Citizen Seamstress

Citizen Seamstress

Many people know at least a little about Betsy Ross, the supposed maker of the nation’s first flag. Ever since Ross’ grandson, William Canby, first related his family’s story of the flag’s origins in an 1870 talk to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, generations of Americans have heard how George Washington stepped into her Philadelphia shop on the eve of independence, a sketch in hand for a new flag to represent the colonies united in the rebellion against England – 13 red and white stripes alongside a blue canton with a “new constellation” of 13 stars. 

Most memorable is the story’s climax, in which the seamstress – looking at the six-pointed stars in the general’s drawing – folds a piece of paper just so and, with one snip of her scissors, reveals (and proposes) a perfect five-pointed star. In the legend of our flag’s origins, Washington is convinced and an important element of our national identity is confirmed.

If millions of American children have since observed and replicated that moment in elementary school classrooms and holiday pageants, comparatively few people know much about the real woman behind the legendary Betsy Ross. Twenty-four-year-old upholstery seamstress Elizabeth Griscom Ross was, in spring 1776, an experienced craftswoman. One of 17 children born to house carpenter Samuel Griscom and his wife, Rebecca James, she had worked since a teenager in shops that fabricated the city’s most stylish and comfortable domestic interiors. 

As an employee of the London-trained artisan John Webster, she had worked alongside an older sister and several other women to produce curtains, slipcovers, bed hangings and mattresses, as well as a range of decorative elements, including the fringes and tassels essential to the high-style design desired by the city’s most affluent residents. In that shop, she met the man who would become her husband, apprentice John Ross; the two married in November 1773 and established their own shop, enjoying just over two years together before John died and left her a widow in the same month that Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” transformed the colonial protest movement into a full-on revolt.   

Betsy Ross’ life as a craftswoman in the epicenter of rebellion is essential to understanding not only the flag legend as we know it today, but the revolution itself. Whatever her role in the creation of the first U.S. flag – and that story is a complex one – the life behind the legend is worth knowing for the light it sheds on the little-known contributions of working women – particularly those in artisanal trades – to the American Revolution.  

The crisis over imperial tax policy hit artisans like John and Betsy Ross especially hard. When leaders of the colonial resistance effort urged consumers to boycott imported goods as a show of their collective strength, craftswomen like Ross, whose livelihoods depended on the consumption of luxury goods, watched with apprehension. In fact, it seems likely that her whole family – which included artisans in other cloth and clothing trades as well as the building trades – held its breath as they waited to see how this series of crises would shake out. 

In spring 1775, Anne King – Betsy’s onetime supervisor in the Webster shop – sought to appeal to the “Buy American” impulse by boasting in the columns of The Pennsylvania Gazette that she was the “first American tossel maker [sic] that ever brought that branch of business to any degree of perfection,” inviting readers to browse her stock of fringes, cord and mattresses “of every sort” that she now offered. In emphasizing her status as the first American tassel maker, she was surely trying to distinguish herself from George Richey, the Edinborough upholsterer whose Front Street shop – the “Crown and Tassell” no less – offered “lines and tassels to answer any furniture or chariots,” as well as “all sorts of upholstery work in the newest fashions, and at the lowest prices, such as beds, chairs, easy chairs, French chairs, sofas, couches and settees; likewise all sorts of window curtains, in the newest fashion, such as festoon, Venetian, long and short drapery, with or without cornices.” 

Craftswomen necessarily navigated the boycott movement carefully. On one hand, directing consumer spending toward American-made goods could prove a boon for women like King and Ross, who had the skills to satisfy at least some of that demand (provided they were able to find suitable materials). On the other, consumers nervous about the implications of their purchases could choose to put off any shopping until this latest crisis blew over. Where would that leave the city’s artisans? Ross, recently widowed and without access to a husband’s support, may well have been especially worried about her future when the prospect of orders from the new wartime governments of both Pennsylvania and the Continental Congress arose in the form of a request for a flag.

Ross had already committed to the political cause. Despite her Quaker upbringing, which would have encouraged the young Philadelphian to steer clear of any violent protest, she and her husband had embraced the rebellion. An inventory of John’s estate after his death shows the couple had spent some of their hard-won earnings on two prints documenting the clash between British regulars and colonists in Massachusetts. Now, as the demand for ships and the suites of flags they required expanded, she could help advance both political and financial security, turning her skill and contacts to profit by supplying these military goods. The flag tale is often told as a story of design, but it is not. It is a story of construction, production and entrepreneurship. If the government was going to need a lot of these, and quickly, the five-pointed star – as Ross demonstrated with that snip of her shears – was a more efficient choice.

