Were any other names proposed for the United States of America?

Factual Questions
41

I don’t think the Congress thought of itself as establishing “a new country”.

“Country” is a geographic and/or cultural concept. Ireland, for example, was a country, and universally spoken of as such, long before there was an Irish state of any kind. Conversely there were many German states, independent of one another, but “Germany” was a cultural unity, and Germany as a country would have been understood to exist independently of the German political units.

What happened in 1776 was that a number of existing political entities, the colonies (a) severed their connections with Great Britain (and so recharacterised themselves as “states” rather than “colonies”) and (b) formed a new political entity, a confederacy between themselves.

The new confederacy was called “the United States of America”, but nobody would have said at the time that this meant that a new country had been called into being any more than a new country came into being when the EU was established in 1957. The question of abandoning the name “America” in favour of some other name probably wouldn’t have been on anybody’s mind; place-names were a matter for geographers, not revolutionaries. “United States of” might perhaps have been something else - “Confederacy of”, “Union of”, or something of the kind. But there were existing precedents - United Kingdom, United Provinces - and no obvious reason to depart from them.

42

I disagree. My reading of the times is that the revolution cast off the ties with Britain to form a new entity, which could be interpreted in no other way than as a new country, and that the Constitution utterly sealed this notion. Moreover, other countries - especially Britain’s enemies, true - were more than happy to see it and treat it as a new country.

It’s true that in 1776 the nature of the interaction among the former colonies was not yet worked out and that a period of experimentation ensued. You may be confusing that with a lack of nationhood. The connection between the states remained at a wholly different level than your example of the EU; it was political and not merely economic.

43

No, I don’t think so. “Vesper” is a Latin word meaning “evening”, “west” (related to Greek hesperos), so “Vesperia” just means “the western country”, “land of the west”.

The name “Vespucci” comes from Italian (originally Latin) vespa, “wasp”. The Latin words “vesper” and “vespa” don’t actually seem to be cognates, counterintuitive as that may appear.

44

No, I think they understood they were creating a new state, a new sovereign political entity, except they couldn’t call it a “state” because they were using that term for the former colonies which were subordinate entities within the new entity.

I don’t think they would have called their new entity a “country”, though, because the country already existed, and indeed had done so long before Europeans arrived. They might see the country being changed by European settlement and possibly, in so far as a country is a cultural entity rather than a purely geographical one, a new country might emerge in a long process in which not only independence but also colonisiation and federation play a part. But a country, in the sense of the word that was current in 1776, can’t be created by political fiat.

My point is really about what the word “country” means. There is a sense today in which it is can be synonymous with “internationally sovereign state”, but I think that sense developed well after 1776. I suspect nineteenth-century nationalism - the notion that each nation should establish its own independent political sovereignty in its own territory, or "country’ - played a role in the development of this sense.

Well, “nationhood” is another matter. A nation is a group of people united (and distinguished from other nations) by common culture, language, history, etc. Ireland was a nation long before there was an Irish state. Conversely, the Austrian empire was a state but not a nation (though it included many nations).

At one point, (British) colonists in the Americas regarded themselves as part of the British nation. Over time, the concept of a distinct American nation emerged; you could debate whether this happened before or after independence, or was a process which unfolded both before and after independence. At the very least, independence gave that process a considerable push. But just ten years previously, Ben Franklin was protesting various governmental Acts as inconsistent with “the liberties of Englishmen”, an objection which makes no sense unless the colonists consider themselves to be English.

I take the point that the relationship between the signatories of the Treaty of Rome was not the same as the relationship between the signatories of the Articles of Confederation, or even the states ratifyin the Constitution of 1787. My point is that what all of these things did was to create a political relationship (bewteen the states and the union, or between the citizens, the states and the union, or between the citizens and the union). But a political relationship is not a country.

45

Four years before the Constitutional Convention, Washington referred to the U.S. as a “country” (he also referred to it that year as a “nation,” as shown in my post 40, above). In a July 1783 letter to historian and educator the Rev. William Gordon, he wrote:

“It now rests with [Congress]…to make this country great, happy, and respectable; or to sink it into littleness; worse perhaps, into anarchy and confusion; for certain I am, that unless adequate powers are given to Congress for the general purposes of the Federal Union that we shall soon moulder into dust and become contemptible…We are known by no other character among nations than as the United States; Massachusetts or Virginia is no better defined, nor any more thought of by foreign powers than the County of Worcester in Massachusetts…or Glouster County in Virginia…yet these counties, with as much propriety might oppose themselves to the laws of the state in [which] they are, as an individual state can oppose itself to the Federal Government, by which it is, or ought to be bound. [When counties] come in contact with the general interests of the state, when superior considerations preponderate in favor of the whole, their voices should be heard no more; so it should be with individual states when compared to the Union…I think the blood and treasure which has been spent has been lavished to little purpose, unless we can be better cemented; and that is not to be effected while so little attention is paid to the recommendations of the sovereign power.”

46

Oh, sure. There’s no doubt that there was a country which was subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. It doesn’t follow, though, that the country was brought into existence by the creation of the United States. Similarly, the fact that Washington regarded the American people as constituting a nation doesn’t necessarily mean that he believed the nation had been brought into existence by the Declaration of Independence. You could just as easily make the contrary argument; a distinct American nation having emerged, that nation had the moral/political right to self-determination, and the Declaration of Independence was the exercise of that right.

