Compares French and American revolutions; describes American government, America's future, and her expectation that wealth from commerce will inevitably hurt democracy and rob the people.

Written after news of the beginning of the French Revolution reached America. Assesses the new government's prospects. Remarks, we are too poor for Monarchy, too wise for Despotism, and too dissipated selfish & extravagant for Republicanism. Discusses the struggles of the infant republic.

Expresses thanks for her book (which she hasn't yet seen), Macaulay's comments on Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution: it is a vehement and virulent attack on the French constitution and Legislature for I must tell you that we in general look with a very malignant eye on the progress which our enlightened neighbors are making towards political perfection the [sic] Government because it will oblige them to keep within some bounds of moderation towards their own subjects[.] Macaulay adds: I look with impatience for yr history of the American Revolution because I expect it will be the most authentic account of that grand event with sagacious reflection on the subject of genuine liberty.

Refers to the present dangerous affairs due to British barbarity. Alludes to the Bravery of the peasants of Lexington. Describes the investment of a colonial army led by Washington and the beginnings of a representative government in Massachusetts.

Catharine Macaulay's reply to Burke on the French Revolution has never been reprinted, but takes its place alongside Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Men as the immediate response of the radical left, preceding Priestley, Mackintosh and Paine. The leading professional historian of her day, Macaulay was a personal friend of Washington, and had Volumes 1-5 of her History of England translated into French by Mirabeau. Her Letters on Education 1790 (see p. 21 of this catalogue) contains the basic feminist positions taken up by Wollstonecraft in her second Vindication.

This volume gathers more than one hundred letters-most of them previously unpublished-written by Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814). Warren, whose works include a three-volume history of the American Revolution as well as plays and poems, was a major literary figure of her era and one of the most important American women writers of the eighteenth century. Her correspondents included Martha and George Washington, Abigail and John Adams, and Catharine Macaulay. Until now, Warren's letters have been published sporadically, in small numbers, and mainly to help complete the collected correspondence of some of the famous men to whom she wrote. This volume addresses that imbalance by focusing on Warren's letters to her family members and other women. As they flesh out our view of Warren and correct some misconceptions about her, the letters offer a wealth of insights into eighteenth-century American culture, including social customs, women's concerns, political and economic conditions, medical issues, and attitudes on child rearing. Letters Warren sent to other women who had lost family members (Warren herself lost three children) reveal her sympathies; letters to a favorite son, Winslow, show her sharing her ambitions with a child who resisted her advice. What readers of other Warren letters may have only sensed about her is now revealed more fully: she was a woman of considerable intellect, religious faith, compassion, literary intelligence, and acute sensitivity to the historical moment of even everyday events in the new American republic.