Muito antes da independência ser conquistada nos campos de batalha, ela foi disputada nas páginas dos jornais. Com a peça "O Adulator", Mercy Otis Warren mobilizou a opinião pública contra o domínio britânico e tornou-se uma das vozes mais influentes da Revolução Americana.
Kathleen DuVal
.jpeg) |
| lIustração de Tim McDonagh |
Mercy Otis Warren estava entre os primeiros escritores do período Revolucionário a definir a luta contra a Grã-Bretanha como um combate contra a tirania. Antes de Thomas Paine escrever “Senso Comum” ou Thomas Jefferson redigir a Declaração de Independência, Warren ajudou a lançar as bases ao emoldurar o conflito em termos emocionantes e dramáticos. Em uma série de peças publicadas no início da década de 1770, ela cativou o público leitor ao elevar suas queixas pessoais contra o domínio britânico por meio do uso de tropos clássicos e linguagem simbólica.
Warren testemunhou o crescente poder britânico desde cedo e de perto, e passou a acreditar que o confronto entre os colonos e os oficiais britânicos que os governavam não era uma disputa egoísta por impostos. Tratava-se, em vez disso, de um choque fundamental entre a liberdade e a opressão, com raízes que remontavam à república romana. Suas peças persuadiram muitos outros colonos a enxergar a situação da mesma maneira.
Para Warren, isso não era um exercício intelectual. Ela e sua família vinham rivalizando com Thomas Hutchinson desde meados da década de 1750, mais de uma década antes de qualquer pessoa sequer pensar em revolução. Naquela época, quando Warren estava na casa dos 20 anos, ela não tinha ideia de que as colônias eventualmente lutariam para deixar o Império Britânico. Ela tinha orgulho de viver no império mais poderoso, mais lucrativo e no que muitos colonos brancos viam como o mais livre do mundo.
Ela e seu amado marido, um comerciante e político chamado James Warren, podiam pagar por seda, cetim, renda e fitas para os vestidos dela e queijo e vinho importados para a mesa deles. James e outros na família de Warren — seu irmão e seu pai, ambos chamados James Otis — eram homens de importância que ocupavam cargos no governo colonial de Massachusetts. Criada na cultura da Nova Inglaterra britânica em Barnstable, Massachusetts, Warren teve a rara oportunidade de receber tutoria, junto com seus irmãos, e foi ensinada a manejar uma caneta. Para os Warrens e os Otises, era bom ser britânico.
Mas enquanto o império tornava possível a vida confortável de Warren, ela e sua família atingiram o que poderíamos chamar de teto de vidro colonial. Eles culparam Hutchinson. Em 1757, Hutchinson, então membro do Conselho do Governador, fez lobby contra a nomeação do pai dela para o mesmo grupo. Três anos depois, o governador nomeou Hutchinson como juiz-presidente da Suprema Corte de Massachusetts, somando-se a um número surpreendente de nomeações que Hutchinson também acumulou, incluindo, eventualmente, a de vice-governador de Massachusetts.
Em 1761, o irmão de Warren, James Otis Jr. — conhecido como Jemmy — defendeu um caso perante a Suprema Corte de Massachusetts contestando a capacidade dos oficiais de alfândega de embarcar em navios para buscar mercadorias contrabandeadas, argumentando que a prática violava a Constituição britânica e os direitos coloniais ao devido processo legal. Como vice-governador, Hutchinson aplicava as leis em questão no caso; como juiz-presidente da Suprema Corte de Massachusetts, ele também era o juiz. Sua decisão previsível contra Otis e os comerciantes de Boston pareceu um sinal claro da corrupção não apenas de Hutchinson, mas também da relação entre o governo britânico e suas colônias.
Por volta de 1770, a agitação em decorrência das políticas restritivas do Parlamento na década anterior — incluindo as Leis do Açúcar, do Selo e Declaratória — havia se espalhado pelas ruas. Naquele ano, cinco habitantes da cidade foram mortos no Massacre de Boston. O rei George III, em vez de destituir o vice-governador Hutchinson por conta do desastre, promoveu-o a governador permanente com ordens de reprimir a cidade.
