For a brief period during the American Revolution, the country we now know as the United States didn't have the name we know today.
The colonies were increasingly acting together as a single political force, but they were still commonly referred to as the “United Colonies.” It wasn't until September 9, 1776, that the Second Continental Congress officially ordered its documents to use “United States” instead.
And even then, the name was far from universally settled.
The colonies needed to unite before they could become a country
The idea of the colonies acting together wasn't new.
Benjamin Franklin had already illustrated the importance of colonial unity in his famous 1754 “Join, or Die” woodcut, created years before the Declaration of Independence. Later, Thomas Paine's Common Sense argued that the colonies should establish a Congress and create a “charter of the United Colonies.”
The basic idea was simple: individually, the colonies were vulnerable. Together, they had a much better chance of resisting Britain.
By 1775, that cooperation had become a reality.
The Continental Congress was raising an army, issuing currency, establishing a postal system and directing a war against Britain. Yet the political entity behind all of this was still being described as the United Colonies.
The name reflected an important uncertainty: were these colonies creating one new nation, or were separate states joining together for a common purpose?
“United States” was meant to emphasize the states
That distinction mattered enormously to the people creating the new government.
In June 1776, Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee introduced a resolution declaring that the colonies should become “free and independent states.”
That language helped shape the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration's famous heading reads: “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.”
The lowercase “u” in “united” is often pointed to as evidence of the political thinking of the period: the states were understood as separate sovereign entities joining together rather than simply becoming parts of one consolidated nation.
On September 9, Congress made the terminology official, directing that future documents replace “United Colonies” with “United States.”
The name had finally stuck.
But the government was deliberately weak
The Articles of Confederation, which became effective in 1781, made the arrangement even clearer.
Its second article declared that each state retained its “sovereignty, freedom and independence”, with only specifically delegated powers transferred to the United States in Congress.
The central government couldn't directly tax citizens and struggled to raise money or maintain military strength.
The system eventually proved too weak to handle the problems facing the young republic.
When the Constitution replaced the Articles in 1789, the balance shifted.
Its opening words — “We the People of the United States” — placed the people, rather than the individual states, at the beginning of the new governing framework.
The country's name remained the same, but the meaning of the union was changing.
And “United States of America” wasn't the only name considered
The story gets even stranger when you look at what happened afterward.
“America” itself wasn't originally the name of the United States. The word had been applied to the Western Hemisphere in the early 1500s, based on the name of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.
After independence, some Americans questioned whether a new country should really be called “America” when the name referred to an entire hemisphere.
Alternative names appeared over the years.
Columbia was proposed as a patriotic alternative. In the 1830s, Washington Irving reportedly suggested names including “United States of Appalachia” and “United States of Alleghania.”
Edgar Allan Poe later favored “Appalachia.”
Other proposals followed, including “Republic of Allegania.”
The suggestions never came close to replacing “United States of America,” but they reveal just how unsettled national identity could be in the young republic.
One congressman even proposed “United States of the World”
In 1893, Wisconsin congressman Lucas Miller reportedly went considerably further.
He proposed changing the country's name to “United States of the Earth” or “United States of the World.”
His vision was that the republic could eventually expand until every nation became part of it.
The proposal was widely mocked, and some later accounts have suggested that Miller may have been making a satirical point about American expansionism.
Either way, it went nowhere.
The name United States of America survived.
And that's perhaps the most interesting part of the story.
The name that now feels inevitable was once just one choice among several possibilities. Before the United States existed, there were United Colonies. Before the name became settled, people imagined Columbia, Appalachia and Alleghania.
For a country still figuring out whether it was a collection of independent states or a single nation, even its name was part of the experiment.
