Mercy Warren E-Book

Alice Brown

• Herausgeber: Seltzer Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 346

Beschreibung

Biography of Mercy Otis Warren. Mercy (1728 – 1814) was a political writer and propagandist of the American Revolution.Her brother, James Otis, was a leader of the rebels at the time of the Stamp Act.  Her husband James Warren was head of the Massachusetts legislature and paymaster to the Continental Army. She initiated the Committees of Correspondence and stayed in close touch with leaders of the Revolution, in particular with her close friends Abigail and John Adams. During the debate over the United States Constitution in 1788, she issued a pamphlet, Observations on the new Constitution, and on the Federal and State Conventions written under the pseudonym "A Columbian Patriot," that opposed ratification of the document and advocated the inclusion of a Bill of Rights. She wrote plays and poems and also a three-volume history of the American Reovlution -- "History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution."

Leseprobe

MERCY WARREN BY ALICE BROWN

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CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

NEW YORK MDCCCXCVI

Copyright, 1896, by Charles Scribner's Sons

TO THE DESCENDANTS OF MERCY OTIS WARREN AT PLYMOUTH AND AT DEDHAM

PREFACE

There are few consecutive incidents, save the catalogue of births, marriages, and deaths, to be gathered concerning the life of Mercy Otis Warren. Therefore it seems necessary to regard her through those picturesque events of the national welfare which touched her most nearly, and of which she was a part. It is impossible to trace her, step by step, through her eighty~six years; she can only be regarded by the flashlight of isolated topics.

In compiling this sketch of the Revolutionary period, I am especially indebted to Winslow Warren, Esq., and Charles Francis Adams, Esq., for their generosity and courtesy in allowing me the use of the valuable manuscripts in their possession. I have also to make grateful acknowledgment to the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Life of James Otis, by William Tudor; the Life of Thomas Hutchinson, by James K. Hosmer; a History of American Literature, by Moses Coit Tyler; American Literature, by C. F. Richardson; the Governor's Garden, by George R. R. Rivers; to all Mrs. Alice Morse Earle’s delightful pictures of a by-gone day, and to scores of books so vivid or so accurate as to have become the commonplace of reference.

A. B.

BOSTON, October 3,1896.

I— IN THE BEGINNING

Ancestry of Mercy Otis — Old-World Associations of the first John Otis — Dissension in Hingham—John Winthrop’s Trial —Life on Cape Cod—Distinguished Members of the Otis family

II— BARNSTABLE DAYS

Childhood in Colonial Times— Intimacy between James and Mercy Otis —James Otis’s Tastes and Education — Life at the Barnstable Farmhouse—A Harvard Commencement— Professional Life and Marriage of James Otis —Marriage of Mercy Otis to James Warren . .

III— LIFE AT PLYMOUTH

Ancestry of James Warren — Early Events of his Life — Development of Mercy Warren’s Character in Relation to Events—Life at Clifford — Removal to Plymouth Town — Birth of Children — Writs of Assistance — James Warren’s Advance in Political Life—Attack upon James Otis — Birth of Mercy Warren’s Two Youngest Sons—Her Friendsand Intellectual Life— John Adams’s Relation to the Warren Family— Friends and Correspondents of Mrs. Warren—The Celebrated Mrs. Macaulay—Committees of Correspondence—The Colonial Clergy 

IV— THE TESTIMONY OF LETTERS

An Academic Style — James Warren’s Letters—His Account of the Battle of Bunker Hill—Letter “To a Youth just Entered Colledge"— Mrs. Warren’s "Vapours ” 

V—THE WOMAN’S PART

Feminine Abstinence from Luxuries—The Squabble of the Sea Nymphs—Satirical Poem — Hannah Winthrop’s Letter on the Battle of Lexington —Fear of British Troops—Mrs. Warren’s Character-Drawing— The Small-Pox 

VI—EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE

English Source of American Literature—Our First Book-Makers—American Colleges and Newspapers .

VII—LITERARY WORK

Period of Mercy Otis Warren—Her Undaunted Expression in Political Matters—John Adams’s Flattery — His Defence of Satire—The Group—The Adulator and The Retreat — Poems — Mrs. Warren’s Place among the Pamphleteers

VIII—THE HISTORY OF THE REVOLUTION

Letters from James Freeman — A Collection of Mottoes — Mrs. Warren’s Portraiture of Public Men — Distrust

of the Order of the Cincinnati

IX—AN HISTORIC DIFFERENCE

John Adams’s Remonstrance — Mrs. Warren’s Retort— Talk of Monarchy — Comparison of the History with its Manuscript—Reconciliation —An Exchange of Gifts

X—THOUGHT AND OPINION

Intolerance of Scepticism — Exchange of Literary Criticisms with Abigail Adams—Attitude toward the Woman Question — Criticism of Lord Chesterfield ...

