How Did the Nation Get Its Name? Other Suggestions Included the United Colonies, Columbia and the United States of Alleghania

When America’s founding fathers set out to create a new country independent from Great Britain, they had a lot of decisions to make. One was simply what to call their invention. Today, the world may take the name that these men chose 250 years ago—the United States of America—for granted.

But at the time, every word was laden with meaning, and each had its own backstory, beginning with “United.” The founders knew from the start that the original Thirteen Colonies stood a far better chance of successfully breaking away from Britain if they did so as a group. Rebellions by a single colony or two would be easy for the British Army to put down, but more than a dozen rebelling at once was a different matter. The pro-independence pamphleteer Thomas Paine stressed unity in his widely read and hugely influential Common Sense, first published in January 1776.

He called on the Colonies to send representatives to form a Congress and frame a “charter of the United Colonies.” Benjamin Franklin was also a longtime advocate of this cause, as vividly illustrated by his 1754 woodcut of a snake chopped into separate pieces representing the Colonies, which he captioned “Join, or Die.” When the Colonies’ representatives finally signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Franklin reportedly remarked that they must now “all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” As the colonists moved ever closer to declaring independence, proponents called for the creation of the United Colonies, the United Colonies of America or the United Colonies of North America. Aside from those who favored reconciliation with Britain rather than revolution, most assumed that the name was only a temporary placeholder for what was coming next. September 9, 1776, is generally recognized as the date that the country formally adopted the name the “United States.” In a series of resolutions largely devoted to paying George Washington’s troops and other routine matters, the Second Continental Congress ordered that in official documents “where, heretofore, the words ‘United Colonies’ have been used, the stile”—an old-fashioned spelling of “style”—“be altered, for the future, to the ‘United States.’” Colonists who were paying attention to the politics of the day would not have been surprised by the move.

Paine had promoted “the American states” and “the free and independent States of America” in Common Sense. In June 1776, Richard Henry Lee, a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress, picked up on Paine’s wording, introducing a resolution that called for the Colonies to become “free and independent states.” Lee’s resolution had a major influence on the Declaration, as drafted by Thomas Jefferson. The finished version dated July 4 and signed by the vast majority of the delegates on August 2 carried the heading “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.” The Declaration’s wording reveals a significant difference between the way the name was understood at the time and how it is commonly used today: namely, the lowercase “u” in the word “united.” This was not a misprint or some quaint quirk of 18th-century typography.

The founders were deliberately putting greater emphasis on the word “States” than the word “united.” “They didn’t think they were creating a nation,” Edward J. Larson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and the author of Declaring Independence: Why 1776 Matters, tells Smithsonian magazine. It didn’t even have the power to tax, in fact, but had to rely on the states for funding.

While some of the founders might have sought a stronger central government, getting approval from all Thirteen Colonies would have been a nonstarter. The Federalists and the Anti-Federalists In 1781, the country’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, reinforced the new name with its very first article, which declared that the style “of this confederacy shall be, ‘The United States of America.’” Article II, meanwhile, reaffirmed that most power still resided with the individual states: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power, jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.” Later in the document, the framers spelled out the limited powers that would belong to the central government rather than to the states. These included making treaties with foreign countries, imposing duties on imported goods and declaring war.