Betsy Ross

In American historical memory, the name Betsy Ross evokes a quiet Philadelphia upholsterer stitching the first Stars and Stripes in a back parlor while George Washington looks on. The story—first published in 1870 by her grandson William Canby—remains unverified by any surviving period documentation, yet it endures because it fits a larger national instinct: the desire to root the Revolution in homespun craft rather than in the complex, contested, and Indigenous landscapes over which that Revolution was fought. For students of Native and Indigenous history, the Betsy Ross legend functions less as a biography than as a lens—what it reveals about how the new United States imagined itself against the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Lenape homelands of Philadelphia, and the nations whose diplomacy helped shape the war.

The Historical Setting: Philadelphia, the Lenape, and the Coming of Revolution

Elizabeth Griscom Ross (January 1, 1752 – January 30, 1836) lived her entire life in Philadelphia, a city built on Lenape (Delaware) homelands at the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. The Lenape name for the Delaware River—Lenape Wihittuck—means the river of the Lenape people; the walking purchase of 1737 and subsequent colonial land frauds had by Ross’s lifetime already displaced most Lenape westward. Philadelphia in the 1770s was thus both the seat of revolutionary government and the site of an unfinished dispossession—a contradiction woven into every artifact of that era, including the flag.

Trained as an upholsterer, Ross ran a successful business making flags, tents, and military accoutrements for the Continental Navy and the Pennsylvania militia. Records of the Continental Congress and the Pennsylvania State Navy Board confirm that she supplied flags and provided ships’ colors during the war years. That documented work—not the apocryphal 1776 visit from Washington—is the solid historical ground beneath her name.

The Flag, the Congress, and the Question of Origins

On June 14, 1777, the Continental Congress adopted a resolution stating that the flag of the United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white, with a union of thirteen stars in a new constellation. No surviving document names the designer. Significantly, the design was not fixed: the Flag Act of 1794 added two stars and two stripes for Kentucky and Vermont, and the Flag Act of April 4, 1818—largely credited to Representative Peter Wendover of New York—returned the stripes to thirteen while adding a star for each new state.

The number thirteen carried layered meaning. To the revolutionaries it signified the original colonies. To the thirteen fires of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the same number carried an older sovereign weight: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—later joined by the Tuscarora—had for centuries been governed by a confederacy whose logic of union was well known to Benjamin Franklin, who cited it in the Albany Plan of Union of 1754. Any honest account of the American Revolution’s intellectual origins must acknowledge that the Indigenous confederacies of the Northeast provided working models of federal union that colonial thinkers observed and debated.

Material Culture: Wool, Silk, Hemp, and Hand Stitch

A Revolutionary War flag was not bunting. The earliest surviving examples were built from worsted wool with hemp or linen hoists and, in the finest naval examples, hand-stitched silk stars. Reproducing one today requires the same materials: a wool field for durability in sea air, cloth stars applied by appliqué, and hand-sewn heading for the hoist. The craft Ross is credited with is thus not a fairy tale of a single flag but of an entire trade—appliqué, embroidery, and sailmaking—skills shared across colonial communities and, in the lands westward, in Indigenous textile and fiber traditions such as the twined bags of the Great Lakes, the wool leggings of the Plains horse cultures, and the woven sashes of southeastern peoples.

Flags, Wampum, and Diplomacy Across Two Worlds

Where colonists used cloth flags to signal sovereignty at sea and in battle, many Native nations used wampum—beads of quahog (purple) and whelk (white) shell strung on thread—as a material record of treaties and alliances. Wampum belts such as the Hiawatha Belt, the Two Row Wampum (Kaswentha) of 1613, and belts exchanged at later councils served as the parchment of Indigenous diplomacy, encoding the terms of alliance, friendship, and peace. Where the new United States used cloth banners to declare sovereignty, the Haudenosaunee used wampum belts to renew it—two distinct but parallel systems of material diplomacy operating in the same century.

