Visiting with Mercy Warren

Among the Massachusetts Historical Society’s ongoing crowd-sourced transcription projects is the Mercy Otis Warren Papers, including both political and family letters.

I found an example of a document from Mercy Warren showing the wrinkles of this sort of project. It’s a letter dated 16 June 1775. There’s no recipient noted on the paper, nor on the webpage or caption for the images.

The transcription begins:

With the highest pleasure I Receved the several Letters of my Dearest Friend. & now having Returned to my own Habitation I have Leasure to answer them I Returnd from a Visit to my Father [James Otis, Sr.] yesterday. the two miss Otis’s sister Hannah & Miss Otis Came away with me Designing only to accompany me to Sandwish but it being a very fine Day they Came as far as Plimouth. & after spending the afternoon & Evening & Regaling several times on the finest strawberys I have seen Left me this morning at 10 o clock. but the Beauties of Nature. the Bounties of providence nor the social Intercourse of Friends Can I taste with unalloyed Delight so Long as my Country is threatned with Desolation & Bloodshed. & my Beloved Husband not only Long abscent from me but stationed on Duty in a place where I am Greatly Apprehensive of personal Danger to him.

Eventually the letter is signed “your Mercy Warren.”

Folks who read a bunch of Warren letters will recognize that she often addressed her husband James as “my Dearest Friend.” When she wrote of “my Beloved Husband,” she was being arch and literary, not describing him to a third party. 

Jeffrey H. Richards and Sharon M. Harris recognized that intended recipient in Mercy Otis Warren: Selected Letters, which they published in 2009. Unaccountably, though, they dated this letter to 15 June.

James Warren responded on 18 June. His letter has already been transcribed and published in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Proceedings and Collections volumes—not because it came from the man in the marriage, but because he had a lot to say about the Battle of Bunker Hill.

In his reply James also told Mercy: “I hope your Strawberries are well taken care of and that you have fine feasting on them.”

TOMORROW: The general’s diary.