There is a great bruhaha about the fact that, in drafting the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote the word “subjects,” scratched it out, and then substituted “citizens” for it. Mommy Professor has become such a complete Time Provincial that that is a bit of news.

The decision to write the Declaration was entirely one of deciding not to be subjects of the Crown any more. Until then, the colonies insisted that they had “The Rights of Englishmen.” But they insisted that they were not subject to the Parliament, and only their own legislatures could tax them.

In other words, they were united with England not by Parliament, but as subjects of a the Crown. It isn’t surprising that, after arguing that for YEARS, Jefferson would have used the word “subjects” at first.

None of this will surprise our BUGS British contingent. In my youth, Brits far more often referred to themselves as “British subjects” than as “citizens.”

It may also be added that when Jefferson decided he was a citizen, he was not declaring himself a citizen of the United States. Until his inauguration as the first president, Washington always referred to “my country” as Virginia. Jefferson did the same.

In fact the Act of Union of 1800 with Ireland was not passed until twenty-four years after Jefferson wrote. Until a similar Act passed in 1708, for a century Scotsmen and Englishmen were in entirely different countries and each had its own sovereign parliament. They were British subjects, not British citizens, because they were British only in that they had the same king.

That was the world view Jefferson had lived in a third of a decade before 1776.

Historians are supposed to know all this, but it isn’t mentioned in the discussion of the change of wording in 1776 from subject to citizen. In the real world it is remarkable that Jefferson only did it once.

Even the term “United States of America” had been invented a year before Jefferson wrote that draft. The term “United States of America” was first used by Thomas Paine in his 1775 book, Common Sense.

It is not surprisingly that the term “United States of America” was coined by a Paine, who was born and raised in England and had relatively recently moved to America. As a foreigner, he saw “America” as a whole, just as Jews see “humanity” outside Judaism as a whole.

Alexander Hamilton only came to America in 1772 and he, too, thought of America as a single unit.

This was a very alien idea to Virginians, New Yorkers, and South Carolinians.

A Wordist cannot see this because he thinks that all men have always thought as he does, that a person is one individual in a world society. The problem is that each of the thousands of Wordist faiths sees all the other Wordists as aliens.

And all the Mommy Professors see the real Jefferson as an alien because his loyalties were utterly alien to THEM. Mommy Professor and other Wordists cannot see Jefferson as just sitting down to write a completely new definition of the loyalty of his fellow Americans. They think he was writing for himself.

Mommy Professor looks at the words Jefferson wrote at that moment in history as the only indication THEY CAN UNDERSTAND of his entire world view in 1776. If you ask anyone today what Jefferson was really thinking when he sat at the table in Philadelphia, they will honestly go to the words he wrote and dissect them one by one to get at his “meaning.”

So they think that the fact that he wrote subject and scratched it out shows a profound change in his thinking.

Jefferson was not writing his own Declaration.

Jefferson had been instructed by congress to DRAFT a declaration that America had declared itself independent, no longer subjects of a common Crown, no longer Englishmen Abroad.

That was hell of an assignment. He was NOT told, “Thomas, why don’t you write up your own personal World View?” He was told to write the best argument he could to the whole world.

And it had to be a document every single state delegation could agree to.

If Jefferson HAD written only his honest personal view of the world, he would have violated the trust put in him. But no historian today sees it that way.

A Wordist cannot understand history.