Warren estava determinada não apenas a enfatizar as falhas fatais de Hutchinson — ela escreveu mais tarde que ele “era sombrio, intrigante, insinuante, altivo e ambicioso, enquanto o extremo da avareza marcava cada característica de seu caráter” — mas também a despertar seus compatriotas colonos para o avanço tirânico do governo britânico. Ela escreveu “The Adulateur” em 1772 e usou versos brancos, com seu pentâmetro iâmbico, para fazer as falas de Rapatio parecerem caminhar em direção a uma conclusão inexorável. A métrica o torna não apenas mau, mas quase irrefreável enquanto ele soliloquia sobre suas ambições tirânicas:
O governo despótico é meu primeiro, meu soberano desejo;
Contudo, para triunfar além de minha otimista esperança,
Apagar a chama generosa, o ardente amor
Pela liberdade nos filhos livres da Servia,
Destruir seus alardeados direitos, e marcá-los como escravos.
Mesmo que Warren tenha publicado a peça anonimamente, deve ter sido emocionante para ela ver suas próprias palavras impressas — não na caligrafia cursiva fina de uma dama, mas no tipo negrito geralmente reservado aos homens, com suas notícias de política e guerra e os anúncios de suas empresas sobre as mercadorias mais recentes de Londres. Ainda assim, ela escreveu para sua amiga Hannah Winthrop que não pretendia que “The Adulateur” ganhasse a repercussão que ganhou. Ela estivera escrevendo apenas “para dar prazer a um pequeno círculo de amigos muito valiosos” e “nunca acalentou uma ideia tão quimérica a ponto de supor que estivesse em meu poder divertir grandemente — e muito menos beneficiar o mundo”.
 |
| Trecho de “The Adulateur”, publicado no The Massachusetts Spy em 1772. Biblioteca do Congresso. |
It didn’t take long for leaders of Massachusetts’s rising rebellion to figure out that the author was the wife of their friend James Warren of Plymouth. In December 1773, after the clandestine political group known as the Sons of Liberty dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor, John Adams wrote to James Warren, asking him to “make my Compliments to Mrs. Warren” and urge her to fight for the cause. Adams hoped that she would write a poem praising the Boston Tea Party: “I wish to See a late glorious Event Celebrated by a certain poetical Pen,” Adams wrote, “which has no equal that I know of in this Country.”
Warren’s works were extraordinary in more ways than one — for being written by a woman and helping push the colonies toward revolution. After the war, Warren would stay true to her belief that the new American government shouldn’t reproduce the old tyrannies of the British, nor should it leave room for the development of new ones. She never abandoned what she saw as her readers’ “ardent love of liberty,” as her first play put it, which she knew was essential to the Revolution in its day — and something that has been central to the American conversation ever since. This commitment to liberty would lead her to oppose the original Constitution, pitting herself against many founding fathers in the process.
***
The person who most influenced Warren’s political formation was her brilliant older brother, Jemmy. He was known for his passionate defenses of liberty, which he distributed in the political pamphlets he wrote, and for his impetuosity — John Adams called him “a flame of fire.” Back in 1761, Jemmy won a seat in the Massachusetts Assembly and spent many nights with his sister and brother-in-law at their home in Plymouth, which was on the road between the Otis family home in Barnstable and the Assembly in Boston.
In the years before the war, Jemmy also helped attract other frequent visitors, including both John and Samuel Adams, who would help form the Sons of Liberty. Their first steps toward revolution took place on the wooden floors of the Warrens’ living room. At first, Warren might have only listened to the men debating as she poured tea or bent over needlework, but soon she was part of the conversations. After all, she had read the same philosophy and history books that they had. She freely expressed her opinions, as she later wrote to John Adams, “at a Certain Fire side, where many Political plans were Laid, Discussed, and Digested.”
Jemmy’s name might have become as famous as those of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. But some sort of mental illness came upon him in his 40s. He shouted inappropriate and often incomprehensible insults and got in fights. At first, people thought it was just his hot temper and heavy drinking. But by 1771, he was declared mentally incompetent and moved to his parents’ house in Barnstable. Growing up together, the siblings had been taught that women were as intellectually capable as men, yet Warren had never planned to write for anyone beyond family and friends. Now she believed that the movement had lost its best defender. She took up her brother’s pen.
