Mercy Otis Warren
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
40 free Mercy Otis Warren trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Mercy Otis Warren never held office, never went to school and never signed most of what she published, yet few people did more to argue the American colonies into revolution. She wrote satires that made royal officials into laughing stocks, traded letters with the leading rebels, and then sat down to write the story of the struggle herself. This quiz gathers the fun facts about her life: the family she came from, the plays and poems she wrote in secret, the presidents who praised her and the one who quarrelled with her, her stand on the Constitution, and the honours that came long after her death. It suits students of the Revolution, teachers building a women's history lesson, and anyone who likes a founding-era story with a sharp pen at the centre of it. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Mercy Otis Warren's brother James, the lawyer who fought the writs of assistance, was killed by what in 1783?
Lightning
Lightning struck James Otis as he watched a thunderstorm from a friend's doorway. A brawl with a customs officer years earlier had left him with a head injury from which he never fully recovered.
Q 02Which US president, stung by Mercy Otis Warren's History, fumed that history is not the province of the ladies?
John Adams
John Adams had urged her to write the book, then sent furious letters when it accused him of forgetting the Revolution's principles. The two old friends made peace before she died.
Q 03Mercy Otis Warren's 1788 pamphlet attacked the US Constitution for lacking which safeguard, added three years later?
A bill of rights
A bill of rights was the missing piece, she argued, and she listed protections such as a free press and trial by jury. The first ten amendments were ratified in 1791.
Q 04Which college, closed to women like Mercy Otis Warren, taught both her brother James and her future husband?
Harvard
Harvard is where James Warren befriended her brother. She may have first met her future husband at her brother's commencement there, though she could never enrol herself.
Q 05Mercy Otis Warren wrote a poem, at a friend's request, about which famous event before the Revolutionary War?
The Boston Tea Party
The Boston Tea Party poem was a favour for a friend. She told her husband it had been written off with little attention and lacked the merit for the public eye.
Q 06Which president ordered copies of Mercy Otis Warren's History of the American Revolution for himself and his cabinet?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson was in office when the three volumes appeared in 1805, and he predicted her account of the previous thirty years would be a lesson to mankind.
Q 07A Mercy Otis Warren satire went to press in 1775 shortly before which opening battle of the Revolutionary War?
Lexington
Lexington was fought on April 19, 1775, so her pamphlet mocking the Crown's men in Massachusetts reached readers only shortly before the shooting started.
Q 08Mercy Otis Warren's home in which Massachusetts town, where she is now buried, was a meeting place for revolutionaries?
Plymouth
Plymouth was her husband's hometown, and she lies there beside him in an old burying ground shared with several of the Pilgrims.
Q 09Mercy Otis Warren's mother descended from Edward Doty, a passenger who sailed to New England aboard which famous vessel?
The Mayflower
The Mayflower link ran on both sides of the marriage: her husband James descended from Richard Warren, another of the passengers of 1620.
Q 10Mercy Otis Warren was born in 1728 in Barnstable, a town on which Massachusetts peninsula?
Cape Cod
Cape Cod was her whole world as a girl: her brother's college commencement in 1743 may have been the first time she ever set foot off it.
Q 11Rapatio, the villain of Mercy Otis Warren's play The Adulateur, was a thinly veiled portrait of which royal governor?
Thomas Hutchinson
Thomas Hutchinson had beaten her father to the post of chief justice, which began a family feud. Once the play was out, Whigs took to calling the governor Rapatio.
Q 12Born a British subject in 1728, Mercy Otis Warren died at 86 during which later American conflict?
The War of 1812
The War of 1812 was still being fought when she died in October 1814, about two months after British troops burned Washington, D.C.
Q 13During World War II, what kind of vessel was launched in 1943 bearing Mercy Otis Warren's name?
A Liberty ship
Q 21Mercy Otis Warren was inducted in 2002 into the National Women's Hall of Fame, located in which New York town?
Seneca Falls
Seneca Falls hosted the landmark women's convention of 1848, which is why the hall stands there. Warren entered it 188 years after her death.
Q 22Which colonial painter made the circa 1763 portrait of Mercy Otis Warren now held by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts?
