Founding Fathers and Official English
There never was a deliberate decision against making English the official language of the United States. With English as the language of the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, and the vast majority of the population, a declaration of English as our official language may have seemed superfluous. Quite simply, it may not have occurred to them to do so.
Of the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, only eight were not born in the United States. Of those eight, four were from Ireland, two from England, one from Scotland, and one (Alexander Hamilton) was born in the West Indies. We have found no evidence to show that any of them had a first language other than English.
This does not mean that none of them did, just that we cannot find any evidence of it. For instance, while it is possible that at least one of the four Irish-born delegates spoke Irish Gaelic as his first language, the very fact of their success in the English-speaking American colonies weighs against the possibility. Surely the story of the immigrant who learned English and went on to become a delegate to the Constitutional Convention would be a story worth mentioning. The absence of such a story strongly suggests that all the delegates were native English speakers.
The founders took it for granted that English was the language of this country. John Jay, in The Federalist No 2, wrote “With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice, that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country, to one united people; a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language….”
It is not surprising that the founders would think of the United States as an obviously English-speaking nation. The 1790 census was the first comprehensive census of the United States. Since it was taken just three years after the writing of the Constitution, it is a fair reflection of the United States at the time of the Founding Fathers.
It also bears noting that in 1811, President James Madison signed the Louisiana Enabling Act, establishing the conditions under which Louisiana could become a state. One of the requirements was that “the laws which such state may pass shall be promulgated and its records of every description shall be preserved, and its judicial and legislative written proceedings conducted in the language in which the laws and the judicial and legislative written proceedings of the United States are now published and conducted.”
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