Everyone has heard the beautiful, heart-warming tale of how, in 1776, General George Washington, George Ross, and Robert Morris personally visited the humble Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross and showed her a rough sketch for the first flag of the United States of America, to which she made a few minor alterations before sewing it. It is a good story, which is why we tell it. Unfortunately, it is also completely apocryphal; there is no solid historical evidence linking Betsy Ross to the first American flag aside from a highly implausible story told by her grandson nearly a century later.
First of all, we know for certain that, contrary to the story, Betsy Ross did not design the final version of the first American flag. The real person who designed the first American flag was an otherwise obscure signer of the Declaration of Independence named Francis Hopkinson. In May of 1780, Hopkinson wrote a letter to the Board of Admiralty requesting compensation for having designed the first American flag. The Board of Admiralty accepted Hopkinson’s claim as genuine, but refused to provide him with compensation for his design since he was not the only one who had contributed to it.
ABOVE: Imaginative illustration from before 1850 showing Francis Hopkinson, the real designer of the first American flag, signing the Declaration of Independence
Betsy Ross was a real seamstress who live in Philadelphia at the time of the American Revolution and she really did sew American flags, but she did not design the flag, nor is it probable that she sewed the first one.
In 1870, Betsy Ross’s grandson William J. Canby told the story about his grandmother having designed the first American flag to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. He did not have any evidence to support the story aside from a few affidavits signed by family members, none of whom had been alive at the time of the Revolution. Prior to 1870, there are absolutely no records whatsoever associating Betsy Ross with the first American flag in any way. Not even Betsy Ross herself or any of her children wrote about the story, which makes Canby’s claim extremely doubtful.
William J. Canby published his story in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1873. Within a matter of only a few years, elementary schools across the country had already begun to incorporate the fanciful tale into their official curriculums. These schools totally ignored the story’s dubious origins and simply taught it to their students as though it were an established fact.
One of the main reasons why schools latched onto the story so quickly was simply because there were few good stories about women involved in the American Revolution. The schools were already looking hard for female heroines to teach about. To these schoolmasters and schoolteachers, the story of Betsy Ross came as almost a godsend. Sadly, just because a story is what we want to believe does not automatically make it true.
Not only does the late date of the story make it extremely suspect, but so do nearly all the details surrounding it. William J. Canby claimed that General George Washington had visited Betsy Ross personally, but such a visitation would have been extremely implausible; George Washington was the general of the Continental Army at the time and would have certainly been far too busy to have enough time to visit a lowly seamstress and ask her to sew a flag for him. It is perfectly conceivable that he might have sent someone else to speak with her, but the story claims that he visited her himself.
There is so much about the story that is suspect that it is said that, on the first National Flag Day on June 14, 1916, when someone asked President Woodrow Wilson what he thought about the story, he merely replied, “Would that it were true.”
Nonetheless, the story was so inspiring and patriotic that people simply contented themselves to ignore its obvious flaws and accepted the story as genuine. The legend of Betsy Ross only grew from there. In the following decades, a man living in Philadelphia claimed that his house had previously been owned by Betsy Ross and that it was none other than the very home where she had sewn the first American flag. The man’s claims were almost certainly false; there is absolutely no evidence that Betsy Ross ever owned the house or that she ever lived there. Furthermore, it is suspected that he probably just invented the story in order to increase the home’s market value. The house was slated to be demolished in 1892, but a group of preservationists saved it from destruction.
ABOVE: Photograph of the putative “Betsy Ross House” in Philadelphia, taken in 2012
The house is still standing today. The signs set up around the house baldly state that it belonged to Betsy Ross, ignoring the lack of evidence to support this assertion. There is a grave outside the house, which purportedly contains Betsy Ross’s own remains. The truth, however, is that we do not know who is buried there.
Betsy Ross was originally buried in the Free Quaker Burial Grounds in Philadelphia. In 1856, her skeleton was dug up and moved to the Mount Moriah Cemetery. In 1975, it was decided that her skeleton and that of her husband would be moved to the Betsy Ross House, despite the fact that she probably never lived there. The cemetery workers, however, found that there was no skeleton under the grave marked as hers, so they literally just dug up a random skeleton from her family burial plot, assumed it to be hers, and moved it to the Betsy Ross House.
In other words, Betsy Ross did not design the first American flag, nor is it likely that she even sewed it; there is no evidence that she ever lived in the house in Philadelphia which claims to have been hers and the grave beside the house probably does not even contain her actual remains.
Further Reading
Legends, Lies, & Cherished Myths of American History by Richard Shenkman
http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/summer08/betsy.cfm
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the-american-flag/2011/06/08/AG3ZSkOH_story.html?utm_term=.e6a9711f2808
http://www.history.com/news/ask-history/did-betsy-ross-really-make-the-first-american-flag
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/07/sew_tough.html
This is closer the mark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_East_India_Company#Comparison_with_American_flag