Performing rebellion in Revolutionary Boston

On the morning of March 6, 1775, Joseph Warren, a physician-turned-revolutionary leader, stopped his one-chair carriage in front of Boston’s Old South Church. Warren climbed down from the carriage, followed by a servant holding a small bundle. The two men crossed the street and entered an apothecary’s shop. When Warren came out of the store he wore a Roman toga. He now crossed the street once more and burst into the swarming Old South to deliver the fourth annual Boston Massacre oration.

Few events of the Revolutionary era offered a more stark reminder of the failures of the mother country than the Boston Massacre. In the course of that event on March 5, 1770, British soldiers shot and killed five Bostonians. The massacre was probably not the result of murderous intentions of the British sentries, as Americans claimed, nor an American plot, as some English did. The traditional patriot fear of standing armies, combined with the ominous ratio of four thousand armed redcoats to fifteen thousand Bostonians, led to the fateful clash, almost immediately named “massacre.”

In March 1771, the year following the massacre, a committee on which Joseph Warren sat suggested an oration to commemorate the fateful event. James Lovell, a distinguished Bostonian, was chosen as the orator. Thus began a sequence of annual orations, remaining unbroken until its suspension after the Fourth of July celebration of 1783. These orations, according to Warren’s contemporary, the physician and historian David Ramsay, were administered by “eloquent orators” in order to keep the revolutionary fire “burning with an incessant flame” for thirteen years (they were displaced by national Fourth of July celebrations after 1783). The orations were always published soon after their delivery and, according to John Adams, they were read “scarcely ever with dry eyes.” Indeed there were “few men of consequence,” as Adams further pointed out, “who did not commence their career by an oration at the 5th of March.” The orators included illustrious names such as John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Benjamin Church. Only Dr. Joseph Warren was chosen to deliver the speech twice, in 1772 and 1775.

Warren was born at Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1741, the second generation of Roxburites, descended from a family that had settled in America nearly a century earlier. He was educated in his hometown school and acquired an unusual command of Latin. After graduating from Harvard in 1759, he studied medicine and soon became one of the outstanding doctors of Boston. Warren’s political inclinations surfaced during the Stamp Act crisis of 1765. In a series of newspaper columns, he sharply attacked Massachusetts governor Francis Bernard and played an important role in the governor’s resignation from office. After becoming a member of the Committee of Safety, a board of selectmen who dealt with security issues, Warren delivered the second annual massacre oration in March 1772. “The fervor” of the orator, remarked Warren’s political foe and Bernard’s eventual replacement as governor, Thomas Hutchinson, “could not fail in its effect on the minds of the great concourse of people present.” The doctor was coming into his own as one of Revolutionary Boston’s great orators. As the Boston Gazette reported, Warren’s words were celebrated with “unanimous applause.”

Warren’s reputation was built on much more than simply oratorical talent. He also had a gift for sharply worded revolutionary rhetoric, much like that of the still unknown Philadelphia pamphleteer, Tom Paine. In September of 1774, when the towns of Suffolk County met in convention, Warren delivered a paper, afterwards known as the Suffolk Resolves. These resolutions denounced the Coercive Acts, enacted by Parliament following the Boston Tea Party, as unconstitutional and therefore moot. They also called for the establishment of Massachusetts as a free state (until the repeal of the Coercive Acts) and the preparation of local militias for armed resistance. Warren’s Resolves were forwarded to the Continental Congress, which readily adopted them. Early in 1775, the last year of his life, Warren became chairman of the committee of safety, charged with organizing the militia and collecting military stores. This physician was asked, metaphorically, to preside over an ailing body politic, providing it with the patriotic nourishment and the military arsenal needed for its restoration.

By March of 1775 unmistakable signs of a gathering storm were apparent. After the 1773 Boston Tea Party, in which 150 Bostonians threw 342 crates of tea from British vessels docked in Boston harbour, relations between Massachusetts and Britain deteriorated swiftly, until the colony was finally declared to be in a state of open rebellion. By early spring of 1775, war seemed inevitable. Warren thus staged his second massacre oration at a time when even the smallest spark would have inflamed revolutionary sentiments. And if the timing is any indication—the oration preceded the fateful battle of Lexington and Concord by a little more than a month—Warren’s oration represented just such a spark. Nonetheless, it remains a largely forgotten moment in the story of the Revolution’s early days. In part, this may be owing to the fate of the orator himself. Warren was killed by a British musket ball during the Battle of Bunker Hill several months after delivering his powerful words. Unlike Samuel Adams or Thomas Jefferson or any of the other familiar Revolutionary luminaries, Warren’s role ended before independence was actually declared. And unlike so many other Revolutionaries, he did not survive to play a part in the creation of a new American nation. Whatever Warren’s own fate, there is no doubt that the words he delivered in March of 1775 were a crucial ingredient in Boston’s Revolutionary moment. There is also little doubt that they resonated for Bostonians for many years after the orator himself passed from the scene.

 

Revolutionary oratory was about much more than spoken words; it was also about a delicately formulated theatrical apparatus whose purpose was to transform mere speech into moving performance. For if there was one thing Revolutionary orators knew, it was that if you wanted to move people to action, you had to touch something deep within them. Taking their cues from the tradition of great Roman orators such as Cicero, they thus deployed a range of imagery designed to excite listeners’ passions. Only in doing so, these orators came to believe, could the disagreement with Britain be transformed from a legal and constitutional matter to a matter for the passions—a matter of injustice, of dishonor, and of familial disgrace. As the reception of his oration suggests, Warren was a master of these techniques.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to know just what Warren’s oratorical arsenal consisted of. Even though thousands attended the massacre oration, and we have several accounts of Warren’s performance, reconstructing the event remains difficult. Nonetheless, there is much to be learned about Boston’s mobilization for revolution from the events surrounding this singular act of public speaking.

“This day,” the Boston Evening Post informed its readers on March 6, 1775, “an Oration will be delivered by Joseph Warren Esq., in commemoration of the bloody tragedy on the 5^th of March 1770.” But observant Bostonians recognized that this would not be just another commemorative address. The British forces now stationed in the city, Samuel Adams noted, were likely to resent any insinuation that their actions had been barbaric and would surely “take the occasion to beat up a Breeze.” A later account reported that there was a “threat uttered by some of the British officers, that they would take the life of any man who should dare to speak of the massacre on that anniversary.”

In his diary, Massachusetts royal governor Thomas Hutchinson recalled a larger assassination plot during Warren’s oration. An English officer, according to Hutchinson, reported that if during the meeting Warren would say “anything against the King, etc., an officer was prepared, who stood near with an egg, to have thrown in his face; and that it was to have been a signal to draw swords; and that they would have massacred Hancock, Adams, and hundreds more.” The Virginia Gazette, reprinting a report in a London newspaper, elaborated on the awkward egg episode, claiming that “this scheme was rendered abortive in the most whimsical manner, for he who was deputed to throw the egg fell in going to church . . . and broke the egg.” Tensions clearly ran high as March 6 approached.

The presence of a large crowd, including British soldiers, seems one of the few undisputed facts regarding the oration’s unfolding. A nineteenth-century biographer of Warren recalled that “many people came to town from the country to take part in the commemoration,” and Frederick MacKenzie, a British officer, reported at the time that an “immense concourse of people” assembled at the Old South building for the occasion. Both patriots and loyalists acknowledged the presence of redcoats in the crowd, and both confirmed the obvious point that for them this was a most offensive and most disrespectful occasion. Samuel Adams claimed to treat the “many . . . officers present” with civility as he showed them to their seats, so “that they might have no pretence to behave ill.” The Boston Gazette, a radical patriot publication, labeled the “party of soldiers” at the Old South “perpetrators,” claiming they came to harass the congregating Bostonians. Frederick MacKenzie claimed that “the troops conceived it was a great insult under the present circumstances, to deliver an oration on the occasion.” Thus “a great number of officers,” which Hutchinson estimated at three hundred, “assembled in the church and seemed determined to take notice of, and resent any expressions made use of by the Orator, reflecting on the Military.” The hall was overcrowded, the audience filling the aisles, while the soldiers occupied the stairs, perhaps hoping to scare Warren into silence. Whether they were “many,” a “party,” or “a great number,” as different accounts claimed, the presence of fuming British redcoats among the packed patriot crowd must have added an ominous sense to the impending drama.

 

But Warren would not be intimidated. In fact, if contemporary accounts are correct, his chosen attire—the plain white Roman toga—established a dramatic contrast between the speaker and his redcoat antagonists. It was almost as if Warren knew they would be there and chose the garment precisely to antagonize them. As they sat stiffly in their heavy red wool coats—the sartorial definition of Britishness—he would hold forth, in the flowing freedom of his billowing white garment—the sartorial definition of ancient, primordial virtue. Of course the garment’s color was not its only distinctive quality. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find clothing more unlike that of these British soldiers.

The toga was the principal garment of a freeborn Roman male citizen. It consisted of a single piece of material of irregular form—long, broad, and flowing, without sleeves or armholes, and covering the whole body with the exception of the right arm. Because it was worn without any kind of fastening device, the wearer had to keep his left arm crooked to support its voluminous drapery. What could be more unlike the stiff, tightly tailored coat, waistcoat, and breeches of the British soldier? In the toga, there was no artifice, no false front, no deviant concealment; what you saw was what you got. And the only thing that separated the wearer’s body from his audience was that bent left arm. To wear such a garment, in other words, was to do away with all that superficial finery with which a corrupt Britain had disguised its designs on American liberty and dignity.

In addition to costume, Warren’s stagecraft included a dramatic entry, though there is some dispute about the precise form of that entry. According to one account, he “ascended the Pulpit” from the front of the room, presumably passing through the crowd of soldiers who filled the aisles. According to another, he entered “from the rear by the pulpit window.” And still another recalled that he climbed “a ladder at the pulpit window” (try doing that wearing a toga), to avoid pushing through the crowd of hostile soldiers. In any case, we can imagine this man, in his flowing toga, appearing before the packed audience like some kind of apparition. We can also imagine the hush that came over the boisterous crowd as its gaze fell upon the doctor. Before even uttering a word, his appearance would have spoken volumes to a crowd of Americans steeped in the virtues of ancient Rome.

As Warren began to speak, MacKenzie recalled, there were only a “few hisses from some of the officers.” Samuel Adams similarly observed that Warren appeared to hold sway over the hostile members of the audience and another witness recalled that when one of the British officers held “up one of his hands in view of Warren, with several pistol bullets on the open palm,” Warren silenced the officer by calmly dropping “a white handkerchief upon the officer’s hand.” It took true mastery of the orator’s art form to turn so hostile a gesture to one’s advantage. But Warren was obviously up to the task. Far from quieting his claims, the gesture gave the neo-Roman speaker an ideal chance to show that true virtue would be cowed by no threat of mere violence. Such was the way of the great Roman heroes of the day. The celebrated Roman politician Cato, for example, could take on the great and powerful Caesar precisely because he was entirely immune to threats of violence. Virtue, in his lexicon, would always prevail over base power.

The gathering ended in disorder. After Warren stepped from the pulpit, Samuel Adams stood up and asked for a volunteer to deliver next year’s commemorative oration. Adams apparently took the opportunity to reinforce colonists’ sense that the events of 1770 represented an entirely unjust massacre. Not surprisingly, the redcoats, according to MacKenzie, “began to hiss,” and someone mistakenly heard the words “Fire! Fire!” A scene of “the greatest confusion imaginable” ensued: amidst the screams of “fire” could be heard the threatening sounds of “drums & fifes of the 43rd regiment which happened to be passing by from exercise.” According to another British witness, “the gallerians apprehending fire, bounded out of the windows, and swarmed down the gutters, like rats, into the street. The 43d regiment, returning accidentally from exercise, with drums beating, threw the whole body into the greatest consternation.”

