Uncle Sam

• 1. Introduction

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  Uncle Sam is one of the most recognizable faces in American political life, and yet almost nobody knows where he actually came from. His white top hat, blue tailcoat, and red-and-white-striped trousers are fixtures of recruiting posters, editorial cartoons, and national mythology. But the character's origins are tangled, contested, and stranger than the legend suggests.

  Was he really named after a meatpacker from Arlington, Massachusetts? Did soldiers on the front lines of the War of 1812 invent the name as a joke? And how did a figure that once looked like Benjamin Franklin eventually settle into the gaunt, finger-pointing elder that stares from the famous World War I poster? The answers reach back to 1738, run through a bloody civil war, and arrive at a Brooklyn artist who modeled the character partly on himself.

• 2. Before Uncle Sam

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  Columbia came first. She appeared in 1738, before the United States even existed, as a female personification of what would become the nation. She was sometimes paired with Lady Liberty, another female figure, and for decades she carried the symbolic weight of American identity.

  With the American Revolutionary War of 1775 came a very different kind of figure. Brother Jonathan was male, folksy, and came to represent the American populace rather than the government. John Neal gave him a full literary life in his 1825 novel Brother Jonathan, cementing the character as a vessel for national temperament.

  Columbia and Brother Jonathan coexisted for years, each filling a different symbolic role. But Columbia's grip on the national imagination loosened over time. By the 1920s, she had been claimed as the mascot of Columbia Pictures, and her use as a national personification was effectively abandoned.

• 3. The Samuel Wilson Legend

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  Samuel Wilson was a meatpacker from Arlington, Massachusetts, who later relocated to Troy, New York. During the War of 1812, he supplied rations to American soldiers, and contractors at the time were required to stamp their name and the rations' origin onto each package. Wilson's crates were marked "E.A.-U.S." for Elbert Anderson, the contractor, and United States.

  A co-worker, asked what the initials stood for, reportedly joked that they meant Elbert Anderson and "Uncle Sam," referring to Wilson by his nickname. The story spread, and a running association took hold between those two letters and the avuncular figure of a national government.

  Historians have questioned this account, and not gently. The story did not appear in print until 1842. Meanwhile, the earliest confirmed reference to Uncle Sam as a metaphor for the government dates to 1810, before Wilson had any contract with the military. An 1810 journal entry by Isaac Mayo, a midshipman in the US Navy, uses the name casually, as though it were already common slang.

• 4. An Unstable Identity

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  An 1810 edition of Niles' Weekly Register noted in a footnote that Uncle Sam was "a cant term in the army for the United States," and speculated that it derived simply from the abbreviation U.S. That dry explanation lacks the color of the Wilson legend, but it fits the timeline better.

  For decades, Uncle Sam had no fixed appearance. In 1860, one artist drew him resembling Benjamin Franklin. A contemporaneous depiction of Brother Jonathan, his nearest symbolic rival, looks far closer to the modern Uncle Sam, including the lean frame, though without the goatee. By the 1850s, the two names were being applied nearly interchangeably, and images labeled one were sometimes relabeled the other.

  An 1849 comedic novel captures the casual quality of the name at that point: a clockmaker explains that Americans call the public Uncle Sam just as the British call their own John Bull. The comparison to John Bull suggests the character had taken on a recognizable type, even if the visual details were still in flux.

  The first reference to Uncle Sam in formal literature, as opposed to newspapers, came in the 1816 allegorical book The Adventures of Uncle Sam, in Search After His Lost Honor. Brother Jonathan disappeared as a distinct figure near the end of the American Civil War, but Uncle Sam still did not settle into a single recognizable image until a world war forced the question.

• 5. Flagg's Finger

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  James Montgomery Flagg changed everything. His recruiting poster, made famous in 1917, fixed Uncle Sam's appearance in the public mind: an elderly white man with white hair and a goatee, wearing a white top hat with white stars on a blue band, a blue tailcoat, and red-and-white-striped trousers, one finger extended toward the viewer.

  Flagg drew the image in response to a British recruiting poster that showed Lord Kitchener in a nearly identical pose. The design was not entirely original, but the American version landed differently. According to some accounts, the image first appeared publicly on the cover of Leslie's Weekly on the 6th of July, 1916, carrying the caption "What Are You Doing for Preparedness?" More than four million copies were printed between 1917 and 1918.

  The poster's reach did not stop with the First World War. It was deployed again during World War II, when the United States was codenamed "Samland" by the German intelligence agency Abwehr. The figure also appeared in "The Yankee Doodle Boy," featured in the 1942 musical Yankee Doodle Dandy.

• 6. Memory and Monument

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  Whatever the truth about his origins, Samuel Wilson has been honored as the human anchor of the Uncle Sam story. Two memorials exist, both tied to his life. The Uncle Sam Memorial Statue stands in Arlington, Massachusetts, where Wilson was born. A second memorial sits near his long-term residence in Riverfront Park in Troy, New York. Wilson's boyhood home in Mason, New Hampshire, can still be visited.

  Wilson died on the 31st of July, 1854, at the age of 87, and is buried at Oakwood Cemetery in Troy, New York. Congress made the connection official in 1989, when a joint resolution designated the 13th of September as "Uncle Sam Day" in honor of Wilson's birthday.

  In 2015, the family history company MyHeritage claimed to have traced Wilson's living relatives through genealogical research, extending the chain between the historical meatpacker and a symbol that had long since outgrown any single person's story.