The Revolution fractured these alliances. The 1777 Treaty of Fort Pitt—the first written treaty between the United States and an Indigenous nation—was concluded with the Lenape at Fort Pitt during a war in which the Lenape were already divided. The 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix imposed terms on the Haudenosaunee after the Revolution, ignoring the Confederacy’s own internal divisions and asserting that its members had been conquered. The 1794 Treaty of Greenville, following the Battle of Fallen Timbers, ceded much of the Ohio Country and marked a turning point in federal domination of the Northwest. Each of these treaties, like the flag itself, is a document of governance—one cloth, one shell, one ink.

Betsy Ross in Memory and the Politics of Commemoration

The Betsy Ross story crystallized in 1870, at the height of Reconstruction, and took hold during the 1876 Centennial. The Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia opened to the public in 1898. Historians—including Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Marla R. Miller—have carefully separated what can be documented (a working upholsterer who made ships’ colors) from what cannot (the 1776 design visit). For anyone tracing the history of the Revolution, the lesson is methodological: evidence first, legend second, and always the question of whose homelands the story is told upon.

Historical Context & Key Cultural Takeaways

• Verified: Betsy Ross (Elizabeth Griscom Ross, 1752–1836) was a Philadelphia upholsterer who produced flags and ships’ colors during the Revolution. Her craft is documented; the 1776 Washington visit is not.
• Verified: The flag resolution of June 14, 1777 did not name a designer. The design evolved through the Flag Acts of 1794 and 1818.
• Verified: The Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s model of union—thirteen fires, consensus governance—was known to Franklin and discussed in the Albany Plan of 1754.
• Verified: Indigenous diplomatic record-keeping used wampum belts (quahog and whelk shell) rather than cloth or paper, functioning alongside colonial treaty documents in the same era.
• Scholarly consensus: The Revolution was fought over Indigenous homelands; treaties such as Fort Pitt (1777), Fort Stanwix (1784), and Greenville (1794) reshaped Native territory and sovereignty in ways that continue to be contested today.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Betsy Ross actually sew the first American flag?

No verifiable documentary evidence confirms that Ross designed or sewed the first Stars and Stripes. The claim rests on an 1870 account by her grandson, William Canby. What is documented is that Ross was a working upholsterer who supplied flags and colors to the Continental Navy and Pennsylvania.

What was the flag resolution of 1777?

On June 14, 1777, the Continental Congress resolved that the flag of the United States consist of thirteen stripes, alternate red and white, and that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation. No designer was named.

How did Indigenous nations record treaties in the same era?

Many Indigenous nations, especially in the Northeast, used wampum belts of quahog and whelk shell beads to encode and renew treaty agreements. The Two Row Wampum of 1613 and the Hiawatha Belt are enduring examples of this diplomacy.

Where were Revolutionary-era treaties concluded with Native nations, and what did they do?

Key treaties include the Treaty of Fort Pitt (1777) with the Lenape—the first written U.S.–Native treaty; the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1784) with the Haudenosaunee; and the Treaty of Greenville (1794), which ceded much of the Ohio Country after the Battle of Fallen Timbers.

Where can authentic artifacts from this period be seen today?

The Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia preserves a restored 18th-century upholstery shop. Wampum belts and treaty-era materials are held at institutions such as the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian) and the Canadian Museum of History, and many nations continue to steward their own belts and records.

Legacy: Cloth, Shell, and the Long Memory of the Revolution

Betsy Ross’s legacy survives not because a single flag can be proven to have left her hands, but because her work belongs to a broader world of making—wool, silk, hemp, hand stitch—that the Revolution depended on and that Indigenous nations mirrored in their own materials: the twined bag, the beaded sash, the strung belt of quahog and whelk. To write about the Revolution with integrity is to hold both records at once, the cloth and the shell, the flag and the wampum, and to remember that the soil beneath Philadelphia is Lenape, the confederacy to the north is Haudenosaunee, and the treaties signed in those years still carry legal and moral force today.