A Change of Verb Shaped a Nation

A verb in a name has major connotations.  For example, consider the United States of America.  Prior to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, any correspondence would use “are” to refer to the United States.  For example, “The United States of America are comprised of individual states and territories.”  This implied that the country was a collection of individual states and territories acting on one accord.  This would imply a stronger emphasis on state rights over federal authority. 

After the American Civil War, this changed.  The same sentence would now say, “The United States of America is comprised of individual states and territories.”  This is the preferred verb now.  This emphasised the country as one nation, which happens to comprise many states and territories.  This slight grammatical change affects how the average American thinks of the country, without even realising it.  This is  what the Union winning the Civil War achieved. 

Shelby Dade Foote Jr. the American writer, historian and journalist, was the author of “The Civil War: A Narrative”, a definitive history of the war.  He summed it up by, in that book: “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’.”