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us today – and indeed appear to have struck at least some of his contemporaries – as irregular. For one thing, Jefferson always wrote it’s for the possessive form of it, a practice that looks decidedly illiterate today. In fact, there was some logic to it. As a possessive form, the argument went, its required an apostrophe in precisely the same way as did words like children’s or men’s. Others contended, however, that in certain common words like ours and yours it was customary to dispense with the apostrophe, and that its belonged in this camp. By about 1815, the non-apostrophists had their way almost everywhere, but in 1776 it was a fine point, and one to which Jefferson clearly did not subscribe.35

Jefferson also favoured some unusual spellings, notably independant (which Thomas Paine likewise preferred), paiment and unacknoleged, all of which were subsequently changed in the published version to their more conventional forms. He veered with apparent indecisiveness between the two forms for the singular third person present indicative of have, sometimes using the literary hath (’experience hath shown’) and sometimes the more modern has (’He has kept among us ...’). Two further orthographic uncertainties of the age are reflected in Jefferson’s text – whether to write -or or -our in words like honour and whether to use -ise or -ize in words like naturalize. Jefferson was inconsistent on both counts.

Much is sometimes made of the irregularity of spelling among writers of English in the eighteenth century. Noting that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations varied in its spellings between public and publick, complete and compleat, and independent and independant, David Simpson observes in The Politics of American English: ’Except for Samuel Johnson, no one in 1776, on either side of the ocean, seems to show much concern for a standard spelling practice.‘36

This is almost certainly overstating matters. Although Thomas Jefferson did have some spelling quirks – among many others, he persistently addressed his letters to ‘Doctr. Franklyn’ when he must surely have realized that the good doctor spelled his name otherwise37 – to suggest that he or any other accomplished writer of his age was cavalier with his spelling does him an injustice. To begin with, such a statement contains the implied conceit that modern English is today somehow uniform in its spellings, which is far from true. In 1972, a scholar named Lee C. Deighton undertook the considerable task of comparing the spellings of every word in four leading American dictionaries and found that there are no fewer than 1,770 common words in modern English in which there is no general agreement on the preferred spelling. The Random House Dictionary, to take one example, gives innuendos as the preferred plural of innuendo, the American Heritage opts for innuendoes, Webster’s New World prefers innuendoes but recognizes innuendos, and Webster’s Seventh gives equal merit to both. The dictionaries are equally – we might fairly say hopelessly – split on whether to write discussible or discussable, eyeopener, eye opener or eye-opener, dumfound or dumbfound, gladiolus (for the plural), gladioli or gladioluses, gobbledegook or gobbledygook, licenceable or licensable, and many hundreds of others. (The champion of orthographic uncertainty appears to be panatela, which can also pass muster as panatella, panetela or panetella.) The principal difference between irregular spellings now and in Jefferson’s day is that in Jefferson’s day the number was very much larger – no less than you would expect in an age that was only just becoming acquainted with dictionaries. Just as we seldom note whether a particular writer uses big-hearted or bighearted, omelette or omelet, OK or okay, so I suspect Jefferson and Paine would think it singular that we had even noticed that they sometimes wrote honour and sometimes honor.

That is not to say that spelling or any other issue of usage in this period was considered inconsequential. In fact, the opposite is true. The second Continental Congress contained within