During this stretch, there were a lot of different iterations of the U.S. So Congress passed a new Flag Act, specifying the flag should have 15 stars (and, it should be noted here, that it’s this version that flew over Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, which inspired Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner” and set it to an old English drinking song). When Vermont and Kentucky were admitted as the 14th and 15th states, respectively, no one knew definitively how to represent the new members of the American family. In other words, we weren’t going to stay at 13 states for long. The “Francis Hopkinson Flag” doesn’t have the same kind of homespun ring to it, anyway.īy 1794, the United States was free and independent of Great Britain, sitting on a vast continental reserve, and expanding west. Regardless, the flag bearing the original circular star pattern is most often called The Betsy Ross Flag. Notes from the Continental Congress at the time suggest Hopkinson did indeed design the first flag, but because there are no pictures or written descriptions of it, and because Hopkinson also designed other flags, symbols, and seals for our young nation including our first Naval flag, we can’t know for sure what his original design looked like, exactly. In 1780, Hopkinson submitted an invoice to Congress that said in exchange for designing the “flag of the United States of America,” the nation owed him two casks of ale. Unlike Team Betsy, who make claims that Ross created the flag based on oral histories, Team Francis has receipts. A delegate to the Second Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Hopkinson also was a skilled flag-maker and designer – and, in many historians’ view, the creator of the first U.S. Lighten up, Francis We now enter into evidence the esteemed gentleman from New Jersey, Francis Hopkinson. A flag bearing this exact description was officially adopted on J– the first version of what has become one of the most enduring and iconic national standards in the history of the world. Ross made slight modifications – she added another third of horizontal length, then arranged the stars in a circle and gave them five points instead of six. They handed her a sketch of a square flag that featured 13 red-and-white stripes and 13 six-pointed stars in a blue field. As the Ross family story goes, in the summer of 1776, George Washington, Robert Morris, and Betsy’s uncle George Ross met with her at her home in Philadelphia. Her story only entered the American consciousness in the 1870s after her grandson presented a research paper to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in which he claimed that his grandmother had “made with her hands the first flag” of the United States. We even call that first star-spangled banner – with its ring of stars in a blue field – the “Betsy Ross flag.” Here’s the rub, though: Ross, who died in 1836, was never recognized as the flag’s creator during her lifetime. Ross, an upholsterer who had made flags for the Pennsylvania navy, is widely mythologized as the person behind the “first” U.S. This is where the legend of Betsy Ross emerges. Back then, flags were most often created by an upholsterer upon request. Heavens to Betsy The 1770s were a revolutionary time of rapid change in America, but you couldn’t just stroll into Walmart and pick up a flag. Eventually, more stripes were added to represent all 13 colonies. But the clever colonists simply switched the stripes to horizontal and kept on keepin’ on. The flag – of course – was eventually outlawed by the Crown. All of them went on to become active members of the Sons of Liberty, and the nine vertical stripes on the Sons of Liberty Flag were a nod to these men. Those men – John Avery, Henry Bass, Thomas Chase, Stephen Cleverly, Thomas Crafts, Benjamin Edes, Joseph Field, John Smith, and George Trott – became known as the Loyal Nine. That’s when nine Bostonians began rallying and funding large crowds of colonists to protest the Stamp Act. The Sons were the original badasses of the American Revolution many of the men who made up the clandestine political organization that pulled off the Boston Tea Party, in fact, began agitating the British as far back as 1765. One of the earliest recognizable uses of red-and-white stripes on an American standard was on the so-called “Sons of Liberty” flag.
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