Posted on 07/05/2013 8:48:20 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Historians have long tried to pinpoint exactly when the name 'United States of America' was first used and by whom. A new find suggests the man might have been George Washington himself.
As if George Washington hasn’t been credited enough with laying the foundation stones of the American republic, a new discovery might put one more feather in his cap. Our leading Founding Father could have been author of the country's name.
The identity of who coined the name “United States of America” has eluded historians for years. Online sources vary greatly, erroneously crediting Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and others.
But a letter written by Washington’s aide-de-camp on Jan. 2, 1776, discovered this past Memorial Day, suggests that Washington might have been one of the first people – if not the first person – to utter the words "United States of America."
Previously, William Safire and a bevy of Oxford and American researchers essentially concluded in 1998 that Thomas Jefferson was the originator. Jefferson wrote “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” in the header of his “original Rough draught” of the Declaration of Independence sometime on or after June 11, 1776. Then last summer, the Monitor reported the discovery of an earlier citation in an anonymous essay appearing in the Virginia Gazette, dated April 6, 1776.
This latest find comes in a letter that Stephen Moylan, Esq., wrote to Col. Joseph Reed from the Continental Army Headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., during the Siege of Boston. The two men lived with Washington in Cambridge, with Reed serving as Washington’s favorite military secretary and Moylan fulfilling the role during Reed’s absence.
The letter touched on the colonies' desire to enlist Europe's help in their revolution – most likely in procuring much-needed armaments and gunpowder.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
In text though, I think we are the united ... as joined together, States of America.
I read somewhere here in FR ... oh hell .. must'a been "98 or '99, a pretty interesting thread about the corporation of the (all caps) USA as opposed to the union of individual states .. uSA.That thread prompted another thread (or more) of the fringe and eagle on the top of the flag in a court room ... something about admiralty and all that.
Maybe THIS thread could pick up on some o'dat and refresh my failing memory.
And if there was anything TO those threads ... perhaps we should be informed ... eh?
Not to forget that Gore is also one of the most gracious and classy election losers of all time.
That also incorporates Richard Henry Lee’s resolution, word for word:
“That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.”
And two of the Declaration’s four references to God are there.
Essentially, after the War Between the States. Before then, the Union was considered a union of sovereign states. The United States of America, essentially, is a creation of those states.
After the Union victory in the war, the verbiage changed due to a more centralized sense of being one Union, rather than several sovereign states in voluntary federation. Mr. Lincoln's legacy.
No hi-jacked again.
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