On this Independence Day weekend, it is fitting and timely to ask: Who coined the name United States of America?
In the year before independence, many in the colonies went with the name used by Benjamin Franklin in his July 1775 draft of an articles of confederation: United Colonies of North America. Another name, however, most famously appeared in print on July 4, 1776, in the Declaration of Independence, which was drafted by a committee that assigned the task to Thomas Jefferson: its last paragraph referred to ''the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled.''
In our first exploration of this mystery a few months ago, it was reported that the widely accepted Jefferson coinage (written by Young Tom between June 11 and June 28, 1776) might have been antedated by two other citations: the first in a letter from the Continental Congress member Elbridge Gerry to Gen. Horatio Gates dated June 25, and the second in a letter to The Pennsylvania Evening Post published June 29, from the pseudonymous writer ''Republicus.''
This is important; it's our country we're talking about, and we ought to try to pin down its namer. Two letters have come pouring in. One is from a biographer of Thomas Paine, Prof. Jack Fruchtman Jr., of Towson University in Maryland, who insists that Paine's usage two years after the Declaration in his widely read ''American Crisis'' publicized the name. Call me a summer soldier or sunshine patriot, but common sense tells me that a popularizer is not a coiner.
Comes now Ronald Gephart, last of the editors of the Library of Congress's 25-volume ''Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789.'' He searched his new CD-ROM of all that correspondence, then dug around in the Journals of the Continental Congress, and alerted me to his findings just in time for the nation's 222d anniversary.
Richard Henry Lee of Virginia was the Founder who made the motion on June 7, 1776, to declare ''that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.'' His resolution led to the formation of three committees: one, starring Jefferson and John Adams, to draft a declaration of independence; another, including John Dickenson, the conservative Pennsylvanian, and Roger Sherman, to draft articles of confederation, and a third, including Dickenson, Adams and Franklin, to draft a treaty plan.
''All three committees began deliberating simultaneously,'' writes Gephart, ''and continued to do so until the end of June. Jefferson accepted the responsibility for drafting the declaration, Dickenson the articles and Adams the treaty plan. But as many as 18 members of the three committees were working together to create these three fundamental documents in which United States of America was used for the first time.''
So who came up with the catchy name for which the initials are not u.c.n.a. but u.s.a.? We know that Dickenson had by June 17 prepared a second draft -- all that survives -- of the articles, which includes the flat statement ''The name of this Confederation shall be the 'United States of America.' '' Nothing tentative about that.
''Jefferson, on the other hand,'' writes Gephart, ''did not ask Franklin to review his draft of 'A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America' until June 21. It is not known when Adams drafted the preamble to the plan of treaties.''
The historian concludes cautiously, ''The term was first coined by one or more members during the early deliberations of the three committees -- between June 11, when Jefferson's committee began work, and June 17, when it appeared in the second draft of Dickenson's Articles.''
Coinagists would give the edge to the conciliatory Dickenson (who refused to sign Jefferson's Declaration), partly because the first recorded surfacing of the phrase was his, and partly because he's not as famous as Jefferson and can use the recognition.
I'd still like to see Dickenson's first draft, with date. Keep looking, historians; it's not as if he were working on a word processor that obliterates first drafts. It would be of great interest to all of us here in the good old u.c.n.a., or whatever.
CHILLING EFFECT
''A chilling sweat o'er-runs my trembling joints,'' says the frightened Quintus in Shakespeare's ''Titus Andronicus.'' Such a flush of fear stimulates the sweat glands, which then cool the skin with perspiration, metaphorically dampening ardor and freezing action. In underworld lingo, the verb to chill is to change a warm body into a cool corpse.
When it was discovered last month that City College of New York had installed a surveillance camera inside a smoke detector outside a student meeting room, three graduate students sued the school on privacy grounds. Brad Sigal, a graduate student, said, ''It definitely has a chilling effect.''
This phrase has now become the great cliche in First Amendment and libel law. Chief Justice Warren Burger used it 15 times in a 1972 opinion. A chilling effect is one that intimidates, makes timorous and turns timid (all from timere, ''to fear'') the ordinarily gutsy journalist, causing the sin of self-censorship.
Who coined it? Forget early cases about coolants. According to Bryan Garner, editor of the Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, the earliest metaphoric use found so far was in 1899, by Vice-Chancellor Henry Cooper Pitney of New Jersey: ''This letter the wife swears she interpreted as one of intentional discouragement to her return, and that it had a chilling effect on her.''
Thus are we coming up to the centennial of chilling effect. Break out the very cold Champagne, and toast the phrase goodbye.
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