[Ads-l] 1780 Use of "Sam" to refer to the U.S. (precursor to "Uncle Sam"?)

[dave@wilton.net]

I've found a 1780 use of the name "Sam" as an allegorical representation of the United States, or perhaps more accurately, to the colonial resistance to the British during the Revolution.
 
It's in a poem published in a Tory newspaper. The poem is a humorous (or as humorous as a poem about battering a woman can be) allegory of the Revolution. It's quite long, but the lines that introduce Sam are:
 
“Mary Cay.” Royal Gazette (New York), 22 January 1780, 3/3–4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
 
"IV. For Molly counted full thirteen,
 And bundled now with Sammy,
Who said she ought to be a Queen,
 And never mind her Mammy.
V. So Sam an[d] Moll together plot,
 To make a stout resistance,
And from the school, in short, they got
 Some truants for assistants.
VI. Then mother call’d for Dick and Will
 To teach the wench her duty,
They drubb’d her now and then, but still
 They coax’d her as a beauty."
 
Thirteen-year-old (thirteen, get it?) Molly is the colonies. The mother is England. Dick and Will are Richard and William Howe, the commanders of British forces in North America. That leaves Sam as the rebellious element. Elsewhere in the poem is a reference to Bunker Hill and the dismissal of the Howe's, which had occurred two years earlier. Having read the entire poem, there's no doubt in my mind that most of the names in the poem where chosen for some reason, but "Sam" stands out as not having an obvious real-life counterpart (Sam Adams, maybe? That seems a stretch.)
 
The earliest reference to "Uncle Sam" that I know of is from 1803, but could this "Sam" be a precursor? The initials U.S. would not have been in common use in 1780, so that would explain the absence of the "uncle." Are there 1780–1803 interdatings of "Sam" being used in this way? Or is this 1780 "Sam" just a name chosen at random, a one-off usage, and not related to the later "Uncle Sam"?
 
 

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