by Bill Bryson
The upshot is that in early January 1776 – despite the Boston Tea Party, the battles of Concord and Bunker Hill, the revolt over the Townshend Acts and all the other manifestations of popular discontent – Americans were not merely reluctant to part with Britain, but most had never even dreamed of such a thing. Until well after the Revolution had started Washington and his officers were continuing the nightly tradition of toasting the mother country (if not the monarch himself) and the Continental Congress was professing an earnest – we might almost say slavish – loyalty, insisting, even as it was taking up arms, that ‘we mean not to dissolve the union which has so long and happily subsisted between us’, and professing a readiness to ‘cheerfully bleed in defense of our Sovereign in a righteous cause’. Their argument, they repeatedly assured themselves, was not with Britain but with George III. (The Declaration of Independence, it is worth noting, indicted only ‘the present King of Great Britain’.) As the historian Bernard Bailyn has put it: ‘It is not much of an exaggeration to say that one had to be a fool or a fanatic in early January 1776 to advocate American independence.‘7
Fortunately there existed a man who was a little of both. He had been born Thomas Pain, though upon arrival in America he whimsically changed the spelling to Paine, and he was about as unlikely a figure to change the course of history as you could imagine. A tumbledown drunk, coarse of manner, blotchy-faced and almost wholly lacking in acquaintance with the virtues of soap and water – ‘so neglectful in his person that he is generally the most abominably dirty being upon the face of the earth’, in the words of one contemporary – he had been a failure at every trade he had ever attempted, and he had attempted many, from corset-making to tax collecting before finally, at the age of thirty-eight, abandoning his native shores and his second wife and coming to America.
However, Paine could write with extraordinary grace and power, and at a time of immense emotional confusion in America, he was possessed of an unusually dear and burning sense of America’s destiny. In January 1776, less than two years after he had arrived in the colonies, he anonymously published a slender pamphlet that he called (at the suggestion of his friend and mentor Benjamin Rush) Common Sense. To say that it was a sensation merely hints at its impact. Sales were like nothing that had been seen before in the New World: 100,000 copies were sold in the first two months, 400,000 copies overall – this in a country with just three million inhabitants. It was the greatest best-seller America has ever seen, and it didn’t make Paine a penny. He assigned the copyright to the Continental Congress, and thus not only galvanized America into revolution but materially helped to fund it.
Common Sense was a breathtakingly pugnacious tract. Writers did not normally refer to the king as ‘a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man’ and ‘the royal brute of England’ or accuse him of sleeping with ‘blood upon his soul’.8 Above all Paine argued forcefully and unequivocally for independence: ‘Everything that is right or reasonable pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, “Tis time to part.”’ He was one of the first writers to employ republic with a positive connotation and helped to give revolution its modern sense, rather than to describe the movements of celestial spheres. And he did it all in language that anyone who could read could understand.
Jefferson freely acknowledged that his own prose style in the Declaration of Independence was indebted to Paine, whose ‘ease and familiarity of style’ he thought unrivalled. Others were less convinced. Benjamin Franklin believed Paine’s writing lacked dignity. Gouverneur Morris dismissed him as ‘a mere adventurer’s. John Adams, never short of an acid comment, called Common Sense ’a poor, ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass’, and likened Paine to a common criminal. But the book had the desired effect.
Paine’s value was not as an originator of ideas, but as a communicator of them. He was a consummate sloganeer. In Common Sense and a flurry of following works, he showered the world with ringing phrases that live on yet: ‘the Age of Reason’; ‘the Rights of Man’; ‘That government is best which governs least’; ‘These are the times that try men’s souls’; ‘The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot’. Less poetically but no less memorably, he was the first to refer to ‘the United States of America’. Previously even the boldest patriot had spoken of the ‘United Colonies’. Under Paine’s influence Americans became seized with what one British onlooker uneasily termed ‘a Democratical phrenzy‘9
It is easy to forget that those who started the Revolution did not think of themselves as Americans in anything like the way they do today. They were British and proud of it. To them, American was more a descriptive term than an emotional one. Their primary attachment was to their colony. When Jefferson wrote to a friend that he longed ‘to return to my own country’, he meant Virginia.10 In 1765 Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina lamented: ‘There ought to be no New England men, no New York, etc., known on the Continent, but all of us Americans.‘11 That he felt it necessary to articulate the sentiment is revealing.
