War & Peace Quote by Mercy Otis Warren

“Rather incautiously” is the kind of polite knife Mercy Otis Warren liked to keep up her sleeve: a single adverb that performs both deference and indictment. Writing as a patriot playwright turned historian, she doesn’t need to call Washington reckless; she lets the tone do the work. The sentence reads like measured narration, but it’s also a stage direction, setting up a foreseeable reversal. Long Island is introduced not as heroic terrain but as “large and plentiful,” almost inviting occupation. In Warren’s framing, abundance becomes vulnerability, a reminder that in war the attractive ground is often the trap.

The context is the 1776 campaign around New York, when Washington’s position on Long Island exposed the Continental Army to British maneuvering and led to a near-disastrous defeat and retreat. Warren is writing after the fact, when outcomes harden into judgments, and her wording carries that hindsight without surrendering to melodrama. The geography she sketches (“about two miles from the city”) makes the mistake feel intimate: the enemy, the stakes, and the consequences are uncomfortably close.

Subtextually, it’s also Warren staking her authority in a male-dominated political culture. She praises the cause while reserving the right to critique its icons. The line signals a republican sensibility: leaders aren’t monarchs, and reverence must not cancel accountability. Even Washington, she implies, is subject to error, and the Revolution’s story should include the uncomfortable beats, not just the triumphal ones.