If the events surrounding the speech made for powerful political theater, what are we to make of the speech itself? The text, which was so widely reprinted, suggests that Warren skillfully blended the performative elements of his oration with the spoken elements.

Warren began with a historical account of early settlement, which was intended to “determine with what degree of justice the late parliament of Great Britain has assumed the power of giving away that property which the Americans have earned by their labour.” What followed was a Whig interpretation of colonial history. Warren portrayed a Manichean worldview in which “the tools of power in every age” confronted the benign power of liberty, embodied in his case by the Puritan forefathers. Those Puritans, “determined to find a place in which they might enjoy their freedom,” exercised liberty in America through a charter obtained significantly from the British monarch rather than Parliament. They “cultivated and defended” the continent “at an infinite expense of toil and blood,” and thus contributed vastly to the British Empire’s greatness. Their serene prosperity, however, awakened “the madness of an avaricious minister” and brought about “the attempt of the British parliament to raise a revenue from America.” These misfortunes “brought upon the stage discord, envy, hatred and revenge, with civil war close in their rear.”

The speech, however, did not consist merely of a historical account of New England’s settlement. Rather, Warren provided philosophical and ideological argument in defence of the colonists’ position. “Personal freedom is the natural right of everyman,” he noted, as was the right to hold “what he has honestly acquired by his own labour” and to “pursue that course which is the most conducive” to happiness. Hence, “no man, or body of men, can without being guilty of flagrant injustice, claim a right to dispose of the persons or acquisitions of any other man”. Warren continued with a celebration of the ancient Romans, who through self-effacing attitudes, “eminently conduced to the greatness of that state.” We can only imagine what a difference it made to hear such classical musings from an orator clad in a toga.

The massacre oration of 1775 was a significant event in the colonies’ move toward war. Indeed, the fact that the War of Independence eventually commenced on April 19 at Lexington Green was rather incidental; it could have easily started on March 6 at Boston’s Old South. Imagine this: As one of the numerous “gallerians” spots the redcoat that threatened Warren with a fistful of musket pellets, he starts cursing the soldier and his King. What follows is an inevitable, if unintended, altercation between the redcoats and the Bostonians, at the end of which both sides count several dead and wounded. Among the fallen, perhaps, is the orator, lying in a blood stained toga. The news of the “new massacre” would spread fast as armed militiamen start pouring toward the inflamed town. So the war between Britain and her American colonies might have begun.

If this not unlikely scenario would indeed have materialized we would surely witness every March 6 reenactments memorializing a valiant young man preaching the gospel of liberty. The reenactor’s audience would have been a large congregation of plain-clothed patriots peppered with red-coated soldiers. The eloquent orator would have been wearing a flowing, white Ciceronian toga.

Further Reading:

The best survey of the Boston Massacre and its unfolding is Hiller B. Zobel, The Boston Massacre (New York, 1996). Sandra Gustafson conveys interesting insights about massacre orations in the context of Revolutionary Boston’s cultural ecology in Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000). The most recent biography of Warren is already over forty years old: see John Cary, Joseph Warren: Physician, Politician, Patriot (Urbana, Ill., 1961). For the texts of the Boston Massacre commemoration speeches, including both of Warren’s addresses, see Orations Delivered at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston to Commemorate the Evening of the Fifth of March, 1770; When a Number of Citizens were Killed by a Party of British Troops, Quartered Among Them in a Time of Peace (Boston, 1785). For the classical influences on revolutionary America see Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 7.2 (January, 2007).

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Eran Shalev is an assistant professor of history at Haifa University, Israel. He is currently working on a book-length manuscript about historical consciousness and the American Revolution.

Continental currency and the creation of a revolutionary republic

Benjamin Franklin is perhaps most famous for his work on currents: the electrical charges he drew from the clouds with a kite and a key. But he should be equally well remembered for his work on currency: the paper money and coinage he designed for Pennsylvania and later, for the United States. As a young printer, Franklin made his money by making money. In 1729, when the colony of Pennsylvania fell into a trade slump, Franklin, just twenty-three years old, published a pamphlet entitled “A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency,” in which he endorsed soft money (as opposed to hard coins) as an essential catalyst to vibrant business, active labor, and low interest rates. Franklin’s pamphlet swayed public opinion in favor of Pennsylvania’s first emission of paper currency in several years. To reward Franklin for this service, the Pennsylvania Assembly contracted him to print the new issue.

Nearly half a century later, after the clashes at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, Franklin was again called upon to design a paper currency, this time by the Second Continental Congress. To defend the colonies, Congress resolved to organize the Continental Army, commanded by the Virginian, George Washington. To finance this army, Congress, which had no power to tax, resolved instead to print paper dollars, backed by the promise of a future redemption.

Franklin recognized that these new “continental dollars” might serve as more than instruments of trade and finance. They might also function as excellent media through which Congress could speak to the American public. Never before had the various colonies united to issue a currency; this unprecedented continental enterprise would naturally provoke a great deal of interest. Furthermore, because the faces of Congress’s bills would set forth their unique terms of value and redemption, cautious bearers would actually have to read the various denominations they tendered. Franklin seized upon this opportunity to create some of the Revolutionary era’s most ambitious republican propaganda.

Franklin began by rejecting British numismatic convention, which represented the nation in the person of the monarch, in the royal coat of arms, or in the feminine personification, Britannia. Such currency, Franklin later explained, perpetuated “the dull Story that everybody knows, and what it would have been no Loss to mankind if nobody had ever known, that Geo. III. is King of Great Britain, France & Ireland &c. &c.” How much more useful, he observed, to fashion currency with “Some important Proverb of Solomon, some pious moral, prudential or oeconomical Precept, the frequent inculcation of which by seeing it every time one receives a Piece of Money, might make an Impression upon the Mind especially of young Persons, and tend to regulate the Conduct.” Here was Poor Richard at work.

 

To find just the right “Precept[s],” Franklin consulted two emblem books in his personal library: Symbolorum ac Emblematum Ethico-Politicorum, a compendium of fourth-century plant and animal emblems first published in 1597 by the German botanist Joachim Camerarius, and Idea Principis Christiano-Politici Symbolis, a collection of moral emblems originally published by the Spanish political theorist Diego Saavedra Fajardo in 1640. From these volumes, Franklin selected several emblems that visually conveyed discrete moral and political lessons. As was customary for emblems such as these, Franklin captioned each with a Latin motto, which only the classically trained gentry could have translated. But Franklin wished for his money to have broad appeal. If the continental currency were to promote public virtue, it was necessary that all Americans understand exactly what these emblems meant. And so, shortly after Congress began to circulate its currency, Franklin published a key in the Pennsylvania Gazette, setting forth the meaning of each bill.

Franklin’s currency assured Americans that they would survive the looming war. His one-dollar bill, for example, pictured an acanthus plant weighed down beneath a large bowl; the Latin motto, Depressa Resurgit, translated comfortingly as, “though crushed, it recovers” (fig. 1). Franklin’s two-dollar bill suggested that the hardships of war would actually strengthen America (fig. 2). This bill pictured a hand threshing grain with a flail; its motto, Tribulatio Ditat, translated as, “affliction improves it.” “[T]hreshing,” Franklin opined, “often improves those that are threshed. Many an unwarlike nation have been beaten into heroes by troublesome warlike neighbours.” Franklin proclaimed that the “public distress . . . that arises from war, by increasing frugality and industry, often gives habits that remain after the distress is over, and thereby naturally enriches those on whom it has enforced those enriching virtues.” Paper money naturally encouraged spending, particularly the repayment of debts. But by championing frugality and industry, Franklin’s continental dollars urged Americans to save and promised prosperity in reward for their sufferings.

 

Franklin’s currency also incorporated plant and animal imagery to symbolize the triumph of the meek over the mighty, an allusion to the frail colonies’ conflict with the powerful British Empire. His six-dollar bill, for instance, depicted a beaver working assiduously to fell a great tree, captioned with the Latin motto Perseverando, or by perseverance. Similarly, Franklin’s three-dollar bill portrayed an eagle attacking a crane (fig. 3). Though the eagle, which represented Great Britain, possessed “superior strength,” Franklin noted that the weaker bird, America, might mortally wound the eagle with a thrust of its long bill. The moral for the American crane, Franklin asserted, was “not to depend too much on the success of its endeavours to avoid the contest . . . but [rather to] prepare for using the means of defence God and nature hath given it.” Here Franklin offered an emblematic editorial against the Olive Branch Petition, a desperate plea to King George that John Dickinson and other delegates seeking reconciliation with Great Britain had recently pushed through Congress.

Other of Franklin’s bills bore similar political themes. The eight-dollar bill depicted a harp whose thirteen strings represented the various colonies. The motto, Majora Minoribus Consonant, asserted that “the greater and smaller ones sound together.” Franklin further explained that the harp’s frame, which united the strings “in the most perfect harmony,” symbolized the Continental Congress. Several months later, he again sought to reinforce American unity, this time by portraying the colonies as a chain of thirteen links, which appeared on Congress’s half-dollar bill and other fractional notes. Finally, Franklin ornamented his largest denomination, the thirty-dollar bill, with an emblem directed at Congress itself. On this bill, Franklin depicted a wreath sitting atop an altar, as a symbol of enduring glory. This “crown of honour,” Franklin explained, was intended to encourage “brave and steady conduct in defence of our liberties.” Here, Franklin held out the promise of future greatness to congressmen who ruled justly. “Not the King’s Parliament, who act wrong, but the People’s Congress, if it acts right, shall govern America.” In true republican fashion, Franklin’s currency admonished the people and their rulers alike to act with prudence, firmness, and piety.

 

Franklin’s designs sparked curiosity among the American public. A Salem loyalist named William Browne, for example, reported that a British officer introduced him to the “devices upon the denominations of the continental bills.” Browne wrote detailed descriptions of the Doctor’s latest “inventions” and forwarded them to other loyalists exiled in London. At least eight colonial newspapers reprinted the key to Franklin’s emblems, generating further interest in the novel continental money.

There is no way to assess whether Franklin’s currency actually instilled virtue in the American public. But Franklin’s emblems did capture the imagination of at least a few patriots. Six regiments from Pennsylvania and one from New Hampshire adopted Franklin’s designs for use on their battle flags. In so doing, these regiments helped to popularize Franklin’s emblems as the insignia of American resistance. In this early phase of the war, before the constellation of stars, the thirteen stripes, or the bald eagle had emerged as dominant symbols of national identity, Franklin’s designs served to rally Americans in defense of their liberties.

The potency of Franklin’s emblems is further suggested by Tories’ considerable efforts to discredit them. British sympathizers dismissed the continental bills as a “droll kind of money.” Some writers explicitly lampooned Franklin’s designs. In February 1778, the Pennsylvania Evening Post printed a poem, written by a “Maryland Loyalist,” that mocked Franklin’s two-dollar bill and called upon the British army to give Congress a good beating.

“That thrashing makes rich the congress do know,
Or else on their money they would not say so;
But what kind of thrashing they do not explain,
Whether beat by the English or beating out grain;
And since we’re left dark, we may fairly conclude,
That both will enrich them, and both do them good.”

