Real Heroes

by Lawrence W. Reed

  In the latter half of the eighteenth century, Warren was an accomplished poet, playwright, pamphleteer, and historian—though much of what she wrote was anonymous, in part to get a hearing where a woman might not otherwise be listened to. She also risked reprisal from King George III and the British troops with her subversive rhetoric in favor of American liberty and independence.

  She was a close friend and confidante to almost all the major figures of the revolution: the Adamses (Samuel as well as John and Abigail), the Washingtons (both George and Martha), Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, and Patrick Henry, among others. Many of the plans and activities of the Sons of Liberty and, later, the Committees of Correspondence were hatched in her Massachusetts home.

  For decades, she advocated for women’s rights at a time when progress on that front must have seemed glacial at best. When the Constitution was debated, she was an outspoken anti-Federalist who insisted on the adoption of a Bill of Rights. She was the first person, man or woman, to pen a history of the conflict with Britain.

  It’s for eminently good reason that Mercy Otis Warren is regarded in history as the “conscience of the revolution.”

  “We Will Be Free”

  Born in 1728 in West Barnstable, Massachusetts, Warren was homeschooled by parents who encouraged every sign of interest in her studies in general and literature in particular. Her mother was a descendant of a passenger aboard the Mayflower, the ship that brought the Pilgrims to New England in 1620. Her father was a vocal opponent of British rule in the colonial legislature. Both her father and her brother led the fight against the king’s writs of assistance (searches without warrants), and her brother is credited with the first usage of the phrase “No taxation without representation.” Husband James affectionately labeled her “the scribbler.”

  As tensions rose between the mother country and the colonies, Warren was drawn into the fray. “Every domestic enjoyment depends on the unimpaired possession of civil and religious liberty,” she wrote. Encroachments on that liberty, particularly when they came under orders from the unpopular British governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, earned Warren’s opprobrium.

  Hutchinson was the model for (and intended target of) her famous play The Adulateur, which appeared in 1772. It foretold the coming of the revolution through the words of a disagreeable and imperious official named Rapatio. Published anonymously, it enjoyed an enthusiastic reception. “With the publication of The Adulateur,” writes biographer Nancy Rubin Stuart, “Mercy made her debut as the patriots’ secret pen, whose barbed lampoons provoked laughter and longing for liberation from British rule.”

  Words of Wisdom from Mercy Otis Warren

  “The rights of individuals ought to be the primary object of all government.”

  With war clouds gathering in 1775, Warren saw the contending sides in stark terms: “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. Yet Britain, like an unnatural parent, is ready to plunge her dagger into the bosom of her affectionate offspring.”

  During the war, Warren not only wrote plays and pamphlets that championed the American cause; she also dared to promote women’s rights. Her tragedy The Ladies of Castile, set in Spain during the reign of Emperor Charles V, is regarded as the most feminist of her patriotic works. The play’s heroine warns the audience:

  Though weak compassion sinks the female mind

  And our frail sex dissolve in pity’s tears;

  Yet justice’ sword can never be resheath’d

  ’Till Charles is taught to know we will be free;

  And learns the duty that a monarch owes,

  To heaven—the people—and the rights of man.

  After the United States secured independence, Warren turned her attention to ensuring that the government did not stray from the principles of republicanism. In February 1788, during debates over the ratification of the Constitution, she published a nineteen-page pamphlet called “Observations on the New Constitution, and on the Federal and State Conventions.” In it she argued that the Constitution as it stood threatened to violate individuals’ and states’ rights. “All writers on government agree … that man is born free and possessed of certain unalienable rights—that government is instituted for the protection, safety, and happiness of the people,” she wrote. But the Constitution would “betray the people of the United States into an acceptance of a most complicated system of government, marked on the one side with the dark, secret and profound intrigues of the statesman … and on the other, with the ideal project of young ambition … to intoxicate the inexperienced votary.”

  She concluded that without provisions to ensure explicitly freedoms of speech and press, limits on the judiciary, guarantees of trial by jury, and other protections, the Constitution would undermine what Americans had fought for. She demanded the addition of, in her words, “a bill of rights to guard against the dangerous encroachments of power.”

  Ultimately, in large measure because the arguments of Warren and her anti-Federalist compatriots finally swayed James Madison, the Bill of Rights became the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

  Setting a High Standard

  Warren was deeply offended when President John Adams signed into law the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. They led to the closure of newspapers critical of the administration, which Warren saw as the grossest violation of American liberty—and she said so without reservation. Her fierce objections strained her relationship with the president but did not injure her long-standing friendship with his wife, Abigail. Warren’s warnings against a postwar lapse in revolutionary principles helped bring about the ouster of John Adams and the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800.

  Her last major work was History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution. Appearing it 1805, it was the first important history of the period from 1765 to 1789. President Jefferson ordered copies for himself and for every member of his cabinet and no doubt took note of her concern for the country’s future. She wrote:

  The people of the United States are bound together in sacred compact and a union of interests which ought never to be separated. But the confederation is recent, and their experience immatured; they are, however, generally sensible … [understanding that history demonstrates that] deception as well as violence have operated to the subversion of the freedom of the people.

  Warren knew full well that the imperfect Constitution, even improved with a Bill of Rights, was still a scrap of paper. Whether or not it lived to protect Americans’ hard-won freedom depended on the wisdom and spirit of the people. She had already witnessed a dismaying retreat from constitutional principles in the Adams administration. She worried that with the passing of the revolutionary generation, future Americans might embrace diminutions of their liberties through moral corruption, false promises, lies, and unprincipled compromise. “The characters of nations,” she observed, “have been disgraced by their weak partialities, until their freedom has been irretrievably lost in that vortex of folly which throws a lethargy over the mind, till awakened by the fatal consequences which result from arbitrary power, disguised by specious pretexts amidst a general relaxation of manners [i.e., personal character].”

  When Warren died in 1814 at age eighty-six, she was celebrated as a principled defender of the revolution, an eloquent advocate of liberty and limited government, and the epitome of what it meant to be a true “conscience” of great causes. In the two centuries since, how faithfully have Americans lived up to her standards of conscience for those same causes?

  Lessons from Mercy Otis Warren

  Educate yourself: The homeschooled Mercy Otis Warren drew on her extensive studies to become an accomplished poet, playwright, pamphleteer, and historian—and an influential voice for American independence, the Bill of Rights, and women’s rights.

  Speak out for your principles: Warren steadfastly supported the cause of Amer
ican liberty whether that meant defying the British Crown and Parliament, risking her longtime friendship with John Adams, or challenging the common belief of her era that politics and war were subjects only men were to discuss.

  7

  Edmund Burke

  Eloquence and Conviction

  Murray Rothbard, the Austrian school economist, regarded the young Edmund Burke as a libertarian and even a philosophical anarchist. Russell Kirk, the renowned man of letters and author of The Conservative Mind, viewed Burke as the progenitor of the modern conservative movement.

  Rothbard and Kirk differed on many things, but on this they agreed: Edmund Burke was one of the greatest political thinkers of the past three hundred years, a man to whom lovers of liberty owe a considerable intellectual debt.

  Resisting “Injustice, Oppression, and Absurdity”

  Born in 1729 in Dublin, Ireland, Burke moved to England in 1750 to study law, and he considered himself at least as much English as he was Irish. By his early thirties he had gained a reputation as a promising writer and political commentator, and in 1766 he began a long career as a Whig member of the House of Commons. In The Triumph of Liberty, Jim Powell writes: “Burke wasn’t a great orator—indeed, his speeches, which were sometimes three hours long, emptied the seats in Parliament. But Burke had acquired deep knowledge of history which gave him valuable perspective, and he developed a passionate pen.” And he deployed his considerable skills on behalf of causes that, though not always popular, reflected his commitment to principle.

  One such issue was his defense of America and his opposition to conflict with the colonies. On this matter he spoke out against the king, his ministers, and a majority of Parliament. The beginning of George III’s reign in 1760 had marked the end of a long period of British “salutary neglect” of colonial America. Most of the British government was intent on letting Americans know who was boss. Burke spoke out nonetheless—passionately and repeatedly.

  In 1774 Burke rose in Parliament to deliver an eloquent appeal to leave the colonists alone on the all-important issue of “taxation without representation”:

  Again and again, revert to your old principles—seek peace and ensue it; leave America, if she has taxable matter in her, to tax herself. I am not here going into the distinctions of rights, nor attempting to mark their boundaries. I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions; I hate the very sound of them. Leave the Americans as they anciently stood, and these distinctions, born of our unhappy contest, will die along with it.… Be content to bind America by laws of trade; you have always done it.… Do not burthen them with taxes.… But if intemperately, unwisely, fatally, you sophisticate and poison the very source of government by urging subtle deductions, and consequences odious to those you govern, from the unlimited and illimitable nature of supreme sovereignty, you will teach them by these means to call that sovereignty itself in question.… If that sovereignty and their freedom cannot be reconciled, which will they take? They will cast your sovereignty in your face. No body of men will be argued into slavery. . . . Tell me, what one character of liberty the Americans have, and what one brand of slavery they are free from, if they are bound in their property and industry by all the restraints you can imagine on commerce, and at the same time are made pack-horses of every tax you choose to impose, without the least share in granting them. When they bear the burthens of unlimited monopoly, will you bring them to bear the burthens of unlimited revenue too? The Englishman in America will feel that this is slavery; that it is legal slavery, will be no compensation either to his feelings or to his understandings.

