UNCLE SAM

[21]

UNCLE SAM.
BY ALBERT MATTHEWS.

Arising in obscure ways, often originating in derision orabuse or satire, sometimes repudiated by those to whomthey are applied, at other times adopted in spite of theridicule, the origin of nicknames is singularly elusive, andthere are few words or phrases of which it is more difficultto trace the history. Moreover, nicknames are almostinvariably associated in the popular mind with some personor place or thing having a similar name; and so a problemalready difficult is made doubly so by the necessity ofattempting to obtain information about very obscure persons.The history of nicknames usually follows one general course:those who, at the time of origin, perhaps know the realexplanation, fail to record it, and then, a generation or sohaving passed by and the true origin having been forgotten,a series of guesses is indulged in.

In Yankee, Brother Jonathan, and Uncle Sam, we Americanshave perhaps more than our fair share of nationalsobriquets; and we are, so far as I am aware, the only nationto the government of which a sobriquet has been given indistinction from the people. For while Uncle Sam has occasionallybeen applied to us as a nation, its use is almost whollyrestricted to our government. What has been said aboveabout the popular tendency to connect nicknames withpersons is well illustrated in all of our national sobriquets.When the history of Yankee comes to be written, it willbe found necessary to consider a famous pirate who wasthe terror of the Spanish Main in the seventeenth century;a negro who lived in South Carolina in 1725; several membersof a family which was well known in Cambridge, Massachusetts,during the eighteenth century; the Yankoos,[22]an imaginary tribe of Indians invented in 1775 for thepurpose of explaining a word which then first came intogeneral use in this country; and Yankee as a family name.The history of Brother Jonathan involves an inquiry intoan alleged English poet of the seventeenth century; aLondon coffee-house of the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies named Jonathan's; Jonathan Hastings, a tannerwho lived in Cambridge early in the eighteenth century;Jonathan Carver, the noted traveller; and Jonathan Trumbull,the distinguished Governor of Connecticut.[1] Andin Uncle Sam we are confronted with a similar problem—thistime an alleged contractor and inspector named SamuelWilson, who lived in Troy during the first half of the nineteenthcentury. The story connecting Uncle Sam withSamuel Wilson first appeared in print, so far as is known,in 1842, and no example of the term earlier than 1840 hasuntil now ever been cited....