Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/155

128 Altogether, the literary workmanship and the political influence of Mercy Warren appears an anachronism in time and place, for a new country at war is not supposed to shape its course by literature, and surely the Puritan forbearance had shown little disposition to abide by the counsels of women, though ofttimes acting unconsciously under the influence of some brainy woman, who was too clever to let on that she recognized the conceptions of her fertile brain expressed by some man over whom she had subtle power.

In her last illness, her constant fear was that she might lose her mental faculties as death approached. She prayed effectively to be spared this dreaded condition. To her latest breath her mind was unclouded, and with an expression of thankfulness and peacefulness, she passed to the rest that awaits the faithful Christian, October 19, 1814, in the eighty-seventh year of her remarkably forceful life. Mary Draper, who was the wife of Captain Draper of Revolutionary fame, deserves to be classed with Putnam and Stark whose rough-and-ready and instantaneous response to their country's appeal has become a matter of historic tradition. When the news reached Connecticut that blood had been shed, Putnam, who was at work in the field, left his plow in the furrow, and started for Cambridge without changing his coat. Stark was sawing pine logs without a coat ; he shut down the gate of his mill and began his journey to Boston in his shirt sleeves. And Mary Draper, from her farm in Dedham, Massachusetts, was not one whit less active in her patriotic zeal. When the first call to arms sounded throughout the land, she exhorted her husband to lose no time in hastening to the scene of action; and with her own hands bound knapsack and