johnny come lately (10. 857)

Though now mostly resigned to obscurity save in a fossilised reference on diplomas from Yale as “We must consult Brother Jonathan,” before the advent of Uncle Sam with the War of 1812, New Englanders first and by extension the whole of America had the unabashedly boorish, hayseed of a personification in a caricature—though likely conflated with earlier Puritan Roundheads by Royalists during the English civil war—of Jonathan Trumbull, colonial governor of Connecticut, the only one to publicly side with the Revolutionaries and supply materiel during their petition for independence, General George Washington supposedly deferring above when asked if the war could be won. Like Yankee Doodle Dandy, also a British invention and a term of derision, Americans sought to reclaim the honour, transmogrifying him to into a malleable national symbol that stood for not only their resourcefulness and lack of pretensions but also manifest destiny, nativism (see also) and bigotry, adopted as the mascot of the Know-Nothing Party. Uncle Sam, with the trappings of Brother Jonathan though presented as less strident and ostensibly less of an opponent to a federal government through his identification with Abraham Lincoln, did eventually gainsay his primogenitor, dressed in the same spangled and untailored garb—and with the same problematic populist propaganda. Although the other aspects are mostly forgotten, Uncle Same, representing the US government, was the final addition to the triune, tripartite personification of Columbia, the idea of nationhood, and Brother Jonathan, the people—with rather glaring exceptions.