, friends, or country.’” The practice of gratitude opens up an ever-widening sphere of sympathy and goodwill, sustaining the bonds that make civic friendship possible. The reverse contracts our relations.

Preserving history is indispensable to this project of maintaining a virtuous people and a republic, according to Warren. She wrote her History with some attention to the youngest generation of Americans, contending that if the:

education of youth, both public and private, is attended to, their industrious and economical habits maintained, their moral character and the assemblage of virtues supported, which is necessary for the happiness of individuals and of nations, there is not much danger that they will for a long time be subjugated by the arms of foreigners, or that their republican system will be subverted by the arts of domestic enemies.

Warren had in mind both formal and informal education: the education that comes from residing in a culture that, through its institutional, laws, and customs, upholds its principles and signals what it considers distasteful and honorable.

In the final chapters of her History, Warren exhorts Americans to continue in the work of refining their own manners and morals and dedicating themselves to the republican principles that gave rise to the Revolution. If they do so, she argued, the experiment in self-government, which is an ongoing ambition, may endure: “It now depends on their own virtue to continue the United States of America [as] an example of the respectability and dignity of this mode of government.”

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Indeed, the success or decline of America would, she said, have implications not only for current and future American citizens, but for humanity itself; the “American Revolution may be a means in the hands of Providence of diffusion [of] universal knowledge over a quarter of the globe, that for ages had been enveloped in darkness, ignorance, and barbarism.”

Warren was a firm believer, both in her personal life and in her politics, in the role of Providence. The principles of the Declaration of Independence are consistent with natural law, put forth “under the awe of the Divine Providence.” As a historian and scholar, Warren knew how unlikely it was that the Revolutionaries would succeed against the most formidable military in the world and that a republic over an extended territory was a singular achievement in human history. Further, among America’s blessings were its distance from Europe, increasing population, immense territory, mild climate, and considerable natural resources. America was founded during an intellectual highpoint, a time when manners, arts, and education were elevated and the rights of human beings recognized. Taken together, it seemed like a greater plan was at work. In return:

Providence has clearly pointed out the duties of the present generation, particularly the paths which Americans ought to tread. The United States formed a young republic, a confederacy which ought ever to be cemented by a union of interests and affection, under the influence of those principles which obtained their independence.

Natural law and Providence had imposed on the American people the reciprocal duties of protecting those principles of the American Revolution and ensuring that America continue not just in name but in essence, as a self-governing nation.

Mercy Otis Warren is a figure worthy of study. She was a witness to the American Revolution and furthered the cause of human freedom through her own writing. As a female historian of the Founding, Warren was an anomaly for her time. But she helped establish a tradition by beginning what is now a long line of public-spirited women who loved this place we call America.