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

The nascent country adopted its name 250 years ago, on September 9, 1776. Americans have debated the moniker ever since. One congressman even proposed the “United States of the Earth”

Greg Daugherty | History Correspondent

September 8, 2026 7:45 a.m.

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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.”

Why the U.S. became 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.

The Colonies become states

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. “They thought they were creating a confederation of independent states, with the states transferring certain powers to a central government.”

The central government’s authority would be strictly limited to “the power to collectively orchestrate the war with Britain and to collectively deal with foreign nations,” Larson notes. 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. “Virginians, for example, thought of themselves as Virginians,” Larson says. “They would never have agreed to integrate into a single nation or state.”

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.

It soon became clear, however, that the Articles were an inadequate solution for the many challenges the nation faced. “The government could not tax, maintain a standing army or establish permanent departments,” historian Michael Auslin writes in National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America. “The Articles proved unequal even to basic tasks like paying off the war debt. … By the mid-1780s, the future of the republic seemed in doubt.”

In 1789, a new constitution went into effect, superseding the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution, which remains the law of the land today, retained the country’s name but shifted the balance of power, granting far more authority to the central government at the expense of the states. In its famous first line, “We the People of the United States,” the “U” in “United” is capitalized once and for all.

Now, “of America” would become the focus of attention.

America the controversial

Back in 1507, the German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller had bestowed the name “America” on the land masses of the Western Hemisphere in honor of Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer who, unlike Christopher Columbus, recognized that they were not part of Asia.

When the British later established colonies in the future United States, they referred to them as the North American Colonies, the American Colonies or simply America. For example, in a speech reacting to the news that the colonists intended to break away from England, George III called them “my people in America.” So it wasn’t surprising that “America” would be treated as part of the new country’s name.

After independence had been achieved, however, some citizens began to question this decision, in part because “America” covered a lot of territory, including the entire continent of South America, that had nothing to do with their nation. In 1792, the 300th anniversary of Columbus’ 1492 voyage inspired a movement to rename the country Columbia in his honor.

In 1839, the author Washington Irving offered another alternative. He argued that the nation’s name should honor one of its distinctive mountain ranges, suggesting either the United States of Appalachia or the United States of Alleghania. Irving noted that the country could still keep the initials USA. Fellow author Edgar Allan Poe weighed in several years later, casting his vote for Appalachia.

In 1845, the issue again came to the fore, after the New-York Historical Society formed a committee to suggest a new name for the country. Its recommendation: the “Republic of Allegania,” similar to Irving’s idea but with a slightly different spelling.

The society then submitted its report for consideration by similar groups around the country. Replying on behalf of the Massachusetts Historical Society, former U.S. President John Quincy Adams ridiculed Allegania, referring to the Alleghenies as “a mere clod of earth, a mere chain of not even comparatively lofty mountains.” He appeared to hold out hope that if the country did rename itself, it would go with Columbia instead. The original naming of the Americas, Adams wrote, was “a perpetual memorial of human injustice by conferring upon one man [Vespucci] a crown of glory justly due to another [Columbus].”

But the New Jersey Historical Society called for leaving well enough alone. “Our name has become associated with all that is dear and revered in our history,” the group wrote in its reply, adding, “If our name is to be blotted out, let us wait for some tyrant to do it for the purpose of putting to sleep the glorious associations which it kindles in every bosom.”

Nothing came of the historical societies’ efforts, but the battle wasn’t over. Even the possibility of amending the Constitution to change the country’s name arose now and then.

In 1849, the famous newspaper editor Horace Greeley, then briefly serving in Congress, joined the movement for renaming the country in Columbus’ honor, offering a resolution that he said represented “tardy atonement for the injustice hitherto suffered by the great discoverer of this continent.”

In 1866, George Washington Anderson, a congressman from Missouri, took a totally different tack. He had no quarrel with America as part of the country’s name. In fact, he thought America should be the nation’s name, period. This styling, he maintained, would “indicate the real unity and destiny of the American people as the eventual, paramount power of this hemisphere.”

Who Named the United States? (Short Animated Documentary)

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But Anderson’s ambitions for the growing nation would pale next to those of Lucas Miller, a Wisconsin congressman who in 1893 reportedly proposed changing its name to the “United States of the Earth.” (Some accounts suggest that he also would have been happy with “United States of the World.”)

“It is possible for the republic to grow through the admission of new states into the union, until every nation on earth has become part of it,” he argued on behalf of the change.

Miller’s initiative got some attention, but probably not the kind he had in mind. The New Orleans Times-Democrat, for example, awarded him the title of “the greatest crank at Washington” and called him “a fit subject for an insane asylum instead of for our National Legislature.”

In Miller’s defense, the House of Representatives’ website today suggests that his proposal may have been more satirical than serious, and that his goal was to mock “the era’s push for overseas conquest.” Whatever his motive, 1893 marked the end of his congressional career.

Possibly taking a lesson from Miller’s fate, no major public figures have called for changing the country’s name in the decades since. After two and a half centuries, the “United States of America” has stood the test of time.

Greg Daugherty is a magazine editor and writer, as well as a frequent contributor to Smithsonian magazine. His books include You Can Write for Magazines.