XI—THE BELOVED SON

Three Copleys —The Dark Day—Winslow’s Sailing— Purchase of the Hutchinson House — Winslow’s Return and Second Trip Abroad — Death of Charles Warren — Winslow’s Return and Death — Death of George Warren 246

XII— ON MILTON HILL

The Hutchinson Estate—Governor Hutchinson—The Warren Family at Milton—Their Return to Plymouth — Present Aspect of the Hutchinson-Warren Estate

XIII— TERMINUS

An Aged Couple—America after the Revolution—Mrs. Warren’s Dread of an American Monarchy— Death of James Warren — Mercy Warren’s Illness and Death—Her personal Belongings—Her Influence .

I - IN THE BEGINNING

MERCY OTIS WARREN belongs to that vital period when there came between the two Englands, New and Old, the breaking of ancient bonds, the untwining of fibres grown from the hearts of each; she was born at a day when the Colonies 'were outwardly stanch in allegiance, and she lived through the first irritation preluding wrath "with one we love,"to defection, victory, and peace. In time, in feeling and influence, her life kept pace, step for step?' with the growth a nation.

Throughout the first youth of our Colonies, New England was still the willing daughter of her motherland. To every pilgrim settled here, and even to his children, born in a species of exile, it was “home;"and few were they who quite relinquished hope of returning thither, either for travel, study, or the renewal of precious associations. Indeed, spite of the fulfilment of desire in having reached that air of freedom for which they so long had fainted, our forebears honestly felt with Cotton Mather : "I conclude of the two Englands what our Saviour saith of the two wines: ‘No man having tasted of the old, presently desireth the new; for he saith, the old is better.'" Thus identified in recent life and ever-present longing, there is some special savor in tracing family descent at a period when every bud was near the parent stem; for, in the beginning of our stock, it is possible to catch some lustre cast by Old World culture and beauty, the while you detect the hardening of sinews responsive to the stimulus of Old World wrongs.

The ancestry of Mercy Otis took rise in that hardy yeomanry which has ever been the bulwark and strength of England. John Otis,

founder of the American branch to which she belongs, is usually believed to have been born in Barnstaple, Devon, whence he came to Hingham of the Massachusetts, in 1635, and there drew lots in the first division of land. This incident of the allotment of land is virtually the first mention of him; and because it took place in the company of the Rev. Peter Hobart and his twenty-nine associates, it has been conjectured that, like all the band, Otis came from Hingham in Norfolk. It may be, however, that he left Devon and lived for a time at Hingham before embarking for America. Or, if the genealogical ferret would run down a further quibble, he may scent it in a note among the Hingham records, of land granted John Otis in June; and whereas Hobart only arrived at Charlestown in June, and did not proceed to Hingham until September, John Otis was very evidently there before him.

The name, as it crops out in old records both here and in England, is variously spelled as Ottis, Otys, Ote, Otye, and Oatey; but happily it is not to be identified with the one-syllabled Otes relegated to Titus of unholy memory. Thus varied, it appears significantly in the Subsidy Rolls, — a quantity of most precious manuscript, preserved at the Rolls Office in London, and brought thither from the Tower, where it lay for more than two hundred years, rich in truthful records which are now invaluable. Therein are set down the names and residences of most English people from the time of Henry VIII. to that of Charles II., — a means whereby the genealogist may occasionally put his finger on the still-beating pulses of the past. It is a trivial fact that among the Somerset families appears, under several forms, the name Otis; yet when snapped into another isolated record, it completes an unbroken chain of inference. For there was one Richard Otis of Glastonbury, who, in 1611, gave, according to the terms of his will, all his wearing apparel to his sons Stephen and John. Now, was this the John who afterwards made his temporary stay in Devon or Norfolk, and then found his last home in America?