A painting of Mercy Otis Warren in the 1760s by John Singleton Copley. John Singleton Copley, via Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Warrens and the Sons of Liberty wanted to stoke the revolutionary spirit. What started in Boston had broadened to the rest of Massachusetts, but they needed to reach the other British colonies, too. Through newly devised Committees of Correspondence — small groups in each town and county that spread news, coordinated action and enforced the boycotts of British goods — they distributed a bombshell in 1773: a damning trove of Hutchinson’s letters that Benjamin Franklin had received from an anonymous source, in which Hutchinson mused that the government might need to crack down on colonists’ liberties. The letters made their way to the Warren home, where the Warrens and the Adamses decided that this was the chance to lay bare the British plot against liberty. Once leaked, the letters were read aloud in the Massachusetts Assembly, published in newspapers and spread through the committees. “The duplicity of Mr. Hutchinson,” Warren wrote, was “laid open,” and “debates and animosities ran high.” The Assembly began to draw up articles of impeachment against Hutchinson.
Warren began churning out more work, goading her readers to see that “government and legislation were instituted for the benefit of society at large, not for the emolument of a few.” When men like Hutchinson seized too much power, she wrote, it was the people’s “indispensable duty to resist.” And while still anonymous, she wanted to control her work. After someone added to her scenes that ran in The Massachusetts Spy and published a full-length version — in what she justifiably deemed a “plagiary” — Warren wrote an expanded set of scenes for a new play. She published this work as “The Defeat” in The Boston Gazette and Country Journal. One of the “Virtuous Senators” of Warren’s imagined state, Servia, asks in a rhymed couplet:
Shall Servia bleed, and shan’t her sons complain,
While traitors revel o’er her children slain?
The Virtuous Senators together bring about Rapatio’s downfall, as the play’s title predicts. Abigail Adams, John’s wife, praised the play that “so throughly look’d thro the Deeds of Men, and Develloped the Dark designs of a Rapatio Soul.”
After watching the revolutionary ideas she wove into her writing explode throughout the colonies, Warren no longer questioned whether to publish her writing. The poem she wrote praising the Boston Tea Party at John Adams’s request appeared on the front page of The Boston Gazette in early 1774. She wrote another play in early 1775 called “The Group,” which was reprinted in newspapers in New York and Philadelphia. It brutally mocked loyalists as sycophants; it urged colonists who were still on the fence to stand behind Massachusetts, which was suffering under occupation by thousands of British troops and the forced closure of the port of Boston. (The play was so successful that, after the Revolution, a man claimed that he had written it, and Warren had to ask John Adams to publicly spread the word that he knew that she was the true author.)
All people of sense, Warren implied in her writings, were repelled by tyranny, whether that of a violent husband, a cruel slave owner, a power-seizing official or a government that stripped the people of their self-rule. She warned that tyrants should beware: Those on the side of liberty were “resolv’d to die, or see their country free.” As the war started, James Warren became the paymaster of the Continental Army. The colonies went to war, and his wife often traveled to meet him.
The person who most influenced Warren’s political formation was her brilliant older brother, Jemmy. He was known for his passionate defenses of liberty, which he distributed in the political pamphlets he wrote, and for his impetuosity — John Adams called him “a flame of fire.” Back in 1761, Jemmy won a seat in the Massachusetts Assembly and spent many nights with his sister and brother-in-law at their home in Plymouth, which was on the road between the Otis family home in Barnstable and the Assembly in Boston.
In the years before the war, Jemmy also helped attract other frequent visitors, including both John and Samuel Adams, who would help form the Sons of Liberty. Their first steps toward revolution took place on the wooden floors of the Warrens’ living room. At first, Warren might have only listened to the men debating as she poured tea or bent over needlework, but soon she was part of the conversations. After all, she had read the same philosophy and history books that they had. She freely expressed her opinions, as she later wrote to John Adams, “at a Certain Fire side, where many Political plans were Laid, Discussed, and Digested.”
