Lessons for us all from Unionist James Madison

Personal attack deleted. Chellers

The colonies were not trying to form a consolidated nation. The each wanted independence, and because they were to small and weak to obtain it alone, and because they had economic and cultural ties due to their proximity and status as former British subjects, they allied themselves. If they wanted to be one consolidated nation from the very beginning, the AOC would have looked quite different. They were a confederation, not a nation, and that's what they wanted until the Articles proved to be inadequate.

You'll never understand the documents from the 18th Century until you understand the language in which they were written. You're using presentism, trying to read those documents as if they were written today. ***edited by moderator jgg ***
 
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"Collective nouns are usually used with singular verbs: the family is on holiday; General Motors is mounting a big sales campaign. In British usage,however, plural verbs are sometimes employed in this context, esp when reference is being made to a collection of individual objects or people rather than to the group as a unit: the family are all on holiday. Care should betaken that the same collective noun is not treated as both singular and plural in the same sentence: the family is well and sends its best wishes or the family are all well and send their best wishes, but not the family is well and send their best wishes."

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/collective-noun

In 1776, all Americans were British subjects and spoke British English. After the Revolution, as Americans became more separate from the Mother Country, American English evolved away from British English. That is why Americans began saying, "The United States is" instead of "The United States are" years before the Civil War.
 
In order to constitute “one people,” in a political sense, of the inhabitants of different countries, something more is necessary than that they should owe a common allegiance to a common sovereign. Neither is it sufficient that, in some particulars, they are bound alike, by laws which that sovereign may prescribe; nor does the question depend on geographical relations. The inhabitants of different islands may be one people, and those of contiguous countries may be, as we know they in fact are, different nations. By the term people, as here used, we do not mean merely a number of persons. We mean by it a political corporation, the members of which owe a common allegiance to a common sovereignty, and do not owe any allegiance which is not common; who are bound by no laws except such as that sovereignty may prescribe who owe to one another reciprocal obligations; who possess common political interests ; who are liable to common political duties; and who can exert no sovereign power except in the name of the whole. Anything short of this, would be an imperfect definition of that political corporation which we call “ a people.”

Tested by this definition, the people of the American colonies were, in no conceivable sense, “one people.” They owed, indeed, allegiance to the British king, as the head of each colonial government, and as forming a part thereof ; but this allegiance was exclusive, in each colony, to its own government, and, consequently, to the king as the head thereof, and was not a common allegiance of the people of all the colonies, to a common head. These colonial governments were clothed with the sovereign power of making laws, and of enforcing obedience to them, from their own people. The people of one colony owed no allegiance to the government of any other colony
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In farther illustration of this point, let us suppose that some one of the colonies had refused to unite in the declaration of
independence ; what relation would it then have held to the others ? Not having disclaimed its allegiance to the British
Crown, it would still have continued to be a British colony, subject to the authority of the parent country, in all respects as before. Could the other colonies have rightfully compelled it to unite with them in their revolutionary purposes, on the ground that it was part and parcel of the “one people,” known as the people of the colonies ? No such right was ever claimed, or dreamed of, and it will scarcely be contended for now, in the face of the known history of the time. Such recusant colony would have stood precisely as did the Canadas, and every other part of the British empire. The colonies, which had declared war, would have c onsidered its people as enemies, but would not have had a right to treat them as traitors, or as disobedient citizens resisting their authority. To what purpose, then, were the people of the colonies “one people,” if, in a case so important to the common welfare, there was no right in all the people together, to coerce the members of their own community to the performance of a common duty ?

It is thus apparent that the people of the colonies were not “one people,” as to any purpose involving allegiance on the
one hand, or protection on the other.



Abel Upshur, The True Nature and Character of our Federal Government: A review - 1840
 
"Collective nouns are usually used with singular verbs: the family is on holiday; General Motors is mounting a big sales campaign. In British usage,however, plural verbs are sometimes employed in this context, esp when reference is being made to a collection of individual objects or people rather than to the group as a unit: the family are all on holiday. Care should betaken that the same collective noun is not treated as both singular and plural in the same sentence: the family is well and sends its best wishes or the family are all well and send their best wishes, but not the family is well and send their best wishes."