Apparently it was; and here is the pretty reason for such guesswork. On the fourth of June, 1636, there were granted to our John Otis of Hingham, in the Massachusetts, sixteen acres of land, and also ten acres for planting ground on Weary-All-Hill. That name alone is significant. Says the historian of Hingham, relative to the latter grant: "It is very steep upon its western slope, and from this cause known to the early settlers, in their quaintly expressive nomenclature, as Weary-All-Hill." But the reason is possibly further to seek than in the spontaneous fancy of the town fathers; for it goes back to England and to Glastonbury town. Every pilgrim to Glaston knows the step ascent, lined now with houses built of the severe gray stone so common there (much of it filched from the ruined Abbey), at the top of which is a grassy enclosure, and a little slab to mark the spot where Joseph of Arimathea rested when, with his disciples, he stayed his wanderings in Glastonbury and built there a little wattled church, the mother of England’s worship. On the top of Weary-All-Hill he struck his staff, a thorn-branch, into the earth; and it burst into bloom, the first of all the famous thorns to blossom thereafter at Christmas time. The hill was and is a beloved and significant feature of the town, and without a doubt John Otis named his New England hill in memory of it, and so proved himself in the doing a Glaston man. It is quite true that a Devonian might have been perfectly familiar with Weary-All-Hill in "Zummerzett," or that the name might have been evolved from its significance alone; but I like best to think it a fragrant reminiscence of home, like the bit of soil an exile bears jealously from the mother sod.

In loyalty to the romance which is truer than truth, let us believe that John Otis sprang from Glastonbury, and trace in his temperament the serious cast of that dignified, and rich yet melancholy landscape, the outward frame of a spot ever to be reverenced as the nursery of ecclesiastical power. One might even guess what dreams he dreamed, and what images haunted him, when he turned the mind’s vision backward over sea. There they lie, as he saw them, the fertile fields of Somerset, the peaty meadows cut by black irrigating ditches; now, as then, Glastonbury Tor rises like a beacon, Saint Michael’s Tower its crown. Yet Glastonbury is not wholly the same. One vital change has befallen it: the wounds of its sacred spot show some semblance of healing, for now the jewelled ruins of the Abbey are touched with rose and yellow sedum, and the mind, through long usage, has accustomed herself to the evidences of spoil and loss. But when John Otis sailed for America, it was less than a hundred years since Henry VIII had set his greedy mark upon the Abbey; less than a century only since Richard Whiting, last Abbot of Glastonbury, had mounted the Tor to die in sight of his desecrated church and all the kingdoms of the earth for which he would not renounce the crown of his integrity. There are periods when history marches swiftly; and such vivid events as these were the folk-tales heard by John Otis at the fireside and in his twilight walks.

But if, before his flitting to America, he did remove from Glastonbury to Barnstaple, in Devon, the change in mental atmosphere was distinct and bracing, from a sacerdotal to a thriving merchant town, where minds had not yet done thrilling, since Elizabeth’s day, with dreams of adventure and trade with the “golden South Americas."The little parish church, as  you may see it there, on any present pilgrimage, is full of significant hints of the manner of men who built it, worshipped under its roof, and then claimed shelter for their last long rest. The walls are lined with mortuary tablets, testimonial to the good burghers who, having done famously in life, gave munificent alms for the poor to come after them, and doubtless also as a cake to Cerberus, thus forwarding the safe passage of their own thrifty souls. There were men of mark in Barnstaple; let it be assumed that Otis was of them. But wherever he started in life, he took root in our Hingham, and doubtless did his share in building up the sturdy independence so characteristic of the place. For this Colony was on the outskirts both of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, and it owned not too entire an allegiance to any but its own judgment, nor brooked interference.

Hingham was a hot-bed of individualism, and it can never be mentioned without remembrance of one vivid scene connected with its early days, — one of those commonplaces of the time destined to fructify and thus endure. In 1645, a novel case came before the General Court of Boston, founded primarily on dissension in the town of Hingham over the choice of a captain for its trainband. Variance spread, hot words abounded, and some of the delinquents were summoned to Boston to answer for their indiscretion before the General Court. Old Peter Hobart violently espoused their cause, as against the magistrates, and expostulated so boldly with the latter that they grew wroth, and replied that if he were not a minister of the gospel he should be committed. Thereupon the warfare continued through the requirements of the magistrates and the virtual refusal of the Hinghamites to do anything whatsoever which they might be bid, especially to appear meekly for trial; and finally the latter rose with boldness, and, crying that their liberties had been infringed upon by the General Court, singled out John Winthrop, the Deputy-Governor, for prosecution.