A fuller and even more damning response to Franklin’s currency designs appeared in “The History of Peru,” a scathingly satirical poem circulated in 1776 by Joseph Stansbury, a Tory shopkeeper who lived in Philadelphia. In this poem, whose title alluded sarcastically to the riches of the Potosi silver mines, Stansbury derided Franklin’s use of Latin, asking, “For what is plain English / to Perseverando!” Stansbury belittled the honors to which Congress aspired, declaring, “The Laurel awaits us, / if we do not falter, / But it’s Pasteboard, not Marble / that fashions the Altar.” Stansbury ridiculed Franklin’s chain design, proclaiming it an apt emblem of the slavery in which Congress conspired to bind the colonists. Finally, Stansbury appropriated the motto of Franklin’s famous Fugio coin, writing, “Mind your Business, good folks, / of this raving give o’er. / Return to your Duty, / Great Britain is kind, / And all past Offenses, / She’ll give to the Wind.”

Franklin had designed his currency to nurture Americans’ fortitude and resolve. By disparaging Franklin’s emblems, Stansbury also endeavored to sway popular opinion. Stansbury worked to undermine the public’s respect for the money that financed the rebellion. In so doing, Stansbury sought to expose the pretense of the Continental Congress and its aspirations of independence. For, as Stansbury comprehended, the continental currency and the emblems that adorned it embodied the spirit of American resistance. People who held continental currency were literally invested in the Revolution. For this reason, the continental dollar circulated among the American people like a shifting battle line. Patriots promoted the continental dollar and pushed it on their creditors. Congress resolved that any person who refused its currency should be treated as “an enemy of his country.” Loyalists, meanwhile, cursed the partisan bills and refused them when they could. In October 1776, the British-sponsored New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury published a scornful advertisement suggesting that Franklin’s currency designs were better fit for the decoration of walls: “Wanted, by a gentleman fond of curiosities, who is shortly going to England, a parcel of congress notes, with which he intends to paper some rooms. Those who wish to make something of their stock in that commodity, shall if they are clean and fit for the purpose, receive at the rate of one guinea per thousand . . . It is expected they will be much lower.”

This advertisement poked fun at the images on Congress’s bills. But, at the same time, it served as a painful reminder that the dollar’s monetary value derived not from Franklin’s designs but rather from the quantity in circulation and from the public’s faith in the United States. Between 1775 and 1777, the dollar’s purchasing power dropped 25 percent. Yet, pressed on all sides for money, Congress had no choice but to emit more. Between 1777 and 1779, Congress printed the staggering sum of more than $160 million, including many new denominations.

By this time, Franklin had traveled to France on a diplomatic mission, so his numismatic duties fell to congressman and belletrist Francis Hopkinson. In designing many of these bills, Hopkinson followed in Franklin’s footsteps, employing nature imagery to convey simple messages of resilience and hope. But for other bills, Hopkinson experimented with new emblems for the United States. Hopkinson’s forty-dollar bill depicted a circle of thirteen stars, similar to the constellation that appeared on the U.S. flag, which Hopkinson also designed. His fifty-dollar note featured a pyramid with thirteen steps, with the motto Everlasting.

 

From his station in France, Benjamin Franklin endorsed this nascent nationalistic aesthetic. Shortly after he arrived in France, Franklin began to consult with Parisian engravers about casting a new series of medals commissioned by Congress to honor heroic Continental Army officers. After the Battle of Yorktown, Franklin also designed his own medal, the Libertas Americana, which featured a profile of the goddess Liberty (fig. 4). On the reverse, Franklin depicted the infant Hercules strangling two serpents, which signified the United States’ defeat of two British armies, at Saratoga and at Yorktown. Standing over Hercules and protecting him from a mauling British lion was the goddess Minerva, whose shield, decorated with fleurs-de-lis, represented the United States’ ally, France. Franklin commissioned two Libertas medals in gold, which he presented to the French monarchs, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, as tokens of appreciation. Franklin also ordered a few copies of his medal in silver and copper, which he offered as mementos to members of Congress and other dignitaries.

From this experience, Franklin learned that the engraving of a steel die for the casting of a limited-edition medal was an extremely costly production. The expense could only be justified when the medal was cast in large volume. This realization led the ever pragmatic Franklin to an epiphany. After the conclusion of the war, when copper and other precious metals became available once again, the Confederation Congress took tentative steps toward the establishment of a national mint. Mindful of this project, Franklin wrote a letter to John Jay in 1785, explaining his idea for a new American coinage. “The ancients, when they ordained a medal to record the memory of any laudable action, and do honour to the performer of that action, struck a vast number and used them as money. By this means the honour was extended through their own and neighboring nations, every man who received or paid a piece of such money was reminded of the virtuous action, the person who performed it, and the reward attending it . . . I therefore wish the medals of Congress were ordered to be money.”

Franklin had come nearly full circle in his numismatic aesthetics. At the beginning of the Revolution, Franklin rejected the king of England as a suitable imprimatur for American currency, in large part because the colonies would soon renounce royal authority but in part too because Franklin believed that moralistic emblems could do more to positively influence the public’s behavior. By the end of the Revolution, Franklin perceived that images of praiseworthy persons, printed on the nation’s coins, could also inspire the citizenry, while at the same time glorifying the United States. Like British currency, Franklin’s ideal coin would feature the face of a preeminent national figure. But on Franklin’s money, that face would belong to a meritorious hero, not to a divine-right monarch.

Franklin’s vision for U.S. money was decidedly republican: it incorporated neither kings nor coats of arms but rather celebrated selfless deeds and laudable persons. The Confederation Congress never followed through on its plans to establish a mint and so it could not adopt Franklin’s idea for a new coinage. But over the long course of U.S. history, Franklin’s numismatic vision came to prevail, making it possible for the image of a former runaway, an ex-apprentice, by virtue of his public service, to grace our hundred-dollar bill.

Further Reading:

For Franklin’s early career as a printer of money, see Louis P. Masur, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Boston, 1993), 69, 77, 157.

Numismatists have long appreciated Franklin’s contributions to monetary design in the late eighteenth century. For example, see Elston G. Bradfield, “Benjamin Franklin: A Numismatic Summary,” Numismatist 69 (1956): 1347-70; David P. McBride, “Linked Rings: Early American Unity Illustrated,” Numismatist (1979): 2374-93; Eric P. Newman, The Early Paper Money of America (4^th ed., Iola, Wisc., 1987), 57-84; Newman, “The Continental Dollar of 1776 Meets Its Maker,” Numismatist 72 (1959): 915-26; Newman, “Continental Currency and the Fugio Cent: Sources of Emblems and Mottoes,” Numismatist 79 (1966): 1587-98; and Newman, “Benjamin Franklin and the Chain Design: New Evidence Provides the Missing Link,” Numismatist 96 (1983): 2271-83.

A few scholars of literature and rhetoric, notably J. Leo Lemay and Lester Olson, have placed Franklin’s currency amidst his many symbols of American identity—including the segmented snaked of his famous “Join or Die” cartoon—and in the context of other national symbols from the Revolutionary period. See J. Leo Lemay, “The American Aesthetic of Franklin’s Visual Creations,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 111 (October 1987): 465-500; and Lester Olson, Emblems of American Community in the Revolutionary Era: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology (Washington, D.C., 1991) and Benjamin Franklin’s Vision of American Community: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology (Columbia, S.C., 2004). Jennifer Jordan Baker insightfully discusses Franklin’s currency designs as part of his decades-long endeavor to back the American nation with his own credibility. See Baker, “Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and the Credibility of Personality,” Early American Literature 35 (2000): 274-93, esp., 279-80. As yet, however, no scholar has fully located Franklin’s numismatic work within its immediate political and institutional context, that is, as part of broader efforts by the Continental Congress to strengthen the resistance movement, to promote the war effort, and, later, to establish a national identity for the young United States. That is the focus of my larger project, from which this essay is drawn.

For Franklin’s rejection of British numismatic convention, as expressed in his letter to Edward Bridgen, written from Passy in October 1779, see, Barbara B. Oberg, et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven and London, 1993), 30: 429-30. 

Franklin’s key to the continental currency, pseudonymously signed Clericus, appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette on September 20, 1775.

Finally, for a broader perspective on Revolutionary culture, see Kenneth Silverman’s masterful volume, A Cultural History of the American Revolution: Painting, Literature, and the Theatre in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of George Washington, 1763-1789 (New York, 1976).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 6.3 (April, 2006).

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A social and cultural historian of early America, Benjamin H. Irvin is an assistant professor at the University of Arizona. He is currently revising a manuscript about the Continental Congress and the material and ceremonial culture by which it promoted the Revolution.

For scholars, the story of how Betsy Ross made the first American flag is about as credible as Parson Weems’s fable about little George Washington cutting down the cherry tree. Yet for more than a century, it has been an established part of American education. Among the general public, it shows no signs of going away.

The story emerged in the last third of the nineteenth century as the United States was redefining itself after the Civil War. In 1870, Ross’s grandson, William J. Canby, read a paper before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in which he claimed that in June of 1776, George Washington and two other members of the Continental Congress visited his grandmother in her shop on Arch Street in Philadelphia. The men, according to Canby, brought a rough sketch of a striped flag with thirteen stars in a blue field. The stars had six points. Having a better idea, Ross folded a piece of paper into neat triangles, and “with a single clip of the scissors” produced a five-pointed star. Within days, she had completed the first American flag.

To the general public, details about the flag are unimportant. It is Betsy they care about.

Unable to find documents supporting his tale, Canby secured affidavits from aged relatives. These confirmed the details just as he had told them. From the first, scholars were skeptical. George Henry Preble included Canby’s account (along with virtually every other scrap of oral tradition that came his way) in his detailed and carefully documented 1872 history of the flag. But he was blunt about Canby’s credibility. For him, as for most historians, the problem was chronology. “Mr. Canby contends that the stars and stripes were in common if not general use soon after the Declaration of Independence, nearly a year before the resolution of Congress proclaiming them the flag of the United States of America; but I cannot agree with him.” Writing in 1908, John Fow dismissed the Betsy Ross legend as “ridiculous.” A 1942 history catalogued it under “More Fictions and Myths.” In the 1950s David Eggenberg concluded that the “grand total of provable facts in the Betsy Ross legend” amounted to two: that Betsy was a twice-widowed patriot needlewoman of Philadelphia and that she was paid to make Pennsylvania naval flags in 1777. “Of such flimsy material are constructed the cherished legends of American history,” he wrote.

 

Recent studies have been less censorious but no more supportive of the story. “Historians view her role in designing and making the first American flag as another cherished myth that has its own place in American history,” writes Lonn Taylor in a 2000 Smithsonian history. David Hackett Fischer thinks Ross’s descendants misunderstood her story. Perhaps the commission wasn’t for a national flag but for a standard for Washington’s headquarters. That explanation has its own problems, as we shall see, but it has the virtue of shifting attention from Old Glory to other flags made during the Revolution.

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.

 

Were it not for her putative role in the creation of the nation’s flag, Betsy’s life would be indistinguishable from the mass of American women who lived through a war, survived widowhood, raised families, and sustained communities. Even her work as flag maker does not, in the end, set Betsy apart. The single piece of documentary evidence for her work during the Revolution—a 1777 receipt for making ship’s flags for the Pennsylvania navy—places her among a group of Philadelphia flag makers. Margaret Manning was making ships colors for Pennsylvania as early as 1775. Cornelia Bridges, who stitched flags for the state’s “Floating Battery,” preceded Ross in the official records by a full year. More visible than any of them, however, was Rebecca Young, whose name appears frequently in the quartermaster records of the Continental Army. In the 1780s, Young was not only paid for making “continental standards” but for drum cases, blankets, and uniforms. In 1781 and thereafter, she advertised in the Pennsylvania Packet that at her shop in Walnut Street she would make “All kinds of Colours, For the Army and Navy” on the “most reasonable Terms.” Young’s career is especially interesting. For she was still alive in 1813 when her daughter, Mary Pickersgill, made the flag that Francis Scott Key saw “by the dawn’s early light” and immortalized in his “Star-Spangled Banner.”

In the last years of her life, Ross was neither more nor less important than other aging women who had lived through the Revolution. That she became famous while others were forgotten exposes the interlocking power of family history, local memory, and national politics.

Betsy Ross and Oral Tradition

When debunkers pulled Paul Revere from his horse, historians enlarged his story, turning one ride into many and a single act of patriotism into a complex narrative of revolutionary activity. In like manner, historians of Plymouth used the mythical character of the First Thanksgiving to introduce a more complex narrative of migration, settlement, and cultural transformation. So far, the story of Betsy Ross has been left to the mythmakers. As a consequence, the argument over her story hasn’t moved an inch from its nineteenth-century beginnings. Now, as then, Betsy’s defenders pit the power of oral transmission against a scholarly fixation on written sources. “It is not a tradition,” Canby wrote George Preble in 1871, “it is [a] report from the lips of the principal participator in the transaction, directly told not to one or two, but a dozen or more living witnesses, of whom I myself am one, though but a little boy when I heard it.”

The semi-official Betsy Ross Website continues in the same vein. To the question, “Can Canby be trusted?” they respond, “Can Betsy Ross herself be trusted?” They argue that since Canby got his story straight from the source, the real question is, “Did Betsy, a known flagmaker, embellish the truth by saying she made the first one?” Surely Betsy, the patriotic Quaker, could not have told a lie. To the argument that “Congress did not adopt an official flag until June 1777, a full year after Betsy claimed to have made the flag,” they respond, “Congress acting within one year! Not bad.” For them, the controversy remains what it was in 1870, a quibble between those who insist upon written documents and those willing to listen to living witnesses. The authors conclude confidently, “Historians, to their credit, always want source documentation. However, in this case, the circumstantial evidence has to be weighed. We find that it overwhelmingly supports Betsy Ross as the maker of the first flag.”

They have a point. Family traditions often convey information that would otherwise be lost. It is worth remembering that until DNA testing forced them to reconsider, many scholars dismissed the family stories that identified Thomas Jefferson as the father of Sally Hemings’s children. But unlike Ross, Hemings did not become a national icon. Popular history chooses its own company. It is not enough to tell a good story. That story must be something other people want to hear.

 

The debate over Betsy Ross exposes the difficulty of including women in a national narrative constructed around the biographies of leading figures. To defend Betsy Ross as Everywoman means abandoning her as heroine. But what if we really paid attention to those nineteenth-century stories, listening not for what they tell us about the first flag but for what they tell us about women’s perceptions of their own history?

In the nineteenth century, ordinary women made history. They did it by telling stories, by attaching labels to family relics, by joining honorary societies, and by carrying flags at public events. Honored by their sons and daughters, they created a version of American history that broke down boundaries between the supposedly male world of war and politics and the supposedly domestic worlds of women. They did so, not by challenging women’s exclusion from politics, but by elevating their devotion to the state.

Listen to eighty-two-year-old Rachel Fletcher telling her story to William Canby in 1870: “I remember having heard my mother, Elizabeth Claypoole, say frequently that she, with her own hands (while she was the widow of John Ross), made the first Star-Spangled Banner that ever was made.” That Fletcher called the flag a “star-spangled banner” situates it in her lifetime rather than her mother’s. Although published in 1814, Francis Scott Key’s poem entered into public consciousness during the Whig campaigns of the 1840s. During the Civil War, the flag it celebrated became synonymous with the Union.

Fletcher described an intimate and detailed collaboration between her mother and Washington. When Ross recommended five-pointed stars, “General Washington very respectfully considered her suggestions and acted upon them.” Sitting down at her table, he “altered the drawing and then made a new one according to the suggestions of my mother.” Fletcher admitted that her mother had little experience in flag making. Previously, she had been engaged in making General Washington’s ruffles. When a member of the supposed congressional flag committee, “a shipping merchant at the wharf,” invited her to call upon him, she was “punctual to her appointment.” He took an old ship’s color out of his chest, loaning it to her “to show her how the sewing was done, and also gave her the drawing finished according to her suggestions.” Since the single record documenting Ross’s work as a flag maker refers to ship’s colors, this detail is highly suggestive, but Fletcher connected it to a larger narrative focusing on the “first flag.”

She claimed that “other designs had also been made by the committee and given to other seamstresses to make, but that they were not approved.” When Ross carried “the first Star Spangled Banner that ever was made, to her employers,” it was “run up to the peak of one of the vessels belonging to one of the committee then lying at the wharf, and was received with shouts of applause by the few bystanders who happened to be looking on.” Even this validation was not enough. The committee carried the flag on the very same day “into the Congress, sitting in the State House, and made a report, presenting the flag with the drawing.” The next day, one of the committee members called on Ross and told her “that her work had been approved and her flag adopted; and he gave orders for the purchase of all the materials, and the manufacture of as many flags as she could make . . . from that time forward, for over fifty years, she continued to make flags for the United States Government.”

In her application to the Daughters of the American Revolution, a great-granddaughter went even further. After telling the story about the insistence on a five-pointed star, she noted that her ancestor was also responsible for maintaining the shape of the flag. She said that before leaving Ross’s house, a member of the congressional committee said that if more states were added to the union, more stripes would also have to be added. “Pardon me,” Betsy responded, “more stripes will spoil the symmetry of your flag. Let the symbolic thirteen stripes remain, but for each additional State let a new star shine upon the blue—there is room.” At first, the men “held their own idea the better one and added stripes until nineteen, I believe, were added; then they began to realize that they were spoiling the flag and so went back to the original thirteen.” Once again the wisdom of the venerable ancestor prevailed.

The central themes in nineteenth-century stories about Betsy Ross reflect the preoccupations of other contemporary writings about women in the Revolutionary era. Elizabeth Ellet, for example, not only emphasized the resourcefulness and sturdy patriotism of American women, but also the approbation of men in high places. By the 1870s there were hundreds of such stories about the contributions of women to the American Revolution. Among these, were many claims about a “first flag.” In his 1872 history, George Henry Preble included a story given to him by “Miss Sarah Smith Stafford,” who received it “from Mrs. Patrick Hayes, who had it from her aunt, Miss Sarah Austin,” who claimed that she and several “patriotic ladies of Philadelphia met at Swedes’ Church in that city, and under the direction of John Brown, Esq., secretary of the new Board of Marine, formed or arranged a flag,” which they presented to John Paul Jones, the hero of the American navy. Again the punch line of the story was the public display and acknowledgement of the gift. “Captain Jones was so delighted and enthusiastic, that after the presentation he procured a small boat, and, unfurling the flag, sailed up and down the river before Philadelphia, showing it to thousands on shore.” In a footnote, Preble commented dryly, “I can find no notice of this event in the church records or in the newspapers of the time.”

Stories about Jones’s flags proliferated. By 1900, the captain’s least-reliable biographer was asserting that the “unconquered and unstricken flag” that went down with the Bon Homme Richard in Jones’s famous battle with the British warship Serapis had been made at a “quilting party” in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from “slices” of women’s silk gowns. The white stripes came from “the bridal-dress” of a woman married to “a young officer in the New Hampshire line.” There are other stories about banners constructed from fragments of clothing. The most famous has to do with the display of an improvised flag flown at Fort Schuyler after the defeat of Burgoyne in 1777. One version says that the men of the fort stitched the flag, using strips of white cut from “ammunition shirts,” blue from an enemy cloak, and red from “different pieces of stuff procured from one and another of the garrison.” Another claims that the “ladies of the settlement and the wives of some of the American officers” made the flag from “their flannel petticoats, etc.”

 

Stories about American women sacrificing their own food, clothing, and bedding to supply the army had been a staple of antebellum narratives. In 1889, Benson Lossing reprinted a story he had originally published in 1850 describing a visit to Mrs. Anna Bailey, an aged Connecticut woman “familiarly known as ‘Mother Bailey,'” who recalled the British assault on Fort Griswold (led by the traitorous Benedict Arnold). “I saw the American flag that was flying over the southwest bastion shot down,” she recalled. This recollection turned her thoughts to the attack on New London during the War of 1812. She told Lossing that when one of the men at the fort came to her house in Groton seeking flannel for cannon cartridges, she “started out and collected all the little petticoats of children that she could find.” When he told her that was “not half enough,” she cut the string of her own petticoat and gave it to him. “It was a heavy new one, but I didn’t care for that,” the old lady told Lossing. “All I wanted was to see it go through the Englishmen’s insides!” The men at the fort said it was a shame to cut up such a petticoat. They would rather see it “fluttering at the mast-head” of a ship, “as an ensign under which to fight upon the broad ocean!” Lossing concluded, “This and other circumstances make Mrs. Bailey a woman of history.”

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Americans had been largely indifferent to flags. Those that survived moths and time were often cut up for souvenirs. But in the decades following the Civil War, the flag and its history became compelling topics. Old ladies not only told stories, they preserved and displayed the ragged remnants of flags they believed had been used in the Revolution, The Old-Time Farm House exhibit at the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876 included two Massachusetts squadron flags as well as powder horns, a cocked hat, a canteen, a pair of spurs, and a pistol. This was without question a “women’s exhibit,” yet it included war memorabilia alongside spinning wheels and cradles. In August 1877, five granddaughters of General John Stark carried “many personal relics intimately associated with their famous ancestor” to the Centennial of the Battle of Bennington. Among them was a canton of blue silk “much faded and cracked” with thirteen five-pointed stars painted on it. In 1927, the general’s great-great-granddaughter Jennie Osborne provided the Bennington Museum with an affidavit describing the flag and its descent from mother to daughters. “Since 1910 it has been in my possession,” she wrote, explaining that she kept it in her safe deposit box at the bank. “I have never examined it carefully until lately as I have had a feeling that it was very sacred and should be taken out only on special occasions.”

Ironically, Betsy’s story may have survived because there was no actual flag to confirm or undermine it. In contrast, the flag Mary Pickersgill made for Fort McHenry survives in all its tattered glory, though the story of its manufacture is little known. When Pickersgill’s daughter Caroline Purdy heard that the flag that inspired the National Anthem was going to be exhibited in Philadelphia in 1876, she wrote Georgianna Appleton, who had inherited the flag from her father, George Armistead, the commander at Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. “I take the liberty to send you a few particulars about the ‘Flag,'” she wrote. “It was made by my mother, Mrs. Mary Pickersgill, and I assisted her. My grandmother, Rebecca Young made the first flag of the Revolution, (under General Washington’s direction) and for this reason my mother was selected by Commo. Barney and George Stricker (family connections), to make this ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ which she did, being an exceedingly patriotic woman.”

The themes in Purdy’s story are much like those in other nineteenth-century flag stories. She emphasized her mother’s work ethic and skill and the approbation of the men who commissioned the flag. The result of her mother’s labors, she believed, had four hundred yards of bunting, and her mother had “worked many nights until 12 o’clock to complete it in the given time.” The flag was so big Pickersgill had to get permissions from a nearby brewery to lay it out in their malt house. Purdy, who was then thirteen years old, assisted in the work. She remembered seeing her mother “down on the floor placing the stars,” and she insisted on “topping it” herself to make sure that in the heat of battle it would not be “torn away by balls.” History confirmed the wisdom of her decision. The flag survived, not only because of the bravery of the fort’s defenders but also because of her secure stitching. The commander of the fort was so pleased that he “declared that no one but the maker of the flag should mend it, and requested the rents be merely bound round” as a memorial to the fort’s night of glory.