Jemmy’s name might have become as famous as those of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. But some sort of mental illness came upon him in his 40s. He shouted inappropriate and often incomprehensible insults and got in fights. At first, people thought it was just his hot temper and heavy drinking. But by 1771, he was declared mentally incompetent and moved to his parents’ house in Barnstable. Growing up together, the siblings had been taught that women were as intellectually capable as men, yet Warren had never planned to write for anyone beyond family and friends. Now she believed that the movement had lost its best defender. She took up her brother’s pen.
A painting of Mercy Otis Warren in the 1760s by John Singleton Copley. John Singleton Copley, via Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Warrens and the Sons of Liberty wanted to stoke the revolutionary spirit. What started in Boston had broadened to the rest of Massachusetts, but they needed to reach the other British colonies, too. Through newly devised Committees of Correspondence — small groups in each town and county that spread news, coordinated action and enforced the boycotts of British goods — they distributed a bombshell in 1773: a damning trove of Hutchinson’s letters that Benjamin Franklin had received from an anonymous source, in which Hutchinson mused that the government might need to crack down on colonists’ liberties. The letters made their way to the Warren home, where the Warrens and the Adamses decided that this was the chance to lay bare the British plot against liberty. Once leaked, the letters were read aloud in the Massachusetts Assembly, published in newspapers and spread through the committees. “The duplicity of Mr. Hutchinson,” Warren wrote, was “laid open,” and “debates and animosities ran high.” The Assembly began to draw up articles of impeachment against Hutchinson.
Warren began churning out more work, goading her readers to see that “government and legislation were instituted for the benefit of society at large, not for the emolument of a few.” When men like Hutchinson seized too much power, she wrote, it was the people’s “indispensable duty to resist.” And while still anonymous, she wanted to control her work. After someone added to her scenes that ran in The Massachusetts Spy and published a full-length version — in what she justifiably deemed a “plagiary” — Warren wrote an expanded set of scenes for a new play. She published this work as “The Defeat” in The Boston Gazette and Country Journal. One of the “Virtuous Senators” of Warren’s imagined state, Servia, asks in a rhymed couplet:
Shall Servia bleed, and shan’t her sons complain,
While traitors revel o’er her children slain?
The Virtuous Senators together bring about Rapatio’s downfall, as the play’s title predicts. Abigail Adams, John’s wife, praised the play that “so throughly look’d thro the Deeds of Men, and Develloped the Dark designs of a Rapatio Soul.”
After watching the revolutionary ideas she wove into her writing explode throughout the colonies, Warren no longer questioned whether to publish her writing. The poem she wrote praising the Boston Tea Party at John Adams’s request appeared on the front page of The Boston Gazette in early 1774. She wrote another play in early 1775 called “The Group,” which was reprinted in newspapers in New York and Philadelphia. It brutally mocked loyalists as sycophants; it urged colonists who were still on the fence to stand behind Massachusetts, which was suffering under occupation by thousands of British troops and the forced closure of the port of Boston. (The play was so successful that, after the Revolution, a man claimed that he had written it, and Warren had to ask John Adams to publicly spread the word that he knew that she was the true author.)
All people of sense, Warren implied in her writings, were repelled by tyranny, whether that of a violent husband, a cruel slave owner, a power-seizing official or a government that stripped the people of their self-rule. She warned that tyrants should beware: Those on the side of liberty were “resolv’d to die, or see their country free.” As the war started, James Warren became the paymaster of the Continental Army. The colonies went to war, and his wife often traveled to meet him.
***
Throughout the war, when she wasn’t at her desk or visiting her husband, Warren ran the family farm. Like many Revolutionary wives, she would sometimes move herself and the children to be closer to wherever he needed to be. But she kept up correspondences with the influential people she had hosted in her living room, and after the war she continued to play a central role in Americans’ discussions about how to, as Thomas Paine put it, “begin the world over again.”
Winning independence did not end Warren’s worries about tyranny. In fact, she feared that the new nation’s leaders might forget the Revolution and, in their triumph, blindly recreate a new form of oppressive government. If toppling British control was worth fighting for, reinstituting tyranny with their newfound independence would be heartbreaking.
In 1787, the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia to draft a new governing document to replace the weak Articles of Confederation. Warren wrote that she was alarmed that no press was allowed in to observe the proceedings, “lest their consultations and debates should be viewed by the scrutinizing eye of a free people.” Based on scattered reports she heard from Philadelphia, the men writing the document were recreating tyranny by drafting a Constitution that neglected to mention freedom of the press, ordered elections to be held too infrequently and created a standing army, which would remain a threat to the populace.
