Betsy Ross 1777, a ca. 1920 depiction by artist Jean Leon Gerome Ferris of Ross showing Gen. George Washington (seated, left), Robert Morris and George Rosshow she cut the revised five-pointed stars for the flag. United States Library of Congress
In honor of Independence Day with flags unfurling up and down avenues, commemorating the graves of fallen heroes, and waving in the hands of small children watching parades in their hometowns, it is also appropriate to honor the women who made the first ones.
Betsy Ross is credited in legend as the first person to sew the Stars and Stripes. It is a lovely story. Young Elizabeth (Betsy) Griscom, born to a respectable Quaker family, was apprenticed as an upholsterer. The role of an upholsterer included more than just furniture in those days. She learned to sew bedclothes, drapery, Venetian blinds, and tablecloths. Betsy fell in love with John Ross, the son of the local assistant rector of Christ Church in Philadelphia who was apprenticed in the same shop. Knowing she would be disowned by her family and, indeed, “read out” of her Quaker congregation, she eloped with John Ross. Together they set up their own upholstery shop. However, not long after their marriage, John was gravely wounded in one of the battles for independence and died as she attended his injuries. She struggled to run the business alone, making supplies for the Continental Army such as tents and cartridges, and as we would expect, flags.
Quite the American success story. Some say none of it is true, that the story is a whole-cloth fabrication.
Heavens to Betsy
by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze
Grandson William Canby formalized the family's account in his paper presented to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1870 nearly 100 years after the events occurred. We have the affidavits from her daughters recounting what their mother told them about how she came to sew the flag. With this lack of contemporaneous formal documentation, however, the story is open to challenge. Thus, we have a familiar conundrum in searching out the truth of women’s work. Without contemporaneous documentation, historians cannot certify it as true. In the chaos of wartime bureaucracy as a new nation is born, few people are prioritizing documentation. We cannot know with certainty the truth of this story. If the story is untrue, the woman who did sew these seams—probability does suggest the maker is female—that woman is lost to us.
Myths and fables are as important as fact. George Washington's biographer knew that he never chopped down a cherry tree, but he knew that the country needed an example of his integrity as a trait he possessed all of his life. Reading William Canby's account of his grandmother, you can see how the story of Betsy Ross is used to hold up the exemplar of virtuous, industrious women. She was a woman of "pleasant and by no means unhandsome features." Though a woman of " patient industry and perseverance," she found it difficult not to fall into despair after the death of her husband John, she "yet she always rallied when she reflected upon the goodness of Providence who had never deserted her." Her neighbors admired her because "never had any time to spend in street gaping or gossip." Underlying his portrait of her is the insistence that she is virtuous enough as a woman to be maker of our country's first flag.
The woman credited with making the Star-Spangled Banner hailed in our National Anthem has a suitably documented identity. Mary Pickersgill was commissioned by Major George Armisted to complete two flags that would fly over Fort McHenry guarding the water entrance to Baltimore. One flag, the smaller storm flag, was 17’ x 25’. The larger one, designed to fly over the garrison, was an enormous 30’ x 42’. (Forty-two feet is the half-court line on high school basketball court.) From June through August of 1813, Mary Pickersgill, her daughter, her nieces, and her African-American indentured servant, whose name is lost to us, pieced and sewed by hand both flags cut from woolen bunting and likely linen thread. Machine stitching was not introduced until the 1840s. Even now stars are hand-sewn, often in China, on most cloth flags Mary Pickersgill and the women helping her did it.
During the War of 1812, on September 14, 1814, Francis Scott Key saw the flag stitched by these women as it still flew over Fort McHenry. He wrote the poem for “The Star-Spangled Banner” with the tune for “To Anacreon in Heaven” in mind. The smaller of the two flags is missing, but the larger one is on display in the Smithsonian Institute.
By George Henry Preble - Frank A. O'Connell; Wilbur F. Coyle (1914). National Star-Spangled Banner Centennial, Baltimore, Maryland, September 6 to 13, 1914. Baltimore: National Star-Spangled Banner Centennial Commission. p. 66., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11468994
Oh, say can you see
Mary Pickersgill's large flag that inspired Francis Scott Key is now enshrined at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History
Whether or not Betsy Ross really sewed the first flag does matter. In all of my reading questioning Betsy Ross's role in sewing the first flag, I have seen no one question that George Washington designed it even though there exists no more contemporaneous evidence of that. I have found no credible evidence that she did not make the flag as her family claimed. But if Betsy Ross is not the first, some other person, likely a woman, is not receiving her due for creating one of the most important symbols in American life. Much of textile art is anonymous not because no one knew who made it but rather because no one thought she was important enough to remember. Women or their descendants trying to lay claim to their own work has often been problematic. Their claims have been dismissed by bureaucrats, historians, art curators, and others—gatekeepers all.
On this Fourth of July as you salute the Stars and Stripes, give a thought to the women who hand stitched flags that gave hope to soldiers, heartened the immigrants seeking freedom, blessed the coffins of our fallen soldiers and presidents, and inspired Americans to put aside their differences to build one nation.
Christmas 2014 Afghanistan War veteran, Arlington Cemetary, credit: EPA
President John F. Kennedy, funeral procession November 1963
World Trade Center Flag 2001 copyright The Record