ExclusiveBetsy Ross: Did She Really Create the First American Flag?

I'm Tiffany Brannan. Welcome to American Legends. Each culture has its legends, and that could be myths or different stories, but here in America, our greatest legends are the wonderful heroes who are right from our history pages. Now, some of these heroes are very famous and some are obscure, but each person deserves to be discovered because each man or woman stands as a great example of how we can be better Americans in our daily lives. Just about any American will tell you that the name of Betsy Ross is an instantly recognizable one. As one of the few women whose role in the revolution is really remembered, we all hear about Betsy Ross throughout our childhood. She was the woman who sewed the first American flag. In fact, she's often given credit for even designing it. However, it seems strange that for such an important figure, few of us know more about her than just her name and that simple fact. If you do a little more research into her life, though, you'll see why not that much more is known because not that much information is available. And even more surprising, historians in recent years, even up to the last 60 years, have doubted whether the stories we've cherished for 150 years are really true. Was Betsy Ross indeed the maker and designer of the original old glory? Or is that perhaps a fanciful legend? As it's now 250 years since the American Revolution, it seems a fitting time to revisit some of the events leading up to that famous revolution. As the founding fathers were creating a new nation, it makes sense that one of their main priorities would be to design a flag, a banner under which the patriots could unite as they were finding this new identity away from England. Nevertheless, the story about the designing and making of that first flag isn't one which has been commonly told for all 250 of those years since the Declaration of Independence. In fact, it's more like 150 years. The story that we all know about Betsy Ross started in 1870. In that year, William J. Canby presented a paper to the Pennsylvania Historical Society in preparation for the centennial, which was coming up in 1876. He presented this paper and also read along with a few signed affidavits as proof of the origins of that first flag. In this very scholarly paper, Mr. Canby began by explaining some research that he and some others had done, looking into historic records, congressional papers, and all the official sources they could find for some kind of official verifiable proof. One would think there'd be a lot of documentation. Nevertheless, he was rather unsurprised when the search came up empty. He wasn't the first person who had tried to find a really official source. Like others, he found that the only really official mention of a flag in those early papers came from a congressional report on June 14, 1777. This resolve stated that the flag of the United States be 13 stripes, alternate red and white, that the Union be 13 stars white in a blue field representing a new constellation. There was no diagram or design to go along with that description, which certainly could describe what's typically called the Betsy Ross flag, but wouldn't necessarily have to be that exact arrangement. Having very thoroughly explained the lengths to which they went, Canby proceeded to discuss the legend which had been passed down in his family. And it's definitely a very scholarly piece to read and quite noble in its statement as he describes the importance of seeking the truth and history and that historians, rightly so, often dismiss anything that's oral tradition as it seems like a mere folk legend. Nevertheless, he states that these folk legends could often be shown to be the truth when they come directly from people who are involved in these incidents or are recounted by people who spoke with players in these activities. Thus, we proceed to the first official telling of the Betsy Ross story. You see, William J. Canby had a grandmother named Elizabeth Ross. She was born Elizabeth Griscom in the year 1752 in the colony which could be called New Jersey. She was one of a very large family, sometimes said to be eighth or ninth in a although around nine children lived to adulthood. Not wanting to be a burden on her father as a dependent, she apprenticed herself to an upholsterer and there she learned how to make and mend fabric. She sewed curtains, carpets, upholstery. She became just a general seamstress. But although there are some records of her making clothing, it seems that she spent an equal amount of time making household goods. As a young woman, she grew up in a devout Quaker household. But as she was thus apprenticed, she met a fellow apprentice whose name was John Ross. This young man was the son of a minister from the Christ Church, which was separate from the Quaker religion. She fell in love with him and against her parents' approval, they got married and thus she was expelled from the Society of Friends, as the Quakers called themselves. She didn't leave her Christian faith though and they both became members of the Christ Church congregation. Her reliance in providence would help her throughout her long and sometimes difficult life. After only two beautiful years of marriage, John Ross died, leaving her a very young widow at the age of 21. At this point, she already had a small