Fœderalism

The Rev. Larry L. Beane II, a Lutheran Latinist, offers a lesson in language, government, and American history — The Founders Knew Latin. An excerpt:

The founders of the American Republic knew their Latin.

That is why they carefully chose the word "federal." In James Madison's original draft of a proposed new Constitution (the "Virginia Plan"), the word "national" was used to describe the proposed new Union. However, this word was explicitly rejected by the Constitutional Convention, specifically because the founders did not see the United States as a "nation" but rather as a "federation." Their vision was for the United States to be a union of sovereign states as opposed to a consolidation of the states into "one nation, indivisible" – and this reality is embedded in the very word "federal."

The Latin motto "e pluribus unum" also captures the plural nature of the Union. It was never meant to be collapsed and rolled into into "one nation." This is even evident in common grammatical usage, for while the architects of the Union were still living, the singular verb "is" was not paired up with the plural subject "United States."

"Deo gratias that the founders knew their Latin," the good pastor concludes. "And even more so, thank God they knew the danger of centralized power, leading them to establish a federation and to reject a nation."