In response, Warren published “Observations on the New Constitution, and on the Federal and State Conventions, By a Columbian Patriot” — a work that lambasted “the secret transactions of the convention at Philadelphia.” Behind those closed doors, she charged, a Constitution had been drafted that concentrated power over the states and the people. Was this any different from what had allowed Hutchinson to reign over Massachusetts? She criticized the delegates for not including “a bill of rights to guard against the dangerous encroachments of power,” especially on individual rights. Many of the states’ own constitutions written during the Revolution included this kind of list of protections, and Warren knew that without one for the burgeoning nation, the union could drift into a homegrown version of the British tyranny it had just defeated.
In response to criticism from Warren and others, James Madison and other framers promised that one of the new Congress’s first acts would be to protect individual liberties. Congress indeed passed a series of amendments that were ratified in 1791 and became known as the Bill of Rights. As Warren wrote, Americans could now be more confident that the ideals of the Revolution would persist — and that “the government of the United States stood on a basis which rendered the people respectable abroad and safe at home.”
Since declaring independence, Americans have continued to argue over the right balance between liberty and order. While Alexander Hamilton believed that a republic could never be accused of tyranny — because it represented the will of the people — Warren knew that tyranny could come from many places, including the elected officials we choose to represent us. Liberty can always be taken away, even from within a democracy.
Warren’s defense of liberty and distrust of the powerful has become a recurring part of the American conversation. The Bill of Rights, and the court systems that evolved to protect those rights, proved essential to defending countless Americans over the centuries, including journalists, people accused of crimes and those using the rights of free speech and assembly. In our lifetimes, activists from the Tea Party of the late 2000s to today’s No Kings movement have echoed her ideas: Americans must always be attuned to the concentration of power and the possibility of, as Warren put it, “uncontrouled despotism.” She was always on the side of liberty.
And yet Warren herself has been almost forgotten. There have been a few biographies, including the excellent “A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution,” by Rosemarie Zagarri, a historian at George Mason University. But general histories, whether popular accounts of famous revolutionaries or academic analyses of the war’s causes and consequences, mention Warren in a sentence or two, if at all, and almost never as a mover of early Revolutionary thought and action.
In 1790, at age 61, Warren finally published under her own name. It was a collection of poems and plays, some previously published anonymously; unlike her prior work, she was able to register the book’s copyright under Congress’s new copyright law, one of the few instances in which, as a woman, she could legally own property. Alexander Hamilton wrote to congratulate her: “In the career of dramatic composition at least, female genius in the United States has outstripped the Male.”
She also wrote one of the first histories of the Revolution. The book begins with an explanation of why a woman was the right person to write it. “At a period when every manly arm was occupied, and every trait of talent or activity engaged, either in the cabinet or the field,” she wrote, “many circumstances might escape the more busy and active members of society.” Busy with the work of war, men might not have taken in or had the time to jot down all the events “that flowed in quick succession.” Only a woman — and only a woman in the United States with an education, living and publishing in the heart of the Revolution’s action — could write the detailed history from personal experience that the country deserved.
Perhaps a woman, too, was best positioned to observe the fragile nature of liberty, the obligation to constantly protect it and the need of never taking it for granted. As with all wars, the Revolution had tremendous consequences for colonial women, who saw their homes and lives overturned. They had opinions about how societies should run, when they should go to war and when they should make peace. And Mercy Otis Warren wrote hers down.
Throughout the war, when she wasn’t at her desk or visiting her husband, Warren ran the family farm. Like many Revolutionary wives, she would sometimes move herself and the children to be closer to wherever he needed to be. But she kept up correspondences with the influential people she had hosted in her living room, and after the war she continued to play a central role in Americans’ discussions about how to, as Thomas Paine put it, “begin the world over again.”
Winning independence did not end Warren’s worries about tyranny. In fact, she feared that the new nation’s leaders might forget the Revolution and, in their triumph, blindly recreate a new form of oppressive government. If toppling British control was worth fighting for, reinstituting tyranny with their newfound independence would be heartbreaking.
In 1787, the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia to draft a new governing document to replace the weak Articles of Confederation. Warren wrote that she was alarmed that no press was allowed in to observe the proceedings, “lest their consultations and debates should be viewed by the scrutinizing eye of a free people.” Based on scattered reports she heard from Philadelphia, the men writing the document were recreating tyranny by drafting a Constitution that neglected to mention freedom of the press, ordered elections to be held too infrequently and created a standing army, which would remain a threat to the populace.
In response, Warren published “Observations on the New Constitution, and on the Federal and State Conventions, By a Columbian Patriot” — a work that lambasted “the secret transactions of the convention at Philadelphia.” Behind those closed doors, she charged, a Constitution had been drafted that concentrated power over the states and the people. Was this any different from what had allowed Hutchinson to reign over Massachusetts? She criticized the delegates for not including “a bill of rights to guard against the dangerous encroachments of power,” especially on individual rights. Many of the states’ own constitutions written during the Revolution included this kind of list of protections, and Warren knew that without one for the burgeoning nation, the union could drift into a homegrown version of the British tyranny it had just defeated.
In response to criticism from Warren and others, James Madison and other framers promised that one of the new Congress’s first acts would be to protect individual liberties. Congress indeed passed a series of amendments that were ratified in 1791 and became known as the Bill of Rights. As Warren wrote, Americans could now be more confident that the ideals of the Revolution would persist — and that “the government of the United States stood on a basis which rendered the people respectable abroad and safe at home.”
Since declaring independence, Americans have continued to argue over the right balance between liberty and order. While Alexander Hamilton believed that a republic could never be accused of tyranny — because it represented the will of the people — Warren knew that tyranny could come from many places, including the elected officials we choose to represent us. Liberty can always be taken away, even from within a democracy.
Warren’s defense of liberty and distrust of the powerful has become a recurring part of the American conversation. The Bill of Rights, and the court systems that evolved to protect those rights, proved essential to defending countless Americans over the centuries, including journalists, people accused of crimes and those using the rights of free speech and assembly. In our lifetimes, activists from the Tea Party of the late 2000s to today’s No Kings movement have echoed her ideas: Americans must always be attuned to the concentration of power and the possibility of, as Warren put it, “uncontrouled despotism.” She was always on the side of liberty.
And yet Warren herself has been almost forgotten. There have been a few biographies, including the excellent “A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution,” by Rosemarie Zagarri, a historian at George Mason University. But general histories, whether popular accounts of famous revolutionaries or academic analyses of the war’s causes and consequences, mention Warren in a sentence or two, if at all, and almost never as a mover of early Revolutionary thought and action.
In 1790, at age 61, Warren finally published under her own name. It was a collection of poems and plays, some previously published anonymously; unlike her prior work, she was able to register the book’s copyright under Congress’s new copyright law, one of the few instances in which, as a woman, she could legally own property. Alexander Hamilton wrote to congratulate her: “In the career of dramatic composition at least, female genius in the United States has outstripped the Male.”
She also wrote one of the first histories of the Revolution. The book begins with an explanation of why a woman was the right person to write it. “At a period when every manly arm was occupied, and every trait of talent or activity engaged, either in the cabinet or the field,” she wrote, “many circumstances might escape the more busy and active members of society.” Busy with the work of war, men might not have taken in or had the time to jot down all the events “that flowed in quick succession.” Only a woman — and only a woman in the United States with an education, living and publishing in the heart of the Revolution’s action — could write the detailed history from personal experience that the country deserved.
Perhaps a woman, too, was best positioned to observe the fragile nature of liberty, the obligation to constantly protect it and the need of never taking it for granted. As with all wars, the Revolution had tremendous consequences for colonial women, who saw their homes and lives overturned. They had opinions about how societies should run, when they should go to war and when they should make peace. And Mercy Otis Warren wrote hers down.
Kathleen DuVal é historiadora, professora da Universidade da Carolina do Norte em Chapel Hill e autora de vários livros, incluindo "Native Nations: A Millennium in North America", vencedor do Prêmio Pulitzer de História de 2025. Storyboards de ilustração de Anthony Liberatore.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário