As Henry noted, the term certainly does appear in
Wheatley's poem to Washington in 1775, but we
have not been able to determine whether she
coined it or not; Wheatley was quite well-read
and may have picked it up somewhere.  A 1756
French work of poetry by Marie Anne Le Page
Fiquet Du Boccage is entitled _La Colombiade, ou,
La foi portee au Nouveau Monde_ and may have been
in circulation.  Clearly the term was in the
public consciousness by the end of the
Revolutionary War, when the trustees of King's
College in NYC reopened the school as Columbia
University.  One book that may shed some light
-- but which alas is not in our library at this
time -- is _The American Columbiad: Discovering
America, Inventing the United States_, edited by
Mario Materassi, Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa
Santos, and Clara Bartocci, et al., Amsterdam,
1996.


--
Frank E. Grizzard, Jr.
Associate Editor
Papers of George Washington
University of Virginia

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_George Washington: A Biographical Companion_
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