No scene more picturesque and impressive belongs to this stirring time than that of John Winthrop, stepping down from his official station, and sitting uncovered, in dignified acquiescence, "beneath the bar." The case turned upon the question of the power of the magistrates, and the possibility of their endangering the liberties of the people through over-much arrogance. The Deputy-Governor was acquitted, but, after taking his place again upon the bench, “he desired leave for a little speech" and then was uttered his wonderful exordium upon liberty, destined to live in the minds and ears of the people so long as they shall love just thought and noble expression. He began with these fit and burning words : —

"There is a twofold liberty, natural (I mean as our nature is now corrupt) and civil or federal,"and after defining the first, went on to that other higher, spiritual liberty, the "civil or federal; it may also be termed moral, in reference to the covenant between God and man, in the moral law, and the politic covenants and constitutions among men themselves. This liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just and honest. This liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard (not only of your goods, but) of your lives, if need be.”

And so was the stiff-backed Hingham of the time responsible for an enduring piece of thought, a noble moral precedent.

In those days, the minister was the man of mark; and Peter Hobart proved himself doubly the leader of feeling in this exigency, not only from his position, but from his almost aggressive individuality. It is significant to read, in another instance, the verdict of the time upon him, and to realize how strongly he must have influenced his people to independence, even though it led to revolt. In 1647, a marriage was to be celebrated in Boston, and, as the bridegroom was a member of "Hobard’s" church, "Hobard "was invited to preach, and indeed went to Boston for that purpose. But the magistrates ordered him to forbear, saying plainly, "That his spirit had been discovered to be adverse to our ecclesiastical and civil government, and he was a bold man, and would speak his mind”

From the concerted action of the time, it is possible to guess the individual; from the public attitude of the town of Hingham, to imagine what spirit animated its citizens. This was the air breathed by our yeoman Otis; the social atmosphere which he doubtless did his part to preserve clarified, bracing, free. And no one who has followed the line of his descendants can doubt that he also could "speak his mind.”

From John Otis was descended, in the fifth generation, Mercy Otis, the third among thirteen children. She was born September 25, 1728, at Barnstable, Massachusetts, whither John, son of the first John, had moved in 1678, to build his house on land known thereafter Otis Farm. It belonged to that part of the town called Great Marshes, now the West Parish, or West Barnstable. When it

comes to guessing out life-history from external evidence, every spot identified with family life becomes significant; for nature, even in her common phases, holds deep meaning, which the growing soul inevitably absorbs. Personal history becomes, to a vast extent, topographical, provided only a family line has grown and thriven in one spot. Given the sensitive, impressionable temperament, and it is possible to say, "Show me the landscape, and I will show you the man." To be born in Barnstable means to be born on Cape Cod -- potent phrase to those who know, either by birthright or hearsay, that strong and righteous arm of Massachusetts.

Barnstable has no thrilling story; she has always held herself in self-respecting quiet, ready to meet public questions, or content to be of the happy nations that have no history, save of industry and thrift. She had rich resources, and in 1639 they attracted the Rev. John Lothrop, who moved thither with his congregation. She owned her land honestly by just though thrifty bargain with the Indians (what though it be recorded that thirty acres went for "two brass kettles, one bushel of Indian corn," and the fence to enclose the tract? When we sell for a song, sometimes the song outweighs the purchase). All the peculiar beauties destined to make Cape Cod so unique and lovable were hers: the scrubby growth of pine and oak crowning the knolls, fair little valleys, great marshes where the salt grass sprang, sweet fresh-water ponds dotting the inland tracts, and, at her door, the sea, challenger to fear and purveyor of good, — insistent, mighty, inducing in men that hardy habit and longing which belong as truly to Cape Cod as to Devon.The duck does not take to water with a surer instinct than the Barnstable [County] boy,"says a local, historian.He leaps from his leading strings into the shrouds. It is but a bound from the mother’s lap to the mast-head. He boxes the compass in his infant soliloquies. He can hand, reef, and steer by the time he flies a kite.”

Of Mercy Otis’s dozen brothers and sisters, three deserve especial remembrance. One, the eldest, was James Otis, the patriot. The second, Joseph, held various important positions during Revolutionary days, and gave his country definite and picturesque service in opposing the attempt of the English to destroy a privateer which had sought refuge in Barnstable harbor. Samuel Allyne, one of the younger sons, founded a memorable house; for he married Elizabeth, daughter of the Honorable Harrison Gray, and their son was Harrison Gray Otis.