  Words of Wisdom from Edmund Burke

  “Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.”

  A year later, as the bonds between Britain and America were breaking, he once again urged peace and reconciliation. He poignantly reminded his colleagues in the House of Commons that Americans were fellow Englishmen:

  They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and on English principles. The people are Protestants . . . a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it.… My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government—they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any mutual relation—the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you.… Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil. They may have it from Spain, they may have it from Prussia. But, until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you.

  War with America, in Burke’s view, could lead only to disaster. Even if Britain were successful, it would come at a great cost in lives, treasure, and goodwill. “The use of force alone is but temporary,” he warned. “It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.” He openly declared that to support the war was to “wish success to injustice, oppression and absurdity.”

  Limiting Government Power

  Burke criticized the overreach of government in all spheres, arguing that treating people as pawns of power bred only violence and disorder. “People crushed by law,” he reasoned, “have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous.” In his famous letter to the sheriffs of Bristol in 1777, he noted that liberty is usually lost not in one fell swoop but one slice at a time: “The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.” He was a leader in Parliament’s debates—perhaps the most important one in his day—in favor of enacting constitutional limitations on government power, whether it emanated from the king or from Parliament itself.

  The Anglican Burke championed the unpopular cause of Catholic emancipation, supporting the right of Catholics to hold positions in government and opposing the appropriation of public funds for the support of the Anglican Church in Ireland.

  He was an ardent free trader at a time when Adam Smith’s ideas against protectionism were only beginning to take root: “Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.” He spoke of “the advantage of free intercourse between all parts of the same kingdom” as well as “the evils attending restriction and monopoly.” Echoing Smith, he asserted that “the gain of others is not necessarily our loss, but on the contrary, an advantage by causing a greater demand for such wares as we have for sale.”

  Enjoying special privileges bestowed by the British government, the East India Tea Company by the 1780s dominated the political and economic life of India. Abuses of Indians were rampant, leading Burke to champion the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the British governor-general of Bengal. Piers Brendon, in his The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: 1781–1997, recalls that Burke’s piercing, well-documented indictment labeled Hastings a “captain-general of iniquity,” a man “who never dined without creating a famine,” a blackguard whose heart was “gangrened to the core,” and a despoiler who resembled both a “spider of Hell” and a “ravenous vulture devouring the carcasses of the dead.” Though the House of Commons did impeach Hastings, his friends in the House of Lords refused to convict.

  “Architects of Ruin”

  The French Revolution that began in 1789 provi
ded Burke with an issue that has surely defined him and his political philosophy more than any other. His powerful treatise in 1790, Reflections on the Revolution in France, is perhaps the best-known contemporaneous critique of the revolution and the primary source for Russell Kirk’s claim that Burke is the father of modern conservative political theory. Though he applauded the spirit of liberty that provoked the upheaval, he quickly saw where the French were tragically headed. They were becoming, in his words,

  the ablest architects of ruin that had hitherto existed in the world. In that very short space of time they had completely pulled down to the ground, their monarchy; their church; their nobility; their law; their revenue; their army; their navy; their commerce; their arts; and their manufactures.… [There was a danger of] an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody and tyrannical democracy.

  When the French added hyperinflation and price controls to their panoply of tyranny in the mid-1790s, Burke showed himself to be a staunch defender of sound money. He upbraided the French for the destruction of private property and commercial order that their depreciating paper money engendered:

  Your legislators, in everything new, are the very first who have founded a commonwealth on gaming, and infused this spirit into it as its vital breath. The great object of these politics is to metamorphose France from a great kingdom into one great play table; to turn its inhabitants into a nation of gamesters.… With you, a man can neither earn nor buy his dinner without a speculation. What he receives in the morning will not have the same value at night.… Industry must wither away. Economy must be driven from your country. Careful provision will have no existence.

  Burke understood a cardinal rule of society—namely, that there’s a vital connection between liberty and personal character. “All who have ever written on government are unanimous,” he wrote, “that among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.” His most eloquent statement of this principle appeared in a letter to a member of the National Assembly in 1791: