525: United States Is or Are May 16, 2016

A good rhetoricician knows how to bend words to his advantage, by definition. Before the Civil War, the general convention was to speak of the United States as a collective entity using the grammatical plural, such as in the 13th amendment's, slavery nor involuntary servitude, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction" (1865). Starting just after that, and in limbo for a few decades thence, people wanted to have an image of a single-body: United States, and so used the singular. This change in the sense of nationalism over regionalism is evidenced by the change in grammatical number.