Betsy Ross Is Famous For Sewing The First American Flag, But Historians Now Doubt It
The story of widowed seamstress Betsy Ross painstakingly stitching the Stars and Stripes of the first American flag has been lovingly taught to every elementary school kid in the nation. Betsy is a national icon who embodies everything Americans love to believe they are: patriotic, skilled, and noble. Yet over the years, the provenance of Betsy’s tale has been picked over and questioned so much that many historians now believe it to be little more than a well-intentioned myth.
Who was Betsy Ross?
The woman who would be immortalized as Betsy Ross was born Elizabeth Griscom in 1752 in New Jersey. She was raised as a Quaker, but she abandoned that religion when she met her first husband.
In later life she married twice more and had seven daughters, two of whom died as infants. She was a sought-after seamstress, sewing flags for the Navy and tents for the Continental Army to use during the Revolutionary War.
The Betsy Ross flag
Over the centuries, though, Betsy acquire the status of a cultural icon for sewing something much more enduring than a flag for the Pennsylvania navy. Yes, she would become synonymous with the creation of the iconic American flag.
In fact, to this day her early design — 13 red-and-white stripes and 13 stars representing the colonies which had fought so hard for independence — is routinely identified as the “Betsy Ross flag.” But is there more to Betsy’s story than meets the eye?
No credible evidence of the story being true
What if we told you no one has ever been able to confirm Betsy’s status as the first flag-sewer? According to Marc Leepson, writer of Flag: An American Biography, it’s not for the lack of trying, though.
Leepson told National Geographic, “Every historian who’s looked into it has found no credible evidence that Betsy Ross made the first American flag, or helped design it, or even that there was a flag committee. It could have existed, but there is no evidence whatsoever.”
The root of the belief
Most observers think that belief in the — potentially — tall tale first began when Betsy’s grandson William J. Canby delivered a fateful speech in 1870. At this point, Betsy had already been dead for 34 years, having passed away in 1834 at the age of 84.
Speaking to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Canby’s speech was entitled “The History of the Flag of the United States,” and he claimed his grandmother’s part in the creation of the flag had begun nearly 100 years earlier.