Have you ever wondered how the United States got the name Uncle Sam? Well, here’s the story. During the War of 1812, Samuel Wilson was the meat packer who sent the army barrels of beef, and he stamped the barrels with “U.S.” for United States. The soldiers, however, began to call the meat “Uncle Sam’s,” which caught the attention of the local newspaper. The newspaper liked this story so much that by September 1813 (200 years ago this week!), they started to use Uncle Sam as the nickname for the U.S. federal government.
In the late 1860s and 1870s, Thomas Nast started drawing cartoons of Uncle Sam that became popular, and they slowly changed into a man with a white beard and stars-and-stripes suit. Then James Montgomery Flagg drew his own version of Uncle Sam wearing a tall top hat and blue jacket and is pointing straight ahead at you the viewer. This picture of Uncle Sam was used with the words “I Want You For The U.S. Army” to encourage people to join the war of World War I. It became the widely popular picture of Uncle Sam that we still see today!
In September 1961, more than 100 years after his death, the U.S. Congress called Samuel Wilson “the [model] of America’s national symbol of Uncle Sam.” 
