[Ads-l] United States is/are

[Bill Mullins]

I spent last week driving to some of the Virigina Civil War battlefields with my son, who is a big history buff.  While driving I listened to Shelby Foote outtakes from Ken Burns' The Civil War, in which he read the following passage from the third volume of his history of the conflict (published in 1974):

"This new unity was best defined, perhaps, by the change in number of a simple verb. In formal as in common speech, abroad as well as on this side of its oceans, once the nation emerged from the crucible of that war, “the United States are” became “the United States is.” "

I've heard this claim, that the Civil War was the point in history that the United States went from "are" to "is", before.  Is this the first place it is made?  I've not been able to come up with a search strategy to confirm or deny it that doesn't have far too many false positives.

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