No one questioned Purdy’s claim that her mother made the star-spangled banner, but the comment that her grandmother, Rebecca Young, “made the first flag of the Revolution” caused some confusion. In 1894, a New York Times article on Fort McHenry said that “Mrs. Mary Pickersgill, who forty-seven years later made the flag in Baltimore that inspired Key’s lines, was the daughter of Betsy Ross, whose work from the design of Gen. Washington was adopted by Congress.” So it was that Betsy Ross became famous and Rebecca Young and her daughter were forgotten. One could argue that Young was simply unlucky in leaving so few descendants willing to press her case. Or perhaps the stories she told her children were less dramatic, less insistent.

To appreciate the triumph of Betsy Ross, we need to appreciate how many stories women told in the decades after the Revolution. Historians are now beginning to recapture this lost archive, a repository of oral tradition that, like the slave stories gathered by the WPA, offers a complex mixture of history and memory. As Carol Berkin has written, “These stories of Revolutionary War heroines reveal surprising humor and resourcefulness. In them, young girls chew and swallow documents rather than have them discovered by the enemy; middle-aged women listen at keyholes to spy on military planning sessions; and old women serve liquor to soldiers and rob them of their guns.” To use such material requires much sifting, much sorting, and more sophisticated analysis than most scholars have yet undertaken. 

Betsy Ross and Veneration of the Flag

In 1989, Michael Frisch tried a now famous experiment with students in his introductory American history course. At the beginning of the semester, he gave them a simple test. Part one asked them to write down the first ten names that came to their minds at the prompt, “American history from the beginning to the Civil War.” Not surprisingly, George Washington topped the list, followed by Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and other national heroes. Then he asked them to do the same thing again, this time excluding “presidents, generals, and statesmen.” In seven out of eight years, Betsy Ross was number one. The year he neglected to exclude “statesman,” she came in second to Benjamin Franklin. No other woman came close. When I tried the same experiment in the early 1990s with my own students at the University of New Hampshire, I got almost identical results.

Frisch argues that Betsy Ross endures because of her association with our “most inclusive symbol of national identity,” the flag. If George Washington is the father of the country “then surely Betsy Ross exists symbolically as the mother, who gives birth to our collective symbol.” Indeed, in America’s “civil religion” she occupies very much the position of the Virgin Mary in the Christian story. In the classic version of the Ross legend, as in the biblical story of Mary, an ordinary woman “is visited by a distant god, and commanded to be the vehicle, through their collaboration, of a divine creation. And indeed, in the classroom pageants enacted by generations of American schoolchildren over the past century, that is exactly what we see: Washington calls on the humble seamstress Betsy Ross in her tiny home and asks her if she will make the nation’s flag, to his design. And Betsy promptly brings forth—from her lap!—the flag, the nation itself, and the promise of freedom and natural rights for all mankind.”

 

If the religious symbolism seems far-fetched, consider an 1892 painting by Charles Weisgerber, still featured on the Betsy Ross House Website. The flag maker sits with the flag in her lap as streams of light enter from an open window linking her to the three bewigged men on the other side of the room. This is not just a patriotic illustration. It is an Annunciation.

To understand the power of the Betsy Ross story, we need to consider the historical circumstances that transformed a fragment of personal and family history into a quasi-religious epiphany. When Canby read his paper before the Pennsylvania Historical Society, the nation had just emerged from civil war and was preparing to celebrate its centennial. At the time, there were several competing ways of representing the place of women in the American Revolution. Among them was the cluster of associations embodied in the iconic Goddess of Liberty.

In the Revolutionary era, engravers pictured Liberty with a floppy cap perched on the end of a pole. These symbols derived from an ancient Roman ceremony in which a slave about to be freed was touched with a rod (the vindicata) and given a soft hat or pileus symbolizing free status. After abolitionists adopted her, the Goddess of Liberty became politically controversial. The original sketch for the statue on the dome of the United States Capitol featured the goddess with her Phrygian cap, but when the cabinet member responsible for overseeing the project objected, the designer obediently removed it. Jefferson Davis insisted that the ancient symbolism of the freed slave was “inappropriate to a people who were born free and would not be enslaved.” In 1870, a socialist uprising in Paris added a new layer of radicalism to Liberty’s cap. In May of 1871, Harper’s Weekly dismissed the women of the Paris Commune as “ten times more cruel and unreasonable than the men.” An accompanying illustration showed a crowd of “female avengers . . . with a high priestess in the middle crowned with the orthodox red cap of Liberty.

Meanwhile, noisy activists were disrupting America’s own civic ceremonies. On July 4, 1876, Susan B. Anthony and three of her compatriots interrupted the all-male program at Independence Hall by walking down the aisle and presenting a women’s “Declaration of Rights” that accused the nation of violating its own Constitution by denying women the right of trial by jury and by taxing them while denying them representation. When a much tamed Statue of Liberty was finally dedicated in New York harbor in 1886, Lillie Devereaux Blake, one of the women who had joined Anthony in Philadelphia ten years before, chartered a boat for two hundred members of the New York Women’s Suffrage Association. As the New York Times reported, “Immediately after the veil had been drawn from before Liberty’s face Mrs. Blake called an indignation meeting on the lower deck. After denouncing the ceremonies just witnessed as a farce she offered resolutions declaring ‘that in erecting a statue of Liberty embodied as a woman in a land where no woman has political liberty men have shown a delightful inconsistency which excites the wonder and admiration of the opposite sex.'”

In contrast to Liberty, Betsy Ross excited little controversy. She appeared to affirm both the nation’s devotion to freedom and the power of white women to shape history.

Weisgerber’s painting, seen by millions of visitors to the Chicago World’s Fair, thus reinforced a growing movement to venerate Betsy Ross and the flag. There were many forces at work: expanding immigration, the creation of new patriotic honor societies, contentious political campaigns, the threat of European socialism, and the triumph of United States military actions abroad. Together they fed the desire for a single, compelling national symbol—and an equally compelling story to go with it.

On Flag Day in 1894, the Pennsylvania Society of the Colonial Dames of America gathered five hundred schoolchildren at a ceremony honoring “the adoption by Congress . . . of the flag made by Betsy Ross from the design submitted to her by Gen. Washington.” The flag-veneration movement and the Betsy Ross legend grew together. By 1895, ten states had passed laws requiring public schools to display the flag on ordinary days as well as on holidays. In 1897, the New York City public schools ordered thousands of copies of Weisgerber’s painting. As the New York Times reported, “It is thought that the representation which is declared historically correct, together with such lectures as the teachers may deliver, will add much to the pupil’s knowledge and keep alive a proper reverence for the country’s emblem.”

 

After the nation’s quick victory in the Spanish-American war, flags flew everywhere. Americans raised a one-hundred-twenty- by forty-three-foot flag over Havana in 1899, and when a victorious Admiral George Dewey returned from Manila his ship trailed a banner over five-hundred-feet long. On “Dewey Day” in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1899, historical tableaus staged at a local church included a scene of Betsy making the first flag. On Memorial Day in Philadelphia that same year, people decorated Betsy’s grave as well as those of Union and Confederate soldiers.

In Philadelphia, veneration for the flag stimulated a movement to rescue the house on Arch Street long thought to have been Betsy’s when Washington came calling. The entrepreneurial Weisgerber, a charter member of the American Flag House and Betsy Ross Memorial Association, launched a national campaign targeted in part at schoolchildren. For ten cents, contributors received a lithographed certificate and a copy of his 1893 picture. The Ross Memorial Association claimed that over two million persons, many of them children, contributed to the restoration.

Weisgerber lived in the Flag House with his family until 1932, supporting himself in part by selling souvenirs. He even christened a son Vexil Domus, Latin for “home of the flag.” Visitors to the house had the pleasure of hearing little Vexil declaim the speeches of Patrick Henry, Nathan Hale, and other patriots as he stood on the shop counter. In 1937, an enlarged house, refurbished with a grant from Philadelphia businessman A. Atwater Kent, opened to the public. In 1941, the Betsy Ross Association deeded the house to the city of Philadelphia.

By the turn of the twentieth century, an association with Betsy Ross was almost as good as a meeting with George Washington. In 1900, a New Haven journal published Katharine Prescott Bennett’s recollections of stories that an aged relative had told her about their ancestor Rebecca Sherman, the wife of Connecticut’s representative to the Continental Congress. The old woman claimed that when “George Washington designed and ordered the new flag to be made by Betsy Ross, nothing would satisfy Aunt Rebecca but to go and see it in the works, and there she had the privilege of sewing some of the stars on the very first flag of the young Nation. Perhaps because of this experience, she was chosen and requested to make the first flag ever made in the state of Connecticut—which she did, assisted by Mrs. Wooster. This fact is officially recorded.” The story not only linked Sherman with Ross. It used that association to justify and explain the woman’s own claims as a flag maker.

In 1912 Bennett’s story reappeared in a popular history of early American women. And in 2004, journalist Cokie Roberts repeated it in her book Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation. Roberts acknowledged that historians doubted the Betsy Ross story, but in her view Bennett’s 1900 report of a story she got from an aged aunt who got it from Sherman’s own lips was “fairly close to a contemporaneous account.”

Betsy Ross will not go away because she gives women a part in the revolutionary narrative without disrupting its heroic outlines. Our national story does indeed focus on “presidents, generals, and statesmen,” but it also demands a role for ordinary people who sustained the patriot cause. If Paul Revere is a stand-in for the common man, Betsy represents the common woman. Her story is democratic. Unlike the allegorical Liberty, she was a flesh and blood woman—an ordinary woman—who by applying her own ingenuity and skill gave our nation its flag. Or so we would like to believe. But Betsy became famous, not because of what she did or did not do in the 1770s, but because her story embodied nineteenth-century ideas about the place of women. As told by Canby, her story was patriotic yet safe from the rough and tumble of politics. In the hands of her preservers, she challenged George Washington’s design for the flag, but she did not challenge a gender division of labor that put needles in the hands of little girls and guns on the shoulders of their brothers.

The flag-veneration movement simultaneously elevated and absorbed the stories William Canby and others gathered. In their original form, these stories were fragments in a collective oral history of the American Revolution, a largely local enterprise in which groups gathered relics into museums and historical societies and preserved stories about ordinary people, stories that had both the strengths and the weaknesses of their origins in a participatory public culture. Women’s stories encompassed many themes, but they were animated by civic pride and an insistence that women, no less than men, created a new nation. In comparison with these early stories, the Betsy Ross who emerged in the late nineteenth century seems less individual, more iconic, more a product of triumphal nationalism than of a proud and locally grounded republic.

Whether she can sustain her fame for another century is uncertain. In the fall of 2004, I tried Michael Frisch’s test on two hundred Harvard students. Their responses to the first question were almost exactly the same as in New Hampshire ten years before, but when I gave them the second question, there was an audible gasp in the room. The students had no trouble identifying the Founding Fathers, but they had a hard time coming up with the name of anyone who was not a president, general, or statesman. Perhaps acknowledging my presence in the room, a few quickly wrote, “Mrs. Washington,” “Mrs. Lincoln,” and “Mrs. Adams,” but there were a lot of blanks on these papers. In the end Paul Revere came in first and Betsy Ross dropped to seventh, though the answers were so scattered, it is hard to determine significance. The debunkers may be winning, though so far there appears to be nothing to take Betsy’s place.