But how did the rebellion find Betsy Ross? A recent discovery in Washington’s papers confirms that he met her when she and John fabricated new bed hangings for Washington’s household. In 2014, as the curatorial staff at Washington’s home at Mount Vernon was preparing to refurnish the estate’s second- and third-floor bedchambers, they carefully reviewed the papers in hopes of uncovering new information about how those rooms looked. Associate curator Amanda Isaac found in Washington’s cash memoranda, held by the Huntington Library, these entries:

 September 23, 1774 – Memr. Left with Mr. Ross the upholder (that is, upholsterer) 5 half Joes to buy furniture with and to be accounted for 15.0.0 

 September 30, 1774 – By 2 ps. Callico Bed furniture   9.0.0

 September 30, 1774 – By 7 yds of Muslin at 5/   1.15.0

 October 10, 1774 – By Mr. Ross’s acct. exclusive of ye 15£ advanc’d ye. 23d of Sepr.  29.17.2

Apparently, on Friday, Sept. 23, Washington – in Philadelphia as one of Virginia’s delegates to the First Continental Congress – stopped into the Ross shop and gave John Ross five “half-Joes” (Portuguese coins bearing the portrait of King Johannes V) as a down payment toward three sets of new bed hangings. A week later, Washington had secured and supplied some of the necessary fabrics, and by Oct. 10 John’s and Betsy’s work was completed, the firm then billing Washington an additional 29/17/2 for labor and materials.

One might rightly wonder how the Virginia planter and politician came to choose this young couple, just starting out in their own shop, to make a bed for his home. It seems likely that Benjamin Chew (chief justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania) recommended Ross’ upholstery shop to Washington. Chew knew John and Betsy since their days in Webster’s shop, and in those same weeks had hired them to help outfit the home of his daughter Elizabeth on the occasion of her marriage to Edward Tilghman, commissioning bed furniture, curtains, chair covers and other goods for his daughter’s new home. 

Washington dined with Chew on Sept. 22, the day before he commissioned his own bed furniture, so it is easy to imagine, as they talked over dinner, Chew recommending the Ross enterprise to Washington. The project was finished in October 1774, just 10 days before the Continental Congress adopted its plan to boycott British goods beginning Dec. 1.

Some 18 months later, as the Revolution began in earnest, legend has it that Washington returned to Ross’ shop, in the company of Robert Morris and George Ross (John’s uncle), and commissioned what would become the first flag as we know it today. 

As I explain in my book “Betsy Ross and the Making of America,” there is much to quibble with in this tale as it has come down to us, as various family members through the years repeated elements that cannot be confirmed in the archival record. But the presence of George Ross and the prior acquaintance with Washington certainly lend credence to the story as it was handed down by Betsy’s children, nieces and grandchildren. 

Importantly, in their tale, the emphasis is not Ross having made the first flag; rather, it is having met the man she and others recognized as the father of the country – and, what’s more, having taught him something. What resonates most persuasively from that story is the snipping of those shears, as the experienced artisan angled to improve the emblem’s design, and hence its production, and in so doing secure some much-needed business for herself as well.

Whatever the truth of this story, Betsy Ross did go on to a long career as a flagmaker for the U.S. government, particularly in the years just before the War of 1812, when she – now the wife of Revolutionary War veteran and retired customs official John Claypoole, her third husband – secured a number of contracts to make garrison flags for the U.S. Army and diplomatic flags for the Indian Department. Dozens of flags made by her can be found in archival records headed to military posts up and down the East Coast, the Mississippi Valley and into the West. Ross continued to sew for the government into her 60s and 70s, until her eyesight failed. Several daughters, nieces and granddaughters would aid and follow her into what became a multigenerational flag-making enterprise.

If much about the woman behind the Betsy Ross of legend seems elusive, there is much to be discovered as well. As one of 17 children in a family of artisans, a young woman who weathered the rebellion and a second war to secure national sovereignty, and a craftswoman who spent six decades fabricating domestic interiors and military goods as well as a family enterprise in the early republic, her life helps us contemplate the Revolution and its aftermath in new ways. She is important to our understanding of U.S. history not because she made any one flag – however iconic that moment may have become – but because she was a young craftswoman who embraced the resistance movement with vigor, celebrated its triumphs and suffered its consequences. Her story is important for what it tells us about the working women and men who built early America’s cities, furnished its rooms and clothed its citizens – and because she helps us imagine more ordinary times, the familiar cares of everyday life, and the pleasure taken in the simple comforts of beautiful and functional things made by capable hands.  

 

Marla R. Miller is the author of “Betsy Ross and the Making of America,” which was a finalist for the Cundill Prize in History in 2010.