There is really no point in arguing over who made the first flag because there wasn’t one. The stars and stripes that we know today had multiple parents and dozens of siblings. True, on June 14, 1777, the Continental Congress passed a cryptic resolution specifying that “the flag of the thirteen united States be 13 stripes alternate red and white, that the union be 13 stars, white in a blue field representing a new constellation,” but nobody specified the shape of the flag, the arrangement of the stars, or the ratio of the canton to the field. In October 1778, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams actually told the Neapolitan ambassador that “the flag of the United States of America consists of thirteen stripes, alternately red, white and blue.” Flag sheets from the 1780s and 1790s do in fact show flags with three-colored stripes. As for Betsy’s nifty five-pointed star, a Smithsonian study showed that four-, six-, and eight-pointed stars were far more common. Although Charles Wilson Peale’s 1779 painting of George Washington at Princeton shows stars in a circular arrangement on the general’s flag, the stars themselves have six points.
To the general public, details about the flag are unimportant. It is Betsy they care about. Annually, over a quarter of a million tourists visit the supposed Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia. According to its Website, “only the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall draw more visitors than the home of the adored flagmaker.” Uptight historians might quibble about details, but the Philadelphia heroine rests securely in the sanctity of public memory.
She survives because children, teachers, and publishers love her story; because her house is located near the shrines of American liberty; and because, as with so many national legends, the legend of Betsy Ross has something to do with who we Americans believe ourselves to be. Betsy and her story are endlessly deployed as exemplars of some distinctive and noble American spirit. Hence, in a 1915 account, she represents “the glorious tradition of the patient, skillful, cheerful, energetic, patriotic woman of the American Revolution.” In a 2002 story, she embodies entrepreneurial energy. With or without the flag, the author insisted, Betsy Ross deserves to be remembered because she “challenged convention as a talented businesswoman.”
For my part, I find Betsy’s actual life less interesting than her “afterlife”—her resurrection as a national heroine. Even her name is a later simplification. Born in Philadelphia in 1752, Elizabeth Griscom married John Ross in 1773 and was widowed three years later. In 1778 she married Joseph Ashburn, a merchant mariner who died in 1783 in a British prison. Her third husband and the father of her children was John Claypoole, whose surname she bore until her own death in 1836.