John Singleton Copley
John Singleton Copley painted her and her husband as a pair. She sat for him in satin and point lace, a picture far removed from the sharp-penned satirist.
Q 23Mercy Otis Warren kept the paperwork for her husband James while he held which post in the Continental Army?
Paymaster general
A Liberty ship named SS Mercy Warren went down the slipway in November 1943, one of the war's mass-produced cargo carriers. She was laid up in the Hudson River afterwards and scrapped in 1971.
Q 14Mercy Otis Warren named the hero of The Adulateur, modelled on her brother, after which assassin of Julius Caesar?
Brutus
Brutus leads the patriots against the tyrant Rapatio in a play she published three years before the real fighting began, with her brother James as the model for its hero.
Q 15Which enslaved poet published a book of verse 17 years before Mercy Otis Warren's own collection appeared?
Phillis Wheatley
Phillis Wheatley published her collection in 1773 while still enslaved, and was freed within months. Warren's own volume followed in 1790, the first work to carry her name.
Q 16Mercy Otis Warren shared her brothers' lessons with their tutor in every subject except which two?
Latin and Greek
Latin and Greek were what her brothers needed for college, a door closed to her. The Reverend Jonathan Russell let her study everything else at their side.
Q 17Mercy Otis Warren's husband came to lead Massachusetts's rebel legislature after Joseph Warren fell in which battle?
Bunker Hill
Bunker Hill cost the rebels Dr. Joseph Warren in June 1775, and James Warren was chosen president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in his place.
Q 18Mercy Otis Warren's husband James fondly called her by which nickname?
The scribbler
The scribbler was his pet name for a wife whose pen made him proud: he passed her unsigned satires around to his friends under seal of secrecy.
Q 19Under which pen name did Mercy Otis Warren publish her 1788 pamphlet against the proposed US Constitution?
A Columbian Patriot
A Columbian Patriot hid her so well that the pamphlet was credited to a man for generations, until a descendant found her mentioning it in a letter.
Q 20Mercy Otis Warren's unsigned Observations was long credited to which delegate who refused to sign the Constitution?
Elbridge Gerry
Elbridge Gerry was a Massachusetts ally and a fellow critic of the document, so readers assumed the essay was his. He went on to serve as vice president.
Paymaster general was a job James Warren took up in July 1775 at a salary of 100 dollars a month. Mercy travelled between home and the army to assist him.
Q 24Before their 1754 wedding, how was James Warren already related to his bride, Mercy Otis Warren?
Her second cousin
Her second cousin, James Warren courted her through an engagement of six years before the two were married at the Otis family home.
Q 25Why were Mercy Otis Warren's satirical plays of the 1770s printed for readers rather than staged in Boston?
Theatre was banned
Theatre was banned in Puritan Boston, so her dramas reached the public through newspapers and pamphlets, as reading matter rather than performances.
Q 26The Blockheads, a farce credited to Mercy Otis Warren, answered The Blockade of Boston, by which British commander?
John Burgoyne
John Burgoyne took as much pride in his playwriting as in his soldiering, and wrote his farce while the British held Boston. His script is lost, while her reply survives.
Q 27Meetings at Mercy Otis Warren's home helped found which network, which she credited with cementing the colonies' union?
Committees of correspondence
Committees of correspondence let towns and colonies trade news and plans in writing. She later wrote that perhaps no single step did so much to bring about independence.
Q 28Mercy Otis Warren's brother Samuel, who held the Bible at the first US inauguration, spent 25 years in which post?
Secretary of the Senate
Secretary of the Senate was a new office in 1789, and Samuel Allyne Otis was its first holder. He never missed a day's work and died in 1814, six months before his sister.
Q 29Which English historian, author of an eight-volume History of England, was Mercy Otis Warren's friend and pen pal?
Catharine Macaulay
Catharine Macaulay later crossed the Atlantic and visited Warren, who told a friend that her guest had a commanding genius and brilliance of thought.
Q 30Which Mercy Otis Warren satire of 1775 mocks Loyalists under names like Brigadier Hateall and Hum Humbug?
The Group
The Group was so biting that many readers credited it to a man. Decades later an ex-president swore in writing that only Madam Mercy Warren could have written it.