Further Reading:

Two short and very accessible histories of the flag are: Lonn Taylor, The Star-Spangled Banner: The Flag that Inspired the National Anthem (Washington, D.C., 2000) and Karal Ann Marling, Old Glory: Unfurling History (Boston and London, 2004). Longer studies include: William Rea Furlong and Byron McCandless, So Proudly We Hail: The History of the United States Flag (Washington, D.C., 1981); Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany, N.Y., 1990); Robert Justin Goldstein, Saving ‘Old Glory’: The History of the American Flag Desecration Controversy (Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford, 1995).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 8.1 (October, 2007).

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Laurel Thatcher Ulrich teaches history at Harvard University. Her latest book is Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History (2007).

In the archives of the City College of New York, one object catches the eyes of visitors immediately: a large (six-foot by five-foot) faded flag of the United States. The flag was made in 1857, when U.S. flags featured thirty-one stars, arranged in no certain fixed pattern, in the upper left rectangle, or blue canton, that rests on the thirteen red and white stripes of the original federation. Typically, the stripes of the flag were made of imported British wool bunting and the stars and canton might have been of American cotton. This flag, however, was commissioned and sewn in Japan out of silk crepe, copied by “a Japanese Betsy Ross who is as yet unknown, unhonored and unsung,” in the words of Mario Cosenza, the archivist who nearly a century later arranged for the flag to be moved to City College to join the papers of the first U.S. consul general to Japan (fig. 1).

 

How did this remarkable artifact find its way to City College? What history has it experienced? And what cultural encounters does it continue to stimulate?

The flag is only one of numerous material objects in American and Japanese collections that tell us of the nineteenth-century encounter between liberal and expansionist Americans and the ancien regime of Tokugawa Japan. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry, first U.S. envoy to Japan, demanded that closed Japan open its markets to U.S. trade. A range of the magnificent visual and material artifacts of that encounter are presented in John Dower and Shigeru Miyagawa’s rich Website Black Ships and Samurai.

Townsend Harris received a commission from President Franklin Pierce to follow up the Perry mission and sojourn in Japan as the first U.S. consul general, arriving in August 1856 (fig. 2). Harris negotiated the Harris treaty of 1858, which furthered the terms for U.S. commercial advantage in Japan. He also established the first official U.S. presence in Japan, in a transformed temple in isolated Shimoda, about one hundred miles from Edo (today Tokyo), the castle town that was then the seat of the shogunal government. After signing the treaty, Harris stubbornly exercised his rights to establish the U.S. consulate general in Edo and moved there for the remainder of his stay, despite violent attacks from hotheaded samurai who opposed the shogunal policy of appeasing barbarian (or foreign) demands.

Townsend Harris (1804-1879) was a self-made businessman whose first career culminated in his entrance into New York City political life. From 1846 to 1848, Harris was the head of New York City’s department of education. In that post he distinguished himself as an advocate for the creation of the Free Academy, one of the first public institutions of higher education in the United States. The Free Academy, or Workingman’s Academy, opened in May 1847 and survives to this day as a public university in New York, part of the City University of New York system. A decade later, Harris, the advocate for accessible and democratic higher education in New York, succeeded in his appeal to the U.S. president to represent the U.S. State Department in various treaty negotiations in Asia. This commission resulted in his post as first consul general in Japan (for his extended biography, see the City College online exhibit The Japan Connection). His career transformation appears to follow a pattern many historians have noted among Americans abroad. As the pattern goes, liberals at home become champions of national expansion abroad—in this case, of course, in the name of “free trade.” But for historians who are today interested in the intertwining of U.S. and Japanese history, it is fortunate that Harris’s stature in New York and at City College has meant that the manuscripts and artifacts from his time in Asia have been preserved.

 

The U.S. flag that lies in the CCNY archives, then, is a material object that also has a wealth of fascinating written and visual documentation. Harris and his interpreter, Henry Heusken, originally received an American-made flag from the captain of the USS San Jacinto, the naval frigate that brought Harris to Japan in August 1857. On September 4, just before sailing from Japan, members of the San Jacinto crew erected a flagpole over the converted temple in Shimoda that served as Harris’s first home and diplomatic office. Harris’s efforts with the Japanese authorities paid off a year later, when he became the first foreign envoy to travel to Edo for an audience with the shogun.

The Harris procession from Shimoda to Edo and his shogunal audience marked yet another of the fascinating pageants of bicultural emblems and ceremony that characterized the Great Power diplomacy across the East Asian world before the twentieth century. And though not as iconic as the Perry expedition, the Harris procession and its American flag were also widely portrayed by Japanese artists (fig. 3).

The above undated Japanese representation of the Harris procession clearly differs from the realism of a pen-and-ink drawing sketched by Henry Heusken in one-point perspective, and not just because the Japanese artist lacked that technique of representation. Here, the size of Harris’s palanquin or norimon, which he had constructed to be much larger and more imposing than typical for a shogun-bound procession, adds a note of historical authenticity. But the initial bearers at the front of the procession are carrying Harris’s credentials in a ceremonial box. An artist’s transformation of the one American flag into two constitutes a didactic embellishment. We can conjecture that the print is a much later representation of the Harris procession, in which the artist encodes not just the later, constructed memory of the occasion but also the newly acquired meaning of the national flag as symbol of U.S. global power.

Harris’s written documentation about the flag is ample. Preparations for the audience began with its manufacture in Japan in silk, as a faithful copy of the San Jacinto flag that was said to have become tattered by the strong winds of the sea town of Shimoda. Harris later wrote in several letters sentiments such as this: “A new flag, made of Japanese crepe, was carried before me. This flag is the first foreign banner that was ever carried through the great city [Edo], and I mean to preserve it as a precious relic.”

 

Townsend Harris devoted many pages in his journal to the procession to Edo, which averaged about fifteen miles a day and comprised over 350 persons. At the procession’s head, Japanese samurai officials cried out in rhythm orders for the surrounding populations to “sit down” (in Harris’s words) in respect as the procession passed. “Next came the American flag guarded by two of my guards,” Harris wrote. “Then I came on horseback with six guards, next my norimon with its twelve bearers and their headmen; bearers of my shoes, etc., etc.” As would have been the case at the time, the procession bearers were changed every five miles as others stepped in to fulfill labor requirements imposed by the Tokugawa order.

Harris details the gown of his “standard bearer” and remarks on the insignia that was emblazoned on the dark blue coats of his norimon bearers, as “the arms of the United States on the back” (fig. 4). Indeed, many of his personal effects were covered in cloth bearing these “arms,” an emblem tantamount to the Japanese crest that a daimyo or other notable would display to mark his status as lord. While the American banner, flying from its pole, may not have been read by contemporary Japanese as a national emblem, they certainly could read representations of family or aristocratic crests as symbols of power. Thus, the procession was well equipped to convey the stature and gravity the United States wished to communicate. The hybridity of Japanese and American, or Western, symbols in the procession echoes the many other trappings of diplomatic and colonial ceremony employed across the world in an era of imperial expansion.

Many books have been written about the history of the American flag. In the history of U.S.-Japan relations, however, the U.S. flag on Japanese soil has had an exceptional resonance. At the formal surrender of Japan to the United States in 1945, aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, the United States authorities displayed the same flag Perry had flown over his gunboats in 1853 (fig. 5). Historian John Dower has noted that this American gesture of power constituted a “reprimand” to the Japanese for their wartime defiance. We can only hope that the Harris flag retains a less controversial, less fraught symbolism. After all, Minister Townsend Harris, while voicing his sentiment to preserve this flag as a “precious relic,” nevertheless left it to civic institutions; the archives of City College acquired it in the 1950s from Townsend Harris High School in New York. For some Japanese, anyway, it seems to be remembered with warmth and nostalgia for the period of Japan’s “opening” to the West.

 

Since the late 1980s, City College has welcomed a revival of Japanese interest in the Townsend Harris archive, which has included an annual visit from a delegation of the city council of Shimoda. For the coming 150th anniversary of the signing of the Harris treaty next year, Japanese museums and civic groups are preparing festivities and exhibits, and several of the treaty documents in the collection will be on display in Japan. The flag, however, faded and fragile, will remain in the archives, where it will continue to stimulate bicultural encounters for a long time to come.

 

Further Reading:

I wish to thank Professor Sydney van Nort, archivist of the City College of New York Library, for invaluable help with this essay and for her further research into the life of Townsend Harris as shown in the CCNY Website on Harris, The Japan Connection.

Primary sources for Harris in Japan include: The Complete Journal of Townsend Harris, First American Consul and Minister to Japan,introduction and notes by Mario Cosenza, 2nd ed. (Rutland, Vt., and Tokyo, 1959); Henry Heusken, Japan Journal, 1855-1861, translated and edited by Jeannette C. van der Corput and Robert A. Wilson (New Brunswick, N.J., 1964); the Archives of the City College of New York, Townsend Harris Collection. A recent study of U.S.-Japan diplomacy that reexamines Harris’s diplomacy is Michael Auslin, Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).

The general territory of this essay has been well covered by historian John Dower. Dower and Miyagawa’s Black Ships and Samurai Website is an exemplary virtual exhibition of material and visual materials of the nineteenth-century encounter of Japanese with Commodore Perry. The whole project is entitled Visualizing Cultures and is part of the MIT OpenCourseWare project; not to be missed within it is John Dower’s excellent video tour of the history and the visual materials in his exhibit. Dower is also the author of Elements of Japanese Design: Handbook of Family Crests, Heraldry and Symbolism, 2nd ed. (New York, 1990).

Other scholars have written of Japanese depictions of foreigners, notably Ronald Toby, who recently curated an exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago and wrote “Foreign Faces in Japanese Prints” in the online journal Asian Art. Finally, Marc Leepson, Flag: An American Biography (New York, 2005) and William Rea Furlong and Byron McCandless, So Proudly We Hail: The History of the United States Flag (Washington, D.C., 1981) were helpful to contextualize this flag.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 8.1 (October, 2007).

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Barbara Brooks is associate professor of history and Asian studies at City College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has published on Japanese diplomacy in China and on cultures of Japanese colonialism in its Asian empire.

O you up there! O pennant! Out of reach — an idea only — yet furiously fought for, risking bloody death — loved by me! So loved! O you banner leading the day, with stars brought from the night! Valueless, object of eyes, over all and demanding all — O banner and pennant! . . . I see but you, O warlike pennant. O banner so broad with stripes, I sing you only, Flapping up there in the wind.

—Walt Whitman, Song of the Banner at Daybreak

 

I. O you up there! O pennant!

In 1861, the skies of New York were filled with red, white, and blue cloth, waving defiantly at enemies of the United States. The Confederate assault on Fort Sumter might have been bloodless, but it produced the same flag-draped mixture of anger, sorrow, and anxiety brought on by the nearly three thousand deaths on September 11, 2001. At the outset of the Civil War, as in the months following 9/11, America was ready to follow Walt Whitman and “see but you, O warlike pennant” and to “sing you only, / Flapping up there in the wind.”

Patriotic fervor of the spring of 1861 reached a high point on April 20, when the oversized Stars and Stripes, recently evacuated from Fort Sumter, arrived in Manhattan. During a “monster rally,” U.S. commander Robert Anderson carried this banner into Union Square and placed it in the sculpted hands of George Washington himself. A photographer captured the scene by positioning himself above both the crowd and the first president’s huge equestrian monument. In this blurry image, the throng looked upward, gazing towards an emblem that would soon be carried into war.