business as a seamstress, but as she was thus grief-stricken, she sold her business and returned to live with her father. It wasn't long, however, before she felt like she was again somewhat idle, a dependent, and she never wanted to be a burden on her father. So she decided to go back into business and she rented a small storefront on Arch Street in Pennsylvania, in the city of Philadelphia, as it were, which is often recounted as the birthplace of liberty, and thus she hung out her shingle and got back to work as a seamstress. As she continued going to the Christ Church, a fellow parishioner was George Washington, who supposedly prayed in a nearby pew, and it also was recounted that she would sew his shirts and did some other such business. She and her husband had also been friends of George Washington, largely because of her relation by marriage to another one of the founding fathers, George Ross. He was the uncle of her late husband. And thus we come around to the famous incidents of June of 1776, just one month before the famous Declaration of Independence. During this time, as the new Congress was trying to come up with all sorts of different ideas for the new nation, as they were going to declare independence, a congressional committee of three took an hour to go over to the nearby street and pay a call to this seamstress. There are several reasons why these three men would choose Elizabeth Ross, or Betsy, as she was commonly called, as the seamstress to visit, because she was the friend and fellow parishioner of George Washington and the near kinswoman of George Ross. The third man in the party was Robert Morris. They called upon her and asked if she would make this flag that they wanted to have designed. She humbly and honestly admitted that she hadn't really sewn a flag before, but they assured her that it was a simple task for a good seamstress, and they declared that they would bring her another flag from a ship as an example. George Washington showed her the design they had, which included some stripes and stars, and at this point they had a six-pointed star. Stars on flags or other emblems of this time often had many points, sometimes as many as seven or eight, but Betsy suggested that a five-pointed star would be better, and many have said the reason why would be that it could be created out of fabric with a single snip. So she folded some fabric up and demonstrated this five-pointed star, and George Washington was very pleased at this contrivance, and thus she helped him draw a new design for this flag, which was eventually artistically rendered by another man in the Congress, brought around to her, as well as the heavy tack that was needed for this flag. She studied the peculiar stitchwork that was used on this ship's flag, and thus she created the first flag. They were so pleased with the design and execution of this flag that she was given the commission to make as many as she possibly could, and at this point her grandson can be recounted that she felt a bit distressed at the instructions from George Ross that she should buy up all the heavy fabric needed for these flags that she could possibly lay her hands on and start making more flags, because she had not much money and certainly not enough credit to buy such things, and she wondered how she could possibly follow out these orders, because it, on the one hand, offered a steady income for her, but on the other, she needed money to make money. But she decided to put her trust in Providence and just begin buying as much as she could, and hopefully sell a few flags, and thus make enough money to buy more material. But not long after she had that thought, George Ross came back and said that it was a great oversight on his part, and quite presumptuous of him to presume that she would just buy all this fabric out of her own pocket, and thus he gave her a hundred pound note and said that to call upon him as a bank anytime she needed more money to buy these things. Thus, she was the official flag maker for the government for the next 50 years, and then her daughter took over. Not long after that, she remarried, this time to a man named Joseph Ashburn, and he was in the navy. Unfortunately, in the year 1781, his ship was captured by the British and he died in prison. She received this news from John Claypool, another former Quaker who had ended up leaving the faith because he wanted to be part of the American Revolution, and Quakers didn't believe in any kind of warfare. They had known each other in their youth, and ironically, after he delivered this sad news to the now twice-widowed lady, they began to develop their friendship, and began courting, and eventually he became her third husband. She'd had one daughter who survived by her second husband, two, but one of them died, and then by her third husband, she had several more children, several daughters and one son who sadly did not live to adulthood, and thus it was through this third husband that the grandson was born, and she had many grandchildren. They had a long and happy marriage. Eventually, she did outlive him as well, and he was an invalid in his last days, so she had to continue her sowing to support the family, and thus taught the business to her daughters. Now, is there validity to this story as passed down and recounted by her grandson? There are many arguments which have been made as early as I've seen as the 1960s as to why this is untrue. The official Betsy Ross website has some excellent arguments in favor of this story. Now, one of the most common arguments against it is that Canby was only 11 when his grandmother died, so how could he have such clear memories? One answer to this would be that his parents were still alive and they had heard these stories from Betsy Ross, so even if he hadn't heard it that many times from his own grandmother, he'd heard it from his mother, his aunts, and other relatives. Another common argument is that there isn't more documentation of it, particularly that there's no official mention of this supposed committee of Congress that went to call on Betsy Ross herself. The answer could be that the records of those early Congresses are rather disorganized because they were forming as many as six committees in a day. Some of them were much more important than others, so a committee that lasted for really only a few hours and was a simple matter of a few gentlemen going to call on a seamstress may not have been deemed important enough to warrant mention in the records. To the response that that first mention of the flag is from a year later, the website jokes that that's fast work for Congress to actually get something done in one year. Why, one might ask, would a new flag have been needed at that point when there was a flag of the Union Army? Now, around the time of the Revolution, shortly before, the Union Army flag had been raised on a flagpole and the British mistook it for a sign of surrender. At that point, the colonists were rather shaken in their faith that maybe this flag wasn't a good one and they wanted a new flag. At one point, the flag had the British Union Jack in the corner where the stars would later be, as well as the stripes, and this was a first less confrontational version of the flag. As to the circle of stars, the legend holds that George Washington himself came up with that idea rather than some other arrangement because he wanted to show that, as with King Arthur's round table, no one colony was superior to any of the others. They were all alike, thus being in the circle with even distance from each other. There's a painting by Charles Wilson Peale of George Washington during the Revolutionary War, and in it we see what appears to be the Betsy Ross flag in the background. This is often used as proof that that flag was being used during the Revolutionary War. On the other hand, it's often used as some argument against the Betsy Ross flag in that, in most copies, because Peale made several versions of this painting for many different people, because copying one's own paintings was a very profitable business for portraitists of the day. In most copies, if you zoom in, it appears that the stars have six points rather than five, and that is used to disprove the whole story about Betsy Ross and the five-pointed star. One answer could be that, although Betsy Ross made a lot of flags, maybe she didn't make all of them, because surely they needed a lot of them for all their ships, all their military battles, and they would have used a lot of flags in the war. So possibly other people made copies and most people still weren't used to the idea of the five-pointed star, so perhaps her design was used with six-pointed stars occasionally. As to the argument that why is there no original flag preserved, why do we not have that first flag, at the time they weren't thinking of it as a relic to be preserved. It was something to be carried as a banner into war, so most likely that first flag was taken into war and destroyed in battle or just lost to time, that was a long time ago. But the oldest known flag that is preserved in a museum, which was actually handed down by a relative of one of those original three men, is the original Betsy Ross design. And there is also preserved in a museum a five-pointed star cut out that's believed to be from one of the first flags. So I would say that there is a good deal of truth to that story about Betsy Ross, and in that first presentation by William Canby, he had sworn affidavits by her daughter, who was alive and quite elderly, as well as a granddaughter and a niece. Has some characterization been done over the years? Perhaps. Maybe she didn't come up with the idea of the five-pointed star, maybe it was six-pointed for a while. But to completely disregard the role which Betsy Ross played in the American Revolution, to do her a discredit, and really to discredit the history of history. Before history books were being written, much of what we know comes from spoken legend. And I think all too often we've cast aside the validity of stories which are handed down from father to son or from mother to daughter and then to grandson. The idea of a simple working woman who didn't want to be a burden on her father and learned a trade and then had to pick herself up by the bootstraps and keep persevering in the face of the death of three husbands and several children, and that she continued to be that inspiration. It's no wonder that she has remained an inspiring figure in those early days of the American Revolution. And because of her long life of hard work, faith, and love of her family, her example is certainly one to be admired and emulated. Thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you'll join me next time for more American Legends.