VACANT-LOT GARDENING—Enterprise promoted by the Bureau of Education · A BOYS’ CORN CLUB—County Agent Giving Instruction · EXHIBIT OF WORK OF BUREAU OF FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC COMMERCE · IMMIGRATION STATION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF LABOR, HONOLULU—Japanese Immigrants Awaiting Examination · EQUIPMENT OF A POSTAL MOTOR-TRUCK ROUTE · DISABLED SOLDIERS LEARNING TO WEAVE RUGS AT AN ARMY HOSPITAL
On an April day in 1865, a poor old colored woman was walking through the streets of Richmond wringing her hands and moaning, “Oh, Sam’s dead; Sam’s dead!” “What Sam’s dead, Aunty?” asked a passerby. “Oh, Lord, Uncle Sam!” It was the death of Abraham Lincoln for which that faithful heart was grieving. He was her Uncle Sam, the representative in human form of America, particularly of the Government at Washington, that mid-point of the strong, and protection of the weak. Yet after all she missed the great idea that whoever dies and whoever lives, Uncle Sam is eternal; for Uncle Sam is the American people governing itself. He is the emblem of the force and courage and resolution of the United States of America.
The Birth of Uncle Sam
Among the names by which American heroes and popular figures have been called, how did Uncle Sam come to be adopted as the national denominator? As well ask why Americans were called Yankees, long before the Revolution, or why “Yanks” has been the name applied by Allied soldiers to the forces of the United States in the European battlefields, and has been accepted by regiments from North and South alike. As well try to run down the first use of “Brother Jonathan,” in much the same sense as that in which we now employ “Uncle Sam.” Learned men and some of the unlearned have delved deep to find the origin of the term Uncle Sam, and the significance of his out-of-style clothes.
One school of these explorers has presumed to trace Uncle Sam back to an obscure Samuel Wilson, who during the War of 1812 was engaged in a government contract for beef and pork to feed the United States army. Nobody mentioned this yarn until thirty years later, when Jack Frost in his Book of the Navy gave it currency, without stating where he found what he himself calls “a silly joke.” Frost asserts that from casks marked “U. S.” by Samuel Wilson, the idea was taken by the soldiers, and that gradually it spread through the army and the nation.
AN EARLY PORTRAYAL OF UNCLE SAM
A reproduction of the title page of the first illustrated comic paper in the United States, 1846
The only facts that can be ascertained on this subject are that in 1813 there was a firm of meat packers at Troy, in which Samuel Wilson was a partner. Then that on September 7, 1813, the Troy Post printed an article containing the expression “Loss upon loss, and no ill luck … except what lights upon UNCLE SAM’S shoulders.” A note in the newspaper goes on to say “This cant name for our government has got almost as current as ‘John Bull.’ The letters ‘U. S.’ on the government wagons, etc., are supposed to have given rise to it.” A month later another paper commented on the number of deserters in the army, adding “The pretence is, that Uncle Sam, a now popular explication of the U. S., does not pay well.”