Their exposure to other colonies was often strikingly limited. John Adams, for one, had never left his home colony. In 1776 Philadelphia was the second largest city in the English-speaking world, but more of the delegates to the second Continental Congress had been to London than to Pennsylvania. Despite the interposition of two thousand miles of ocean, London remained the effective centre of American culture and politics. As Garry Wills has noted: ‘Till almost the eve of the Revolution, resistance to imperial policy was better schemed at in London than in the colonies ... London [was] where policy was made and colonial protests directed, where colonial agents were located and a community of Americans from the whole continent resided.‘12
In Philadelphia, they convened in a spirit of excitement mixed with high caution. Though they came from similar backgrounds nine of Virginia’s twelve delegates were related by blood or marriage13 – they were wary of each other, and not without reason. They were engaged in treason and anyone who betrayed them would have much to gain. The step they were taking was radical and irreversible, and the consequences terrifying. The penalty for treason was to be hanged, cut down while still alive, disembowelled and forced to watch your organs burned before your eyes, then beheaded and quartered.14 Widows would be deprived of their estates and children subjected to a life of opprobrium. Benjamin Franklin was no more than half jesting when he quipped to his fellow delegates – and here at last we have a remark that appears actually to have been uttered – ‘We must all hang together or assuredly we shall all hang separately.’ (Yet Franklin, thanks to his close ties with England and his initial support for the Stamp Act, was held by many of his fellows to be one of the most suspect of the lot.)
So what did they sound like, these new Americans? Had they by 1776 adopted a distinctive American accent? Did Jefferson speak with a southern drawl and Adams with the pinched nasal tones of a New Englander, or did they sound like the Englishmen they still loosely felt themselves to be? The evidence is tantalizingly ambiguous. Certainly regional differences were evident in America in 1776 and had been for some time. As early as 1720, visitors to New England were speaking of a ‘New England twang’, which bore a noticeable resemblance to the ‘Norfolk whine’ of England. In much the same way, visitors to the South sometimes remarked on the resemblance of speech there to the Sussex accent. Some detected quite specific differences. One observer in 1780 claimed that natives of the neighbouring towns of Easthampton and Southampton on Long Island could be distinguished in an instant by their peculiarities of speech. Much the same claim was sometimes made for proximate communities in Virginia.
The evidence suggests that in 1776 southerners would have been struck by the New England habit of saying ‘kee-yow’ and ‘nee-yow’ for cow and now, for saying ‘marcy’ for mercy, ’crap’ for crop and ‘drap’ for drop. (This last variation, incidentally, accounts for our pair of words strap and strop.) Northerners would have regarded as curious the southern habit of sayin
g ‘holp’ for help, for rhyming wound in the sense of an injury with swooned – New Englanders rhymed it with crowned – and for using y’all for a collective sense of you (a practice that had been a distinguishing feature of southern speech since the 1600s).
