An Uncle Sam balloon makes its way down New York's Sixth Avenue in the 85th annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2011. | Tina Fineberg/AP Photo A new nickname for the U.S. emerges: ‘Uncle Sam,’ Sept. 7, 1813

Columbia, a goddess holding a torch, served as the earliest known personification of what Patriots declared in 1776 to be the United States of America. She was also often linked to Lady Liberty. During the Revolutionary War came another symbol, that of Brother Jonathan, which has since faded from use. The website History.com reports that Uncle Sam began to appear in 1813 during the War of 1812; he has endured to this day.

Semantic purists hold that while Uncle Sam personifies the federal government of the United States, Columbia represents the United States as a nation.


Columbia initially appeared in 1738 and has been coupled with both Brother Jonathan and Uncle Sam. Over time, however, her use declined in favor of Lady Liberty; she was further demoted when she became the icon of Columbia Pictures in the 1920s.

“Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” remains a patriotic song that was popular on the Union side during the Civil War. Well into the 20th century, it functioned as an unofficial anthem, in competition with "Hail, Columbia” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” until Congress ended the rivalry in 1931 by adopting the “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the official U.S. national anthem.

Uncle Sam is linked to Samuel Wilson (1766-1854), a meat packer from Troy, New York, who supplied barrels of beef to the U.S. Army during the war with Great Britain. Wilson stamped the barrels with “U.S.” for United States. But soldiers began to refer to their rations as “Uncle Sam’s.” A Troy newspaper picked up the story, and Uncle Sam soon entered the fledgling nation’s consciousness.

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The first reference to Uncle Sam in literature (as distinct from newspapers) came in “The Adventures of Uncle Sam in Search After His Lost Honor,” an 1816 allegorical book by Frederick Augustus Fidfaddy.

In the late 1860s and 1870s, Thomas Nast (1840-1902), a political cartoonist, further popularized the image of Uncle Sam. Nast evolved his image, eventually giving Sam the white beard and stars-and-stripes suit that are still associated with the character today.

James Montgomery Flagg (1877-1960) created an even more famous image of Uncle Sam, which first appeared on the cover of Leslie’s Weekly in July 1916 with the title “What Are You Doing for Preparedness?”

Flagg depicts him as wearing a tall top hat and a blue jacket. He is pointing a finger straight ahead at the viewer. Flagg’s poster was based on the original British Lord Kitchener poster of three years earlier and was used to recruit for the U.S. armed forces during both World War I and World War II. Flagg used a modified version of his own face to depict Uncle Sam.

On this day in 1961, Congress recognized Wilson as “the progenitor of America’s national symbol of Uncle Sam.” He was laid to rest in Oakwood Cemetery in Troy, the upstate city in New York that calls itself “The Home of Uncle Sam.”

SOURCE: WWW.HISTORY.COM