During the years before the Revolution, she had published poems and plays that attacked royal authority in Massachusetts and urged colonists to resist British infringements on colonial rights and liberties.

[6] Although Mercy had no formal education, she studied with the Reverend Jonathan Russell while he tutored her brothers Joseph and James in preparation for college.

What next can I do better than write to a Saint," and Mercy would then respond, "Your spirit I admire - were a few thousands on the Continent of a similar disposition we might defy the power of Britain.

Warren wrote, "Perhaps no single step contributed so much to cement the union of the colonies, and the final acquisition of independence, as the establishment of committees of correspondence.

Mercy's husband James encouraged her to write, fondly referring to her as the "scribbler",[20] and she became his chief correspondent and sounding board.

In a letter to Catharine Macaulay, she writes: "America stands armed with resolution and virtue; but she still recoils at the idea of drawing the sword against the nation from whom she derived her origin.

In a letter to James Warren, Adams writes, "Tell your wife that God Almighty has entrusted her with the Powers for the good of the World, which, in the cause of his Providence, he bestows on few of the human race.

[1] Her elite and privileged status amid such a dramatically evolving political situation allowed her as a woman entry into the inner circles of revolutionary activity and debate.

[31] Not only did she come to know as individuals many of the most important political figures of her times, but she also formed strong opinions about many of them and some like Adams became influential in her literary life.

[36] She openly expressed her opinion in the harshest of terms in her historical account of Adams, ending one of the most productive friendships of the revolutionary period.

Warren's assistance in the movement to remove Governor Hutchinson from his position through The Defeat was one of her greatest accomplishments, and she allowed the piece a rare happy ending.

Her work earned the congratulations of numerous prominent men of the age, including George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, who remarked, "In the career of dramatic composition at least, female genius in the United States has outstripped the male".

The two plays, called "The Sack of Rome" and "The Ladies of Castille," deal with liberty as well as social and moral values that were necessary to the success of the new republic.

President Thomas Jefferson ordered subscriptions for himself and his cabinet and noted his "anticipation of her truthful account of the last thirty years that will furnish a more instructive lesson to mankind than any equal period known in history.

"[46] Reflecting her access to Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, "it is considered one of the few great comprehensive histories of the Revolution and formative years of the Republic written by a contemporary," according to biographer Martha J.

[49] Although at first dubious about the proper role of women as propagandists, she succumbed to the urgings of her friends and accepted her duty to use her talents for the patriot cause.

Her interest in current events blossomed into the skills of a self-taught historian, with a romanticized style of the sort readers of contemporary literature expected.

Like the fiction of the day, her historiography pointed toward moral lessons, and her plays and histories reflected her partisanship against the faction around Governor Hutchinson, or the Hamiltonian Federalists in the national capital.

Historians no longer read her for factual details, but they do find her a valuable source on the mood among intellectuals in the Revolutionary era and the early nation.

[51] The SS Mercy Warren, a World War II Liberty ship launched in 1943, was named in her honor.