To the New England ear comes no sweeter sound than the hint of Mayflower ancestry; there is, moreover, somewhat of a superstitious savor in it, and the historian licks his lips at the possibility, as though some pious salt had touched them. Therefore let it be said with reverence that the mothe _of Mercy Otis belonged to that sacred strain. She was Mary Allyne, great-granddaughter of Edward Doten, or Dotey, who came over in 1620; and, being fortunate in topographical conditions, she was doubly well-born, — for she entered this earthly stage in the old Allyne house at Plymouth. No wonder she is designated "a woman of superior character." When it comes to the Mayflower with Plymouth in conjunction, noblesse oblige.

The name Mercy (or Marcia, as Mercy Otis sometimes spelled it) was a favorite one in the family. It keeps cropping out, from generation to generation, like some small plant that runs and flowers on the wall. The line begins with Mercy Bacon of Barnstable, the wife of John Otis, grandson of the first John. This Mercy had a daughter named for her, and her husband’s two brothers had each a daughter Mercy; and so did two of the next generation. Indeed, one of those sons had two Mercys, one little girl having died a baby. Quite evidently the name was a source of love, as it afterwards became of pride to the succeeding generations, when they could look back on the woman who virtually made it her own, through significance of life and thought.

II - BARNSTABLE DAYS

FIRST of all, one would fain know something about the little Mercy Otis, instead of reconstructing a shadowy image from the outer circumstances of other childhood at that time. We want the magic mirror wherein events grow clear. There are those who had it. Such, according to Hawthorne, was old Esther Dudley of the Province House, the weird woman who habited there in the interregnum after Howe left and before Hancock came in. Who would not bargain for her uncanny power! —

“It was the general belief that Esther could cause the governors of the overthrown dynasty, — with the beautiful ladies who had once adorned their festivals, the Indian chiefs who had come up to the Province House to hold counsel or swear allegiance, the grim Provincial warriors, the severe clergymen, — in short, all the pageantry of gone days, all the pictures that ever swept across the broad plate of glass in former times,— she could cause the whole to reappear, and people the inner world of the mirror with shadows of old life.”

Such a mirror do I want, and such an enchantress, to summon up the figure of one modest Colonial maiden; and such a mirror have we not.

The first daughter of the family, little Mercy had that trying position of over-much affection at the start, and later, the responsibility of action and example when the house became crowded with young life. It is easy to imagine her trotting about with her ugly home-made doll (or hoarding worshipfully one of the toys so sparingly sold in Boston, at that early date, thence to reach the country towns on some market journey), a quaint little figure like all the child figures of the time, with long skirt, and a close cap to protect her head from the searching Cape winds fighting their way through the draughty house. For even in such well-to-do "habitations" (as the grown-up Mercy decorously called her home), the entries were speaking-tubes for all the winds of heaven, and Arctic terrors beset the "long black passage up to bed." (Fortunate indeed was the child who could betake herself nightly to the trundlebed in mother’s room, close neighbored by the kitchen and some flickering warmth before the embers were covered, though the apartment itself were that horror of early American life, a dark bedroom.)

Undoubtedly she went through all the conventional miseries dealt out by an inscrutable Providence to the babies of that and an earlier time. She was probably put into fine linen slips, and her mottled arms were bare. For hardships which no grown man would feel called on to endure, save for conscience’s sake, were then made the portion of the young of our New England race, — possibly in some innocent obedience to the law which brings about the survival of the strong. Luckily it was unnecessary for our little maid to endure the extreme rigor of the ceremony of baptism; for being born before the dead of winter, it was probable that the water was not ice-cold, thus to contribute to her undoing. But it is only fair to assume that she became a victim of other intolerable hardships. She was of a delicate organization, and if she fell ill, she must have been drenched with black draughts of simples, bled, and bolused back to health. She was not "innoculated," though that was one of the new lights of her childhood; in her case it was to come later. Certain things we do know about her; that she had her task and, her seam, and that there was time in summer for sweet outdoor delights. She must have picked cranberries, not as a little Cape girl would do it nowadays, from cultivated marshes and for a price, but the sharp wild fruit, owing nothing to the care of man, but born of the benison of sun and air, and relegated to a child’s playhouse rather than kitchen use. She gathered bayberries for candles, and healing salvge and came in odorous of their powdered sweetness, better than "Myrrhs, Aloes, & Cassias smell," like a spice-laden ship from the farther East. In winter, too, she could shut her eyes as she sat by the dying candle, and see as in a vision conjured up through its breath, the pasture where that fragrance had birth, the darling knoll and hollow, and so raise up the image of her summer days.