 

A few weeks after this spectacle, Henry Ward Beecher tried to make sense of the incessant Union flag waving. “Our Flag carries American ideas, American history, and American feelings,” he explained, which had “gathered and stored” the idea of liberty ever since the colonial period. If Beecher overstated the Stars and Stripes’ age, he still captured the main sources of its appeal. Weaving together abstract values, past events, and passionate emotions, the American flag had already become a nearly religious presence across the North. By the end of this war, it would generate an even more powerful aura, which would be perpetuated through America’s uniquely flag-centered patriotism.

In recent years, the American flag’s mystical power has never been far from sight. Pledges from schoolchildren, pregame renditions of the “Star Spangled Banner,” and never ending controversies over flag desecration all testify to Americans’ regard for patriotic cloth. During periods of crisis, Americans’ flag passions rise to their highest levels of intensity. The past year and a half has made this clear, whether one considers the flag-draped coffins of New York or the Pentagon or the thousands, if not millions, of banners hung from windows and porches in the fall of 2001. In this most recent resurgence of patriotism, flags with special associations have generated the most attention, just as they did in 1861. A flag pulled from the Ground Zero rubble missing twelve of its stars gained headlines by traveling to the World Series, to the Super Bowl, and, in its last and most controversial public appearance, to the opening ceremonies of the 2002 Winter Olympics. Another, emblazoned with comments written directly on its cloth by visitors to the World Trade Center site, went via navy ship to Afghanistan, where United States troops raised it over Kabul.

 

It is worth considering why Americans have invested their flags with such importance and how the United States has become more saturated with patriotic color than any other country in the world. The comparative intensity of American loyalties is less noteworthy than the country’s fixation on a single symbol, which has come to be associated with a remarkably wide range of emotions. Americans’ devotion to patriotic cloth has its taproot in the American Civil War, when the cult of the Stars and Stripes intensified just as it broadened its range of associations. During the war for the Union, the flag merged popular energies with government power, while sanctifying the country’s idealism with the shedding of blood. As in the Union Square pairing of flag and founder, the national banner in these years also threaded together present emergencies with the country’s imagined past.

America’s emotional attachment to flags attests the country’s penchant for patriotic spectacle. But flag culture had larger significance, especially in helping the country modify the European path to nationhood. What made the United States’ case special, if not wholly exceptional, was that its flag cult helped to build collective authority on willing sacrifice rather than on sheer national strength. It was a combination of blood and cloth, rather than of blood and iron, that accounted for the star-spangled sentiment of the 1860s. This mixture gained potency as it was passed down to later generations, who would continue to use the flag both as a sign of inspiration and as an all-too-effective instrument against dissent.

 

II. Out of reach — an idea only . . .

Today’s patriots tell a very particular story about the history of the American flag. In this story, Flag Day marks the anniversary of the banner’s “birth,” with Betsy Ross its mother. The flag’s thirteen stripes document the initial size of the Union, just as its fifty stars tell of the nation’s growth. The flag’s story is always accompanied by rousing music and streaming banners, as the flag not only leads Americans through war but also presides over defining experiences like immigrants’ arrival at Ellis Island, African-Americans’ quest for voting rights, and Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon. As omnipresent as Woody Allen’s Zelig, the Stars and Stripes seems to have missed few truly important events in American history.

It took considerable energy to create this tapestry of flag images and icons. In many cases, patriots had to retrospectively drape the past with stars and stripes, especially when portraying the flag’s earliest years. The Founders’ own comparative neglect of their new national symbols required later generations to fabricate—out of whole cloth, one might say—a series of legends that could project flag passions back in time. The best-known case was the Betsy Ross story, which was first presented to the American public in the 1870s. Other famous patriotic images, such as Emmanuel Leutze’s 1855 Washington Crossing the Delaware or Archibald Williard’s slightly later The Spirit of ’76, were part of this same process.

Specialists on American flag culture agree that the earliest roots of star-spangled sentiment lay not in the Revolution but in the country’s second war with England. The war’s most notable creation was Francis Scott Key’s “Star Spangled Banner” which would give the flag a name and the country a national anthem. Less lasting, though no less important to the 1810s, was Joseph Rodman Drake’s poem, “The American Flag,” which focused not on a particular scene, but on this symbol’s mystical origin, imagining the flag’s first heavenly appearance:

When Freedom from her mountain height Unfurled her standard to the air, She tore the azure robe of night And set the stars of glory there. She mingled with its gorgeous dyes The milky baldrick of the skies, And striped its pure celestial white With streakings of the morning light.

Drake’s association of the flag with the “Freedom” of heavenly stars lasted through the secession crisis, when his first stanza was placed directly beneath the 1861 lithograph Our Heaven Born Banner. The soldier in this picture, and all the viewers who were implicitly asked to follow his gaze, confronted a mystical image that was meant to change the way they saw the colored cloth suddenly waving in nearly every public place.

 

At the same time that Drake’s poem was accompanying new images, Key’s more famous tribute from the war of 1812 was generating criticism. Richard Grant White led a committee in 1861 to choose a more appropriate national song than the “Star Spangled Banner,” which he and other genteel critics associated with spread-eagle expansionism and anti-immigrant nativism. “Who cannot but wish that the spangles could be taken out,” White asked, “and a good, honest flag be substituted for the banner!” What the country needed, he believed, was a set of patriotic tunes and rituals that were less specific in their associations and less warlike in their imagery and tone. In 1861, Henry Ward Beecher echoed this view in associating the flag not with armies but with the noble ideas associated with its “bright morning stars of God” and “beams of morning light.”

The “Star Spangled Banner” survived the Civil War, of course, though it would be joined by wartime flag music that, while just as bellicose, would lend a new sense of purpose to the violence associated with flags. The only blood of Francis Scott Key’s anthem was that of invading soldiers and slaves, which, as Key explains in his largely forgotten third stanza, “wiped out their foul footstep’s pollution.” Drake had similarly emphasized how the American flag could blot out violence, as he urged the banner to “ward away the battle-stroke” and to turn soldiers’ eyes upward so that they might look away from “the life-blood, warm and wet” that had “dimmed the glistening bayonet.” In contrast to such lyrical gestures, Civil War poets like Julia Ward Howe focused far less on the triumph of killing the enemy than on honoring patriotic martrydom. By the end of the war, the patriotic ideal of looking upwards towards higher ideals would be joined to an even more solemn task of gazing downwards on fallen bodies.

 

III. [Y]et furiously fought for, risking bloody death —

Civil War bloodshed brought the American flag down to earth and made the cloth repository of national ideas into a powerful means of commemorating sacrifice. Caroline Marvin and David Ingle have recently explored this aspect of American flag culture from a sociological perspective, drawing attention to how death has endowed the Stars and Stripes with its sacred qualities. Their analysis helps to explain why veterans and their families have regularly taken the lead in protecting the sanctity of American symbols.

The roots of America’s blood-soaked flag cult lay in the ancient martial ideal of sacrificing one’s body for a banner. There was nothing distinctively American about soldiers’ willingness to be “sabred into crow’s meat” for “a piece of glazed cotton,” as Thomas Carlyle had put it in 1831. Indeed, for Victorian observers, this death-defying martial heroism was distinct from national loyalty and perhaps even in tension with it. John Stuart Mill considered that single-minded “devotion to the flag” was evidence that a country lacked other cohesive and inspiring ideas. With the Austrian Empire in mind, he denounced armies held together only by the colors of battle as “executioners of human happiness” whose “only idea, if they have any, of public duty is obedience to orders.”

While American soldiers nurtured a martial flag cult within their own ranks before the Civil War, the larger public tended to associate the national flag primarily with the country’s ideas rather than its armies. Significantly, the first attempt to bloody the Stars and Stripes came not from those hoping to glorify the flag but from abolitionists who sought to discredit American hypocrisy. The poet Thomas Campbell began the conversation in 1838, calling out from England:

United States, your banner wears Two emblems–one of fame; Alas! the other that it bears Reminds us of your shame. Your banner’s constellation types White freedom with its stars, But what’s the meaning of the stripes? They mean your negroes’ scars.

Garrisonian abolitionists picked up this image and made the sinister associations of the red, white, and blue part of their campaign against slavery.  Their shift of attention from the flag’s heavenly stars of divine hope to its bloody stripes of guilt pricked at national pieties as effectively as their public burnings of the Constitution.

The flag would be changed more radically by the torrent of bloodshed that ended slavery’s massive violence. Through this crucible, white Americans imagined far more intensely than ever before how their country’s commitment to liberty rested on a set of violent underpinnings. Abraham Lincoln lent a vocabulary to this “new birth of freedom” which involved both a revolutionary dedication to principle and martyred soldiers’ dedication to a republic that they had valued above their own lives. In language tinged with the Christian hope of redemption through death, it was soldiers’ blood that regenerated the republic and allowed it to live up its own founding propositions.

An ever expanding cult of the American flag was a key part of imagining this secular counterpart of the Christian passion. During the spectacle of combat, banners inspired soldiers to acts of death-accepting patriotism, which were made a national ideal through poetry, song, and images. Common soldiers, and especially the mythically brave flag bearers, came to occupy a central place in the popular imagination. As casualties mounted, flags commemorated the heroism of those who had carried them into battle. Banners brought back from the front torn and tattered, covered with smoke, and riddled with bullets were cherished as sacred relics. A mystical aura even emanated from enemy banners, since it was only through acts of courage that these had become captured trophies.

African Americans best appreciated how Civil War bloodshed transformed the United States flag from a symbol of betrayed idealism to an emblem of liberation. Shortly after Confederate surrender, the Reverend E. J. Adams of Charleston drew the attention of former slaves to “the bloody crimson stripes” on the American flag to make a larger point. “Once emblematic of the bloody furrows ploughed upon the quivering flesh of four million of slaves,” he explained, these stripes became thereafter “emblematic of the bloody sacrifice offered upon the altars of American liberty.”

 

IV. So loved! O you banner leading the day, with stars brought from the night . . .

If the wartime Stars and Stripes began to resemble earlier martial flag cults, it never lost its wider associations with the national promise of liberty. Sacrificing on behalf of popular government and emancipation was, from the perspective of most Unionists, every bit as important as their own valor under arms. Just as importantly, the involvement of women in flag culture imbued the flag with other new meanings, creating a distinctly domestic allure evident in a skirt-clad “Michigan Bridget’s” supposed role as flag bearer in a contemporary illustration.

 

Women’s involvement in the war involved a wide range of flag activities, most of which were far less martial than those of Michigan Bridget. Female patriotism was staged with the greatest fanfare at flag presentation ceremonies, when local women unveiled cloth gifts of their own construction and, in many cases, of their own design. One writer noted that it was through such events that the “reverence for the flag amounting almost to worship” acquired a “human face or word.” Elaborately staged ceremonies were meant to give soldiers a set of memories that might sustain them under more trying circumstances. Marching off to war with a gift from home helped them to personalize devotion to country, cause, and their own sense of soldierly honor.

In an array of subsequent efforts, Union women took control of the flag’s sentimental meanings, which would coexist with the same symbol’s evocation of men’s willing sacrifice. They celebrated it in a flood of flag-related poetry in the daily press and in popular magazines. They made it a prominent part of the visual landscape by displaying it from windows in both cities and towns. John Greenleaf Whittier’s Barbara Frietchie was even bold enough to shame Stonewall Jackson into respecting the American flag his troops attempted to shoot from the second story of her home in western Maryland. As Whittier recounted, in a refrain that echoed into the twentieth century:

Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf; She leaned far out on the window-sill, And shook it forth with a royal will. “Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, But spare your country’s flag,” she said.

