What were the alternative names considered for the United States before 'United States of America' was chosen?
The Nation That Almost Wasn't
Alternative Names for the United States
The name “United States of America” feels so permanent, so inevitable, that it is easy to forget it was once a choice—and a contested one at that. In the crucible of revolution, as thirteen colonies tore themselves from the British Empire, the question of what to call the new nation was far from settled. The phrase that Thomas Jefferson scrawled onto parchment in 1776 was less a poetic christening than a functional placeholder, a descriptive string of words that happened to stick. Behind that serendipitous survival lies a shadow history of names that almost were: Columbia, Fredonia, Appalachia, and others that flickered through the imaginations of the Founding Fathers. These rejected appellations are not mere historical curiosities; they reveal a young nation grappling with its identity, torn between classical grandeur, geographic destiny, and the raw idealism of a republic without precedent. To explore what the United States might have been called is to understand what it feared, what it hoped for, and what it ultimately chose to become.
The Classical Impulse: Columbia and the Allure of Antiquity
In the eighteenth century, the Western world was in the grip of a profound neoclassical revival. The Enlightenment drew heavily on the political and philosophical models of ancient Greece and Rome, and the American revolutionaries were no exception. They saw themselves as the heirs of Cato and Cicero, forging a new republic in the wilderness. It was natural, then, that one of the earliest and most persistent alternative names for the new nation would be rooted in this classical tradition, yet linked directly to the so-called discovery of the New World: Columbia.
The name Columbia was derived from Christopher Columbus, the Genoese navigator whose voyages had first brought the Americas into permanent European consciousness. By adding the Latin feminine suffix “-ia,” the name was transformed from a man’s surname into a poetic, geographical designation—a “land of Columbus.” The term had been used in British poetry as early as the 1730s, and by the time of the Revolution, “Columbia” had become a powerful personification of the American colonies, much as Britannia stood for Britain or Marianne would later embody France. She was a goddess-like figure, often depicted wearing a liberty cap or a feathered headdress, a classical virgin representing the uncorrupted promise of the New World. Phillis Wheatley, the enslaved African American poet, addressed a poem “To His Excellency General Washington” in 1775, invoking “Columbia” as the muse of the American cause. The name was in the air, on lips, and in the hearts of patriots.
Had the Constitutional Convention or the Continental Congress formally adopted “Columbia” as the name of the nation, it would have followed a pattern familiar in the history of toponymy. Many nations, from Colombia (which did adopt the name in 1863) to Bolivia, bear the names of explorers and heroes, transmuted into Latin forms. “The Republic of Columbia” or “The Commonwealth of Columbia” would have possessed a rolling, dignified cadence, perfectly suited to the neoclassical architecture and oratory of the early republic. The name implied a direct lineage from the European “discovery” to the American republic, a narrative that neatly sidestepped the messy reality of Indigenous civilizations and the French and Spanish presences on the continent. It was a name for a nation that saw itself as the rightful inheritor of the entire New World, not just a strip of Atlantic coastline.
The name’s most enduring legacy, however, became a memorial to its rejection. When the time came in 1791 to establish a federal district to serve as the nation’s capital, the old poetic name was revived. The Residence Act called for a “district of territory, not exceeding ten miles square… to be located… and accepted as the seat of government of the United States.” This territory, carved from Maryland and Virginia, was christened the “Territory of Columbia,” and the proposed federal city within it was named the “City of Washington.” Thus, the District of Columbia became a living fossil of a discarded national name. A visitor to Washington, D.C., walks through a linguistic ghost town, where the name of the nation-that-might-have-been is etched into street signs and government buildings. Columbia also proliferated across the map; to this day, dozens of towns, cities, and counties bear the name, from Columbia, South Carolina, to the mighty Columbia River of the Pacific Northwest. The enduring poetic use of “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” as an unofficial national anthem kept the name alive in the public imagination long after its political moment had passed. Columbia was the road not taken, a name of classical elegance that ultimately lost out to a more prosaic, but perhaps more honest, description of the federal union.
The Romantic Geography: Appalachia, Allegheny, and the Land Itself
If Columbia represented a turn toward European classical tradition, another set of proposed names looked inward, to the very land the new nation occupied. For a people who had fought a war in the dense forests and over the high ridges of the eastern mountains, the geography of the continent was not just a backdrop but a character in the national story. The mountain ranges that had shielded the interior and shaped the early frontier offered a powerful, non-European identity. Two names, in particular, surfaced as contenders: Appalachia and Allegheny.
The Appalachian Mountains, one of the oldest mountain chains on Earth, stretched from what is now Canada down to the deep South, forming the western boundary of the original thirteen states. The name itself was a European derivation, likely from the Apalachee people encountered by Spanish explorers in the 16th century, though its application to the mountain chain far to the north was a cartographic accident. Nevertheless, by the 1780s, “Appalachia” had a romantic, frontier resonance. It spoke of a nation defined not by a monarch or a distant European explorer but by the land it inhabited. An “Appalachian Republic” or “The United States of Appalachia” would have grounded the national identity in the physical reality of the continent, a bold statement that this was a nation of the New World, answerable only to its own rivers and peaks.
