Made In America (9 page)

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.
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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,
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'weamin' for
women,
'through' for
throw,
'nater' for
nature,
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'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 speech, 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
Å­
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.
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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.

In the summer of 1776, when it occurred to the delegates assembled in Philadelphia that they needed a document to
spell out the grounds of their dissatisfaction with Britain, the task was handed to Thomas Jefferson. To us, he seems the obvious choice. He was not.

In 1776 Thomas Jefferson was a fairly obscure figure, even in his own Virginia. Aged just thirty-three, he was the second youngest of the delegates and one of the least experienced. The second Continental Congress was in fact his first exposure to a wider world of affairs beyond those of his native colony. He had not been selected to attend the first Continental Congress and should not have been at the second. He was called only as a late replacement for Peyton Randolph, who had been summoned home to Virginia. Jefferson's reputation rested almost entirely on his
Summary View of the Rights of British America
written two years earlier. A rather aggressive and youthfully impudent essay advising the British on how they ought to conduct themselves in their principal overseas possession, it had gained him some attention as a writer. To his fellow Virginia delegates he was known as a dilettante (a word that did not yet have any pejorative overtones; taken from the Italian
dilettare,
it simply described one who found pleasure in the richness of human possibility) and admired for the breadth of his reading in an age when that truly meant something. (He was adept at seven languages.)

By no means, however, did he have what we might call a national standing. Nor did he display any evidence of desiring one. He showed a distinct lack of keenness to get to Philadelphia, dawdling en route to shop for books and to buy a horse, and once there he said almost nothing. ‘During the whole time I sat with him I never heard him utter three sentences together,' John Adams later marvelled. Moreover, he went home to Virginia in December 1775, in the midst of debates, and did not return for nearly five months. Had he been able, he would gladly have abandoned the Congress altogether, leaving the drafting of the
Declaration of Independence to someone else in order to take part in drawing up a new constitution for Virginia, a matter much closer to his heart.
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None the less, because he showed a ‘peculiar felicity for expression', in John Adams's words, he was one of five men chosen to draft the Declaration of Independence – John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston were the others – and this Committee of Five in turn selected him to come up with a working draft. The purpose, as Jefferson saw it, was ‘not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent'.
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But of course the Declaration of Independence is much more than that. As Garry Wills has written, it stands as ‘perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great Iiterature'.
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Consider the opening sentence:

In a single sentence, in clear, simple language that anyone can understand, Jefferson has not only encapsulated the philosophy of what is to follow, but set in motion a cadence that gradually becomes hypnotic. You can read the preamble to the Declaration of Independence for its rhythms alone. As Stephen E. Lucas notes, it captures in just 202 words ‘what it took John Locke thousands of words to explain in his Second
Treatise of Government. In its ability to compress complex ideas into a brief, clear statement, the preamble is a paradigm of eighteenth century prose style.
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What is less well known is that the words are not entirely Jefferson's. George Mason's recently published draft of the
Virginia Declaration of Rights
provided what might most charitably be called liberal inspiration. Consider perhaps the most famous line in the Declaration:

Compare that with Mason's
Virginia Declaration:

‘Pursuit of happiness' may be argued to be a succinct improvement over ‘pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety', but even that compelling phrase wasn't original with Jefferson. ‘Pursuit of happiness' had been coined by John Locke almost a century before and had appeared frequently in political writings ever since.

Nor are the words in that famous, inspiring sentence the ones that Jefferson penned. His original version shows considerably less grace and rather more verbosity:

The sentence took on its final resonance only after it had been through the hands of the Committee of Five and then subjected to active debate in Congress itself. Congress did not hesitate to alter Jefferson's painstakingly crafted words. Altogether it ordered forty changes to the original text. It deleted 630 words, about a quarter of the total, and added 146. As with most writers who have been subjected to the editing process, Jefferson thought the final text depressingly inferior to his original, and, like most writers, he was wrong. Indeed, seldom has a writer been better served. Congress had the wisdom to leave untouched those sections that were unimprovable – notably the opening paragraph – and excised much that was irrelevant or otiose.

Though now one of the most famous passages in English political prose, the preamble attracted far less attention then than later. At the time the listing of grievances against the king, which takes up some 60 per cent of the entire text of the Declaration, was far more daring and arresting.

The twenty-seven charges against the king were mostly – sometimes recklessly – overstated. Charge four, for instance, accused him of compelling colonial assemblies to meet in locales that were ‘unusual, uncomfortable and distant ... for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures'. In fact, in only three of the thirteen colonies were the assemblies ever compelled to move and in two of those it happened on only one occasion each. Only Massachusetts suffered it for an extended period and there the assembly was moved just four miles to Cambridge – hardly an odious imposition.

Or consider charge ten: ‘He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our
people, and eat out their substance.' In fact, the swarms numbered no more than about fifty, and much of their activity, such as trying to stop smuggling (an activity which, incidentally, had helped to make John Hancock one of the richest men in New England), was legitimate by any standards.
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In Britain, the Declaration was received by many as arrant hogwash. The
Gentleman's Magazine
mocked the assertion that all men are created equal. ‘In what are they created equal?' it asked. ‘Is it in size, strength, understanding, figure, moral or civil accomplishments, or situation of life? Every plough-man knows that they are not created equal in any of these. All men, it is true, are equally created, but what is this to the purpose? It certainly is no reason why the Americans should turn rebels.‘
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Though the writer of that passage appears to have had perhaps one glass of Madeira too many at lunch, there was something in his argument. No one in America truly believed that all men were created equal. Samuel Johnson touched on the incontestable hypocrisy of the American position when he asked, ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?‘
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