'I doubt anyone thought anything' - this doubt is due to limits of your own thought, springing from limits of your experience, no doubt .... a great many have 'thought' of this, for a long time, anyone who looks at an atlas can easily figure it out .... for instance Profe Ramón García-Pelayo y Gross seems to glanced at least once, prior to editing his Diccionario Usual, Ediciones Larousse [Marsella núm. 53, México 06600, D.F., Sexta Edición] -
' americano adj. y s. De América (Debe evitarse el empleo de americano con el sentido de norteamericano de los Estados Unidos)'
'De Toqueville referred to les Etats- Unis as "Amerique" '
De Tocqueville was a frenchman ... [ahem] ... and he wrote before the 1820s actions of the slavers led by Moses and Steven Austin had their eventual result in a war ending in expansion of slaveholders' lands into those of the mexicanos who had written a prohibition of slavery into their constitucion .... there is however in the notes to his preface this afterthought -
'At the time I published the first edition of this work, M. Gustave deBeaumont, my traveling-companion in America, was still working on his book entitled Marie, ou l'Esclaoage aux Etats-Unis, which has since appeared. M. de Beaumont's primary purpose was to portray clearly and accurately the position of Negroes in Anglo-American society. His work will throw a new and vivid light on the question of slavery, a vital one for all united republics. I am not certain whether I am mistaken, but it seems to me that M. de Beaumont's book, after having vitally interested those who will put aside their emotions and regard his descriptions dispassionately, should have a surer and more lasting success among those readers who, above all else, desire a true picture of actual conditions.'
xroads.virginia.edu |