A closely related variant was “Allegheny.” The Allegheny Mountains are a rugged subrange of the Appalachians, forming the backbone of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. The Allegheny River was a vital artery into the Ohio country. “Allegheny” rolls off the tongue with a distinctly American cadence, derived from Lenape or Delaware Indigenous language roots, though its exact meaning is debated. It carried the same geographic determinism as Appalachia but with a perhaps sharper, more frontier energy. To name a nation Allegheny would have been a declaration of independence not just from British political rule but from the entire naming conventions of the Old World. It would have been a truly American name, born of the continent’s ancient geology and the languages of its first peoples, mediated through the colonial experience. The survival of these names as state appellations—the Allegheny Mountains, the Allegheny River, and numerous Allegheny counties—testifies to their deep cultural resonance. They remain powerful regional touchstones, small-scale vindications of a national name that never was.
The Philosopher’s Choice: Fredonia and the Name of Freedom
Beyond classical poetics and geographic romance lay a third impulse: the desire for a name that was a philosophical argument in itself. The American Revolution was not merely a war for territory; it was a war for an idea—the idea that government could be based on liberty, consent, and natural rights. Why not, then, simply name the country after its guiding principle? The result was the brief but brilliant life of “Fredonia.”
The word Fredonia is a neologism, a coinage derived from the English word “freedom” with the same Latin “-ia” suffix that turned Columbia into a land. It literally means “land of freedom.” The name gained a surprising level of intellectual currency in the early national period, particularly among those who felt that “United States of America” was a clunky, legalistic mouthful. It served as a direct, one-word translation of the nation’s founding creed into its very title. Imagine a map reading “The Republic of Fredonia,” or citizens answering not “I am an American,” but “I am a Fredonian.” The name has a utopian ring, the kind of audacious neologism that revolutions are supposed to produce. It was the ultimate Enlightenment brand, selling the idea of liberty right on the label.
The name’s primary advocate is a figure of both seriousness and satire. The physician and revolutionary Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill, a New York senator and polymath, was a prominent early promoter of the name Fredonia, arguing for its adoption as the official designation of the United States in the early 1800s. His efforts were unsuccessful, but the name did not entirely vanish. Instead, it migrated westward on the map, a phenomenon common to rejected national names. The most famous heir to this legacy is the village of Fredonia in Chautauqua County, New York. Its citizens, aware of the term’s grand aspirations, adopted it, and the town became a minor symbol of the national naming debate. The name Fredonia also found an unexpected second life in popular culture, most famously as the fictional central European country in the Marx Brothers’ 1933 film Duck Soup. Groucho Marx, playing Rufus T. Firefly, becomes the leader of the bankrupt, chaotic nation of Fredonia. The choice was a deliberate, satirical jab. By 1933, Fredonia sounded inherently comical, the name of a place that took itself too seriously. The film forever tainted the name, transforming it from a high-minded synonym for liberty into a punchline for political absurdity. The tragedy of Fredonia is the tragedy of an ideal too pure and too explicit for the messy business of nationhood.
The Simplest Option: America and the Question of Identity
Finally, there was the most obvious, and yet most contested, alternative: simply “America.” The double continent had borne the name since the early sixteenth century, when the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller named it after Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer whose accounts first suggested the lands were a new continent, not the eastern reaches of Asia. For nearly three centuries before the Revolution, “America” had referred to the entire hemisphere. To claim the name for a single, revolutionary nation on its northern edge was an act of extraordinary rhetorical and geopolitical ambition.
Many of the Founders bristled at this. The nation was a union of sovereign states, not a monolithic “America.” The descriptive phrase “United States of America” kept the emphasis on the plural, the “States,” while using “America” as a locational modifier. Yet, in common usage, the shorthand was inevitable. “America” was convenient, poetic, and assertive. It claimed the entire continent’s legacy for the new republic, a foreshadowing of the Manifest Destiny that would fuel its westward expansion. The debate between using “America” as the official name versus the formal “United States of America” was a proxy for a deeper argument about national character: was the nation a single, indivisible entity, or was it fundamentally a federation of distinct political communities? The Civil War would provide the bloodiest answer to that question, but the naming debate already held the seeds of the conflict. The “United States” was a contractual term; “America” was a nationalist one. The official name’s triumph kept the tension at the center of the national project, a tension that, for good and ill, defines the country to this day.
The Name That Won and the Ghosts It Holds
The name “United States of America” was never a foregone conclusion; it was a survivor. It outlasted the classical elegance of Columbia, which was demoted to a poetic spirit and a federal district. It outlasted the geographic pride of Appalachia and Allegheny, which retreated to the mountains and rivers that inspired them. It outlasted the philosophical purity of Fredonia, which became a small-town curiosity and a cinematic joke. And it managed to incorporate, but not be consumed by, the simple, grand ambition of “America.” The name that won was, in a sense, the least romantic and the most pragmatic. It was a constitution in miniature, a phrase that balanced state sovereignty with national union, place with political experiment. The alternative names are not just trivia; they are the ghosts of other possible Americas, visions of the nation that the founders debated and, in the end, declined to create. In the ghostly presences of Columbia, Fredonia, and Appalachia, we hear the echoes of a founding generation still arguing about what they had brought into being—a conversation written into every map, every poem, and every rejected name.
❧ End of Essay ❧
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