The bottom line is that a country is first and foremost a place, and a nation is first and foremost a group of people, and neither places nor groups of people are brought into existence by political acts like declarations of independence; only political entities like states can be created by purely political actions. I think the conflation of the three terms might possibly have started by 1776, and it might conceivably have been accelerated by the confusion of referring to the United States as a “state”, but it didn’t really flourish until nationalist ideology flowered in the nineteenth century - every nation has not only the right but the duty to establish a state to govern and protect its country, and the nation is in some sense incomplete until it has achieved this.

47

I’d argue that you are wholly wrong about this, and at best are using the term “country” in a highly idiosyncratic manner that the rest of us aren’t buying into.

I checked my compact OED and found that the use of country to mean nation in our modern sense long precedes 1776. I’m copying just one usage out a long list of quotes whose spelling and lettering I’d find hard to reproduce.

I’d also argue that nobody, literally nobody, at that time would have thought of America before the Europeans arrives as a country in a sense interchangeable with a nation. There is an old, general, sense that does cover country in that way.

This is how they would have thought as America as country, but it is near opposite to the later sense - the use of undefined seals that. A country was a formally - by law or arms - defined state.

I consider this distinction to be of supreme importance. The Founders were viscerally aware that they were committing treason by trying to carve an independent state out of the King’s realm - that’s why they were so careful to use language that downplayed any indication of that before their hand was forced.

Once it was, and that happened in 1776, they formed a new country by splitting off from the old. Everybody understood that, everybody on all sides knew treason when they saw it. Nobody was making up a new sense for old words. Instead they were applying old words in a completely contemporary way.

Honestly, I don’t see how you can understand anything that happened from, say, 1763 to 1789 without building off of this.

48

I don’t think I’m being idiosyncratic at all. The OED definition you quote (the territory or land of a nation, usually an independent state) clearly observes a distinction between the territory (land), the nation (people) and the state (political construct), and makes it clear that the word “country” refers to the territory. From the definition a country is usually, but not necessarily, the subject of an independent state, but the terms are not synonymous; in 1776 Ireland would have been an obvious example of a country, and a nation, which did not have an associated independent state, and Austria an obvious example of an independent state comprising many countries and many nations.

Obviously in the case of, say, France, which had long been a distinct nation with a well-defined country and a well-established state the terms country, nation and state would be more or less interchangeable, but this wouldn’t have been true where nation-states had not been established. “Country”, when used of a country which was an independent state, could indeed refer to the state, as your quote shows. But that wasn’t its primary sense.

The Low Countries, for example, was a well-understood geographical and to some extent cultural term long before there was a political entity called “the Netherlands”. The United Provinces of the Netherlands, when established in 1579, based its name on the existing name of the existing country, the Low Countries.

The oldest sense of “country”, in English, refers to the land of a person’s birth or residence; the land with which he identifies. This could be what we might now think of as the national territory, or it could be a subdivision of that - even quite a small subdivision. In 1776, for example, General Charles Lee wrote to Washington complaining that “These Connecticutians [soldiers under his command] are more eager to go out of their Country than They are to return home”. In the context, it’s clear that their “country” is Connecticut. And this sense is still current; nobody who remembers the ads for “Marlboro Country” thinks that Marlboro Country was the United States. “Thomas Hardy country” is Dorset, not England. And of course England itself, although not a state, is unquestionably a country.

I think what the founding fathers - or at least some of them - would have felt is that by establishing the confederacy they were doing something which would establish such common bonds between the colonies as to make them not just several countries, but also one country, in a way that they had not been before. Or at least, it would give an impetus to the process. (The foundation of the United Provinces of the Netherlands might have been understood to have a similar effect, or the Act of Union between England and Scotland.) But this, to go back to the OP, wouldn’t have been seen by anybody as an occasion for making up a new name for America. America already had a name, and didn’t need renaming on this occasion any more that the Netherlands or Great Britain had needed renaming. The only think that needed to be named was the new confederacy, and “America” was the obvious referent for the new confederacy.

49

If he did, he probably swiped it from the Firesign Theater:

50

“Bloom was talking and talking with John Wyse and he quite excited with his dunducketymudcoloured mug on him and his old plumeyes rolling about.

  • Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it. Perpetuating national hatred among nations.
  • But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.
  • Yes, says Bloom.
  • What is it? says John Wyse.
  • A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.
  • By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years.
    So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it:
  • Or also living in different places.
  • That covers my case, says Joe.
  • What is your nation if I may ask? says the citizen.
  • Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.
    The citizen said nothing only cleared the spit out of his gullet and, gob, he spat a Red bank oyster out of him right in the corner.”
51

So what does the name “Amerigo” mean, if anything? Could it be Italian for “Circling horses”?

Or maybe that’s only true if his last name had been Roonda.

52

This is why I don’t buy the argument that it’s “illegal” for a state to secede. The mostly-independent nature of the states is inherent in the basic repeated phraseology of “union”, “state”, etc. To deny that… Well, it’s just impossible to deny

Not that Texas seceding would have been good post civil war, or that the North didn’t have the right to invade the South, or that the Supreme Court is always right (they frequently butcher the basic meaning of words)… just, yeah, We’re a Union, not one overarching state.