Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min<\/p>\n
The skirmishes between the colonies and England in April 1775 grew into a full-on war by January of 1776. No longer contained to New England, the fighting had spread to Canada and the South; so much so that British loyalist and Virginia\u2019s royal governor Lord Dunmore offered freedom to any enslaved man who fought on behalf of the Crown. <\/p>\n
The stakes were high. <\/p>\n
The colonies were no longer interested in making nice with England. They wanted independence and realized they had to unite to win. <\/p>\n
Stephen Moylan, a Pennsylvanian and officer in the Continental Army first floated the idea of calling the new nation the \u201cUnited States\u201d in a 1776 letter to politician and comrade in arms Joseph Reed. <\/p>\n
\u201cMoylan wrote the \u2018united states\u2019 needed to spend emissaries to Spain and build a case for the rising revolution and secure foreign support,\u201d explained Matthew Skic, director of collections and exhibitions at the Museum of the American Revolution<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201dThat letter, dated Jan. 2, 1776, is the first documented reference to the colonies as the \u2018united states\u2019,” Skic said. <\/p>\n Eight days later on Jan. 10, Common Sense<\/a>, Thomas Paine\u2019s revolutionary 74-page pamphlet urging the colonies to form an independent empire, dropped. <\/p>\n The pamphlet, read aloud in taverns in colonial Philadelphia and throughout the original colonies, stoked the flames of independence. It was printed in Robert Bell\u2019s print shop at Third and Walnut Streets. <\/p>\n \u201cPaine urged the colonies to form states,\u201d Skic said. \u201cBut not the 21st century perspective of states as in New Jersey, Virginia, or New York. In the 18th century, states were an independent nation or country with its own government.\u201d <\/p>\n And those states, Paine said, needed to come together to defeat a common enemy: England. <\/p>\n In May 1776, Virginia statesman Richard Henry Lee issued a resolution proposing the Second Continental Congress declare the colonies\u2019 independence, explicitly stating that the new country should consist of independent states formerly known as colonies. <\/p>\n On July 2, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence that referred to the new country as the united States. The united was written in lowercase, Skic said, to emphasize the focus on \u201cStates.\u201d <\/p>\n However, it wasn\u2019t until Sept. 9 when during the Second Continental Congress \u2014 meeting at the Pennsylvania State House, today\u2019s Independence Hall \u2014 delegates voted to call the new government the United States of America, with a capital \u201cU\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cAs soon as independence becomes the goal, not just restoring liberty, the United States took hold as a name,\u201d Skic said. \u201cAnd it happened in a neat six month time period.\u201d <\/p>\n The official naming of the United States will be remembered Saturday at Independence Hall<\/a> from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Philadelphia Historic District\u2019s 38th firstival. Firstivals are weekly day parties held in honor of America\u2019s 250th birthday. <\/p>\n \u201cThe Continental Congress had been trying to decide how it should represented when we present ourselves to other countries,\u201d Skic said. \u201cWhat would be the official seal on our government documents? With the Sept. 9 vote, Congress officially says all of the government\u2019s official documents will say \u2018United States.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The Continental Congress ordered the Continental Army\u2019s property be marked United States in February 1777.<\/p>\n \u201c[The Museum of the American Revolution] has muskets, canteens, and cartridge boxes marked U. States,\u201d Skic said. \u201cWe also have the only surviving original molds of USA buttons.\u201d<\/p>\n The army would be called the Continental Army through the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783, after which it disbanded. George Washington was elected president in 1789 and soon after his inauguration, it was reestablished as the United States Army. <\/p>\n This week\u2019s Firstival is Saturday, Sept. 19, from 11 a.m.-1 p.m., at Independence Hall<\/a>, 520 Chestnut Street.<\/p>\n Each week, The Inquirer is highlighting a \u201cfirst\u201d <\/a>from the Philadelphia Historic District\u2019s 52 Weeks of Firsts<\/a>. A \u201c52 Weeks of Firsts<\/a>\u201d podcast, produced by All That\u2019s Good Productions, drops every Tuesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min The skirmishes between the colonies and England in April 1775 grew into a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":288204,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70,119830],"class_list":["post-288203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-united-states-of-america-indendence-hall"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288203\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}