Made In America (10 page)

Jefferson's draft of the Declaration contains several spellings and usages that strike us today – and indeed appear to have struck at least some of his contemporaries – as irregular. For one thing, Jefferson always wrote
it's
for the possessive form of
it,
a practice that looks decidedly illiterate today. In fact, there was some logic to it. As a possessive form, the argument went, its required an apostrophe in precisely the same way as did words like
children's
or
men's.
Others contended, however, that in certain common words like
ours
and
yours
it was customary to dispense with the apostrophe, and that its belonged in this camp. By about 1815, the non-apostrophists had their way almost everywhere, but in 1776 it was a fine point, and one to which Jefferson clearly did not subscribe.
³⁵

Jefferson also favoured some unusual spellings, notably
independant
(which Thomas Paine likewise preferred),
paiment
and
unacknoleged,
all of which were subsequently changed in the published version to their more conventional forms. He veered with apparent indecisiveness between the two forms for the singular third person present indicative of
have,
sometimes using the literary
hath
('experience hath shown') and sometimes the more modern
has
('He has kept among us ...'). Two further orthographic uncertainties of the age are reflected in Jefferson's text – whether to write
-or
or
-our
in words like
honour
and whether to use
-ise
or
-ize
in words like
naturalize.
Jefferson was inconsistent on both counts.

Much is sometimes made of the irregularity of spelling among writers of English in the eighteenth century. Noting that Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations
varied in its spellings between
public
and
publick, complete
and
compleat,
and
independent
and
independant,
David Simpson observes in
The Politics of American English:
'Except for Samuel Johnson, no one in 1776, on either side of the ocean, seems to show much concern for a standard spelling practice.‘
³⁶

This is almost certainly overstating matters. Although Thomas Jefferson did have some spelling quirks – among many others, he persistently addressed his letters to ‘Doctr. Franklyn' when he must surely have realized that the good doctor spelled his name otherwise
³⁷
– to suggest that he or any other accomplished writer of his age was cavalier with his spelling does him an injustice. To begin with, such a statement contains the implied conceit that modern English is today somehow uniform in its spellings, which is far from true. In 1972, a scholar named Lee C. Deighton undertook the considerable task of comparing the spellings of every word in four leading American dictionaries and found that there are no fewer than 1,770 common words in modern English in which there is no general agreement on the
preferred spelling.
The Random House Dictionary,
to take one example, gives
innuendos
as the preferred plural of
innuendo,
the American Heritage opts for
innuendoes, Webster's New World
prefers
innuendoes
but recognizes
innuendos,
and
Webster's Seventh
gives equal merit to both. The dictionaries are equally – we might fairly say hopelessly – split on whether to write
discussible
or
discussable, eyeopener, eye opener
or
eye-opener, dumfound
or
dumbfound, gladiolus
(for the plural),
gladioli
or
gladioluses, gobbledegook
or
gobbledygook, licenceable
or
licensable,
and many hundreds of others. (The champion of orthographic uncertainty appears to be
panatela,
which can also pass muster as
panatella, panetela
or
panetella.)
The principal difference between irregular spellings now and in Jefferson's day is that in Jefferson's day the number was very much larger – no less than you would expect in an age that was only just becoming acquainted with dictionaries. Just as we seldom note whether a particular writer uses
big-hearted
or
bighearted, omelette
or
omelet, OK
or
okay,
so I suspect Jefferson and Paine would think it singular that we had even noticed that they sometimes wrote
honour
and sometimes
honor.

That is not to say that spelling or any other issue of usage in this period was considered inconsequential. In fact, the opposite is true. The second Continental Congress contained within it many men – Jefferson, Adams, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin, John Witherspoon (first president of Princeton University and the first authority on American English) – who constantly displayed a passionate interest in language and its consistent, careful application. They argued at length over whether the Declaration should use
independent
or
independant, inalienable
or
unalienable,
whether the principal nouns were to be capitalized as Franklin wished or presented lower case as Jefferson desired (and as was the rather racy new fashion among the younger set).
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Anything to do with
language exercised their interest greatly – we might almost say disproportionately. Just a month after the completion of the Declaration of Independence, at a time when the delegates might have been expected to occupy themselves with more pressing concerns – like how they were going to win the war and escape hanging – Congress quite extraordinarily found time to debate the business of a motto for the new nation. (Their choice,
E Pluribus Unum,
'One From Many', was taken from, of all places, a recipe for salad in an early poem by Virgil.) Four years later, while the war still raged, John Adams was urging Congress to establish an American Academy along the lines of the Académie française with the express purpose of establishing national standards of usage. To suggest that these men showed ‘not much concern' for matters of usage and spelling is to misread them utterly.

Where there was evident uncertainty was in what to call the new nation. The Declaration referred in a single sentence to ‘the united States of America' and ‘these United Colonies'. The first adopted form of the Declaration was given the title ‘A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled', though this was improved in the final published version to the rather more robust and assertive ‘The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America'. (It wasn't in fact unanimous at all. At least a quarter of the delegates were against it, but voting was done by delegation rather than by individuals, and each delegation carried a majority in favour.) It was the first time the country – had been officially designated the United States of America, though in fact until 1778 the formal title was the United States of North America.
³⁹
Even after the Declaration, ‘united' was often left lower case, as if to emphasize that it was merely descriptive, and the country was variously referred to throughout the war as ‘the colonies', ‘the united Colonies', the ‘United Colonies of America' or ‘the United Colonies of North America'. (The
last two are the forms under which officers were commissioned into the army.)

