The first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" dates from a  letter written by Stephen Moylan to George Washington's aide-de-camp Joseph Reed. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort. The first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in ''The Virginia Gazette'' newspaper in Williamsburg, on .