Strange pabulum she may well have found in print! Even at so late a period of Colonial history the child of any household where books had entrance, knew things whereof even the learned of the present generation are happily ignorant. I have no doubt that little Mercy, omnivorous reader from the first, had shudderingly perused the Day of Doom, and could rehearse the fate of "Idolaters,""Blasphemers," "Swearers shrewd," the "Covetous and Ravenous," and

"children flagitious

And Parents who did them undo

by nurture vicious.”

Perhaps she even skimmed Cotton's Spiritual Milk for Babes, and, from the Bay Psalm Bookcould voice her Lamentations : —

"My heart is smote, & dryde like grasse,

that I to eate my bread forget:

By reason of my groaniags voyce

my bones unto my skin are set.

Like Pelican in wildernes,

like Owle in desart so am I:

I watch, & like a sparrow am

on house top solitarily.”

All through her childhood and youth runs the lovely suggestion of duality and comradeship; for she was the chosen companion of her brother James. The intimate spiritual relation between them through their later years makes it possible to assume this double kinship of their early life. When, a man of middle age, the crowning calamity of mental derangement came upon him, it was Mercy’s voice which had power to soothe him and lull him to self-control; and in 1766, when his patriotic mission had just begun, he wrote her: "This you may depend on, no man ever loved a sister better, & among all my conflicts I never forget that I am endeavoring to serve you and yours.”

Such nearness was not only the kinship of blood; it was an intimacy of soul. To me their early days on the Cape suggest another lad and lassie, — Maggie Tulliver and Tom. As Maggie trotted about after Tom, adoring, worshipful, glad of a glance, so the little Cape girl followed and imitated her big brother. They were more or less alike in temperament, — ardent, mobile, brilliant, though the girl must have had a stronger balance-wheel to fit her for the ills of life. The intellectual air of the farmhouse^jxust have"been keen and wholesome. Think what events were to be talked over, and in what vivid guise! In those days when news travelled by hot word of mouth, and an overflowing though infrequent post, every hint from the outer world became strangely dramatic, and even the children must have gained such an idea of the wonder of life as is scarcely conceivable now. Think how fast the New England drama had swept on from the bleak curtain-raising on Plymouth shore! .Reminiscence had only to stretch forth a finger into the immediate past to bring it back covered with honey or gall: but nothing neutral. There were strange doings in the Massachusetts to be talked over by night when the fire leaped high and the cider mug hissed by the coals: Merry Mount and the unhallowed revellers who dared reinstate May Day in godly New England; John Endicott, the apostle of intolerance, doing his picturesque deed of cutting the red cross from the banner of England, lest a savor of Popery contaminate the air, and Anne Hutchinson, brought up before the bar of public injustice.

The witchcraft delusion was not so far agone, and even a family of such breadth of thought and enlightenment must have been touched, in some fashion, by a vestige of that horror which, like a lifting mist, still lay along the land. Children knew strange lore, and talked it over in secret; or, not daring to speak, even to each other, hugged it to their own little breasts. They knew perfectly well how witches charm the butter and keep the cream from rising. They could guess the hidden cause when horses fell lame, and cows pined in pasture; they knew how maidens wasted while a waxen image burned. They recognized in a black cloud of the early evening some adventurous madam sailing over the town on her faithful broomstick. When they sat on their little stools close within the yawning fireplace, they traced weird figures in the embers, and they knew what used to happen in Salem town when naughty children swore themselves bewitched, and snatched away innocent lives. One little girl of a somewhat later period, in Duxbury, used to sit dreaming over the coals in the beloved company of the iron fire-dogs, in shape two Hessian soldiers; and

when no one was looking, she slyly wiped their little noses on her pinafore, to make them feel alive and cared for, and told them all the secrets intrusted to no one else. Mercy Otis, too, may have had such companions to share her heart-secrets, and wherever they are, possibly they waken at nighttime, like the puppets of German fairy-lore, and tell the tale we wait to hear. There were fresh legends of Indian life and present fear of Indian onslaught to be conjured up by the childish mind. The present might abide in tranquillity, but who that had heard of scalps and ambush would not tremble, and, like John. Fiske, in his precocious boyhood, fail to be comforted by grown-up reassurance? For that youthful sage, living peaceably in his New England home, one luckless day read of the massacre at Schenectady, and thenceforward shivered at night over the logical prospect of its repetition. No one could comfort him; the assertion that all the hostile Indians were hundreds of miles away bore no fruit for his inflamed imagination. Did they assure him of his own safety? He shook his wise little head, in a conviction stronger than fact. "Ah,"said he, mourning over the futility of ready-made platitudes, "that’s what they thought at Schenectady!”