That the signing of the Declaration of Independence is celebrated on 4 July is one of American history's more singular mistakes. America did not declare independence on 4 July 1776. That had happened two days earlier, when the proposal was adopted. The proceedings on 4 July were a mere formality endorsing the form of words that were to be used to announce this breach. Most people had no doubt that 2 July was the day that would ring through the ages. ‘The second day of July, 1776 will be the most memorable Epocha in the History of America,' John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail on 3 July. Still less was the Declaration signed on 4 July, except by the president of the proceedings, John Hancock, and the secretary, Charles Thomson.
^*14
It was not signed on 4 July because it had first to be transcribed on to parchment. The official signing didn't begin until 2 August and wasn't concluded until 1781 when Thomas McKean of Delaware, the last of the fifty-six signatories, finally put his name to it. Such was the fear of reprisal that the names of the signers were not released until January 1777, six months after the Declaration's adoption.

Equally mistaken is the idea that the adoption of the Declaration of Independence was announced to a breathless Philadelphia on 4 July by the ringing of the Liberty Bell. For one thing, the Declaration was not read out in Philadelphia until 8 July, and there is no record of any bells being rung. Indeed, though the Liberty Bell was there, it was not so called until 1847 when the whole inspiring episode was recounted in a book titled
Washington and His Generals,
written by one George Lippard, whose previous literary efforts had been confined almost exclusively to producing mildly
pornographic novels.
⁴¹
He made the whole thing up.

John Dunlap, a Philadelphia printer, hastily ran off an apparently unknown number of copies. (Until recently only twenty-four were thought to have survived – two in private hands and the rest lodged with institutions. But in 1992 a shopper at a flea market in Philadelphia found a copy folded into the back of a picture frame, apparently as padding. It was estimated to be worth up to $3 million.) Dunlap's version was dated 4 July and it was this, evidently, that persuaded the nation to make that the day of revelry. The next year, at any rate, the great event was being celebrated on the fourth, and so it has stayed ever since. It was celebrated ‘with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other', in John Adams's words. The first anniversary saw the entrance of a new word into the language:
fireworks.
Fireworks themselves weren't new, but previously they had been called
rockets.

America wasn't yet a nation, but more a loose confederation of thirteen independent sovereignties – what the Articles of Confederation would later call ‘a firm league of friendship'. True nationhood would have to wait a further twelve perilous, unstable years for the adoption of the Constitution. Before we turn to that uneasy period, however, let us pause for a moment to consider the fate of poor Tom Paine, the man who set the whole process of revolution in motion.

Despite the huge success of
Common Sense,
the publication brought him no official position. By the end of 1776, he was a common foot soldier. After the war, Paine travelled to France, where he performed a similar catalytic role in the revolution there with his pamphlet
The Rights of Man
before falling foul of the erratic Robespierre, who had him clapped into prison for daring to suggest a merciful exile for King Louis XVI (on the grounds that Louis had supported the
American rebels). Unappreciated in France and a pariah in his own country, he returned to America and sank almost at once into dereliction and obscurity.

Not long before he died, an old friend found Paine in a tavern in New Rochelle, New York, unconscious, dressed in tatters, and bearing ‘the most disagreeable smell possible'. The friend hauled him to a tub of hot, soapy water and scrubbed him from head to foot three times before the odour was pacified. His nails had not been cut for years. Soon afterwards, this great man, who had once dined with the likes of Washington, Jay and Jefferson, who had been a central figure in the two great revolutions of the modern age, died broken and forgotten. William Cobbett, the essayist, stole his bones and took them back to England with him, but likewise died before he could find a suitable resting-place for them. And so the remains of one of the great polemicists of his or any other age were unceremoniously carted off by a rag-and-bone merchant and vanished for ever.

It began with a dispute between oyster fishermen.

In 1632 Charles I placed the border between Virginia and Maryland not in the middle of the Potomac River, as was normal practice, but instead gave his chum Lord Baltimore the whole of the river up to the Virginia bank, to the dismay and frustration of Virginia fishermen who were thus deprived of their right to gather the river’s delicious and lucrative bivalves. Over time, the dispute spread to Pennsylvania and Delaware, led to occasional skirmishes known collectively and somewhat grandly as the Oyster War, and eventually resulted in the calling of a gathering to try to sort out this and other matters involving trade and intrastate affairs.

Thus in May 1787 representatives from all over America began to assemble at the old State House in Philadelphia in what would come to be known as the Constitutional Convention. Though America had declared its independence eleven years earlier, it was not yet in any real sense a nation, but rather an uneasy alliance of states bound by a document known formally as the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. Enacted in 1781, the Articles had established a central government of sorts, but had left it subordinate to the states and embarrassingly lacking in clout. In consequence, as the historian Charles L. Mee, jun., has put it,
in 1787 the government of the United States ‘could not reliably levy taxes, could not ensure that its laws would be obeyed, could not repay its debts, could not ensure that it would honour its treaty obligations. It was not clear, in fact, that it could be called a government at all.‘
¹

Since the conclusion of the war with Britain four years before, the states had increasingly fallen to squabbling. Connecticut boldly claimed almost a third of the territory of Pennsylvania after many of its residents settled there. Pennsylvania bickered with Virginia over their common border and was so fearful of New York imposing tariffs on its manufactures that it insisted on having its own access to the Great Lakes. (If you have ever wondered why Pennsylvania’s border takes an abrupt upward jag at its northwestern end to give it an odd umbilicus to Lake Erie, that is why.) New York bickered over patches of land with little Rhode Island, and Vermont constantly threatened to leave the union. Clearly something needed to be done. The obvious solution would be a new agreement superseding the Articles of Confederation and creating a more powerful central government: in a word, a constitution. Without it, America could never hope to be a nation. As Page Smith has put it: ‘The Revolution had created the possibility, not the reality, of a new nation. It is the Constitution that for all practical purposes is synonymous with our nationhood.‘
²