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/collective-noun

In 1776, all Americans were British subjects and spoke British English. After the Revolution, as Americans became more separate from the Mother Country, American English evolved away from British English. That is why Americans began saying, "The United States is" instead of "The United States are" years before the Civil War.
So far all I see is your assertion and using your expertise to prove your assertion. How about period references or references not using your expertise.
 
LIFE IN THESE, UH, THIS UNITED STATES
Freeman rightly observes that this transformation from plural to singular mirrors the history of the phrase the United States. The change from the United States are to the United States is was not at all smooth, and has even served as a linguistic emblem for the nation's own turbulent history: "the Civil War is often credited with (or blamed for) transforming 'the United States' into a singular noun," Freeman writes. But how much truth is there to the claim that the Civil War was the watershed moment for the singularization of the United States, and how did that idea get spread around in the first place?
Other milestones for the shift in usage have been proposed (such as the War of 1812), but it's the Civil War theory that has had the most resonance in the popular imagination. The claim received a great deal of attention when it was made by the historian Shelby Foote (who passed away in June) in Ken Burns' much-watched PBS documentary series The Civil War, first broadcast in 1990. In an interview for the documentary that appeared in the companion book The Civil War: An Illustrated History, Foote said:

Before the war, it was said "the United States are." Grammatically, it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war, it was always "the United States is," as we say today without being self-conscious at all. And that sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an "is."
Foote's assertion echoes one made in 1909 by the renowned classics scholar (and former Confederate soldier) Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve in a lecture collected in Hellas and Hesperia; or, The vitality of Greek studies in America:
It was a point of grammatical concord which was at the bottom of the Civil War — "United States are," said one, "United States is," said another.
—quoted in Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War by Ward W. Briggs Jr. (1998), p. 22
Though Gildersleeve's quote circulated widely (and may have been the basis for Foote's argument), he wasn't the first to put forth this idea. The earliest example I've found so far appeared in the Washington Post in 1887:

There was a time a few years ago when the United States was spoken of in the plural number. Men said "the United States are" — "the United States have" — "the United States were." But the war changed all that. Along the line of fire from the Chesapeake to Sabine Pass was settled forever the question of grammar. Not Wells, or Green, or Lindley Murray decided it, but the sabers of Sheridan, the muskets of Sherman, the artillery of Grant. ... The surrender of Mr. Davis and Gen. Lee meant a transition from the plural to the singular.
—The Washington Post, Apr. 24, 1887, p. 4
Four years later, an article by G. H. Emerson (available on the American Periodicals Series database) elaborated on the argument:
The many histories are careful to distinguish between the Colonies and the States, but they have failed to impress the distinction, the immense and radical distinction, between the States and the United States. Early in the period of the Revolution there was, as just noted, a feeble incipiency of a Union in the Articles of Confederation, proposed in 1777 and ratified in March, 1781. For about a decade the states, under the technical name, "The United States of America," were a Confederacy; but when the Constitution was adopted the United States was. "They" gave place to "it." And as Mr. Fiske in his latest book, "Civil Government in the United States," has noted, the change from the plural to the singular was vital, though it has taken a War of Rebellion to make the difference unmistakable. The sovereign States were consolidated into a unit — a unit indeed with important limitations — when the Federal Constitution was adopted. The United States began not their but its history with the first inauguration of Washington as Chief Magistrate.
—"The Making of a Nation," by G. H. Emerson, in The Universalist Quarterly and General Review, Vol. 28 (Jan. 1891), p. 49
So how "unmistakable" could the shift from plural to singular have been? In any case, Emerson at least provides a source for the claim: Civil Government in the United States by John Fiske (1890). The text is available on Project Gutenberg, but there's nothing specifically linking the shift in usage to the Civil War:
From 1776 to 1789 the United States were a confederation; after 1789 it was a federal nation. The passage from plural to singular was accomplished, although it took some people a good while to realize the fact. The German language has a neat way of distinguishing between a loose confederation and a federal union. It calls the former a Staatenbund and the latter a Bundesstaat. So in English, if we liked, we might call the confederation a Band-of-States and the federal union a Banded-State. There are two points especially in our Constitution which transformed our country from a Band-of-States into a Banded-State. [etc.]
So Fiske only said "it took some people a good while" to move from the plural to singular construal, while Emerson explicitly pointed to the Civil War as the crucial moment. Again, like the Gildersleeve quote, none of this tells us anything about actual changes in usage. The earliest analysis I can find that tackles the usage question with actual research is a May 4, 1901 column in the New York Times book review by John W. Foster, secretary of state under Benjamin Harrison. The headline for Foster's piece reads: "ARE OR IS? Whether a Plural or a Singular Verb Goes With the Words United States." This is evidence that four decades after the Civil War, the plural vs. singular question was still open to debate. (Jan Freeman notes that usage guides of the early 20th century were divided on the issue, with Ambrose Bierce coming out against the singular in 1909, the same year as Dr. Gildersleeve's pronouncement.)
When Ambrose Bierce made his plea against singular United States, he wrote:

