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| Mercy Otis Warren and Sam Adams reading their work on a broadside |
Mercy Otis Warren, A Poet With a Masked Name
Mercy Otis Warren wrote in a world that did not expect women to speak publicly on politics, let alone criticize the British Empire. So she did something ingenious: she wrote anyway and often under pen names. Through poems and satirical plays, she skewered royal officials, mocked abuses of power, and whispered the word liberty between the lines. Her “anonymous” verses would appear as broadsides, pinned up where passersby could read them aloud. People might not know her name, but they knew her voice: sharp, witty, and utterly unafraid. Those pen names were more than a disguise. They were a kind of armor, allowing her to step onto the public stage without invitation, and to join a political conversation that tried very hard to exclude her.
Samuel Adams and the Art of the Article
If Mercy’s lines were the sparks, Samuel Adams supplied the steady flame. Adams also loved a good pseudonym. Under a rotating cast of pen names, he wrote article after article for the Boston Gazette, laying out the case against taxation without representation, standing armies in peacetime, and the creeping reach of imperial power. He understood that politics was persuasion, and persuasion needed stories: victims and villains, dangers and possibilities. In his hands, the Gazette became more than a newspaper, it was a rehearsal hall for revolution, where readers learned to see themselves as something new: Americans, not just British subjects. His articles didn’t just stay on the page. Printers pulled choice passages out, turned them into broadsides, and plastered them across the town, arguments made portable, ready to be read, recited, and debated in taverns and marketplaces.
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| Governor Hutchinson and British Soldiers inspect a tavern broadside |
Liberty in Disguise
Both Warren and Adams knew the risks of being too outspoken in a city watched by royal officials and patrolled by British troops. Pen names gave them a little distance, but the ideas themselves were anything but hidden.
Under every pseudonym, the message was unmistakable:
- Power must answer to the people.
- Rights are not gifts from a king.
- Liberty is worth the risk of speaking out.
Their writings, poems, plays, essays, and editorials crackled with the language of resistance. They didn’t always call openly for revolution at first, but they steadily pushed readers toward the conclusion that something fundamental had to change.
From Typeset to Town Square
At Edes & Gill, the words of Mercy Otis Warren and Samuel Adams were transformed from ink on a compositor’s tray into Boston Gazette broadsides; single sheets, set in type, inked, pressed, and hung up where no one could miss them.
Imagine the scene:
- The press creaks.
- Fresh sheets are hung to dry.
- A rider grabs a bundle for a nearby town.
- A tavern keeper nails one to the beam above the door.
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| Colonialists reading broadsides in a tavern |
By evening, those same words are being read aloud to a crowded room, argued over by fishermen and merchants, echoed in toasts, turned into verses of songs. The authors remain half-hidden behind their pen names, but the talk of liberty, of rights, of the possibility of independence, belongs to everyone.
In the end, the revolution wasn’t just fought with muskets on muddy fields. It was prepared in places like Edes & Gill, in the careful setting of type, in the courage of writers like Mercy Otis Warren and Samuel Adams who trusted that words, anonymous or not, could move a people toward freedom. Their broadsides didn’t just report history; they helped create it, one sheet, one poem, one article of resistance at a time.
