He served continuously from 1766 to 1778, eventually becoming speaker of the House and president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, which had moved to Watertown during the British occupation of Boston. Like the Otis men, James Warren was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. They had a long, happy marriage and raised five sons.
In 1754, Mercy married James Warren, a farmer from Plymouth and a Harvard classmate of her brother. It was the younger James who first uttered the phrase “Taxation without representation is tyranny,” which became the battle cry for the American Revolution.
Both of the Otis children studied literature, including Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope, and became able writers and rhetoricians. Mercy loved history-especially political history-invective, and wit Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World (1614) became a lifelong model for her. She studied the same curriculum as her brother James, except for Latin and Greek, which she read in translation.īoth James and Mercy were exceptional students. When Joseph, the oldest son, decided not to attend college, Mercy, the youngest child, was allowed to take his place. Not an educated man himself, Otis wanted his two sons to have an education and hired the Reverend Jonathan Russell to prepare them for college. James Otis was a farmer, merchant, and attorney, and his successful practice won him election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1745. Both families were descended from the earliest Pilgrim settlers. She was the third child of James Otis and Mary Allyne, of Barnstable, a farming town south of Plymouth, on Cape Cod. The American Revolution and her particular place in Massachusetts society and politics, however, practically forced Warren into the limelight. Mercy Otis Warren was a poet, dramatist, satirist, patriot propagandist, and historian at a time when women, if they wrote, were confined to belle-lettres or religious subject matter. A Massachusetts Daughter of the American Revolution
0 kommentar(er)
