7th September 1813: The United States gained the nickname ’Uncle Sam’

Samuel Wilson’s meatpacking business in Troy, New York, flourished with the onset of the War of 1812, after Elbert Anderson subcontracted Wilson to provide meat for a government contract to feed troops in New York and New Jersey. The salted meat was packed into barrels marked ‘E.A.’ (for Elbert Anderson) and ‘U.S.’ (for the United States), an abbreviation that an employee instead claimed was named for ‘Uncle Sam’. According to the traditional story the nickname spread through the employees and, later, the army where the name was picked up by a local broadside about the ongoing war. Although the epithet spread during the War of 1812, this account only began to receive broader recognition after an anonymous article in the New York Gazette in 1830. Historians have since questioned this origin. Albert Matthews, writing in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society in 1908, and more recent work by professor Donald R. Hickey identified references to Uncle Sam as far back as 1810. This makes it unlik