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for George I). To be fair to Washington, he had to establish from the outset that a President should be treated with utmost respect. In the early days of his presidency people would actually wander in off the street, to wish him luck or ask how things were going. (Eventually, he hit on a system whereby twice a week he set aside time during which any ‘respectably dressed person’ could come and see him.) He was acutely aware that he was setting patterns of executive behaviour that would live beyond him. ‘There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent,’ he wrote a trifle gloomily. After sitting through hours of inconclusive debates in the Senate, he fled, muttering that he ‘would be damned’ if he ever subjected himself to such unproductive tedium again, and since that time no American President has taken part in legislative debates, a striking departure from British practice, though there is nothing in the Constitution to forbid it.28

One of the more intractable myths of this period is that Congress (or the Constitutional Convention itself) considered adopting German as the national language. The story has been repeated so often, by so many respectable writers, that it has nearly attained the status of received wisdom.*16 So let me say this clearly: it is wholly without foundation. In 1789, 90 per cent of America’s four million inhabitants were of English descent. The idea that they would in an act of petulance impose on themselves a foreign tongue is clearly risible. The only known occasion on which German was ever an issue was in 1795 when the House of Representatives briefly considered a proposal to publish federal laws in German as well as in English as a convenience to recent immigrants and the proposal was defeated.29 Indeed, as early as 1778, the Continental Congress decreed that messages to foreign emissaries be issued ‘in the language of the United States’.30

However, considerable thought was given in early Congresses to the possibility of renaming the country. From the start, many people recognized that United States of America was unsatisfactory. For one thing, it allowed of no convenient adjectival form. A citizen would have to be either a United Statesian or some other such clumsy locution, or an American, thereby arrogating to US citizens a title that belonged equally to the inhabitants of some three dozen other nations on two continents. Several alternative possibilities were considered – the United States of Columbia, Appalachia, Alleghania, and Freedonia or Fredonia (whose denizens would be called Fredes) – but none found sufficient support to displace the prevailing title.31

United States of Columbia was a somewhat unexpected choice, since for most of the previous 250 years Christopher Columbus had been virtually forgotten in America. His Spanish associations had made him suspect to the British, who preferred to see the glory of North American discovery go to John Cabot. Not until after the Revolutionary War, when Americans began casting around for heroes unconnected with the British monarchy, was the name Columbus resurrected, generally in the more elegant Latinized form Columbia, and his memory generously imbued with a spirit of grit and independent fortitude that wasn’t altogether merited.

The semi-deification of Columbus began with a few references in epic poems, but soon communities and institutions were falling over themselves to create new names in his honour. In 1784 King’s College in New York became Columbia College and two years later South Carolina chose Columbia as the name for its capital. In 1791 an American captain on a ship named Columbia claimed a vast tract of the north-west for the young country and dubbed it Columbia. (It later became the states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho, though the original name lives on north of the border in British Columbia.) Journals, dubs and institutes (among them the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of the Arts and Sciences, better known today as the Smithsonian Institution*17) were named for the great explorer.