Mercy Otis learned, like all proper maidens, the arts that go to the making of good housewives; yet I cannot believe that they wholly appealed to her. She was one of the children whose vision is inevitably set toward "the vista of the Book." She was created for the intellectual life, and in that day, when the feminine intelligence could demand no special training, she must have taken refuge the more in the vicarious joy of her brother’s possibilities. Not only through her childhood, but until her marriage, it is possible to read her mental phases chiefly through reference to him, — a soul so vivid that it might easily illuminate another more confined. This was an age when needlework and housewifery were all that could be expected of a woman; if she also sang a little, painted a little, and played tinkling tunes on the harpsichord, so much the more elegant was her status; and Mercy Otis was thus doubly fortunate in sharing, though at second-hand, in her brother’s intellectual pursuits. He was a close student, and the Rev. Jonathan Russell, who prepared him for college, was Mercy’s tutor also and the dlirector of her reading. He loaned her Raleigh’s History of the World, and encouraged her in the study of history in general, for which she had a passion. Years after, in a satirical letter of advice to a young lady, she begs her, with mock seriousness, to have nothing to do with any save frivolous and sceptical topics, since they are the only ones likely to pass current in the drawing-room; and adds, with a special stress gained from the devotion of a lifetime: —

"If you have a Taste for the Study of History let me Urge you not to Indulge it, least the Picture of human Nature in All Ages of the World should give Your Features too serious a Cast or by becoming acquainted with the rude State of Nature in the Earlier Ages, — the Origin of Society, the Foundations of Government & the Rise & Fall of Empires, you should Inadvertently glide into that unpardonable Absurdity & sometimes Venture to speak when Politicks happen to be the Subject. —In short, Science of any Kind beyond the Toilet, the Tea, or the Card Table, is as Unnecessary to a Lady’s figuring in the Drawing Room as Virtue unsully’d by Caprice is to the Character of the finish’d Gentleman. — She may be the admiration of the Ton without the One & He the Idol of popular Fame without the Other.”

There spoke the woman devoted not only to history but to "politicks,"and whose later life but copied fair her past.

Unfortunately, very little material is extant relative to James Otis’s youth; he, as the boy, might easily have had a Boswell where a girl would have passed on in an unrecognized obscurity. Like his life, his history is incomplete, illuminated here and there by flashes of insight, but never harmonious and consecutive. We know him to have been brilliant, erratic, no less a genius in capacity than in temperament. A creature of mental impulse, he nevertheless carried the ballast of reverence for exact study. His mind was of the vivid touch-and-go quality, but he was wise enough to feed it on the solid, the permanently satisfying.If you want to read poetry," he wrote from the experience of his later years, "read Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope, and throw all the rest in the fire; these are all that are worth reading.”

James Otis, Jr.

He entered college in 1739 (a wrench for the little sister, then only eleven, left at home to pore over her Raleigh’s History), and though for two years he seems to have been rather beguiled by the amusements of college life, he afterwards settled down to such serious application that even during his vacations at home, he so bound himself to his books that the neighbors seldom saw him out of doors. Mercy was entirely his equal, so far as the ardor of intellectual life was concerned; and here again, as in her first childhood, one can fancy that her attitude toward his studies was that of dear Maggie Tulliver in her ambition to conquer Euclid, which was not above Tom’s capacity and therefore quite within her own. Do we not all remember that heartsick moment when Maggie, in young ambition, asserted her mental equality, and Tom appealed to the tutor, to know whether girls also were intended for the I higher culture?

"They’ve a great deal of superficial cleverness,"said Mr. Snelling, "but they could n’t go far into anything."Conventional dictum, made to fit Maggie Tulliver and Merey Otis as well! And one was as likely to be satisfied with it as the other.