In his much-praised book Albion’s Seed, David Hackett Fischer carefully argues that regional accents – indeed discrete regional cultures – were well in place in America by the time of the Revolution. He points out that American colonists came in four distinct waves: Puritans from eastern England to New England in 1629-40, a mix of elite royalists and indentured servants to Virginia in 1642-75, groups from the north Midlands and Wales to the Delaware Valley beginning in about 1675, and a great mass from the Scottish borders and Northern Ireland to Appalachia in 1718-75. ‘By the year 1775 these four cultures were fully established in British America. They spoke distinctive dialects of English, built their houses in diverse ways, and had different methods of doing much of the ordinary business of life.‘15
By assembling in America in enclaves that reflected their geographic origins, the four main waves of immigrants thus managed to preserve distinctive regional identities. That is why, for instance, horses in New England (as in East Anglia) neigh, while those in the middle states of America (and the Midlands of England) whinny.16 Noting that many words became associated early on with the speech of Virginia – afeared, howdy, catercorner, innards, traipse, woebegone, bide and tarry for stay awhile, tote for carry, disremember for forget, pekid for being pale or unwell – Fischer says: ‘Virtually all peculiarities of grammar, syntax, vocabulary and pronunciation which have been noted as typical of Virginia were recorded in the [southern England] counties of Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Oxford, Gloucester, Warwick or Worcester.‘17 They may indeed have been recorded there – it would be surprising if they were not – but in fact at least some of the words he uses to support his thesis (for instance, poorly for being unwell and right good for something meritorious or agreeable) were primarily northern expressions.
Neat though it is, Fischer’s argument presents two problems. First, with the exception of the final wave of immigrants from the Scottish borders and Ulster, the geographic background of colonial immigrants was nothing like as uniform as Fischer implies. The Puritan movement may have had its base in East Anglia – and this clearly accounts for the preponderance of East Anglian place names in Massachusetts and Connecticut – but its followers came from every corner of England. The Mayflower manifest alone shows passengers hailing from Yorkshire, Devon, Lincolnshire, Westmorland and many other counties linguistically distinct from East Anglia. Equally, an indentured servant was as likely to come from Lanarkshire or Wales or Cornwall as from London. George Washington’s forebears emigrated to America from Northumbria and settled in Virginia. Benjamin Franklin’s came from a town just a dozen miles away, but settled in Boston. Throughout the colonial Period, immigrants came from all over and settled all over. And once settled in the New World, significant numbers of them moved on – for example, Franklin transplanted himself from Boston to Philadelphia, Alexander Hamilton from the West Indies to New York.
The second problem with Fischer’s thesis is that many contemporary accounts do not bear it out. Surprise at the uniformity of American speech is found again and again in letters and journals throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. In 1770 one William Eddis found it a cause of wonder that ‘the language of the immediate descendants of such a promiscuous ancestry is perfectly uniform and unadulterated; nor has it borrowed any provincial, or national accent, from its British or foreign parentage.‘18 Another observer stated flatly: ‘There is no dialect in all North America.‘19 John Pickering, president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and arguably the leading authority on American speech of his day, thought America was marked not by the variety of its speech but by its consistency. One could find ‘a greater difference in dialect between one county and another in Britain than there is between one state and another in America’, he contended, and attributed this to ‘the frequent removal of people from one part of our country to another’. He cited his own New Jersey as a particular example: ‘People from all the other states are constantly moving into and out of this state so that there is little peculiarity of manner.‘20
This isn’t to say that there weren’t distinctive regional varieties of speech in America by the time of the Revolution, merely that they appear not to have been as fixed, evident and susceptible to generalization as we might sometimes be led to believe.
Even less certain is the question of the degree to which American speech had by 1776 become noticeably different from that of Britain. Flexner states that at least as early as 1720 Americans were aware that their language ‘differed seriously’ from that of England.21 In 1756, Samuel Johnson referred without hesitation to an ‘American dialect’, and a popular American play of the day, The Politician Out-Witted, instructed the actors to render British speech as ‘effeminate cries’,22 suggesting that differences in cadence and resonance, if not necessarily of pronunciation, were already evident. On the other hand, Krapp notes that visitors to Boston at the time of the Revolution commonly remarked that the accent of the people there was almost indistinguishable from the English of England.23
What is certain is that Britons and Americans alike sounded quite different from Britons and Americans of today, and in a multitude of ways. Both would have dropped the w sound in backward, Edward and somewhat, but preserved it in sword. They would not have pronounced the c in verdict or predict or the l in vault, fault and soldier. Words like author and anthem would have been pronounced with a hard t, as in orator, or even sometimes a d. Fathoms, for instance, was often spelled ‘fadams.’ Banquet would have been pronounced ‘banket’. Balcony rhymed with baloney (Byron would soon rhyme it with Giorgione). Barrage was pronounced ’bair-idge’ and apparently remained so pronounced up to the time of World War I. Words that we now pronounce with an interiorew sound frequently lacked it then, so that mute, and volume would have been ‘moot’ and ‘voloom’. Vowel sounds in general were much less settled and specific. Combinations that are now enunciated were then glossed over, so that many speakers said ‘partickly’ (or ‘puhtickly’) for particularly, ’actilly’ for actually, ’poplar’ for popular and so on.