It would be pretty hard on a foreigner skilled in the English tongue if he could not venture to use our national name without having made a study of the history of our Constitution and political institutions. Grammar has not a speaking acquaintance with politics, and patriotic pride is not schoolmaster to syntax.



Bierce is usually quite reliable in such matters, but in this case he misread the situation. Sometimes grammar has more than a speaking acquaintance with politics, even if they make strange bedfellows.
 
Why is the U.S. singular?
The Civil War historian James McPherson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom, apparently saw the war as a turning point for singularity. I’ll quote from an article in John Hopkins Magazine (April 2001) about McPherson’s work:
“From his vast reading, he notes that before 1861, the public tended to treat ‘United States’ as a plural: ‘The United States are moving toward war.’ After the conflict, U.S. became singular: ‘The United States is looking forward to peace and reconciliation.’ McPherson traces changes in Abraham Lincoln’s vocabulary as well, with the word ‘nation’ gradually replacing ‘union’ in his speeches as the war progressed.
 
More from Upshur's analysis, pp 26-27, again making the point that we have different people living in different states sending representatives to Congress (not yet a government of any sort) with different levels of authority and different instructions:

It is to be remarked, that no new powers were conferred on congress after the declaration of independence. Strictly speaking, they had no authority to make that declaration. They were not appointed for any such purpose, but precisely the reverse; and although some of them were expressly authorized to agree to it, yet others were not. Indeed, we are informed by Mr. Jefferson, that the declaration was opposed by some of the firmest patriots of the body, and among the rest, by R. R. Livingston, Dickenson, Wilson and E. Rutledge, on the ground that it was premature ; that the people of New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware were not yet ripe for it, but would soon unite with the rest, if not indiscreetly urged. In venturing upon so bold a step, congress acted precisely as they did in all other cases, in the name of the States whose representatives they were, and with a full reliance that those States would confirm whatever they might do for the general good. They were, strictly, agents or ministers of independent States, acting each under the authority and instructions of his own State, and having no power whatever, except what those instructions conferred. The States themselves were not bound by the resolves of congress, except so far as they respectively authorized their own delegates to bind them. There was no original grant of powers to that body, except for deliberation and advisement ; there was no constitution, no law, no agreement, to which they could refer, in order to ascertain the extent of their powers. The members did not all act under the same instructions, nor with the same extent of authority. The different States gave different instructions, each according to its own views of right and policy, and without reference to any general scheme to which they were all bound to conform. Congress had in fact no power of government at all, nor had it that character of permanency which is implied in the idea of government. It could not pass an obligatory law, nor devise an obligatory sanction, by virtue of any inherent power in itself. It was, as already remarked, precisely the same body after the declaration of independence as before. As it was not then a government, and could not establish any new and valid relations between the colonies, so long as they acknowleged themselves dependencies of the British crown, they certainly could not do so after the declaration of independence, without some new grant of power.
 
Looks like "United States are is" a slight favorite until the 1960s.
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What gives on two sets of results? This is a new tool -- I would like to know how the results were generated. I DO like the single graph format.
 
One more Looks like a crossing in 1880. I have seen a report that in the early 1900 The US congress standardized it on 'is'
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