James Otis proved an excellent model. He was a classical scholar, and he saw the necessity of forming written English upon those types of perennial beauty belonging to the greater past; he had, too, a singularly clear appreciation of the value of a general culture in his own chosen profession of the law. In his maturer life, he writes his father in regard to the younger son, Samuel Allyne, who was about to study law, that extraneous culture is not a question of outward ornament, but an absolute necessity to a man who would shine in his profession. "I am sure," he says, "the year and a half I spent in the same way, after leaving the academy, was as well spent as any part of my life; and I shall always lament that I did not take a year or two further for more general inquiries in the arts and sciences before I sat down to the laborious study of the laws of my country." Culture is indeed not so much acquisition as an attitude of mind, and he had it in its broadest significance.

The life of the Barnstable farmhouse at the West Marshes was prosperous and abundant, in the manner of the time. The father, James Otis, was a man of public influence and distinguished character, who owed his standing to a mind of native ability rather than to any exceptional training. How greatly the intellectual atmosphere of the household was brightened by the home-comings of the brilliant eldest son, and the sharing of his fresh experiences, one can easily guess. His course at Harvard was at a period marked by great public excitement, both in the polity and the religious feeling of the college. It was during this time that Whitefield had stirred up Cambridge to a fervent heat by an arraignment of the college for its neglect of religious observances. It shared his ban with other universities; their “light had become darkness." Some of the students, during his visit, were “wonderfully wrought upon;" but the chief effect of his diatribe was to raise in New England a wave of theological controversy which culminated when Dr. Wigglesworth, then Hollis Professor of Divinity, published a full and elaborate refutation of his charges, and sufficiently vindicated the college from a suspicion of irreligion. All this turmoil of other-worldly logic and iron- bound speculation must have reached the Barnstable farmhouse not only through the ordinary channels, but hot from the mouth of so impetuous a witness. Mercy Otis was sharing her brother’s education; she was learning to think.

She seldom went from home, but one of the rare occasions was to attend his Commencement at the college. This, in old New England days, was a fete indeed: a fete so important as to be attended by giant expenditure and sinful extravagance. Indeed, so early as 1722 in its history, an act was passed "that thenceforth no preparation nor provision of either Plumb Cake, or Roasted, Boyled, or Baked Meates or Pyes of any kind shal be made by any Commencer," and that no "such have any distilled Lyquours in his Chamber or any composition therewith,"under penalty of twenty shillings or forfeiture of the said provisions." Five years later, several other acts were passed "for preventing the Excesses, Immoralities, and Disorders of the Commencements" by way of enforcing the foregoing act. These, with a simplicity of conclusion which brings a smile, declare that "if any who now doe or hereafter shall stand for their degrees, presume to doe anything contrary to the said Act or goe about to evade it by Plain Cake," they shall forfeit the honors of the college.

But Commencement was still a great day. Even before Otis’s time, the Governor and his bodyguard rode out to Cambridge in state, arriving there at ten or eleven o’clock in the morning. A procession was formed of the Corporation, Overseers, magistrates, ministers, and other distinguished guests, and marched in stately file from Harvard Hall to the old Congregational Church. There were orations, and disputations in logic, ethics, and natural philosophy, and later, the conferring of degrees; after which, the mighty men of learning and state went back to Harvard Hall for dinner. But the ceremonies were not concluded; for after dinner they returned to the church for more disputations and conferring of the Masters’ degrees. Then the students escorted the Governor, Corporation, and Overseers, still in procession, to the President’s house, and the day was over.

I cannot help thinking that when Mercy Otis, a proper maiden, clad in New England decorum, adorned with the graces of her day, went up to see these learned gymnastics, she was conscious of a homesick yearning for the same intellectual game, only to be partaken of vicariously. From the very first, she longed to know, to do; and I fancy there was in her heart a properly disguised ache over the fact that, for the intellectual woman, the world had apparently no definite place.

After this, her line of life lay only briefly with that of her brother. He left home, a little later, in. 1745, to study law in the Boston office of Jeremiah Gridley; and after two years’ practice at Plymouth, he took up his residence in Boston. But with those Plymouth years she had a pleasant connection, and there lives to this day a witness to testify of it. Tradition says that Mercy Otis used to visit her brother there, and it says also that a certain piece of her handiwork, the embroidered top of a card-table (now the property of her greatgranddaughter at Plymouth), was done about that time. And I like to think she drew the faithful stitches to the accompaniment of maiden dreams, as she sat by the window in the quaint little town and looked up, quite without intention, to receive a greeting from that very personable young man, James Warren, riding in from the farm.