Eighteenth-century users had a greater choice of contractions than now: as well as can’t, don’t, isn’t and so on, there was han’t (sometimes hain’t) for ‘have not’ and an’t for ‘are not’ and ‘am not’. An’t, first recorded in 1723 in print in America though probably older, evolved in two directions. Rhymed with ‘taunt,’ it took on the spelling aren’t (the r being silent, as it still is in British English). Rhymed with ‘taint,’ it took on the spelling ain’t. There was nothing intrinsically superior in one form or the other, but critics gradually developed a distaste for ain’t. By the nineteenth century it was widely, if unreasonably, condemned as vulgar, a position from which it shows no sign of advancing.24
Contemporary writings, particularly by the indifferently educated, offer good clues as to pronunciation. Paul Revere wrote ‘git’ (for get), ’imeaditly’ and ‘prittie’ and referred to blankets as being ‘woren out’. Elsewhere we can find ‘libity’ for liberty, ’patchis’ for purchase, ’ort’ for ought,25 ’weamin’ for women, ’through’ for throw, ’nater’ for nature,26 ’keer’ for care, ’jest’ for just; ’ole’ for old, ’pizen’ for poison, ’darter’ (or even ‘dafter’) for daughter. ’Chaw’ for chew, ’varmint’ for vermin, ’stomp’ for stamp, ’heist’ for hoist, ’rile’ for roil, ’hoss’ for horse, and ‘tetchy’ for touchy were commonly, if not invariably, heard among educated speakers on both sides of the Atlantic. All of this suggests that if we wished to find a modern-day model for British and American speech of the late eighteenth century, we could probably do no better than Yosemite Sam.
To this day it remains a commonplace in England that American English is a corrupted form of British spe
ech, that the inhabitants of the New World display a kind of helpless, chronic ‘want of refinement’ (in the words of Frances Trollope) every time they open their mouths and attempt to issue sounds. In fact, in several significant ways it is British speech that has become corrupted – or, to put it in less reactionary terms, has quietly evolved. The tendency to pronounce fertile, mobile and other such words as if spelled ‘fertle’ and ‘moble’, to give a ŭ sound to hover, grovel and Coventry rather than the rounded o of hot, to pronounce schedule with an initial sk- rather than a sh-, all reflect British speech patterns up to the close of the eighteenth century.*12 Even the feature that Americans most closely associate with modern British speech, the practice of saying ‘bahth’, ‘cahn’t’ and ‘banahna’ for bath, can’t and banana, appears to have been unknown among educated British speakers at the time of the American Revolution. Pronunciation guides until as late as 1809 give no hint of the existence of such a pronunciation in British speech, although there is some evidence to suggest that it was used by London’s cockneys (which would make it one of the few instances in modern linguistics in which a manner of utterance travelled upward from the lower classes). Not only did English speakers of the day, Britons and Americans alike, say bath and path with a flat a, but even apparently such words as jaunt, hardly, palm and father. Two incidental relics of this old pattern of pronunciation are the general American pronunciation of aunt (i.e., ‘ant’) and sassy, which is simply how people once said saucy.