![]() ![]() Less well known is what Key, a Washington lawyer and amateur poet, was doing in the harbor when the bombs were bursting in air. The story of Francis Scott Key witnessing British ships bombard Fort McHenry on September 12-14, 1814, is famous. Army Major George Armistead, the commander of Fort McHenry in that city’s harbor. That flag, measuring an impressive 42 feet wide by 30 feet high, was sewn by Mary Pickersgill in Baltimore for U.S. The most famous single American flag, the tattered Star-Spangled Banner now in the possession of the Smithsonian Institution, is a product of the nation’s second conflict with Great Britain, the War of 1812. Among them were the well-known Bennington Flag with its seven white and six red horizontal stripes and a canton containing the number “76,” above which 11 stars were arrayed in a semicircle with two additional stars above. So the Continental Army fought the British primarily under unit and militia flags, some of which contained 13 stars and 13 stripes. Washington quickly realized that it wasn’t the best idea to fly it while fighting the British because enemy officers saw it as a sign of surrender. That flag had the familiar 13 red and white stripes, but its canton contained the Union Jack. The Continental Army officially engaged British troops under what was known as the Continental Colors or the Grand Union flag, the banner General Washington flew for the first time at the army’s birth on January 1, 1776. And so, despite the impressions left by latter-day paintings such as German-born Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s apocryphal George Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), the Revolutionary War was not fought under the Stars and Stripes. Most historians of the period concur.įrom the Revolution to the present conflict in Iraq, use of the flag has progressed from primarily a naval emblem rarely flown by patriotic citizens to a widely revered national symbol, and the most significant steps in the evolution of Americans’ attitude toward their flag have been taken in wartime. It was used for communication,” Moeller contends, primarily by the military, and mainly on Navy ships. “In the 1777 period, the flag was not a device that was used by the average citizen. “The American flag as a sovereign flag did not occur until 1782,” says early American flag authority Henry Moeller. It would be a stretch, in fact, to say that in 1777 Americans even recognized the Stars and Stripes as the national emblem or symbol. From today’s perspective, America’s first flag seems an afterthought, far from the archetypal symbol it would become in the 19th century, a period of territorial expansion and internal strife. The only thing we know for certain about the original flag’s symbols is that the 13 stars and 13 stripes stood for the first states. The Betsy Ross myth notwithstanding, we really don’t know who designed the American flag, why it’s red, white, and blue, or why it features stars and stripes. Nor did the resolution say anything about the shape of the stars nor their pattern in the constellation. The Congress adopted the resolution without comment, not bothering to specify the flag’s shape, proportions or the size of the canton or field of stripes. ![]() In subsequent wars, our flag fervor has grown.Ī single sentence in the Journals of the Continental Congress defines the object: “Re- solved, That the flag of the United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white: that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.” We don’t know which member or committee introduced the Flag Resolution of June 14, 1777, and we don’t know if the measure was debated or who voted for it and against it. ![]() Americans first embraced their national symbol during the Civil War. ![]()
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