It was his government contract supplying provisions to U.S. troops during the War of 1812 that Uncle Sam first inspired the larger-than-life caricature. But Wilson's service to the U.S. started in ...

Uncle Sam didn’t really become a household name until Thomas Nast’s sketches in Harper’s Weekly in the late 1860s and ’70s, when Nast made him a hero of the Union cause. An 1869 cartoon by ...