The legendary daring of Michigan Bridget and Barbara Freitchie were matched by more secretive, if far less celebrated, efforts of loyal women in the deeper South to harbor American flags behind enemy lines. At the conclusion of the war, such contraband cloth was pulled out of hiding to prove that faith in the Union cause had never waned. The Vermont native Cyrena Stone waved her miniature Stars and Stripes when Sherman’s troops arrived in Atlanta. She had kept this sacred memento throughout the war, hiding it in jars of fruit and in her sugar container when not sharing it with her larger circle of Atlanta Unionists. Press reports also told of how an unnamed black woman in 1865 electrified a Virginia crowd by producing a banner that she too had hidden, at the risk of far greater reprisals, from white Confederates fighting for their freedom to keep her in slavery.

Women’s involvement in the Civil War cult of the Stars and Stripes broadened the range of daring war experiences while it also tinged this symbol with a distinctly domestic hue. Brought within Union households, American flags became part of the civics lessons that mothers had incorporated into the patriotic education of American children. A contemporary writer noted the ultimate effects of making the Stars and Stripes into a “household idol in every Northern home.” Children exposed to such shrines at home were “imbibing a strange love for [the flag] that will tell upon their devotion to country in their future history.” In a telling prediction, he also noted that a symbol “planted in the hearts of men” would be “readily received by them calling forth their love and veneration” thereafter.

After the war, women took on added flag responsibilities in grieving dead soldiers. Patriotic color was a centerpiece of commemorative activities that began in 1865, when black Unionists decorated the graves at the Charleston racetrack. In the tradition of Memorial Days that followed, flags that had been soaked with blood became imaginatively doused with tears. Female groups took the lead in the ceremonial bereavement that shaped how both Unionists and the Confederate would honor their dead. Such rituals depended for their power on the Victorian association of heaven with the virtues of home. But it also perpetuated what would become an instinctive reliance on flags to give solace during times of national tragedy.

Flags’ ever expanding uses in the postbellum period coincided with the growth of a United States’ bunting industry. Patriotic cloth entered nearly every aspect of Americans’ life in these years, with female consumers leading the way. Love for colors accordingly came to depend as much on the flag’s ubiquity as its special associations. This trend continued, despite efforts to protect patriotism from the effects of commercialization. Some feared that the cult of the flag might be diluted if the symbol was not harbored away except in the most solemn occasions. They need not have worried. In the first years of the twenty-first century, Americans have continued to treat the cloth form of flags with nearly religious respect, even while they have been busy pasting its image to every conceivable form of T-shirt, bumper sticker, or household decoration.

 

V. Valueless, object of eyes, over all and demanding all . . .

The Stars and Stripes emerged from the Civil War with a wider range of associations than any other national symbol.  A vibrant flag culture honored the country’s ideals, its history, its fallen men, and its patriotic women. The war for the Union also bolstered the flag’s status as a symbol of supreme national authority. From the secession crisis through the final collapse of the Confederacy, flag-waving Unionists called on government power to suppress an internal threat. When Confederates surrendered, the same flag presided over the loyalty oaths that brought rebels back into a national community of the red, white, and blue.

 

The dynamics of rebellion, coercion, and sentimental reunion were as long-lasting as any aspect of Civil War flag culture. The Confederate threat against the United States passed quickly enough, aided by Northern whites’ fateful preference for national harmony over racial justice. But by the 1890s, the flag was taken up against the perceived threats posed by immigrants, political radicals, and other suspected dissidents. Civil War veterans played a key role in bringing the flag into the public schools and in popularizing new patriotic rituals such as Francis Bellamy’s Pledge of Allegiance. This period saw considerable innovation in matters of organization and codification, which would become a permanent part of how Americans subsequently treated their banners. Yet despite such innovations, the prevailing blend of martial drill, sentimental tributes, and historical tableaux of the 1890s clearly echoed trends first established thirty years earlier.

Francis Bellamy marveled during this late-century patriotic revival that the Stars and Stripes had “as great a potency to Americanize the alien child as it has to lead regiments to death.” Here Bellamy identified the crucial element of voluntarism enshrined in the country’s cult of the flag. By focusing on the willing sacrifices of soldiers, banners had both glorified and obscured wartime violence. The flag-draped repentance of former Confederates rested on a double evasion, turning attention away from the force used to suppress their rebellion and from the brutal racial order that accompanied the growth of sectional amity. Flag rituals meant to “Americanize the alien child” similarly replaced the coercive elements of nationality with a simpler, happier story. In each of these instances, Americans conceived individuals free from outside pressure succumbing to the flag’s inevitable tug upon their heart.

Idealizing patriotic consent has never meant an unwillingness to use coercion, of course. Blood was a vital part of America’s path to nationhood, even if the country’s love of cloth became a national ideal in the way that its blunt use of iron would not. When the country has come under attack, star-spangled sentiment may have brought solace and comfort. But it also has fanned the flames of war. The intimate relationship between patriotic pride, the thirst for vengeance, and the squelching of dissent, has been evident enough in the year and a half since September 11, 2001. On a practically daily basis, we are reminded of that imaginative color line that equates outward display with inner conviction.

Since the Civil War, Americans’ flag patriotism has rested on the uneasy coexistence of freedom and sacrifice, sentimental love, and supreme authority. Yet if the 1860s established these themes, it neither fixed their meaning nor established their relationship to one another. This has been clear in the long-running dispute over the flag’s sanctity that has roiled local authorities, the courts, and politicians for much of the twentieth century. Such recurring conflicts have raised basic questions about state-sponsored patriotism and the limits of dissent. In these, banners have both roused emotions and, ironically enough, marked the boundaries of government power by helping to establish official protection for even the most controversial forms of symbolic speech.

The latest flag flap has concerned the Pledge of Allegiance, and specifically the phrase “under God” that was added to Bellamy’s composition during the Cold War. This episode, which was as fierce as it was short-lived, tended to obscure the true nature of the flag cult’s religiosity. American patriots, both now as in the past, have regularly invoked the Almighty. Even Francis Scott Key ended his anthem with the rousing charge, “In God is our Trust” (words every bit as forgotten as the rest of his second, third, and fourth stanzas). Yet popular reverie for the flag has depended, in the end, on a more secular, if no less mystical, communion between the living and the dead.

What makes the American flag a religious object is evident less in the words of pledges and the lyrics of anthems than in the national rituals that frame such professions. These moments’ half-conscious gestures dramatize a transaction that temporarily makes a gathering of strangers into a community of sentiment. The red, white, and blue cloth that centers attention receives the praise of patriotic voices and the collective gaze of patriotic eyes. Yet in raising their hands to their chests, participants in these ceremonies acknowledge an even deeper set of commitments involved in America’s flag cult. As has been true at least since the 1860s, a flag-waving nation has expected something more than the loyalty of their citizens’ bodies and the devotion of their minds. It has also sought, with a success that earlier generations could scarcely have imagined, the love of their citizens’ hearts.

 

Further Reading: George Henry Preble’s voluminous The History of the Flag of the United States (Boston, 1880) has long been the starting point for understanding America’s nineteenth-century flag cult. His explicitly patriotic approach should be read along with Scot M. Guenter’s more analytical The American Flag, 1777-1924: Cultural Shifts from Creation to Codification (Rutherford, N.J., 1990), and with the more theoretical approaches of Caroline Marvin and David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (New York, 1999) and of Albert Boime The Unveiling of National Icons: A Plea for Iconoclasm in a Nationalist Era (New York, 1998). The following (which are listed in order of the periods they survey) provide historical context for the flag’s place in American patriotic expression: Charles Royster, “A Nation Forged in Blood,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Arms and Independence: The Military Character of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, 1984); Mark Wahlgreen Summers, “‘Freedom and Law Must Die Ere They Sever’: The North,” in Gabor S. Borrit, ed., Why the Civil War Came (New York, 1996); Mark E. Neely, Jr. & Harold Holzer, The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North (Chapel Hill, 2000); Robert E. Bonner, Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South (Princeton, 2002); Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill, 2001); Gaines Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause and the Emergence of the New South (New York, 1987); David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Cecilia O’Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton, 1999); Stuart McConnell, “Reading the Flag: A Consideration of the Patriotic Cults of the 1890s,” in John Bodnar, ed., Bonds of Affection: Americans Define their Patriotism (Princeton, 1996).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 3.2 (January, 2003).

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Robert E. Bonner teaches American history at Michigan State University. He is the author of Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South (Princeton, 2002).

The Continental Congress has received scant attention from the academic community in recent decades. The scholarly zeitgeist tends to portrays its members as perpetually frozen in John Trumbull’s painting of the moment they declared independence, carrying out a famous act that everyone recognizes. But this image has little connection to the social and cultural history that has enriched our understanding of the lives of the men and women who experienced the beginning of the United States. While millions from around the world queue up for the chance for a few moments in the room where the Continental Congressmen performed their most significant work, scholars have seen their story as self evident, and turned attention to other groups—pamphlet writers in scattered towns, the crowds that gathered on Pennsylvania’s State House lawn, the men and women who met at colonial taverns and coffeehouses, the men who enlisted as soldiers in the army the Congress created, and the individuals and groups who lived through the revolution: white and black, men and women, rich and poor.

Benjamin Irvin has resuscitated the Continental Congress in light of recent historiographical method, capturing the way it crafted and then used its own authority, the methods it took to draw an American imagination into supporting a newborn American national cause, and finally, how it lost that authority amidst a failing economy and increasing success by other people who carried out this nationalizing mission better.

As Irvin breathes life into the group, they are meeting in Philadelphia, seeking redress from the government in London for oppressive policies of taxation and military action. Those tales are oft-told, but where Irvin’s book moves into new territory, and where the great benefit of this excellent study of politics and culture establishes itself, is showing the ways that the colonial leadership strove to build on earlier means of authority while at the same time breaking with both the empire and earlier customs. The effort was both tricky and dangerous, the author relates. Immediately upon gathering, congressmen used manners, possessions, and customs of entertainment to show one another and the people of the city around them that they deserved their new level of authority. In their clothing, style of meeting, attendants, and entertainments, they revealed patterns of refinement and gentility. Irvin’s work dovetails nicely into earlier, seminal works by Richard Bushman and T.H. Breen that explained the meaning of these patterns, and adds to that historiography by showing the ways those characteristics came into question as Congress sought ways to protest the king’s ministers’ actions. “The Continental Congress worked concertedly to supplant the tokens and habits of the British nation with fresh ones devoted to the United States. It implemented codes of conduct by which patriotic Americans could distinguish those who belonged to their imagined community from those who did not” (10).

By proscribing the rich entertainments that all social ranks had been using for years to establish their position or ambition as Britons, Congress sought to impose frugality and economic restraint as a means to unite a divergent people. Irvin’s book shows that actually carrying out this sea change of political behavior could be a double-edged sword. Congress created the Articles of Association to draw the people to its cause. Closing theaters and puppet shows, stripping funerals of their lavish display and opulent gifting, and calling on hostesses and hosts to refrain from sumptuous meals all allowed the colonists to join in a shared sacrifice of war. But when Congress itself attempted to underpin its authority in entertainments like a proposed grand ball for Martha Washington, the people’s displeasure became palpable. Even as it called for an end to public dances, Congress found itself in a very complex minuet with the people of the new nation’s largest city, a people willing to use old methods to enforce a new nation’s rules.