Category: Revolutionary War

Flying Flags for the 250th!

The America 250 Logo.

Happy Independence Day! It’s been a while since I’ve been able to post; I’m still surprisingly in the middle of what I’ll call “the academic year that would not end.” There’s still one big project underway that will hopefully be wrapped up soon. Still, I wanted to get back to this, and the quarter-millennial seems too significant to pass up.

I’ve seen this big anniversary called a lot of different things, and I’ve been intrigued by this kind of nomenclature ever since I read Isaac Asimov’s “The Tercentenary Incident.” It was reinforced when I arrived at Elmira College just in time for its sesquicentennial. “Sesqui-,” it turns out, means “one and a half” if that wasn’t obvious. But who knew? More recently, I had some fun back when we had the second “Hari Awards for Foundational Excellence” on the Stars End Podcast. I had to coin the term “semi-semi-septennial” for something that might recur every eighteen months.

We’ve been flying flags to honor the celebration for about a week now. The first was the Betsy Ross flag, which was also the first flag we flew after I purchased a flagpole and began leaning into my interest in vexillology.

It seems kind of appropriate that this flag has its share of controversies. This is one of my favorite American flags, but I’m hesitant to fly it; it’s become popular among groups with whom, let’s say, I have philosophical disagreements. That’s fine, though. It’s their right to fly it, but it belongs to everybody. I’m not willing to cede its use to the folks across the aisle. The second controversy hits a bit of a theme here: the story about Betsy Ross designing the flag with General Washington doesn’t seem to have existed before 1876 except in her family’s lore.

So, here we are at the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Experiment. I like to call it the quarter-millennial because it evokes the possibility that this might last a full thousand years. That might cause some anxiety for anyone who could be tuning into the news right now. The formal term is semiquincentennial, which is a bit of a mouthful. I’ve heard “sesquicentennial,” which means 150 years, on some podcast or other. That’s wrong, clearly. There’s no official prefix for “two and one half,” but apparently some folks are using “sester-,” so sestersentennial. “Some” is doing a lot of work there. Have some fun with it; make up your own! How about semisemimillennial, or the decasilver anniversary? You could try “semipenticentenary” (like tercentenary), but that’s getting pretty fancy.

Our second flag may never have been realized as a flag; it’s simply the 1976 Bicentennial logo printed on a flag. It’s easy to imagine this as a proper flag: remove the text, make the logo larger, and give the background some color. It’s visually striking and more distinctive than the official America 250 logo, which you can see in the featured image above.

The Bicentennial logo was everywhere, and it was immediately recognizable. Below, you can see the logo on the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center. No text was needed. Everyone knew that image.

Having lived through the Bicentennial, I’m disappointed in the 250th. This celebration, whether America 250 or Freedom 250, seems to merely be a few events in particular cities near the actual date of the anniversary. The Bicentennial seemed to be a years-long collection of events that involved the entire country. Schoolhouse Rock sang about American history and government for the entire year. I have strong memories of meeting the Freedom Train when it arrived in town and touring it, and of seeing the movie 1776 on a field trip to a theater on Clematis Street in West Palm Beach. Well, some of the movie. The teachers pulled us out of the theater halfway through because there were “too many GDs.” I’m still mad about that; it took me years to see the rest of the movie, which, by the way, is great.

Our third flag was the Bennington Flag, which we wrote about back in 2019. Like the Betsy Ross flag, its origins are shrouded in family lore rather than contemporary records. Legend holds that it was carried at the Battle of Bennington, then spirited off the field by Nathaniel Fillmore, who passed it down through generations of his family, including a certain US President. When the Smithsonian examined it, they found it was made of cotton and sewn with cotton thread, neither of which would have been readily available in 1777. They dated it to around 1820. So, like the Betsy Ross story, the flag we know and love probably didn’t exist when it was supposed to have made history. Still, it endures, with its distinctive arch of stars and the “76” in the canton, even if only for aesthetic reasons. If you’d like to read our original post, you can find it below.

Happy 4th of July! Bennington Flag

We flew the Serapis flag on 3 July, and it’s another one we’ve written about before. Where the origins of the Betsy Ross and Bennington flags were obscured by history, the genesis of the Serapis flag is known, and it was downright accidental. After John Paul Jones captured the HMS Serapis, his own ship’s colors had been destroyed in the battle, and continuing with no flag flying marked him as a pirate. A new flag was hastily created based on a sketchy, or perhaps garbled, description from Benjamin Franklin. The result was an unusual flag with red, white, and blue stripes and eight-pointed stars in the canton. It was enough for Jones to prove he was sailing under recognized American authority, and unlike many other flags, it has a documented pedigree. Here’s our original post, if you’d like more detail.

Our final flag was reserved for the Fourth; it’s a variant of the Betsy Ross flag with “1776-2026” embraced within the circle of stars. We’ll fly this one for a while.

The Serapis Flag

I like this as our marker of the quarter-millennial. The circle of thirteen stars explicitly calls back to the Betsy Ross flag and the date in the canton reminds us of the Bennington flag. The consistent design of the flag since its inception evokes every version and embraces our history back to the earliest days of the Republic. That embrace makes an unspoken argument about what this semiquincentennial should have been.

Unless I’m specifically writing about politics, I try to avoid it in blog posts. I need to make an exception here, for what are flags but markers of our political divisions? There’s another flag that’s available to mark the occasion; it’s another Betsy Ross variant, but with “250” within the circle. That flag is associated with Freedom 250, which was created to supplant the congressionally established America 250. America 250 was bipartisan and attempted to be inclusive. As near as I can tell, Freedom 250 seems to have an agenda and is frequently, ostentatiously partisan. I explicitly chose a flag that flies outside of that controversy, which I won’t detail here.

So, here we are, fifty years after the Bicentennial’s unifying spirit, with a celebration that has felt chaotic and disjointed. But like the Betsy Ross flag, America and its symbols belong to all of us. If we’re truly celebrating 250 years of the American Experiment, that celebration should include every American, transcend partisanship, and embrace a patriotism that grows from the self-evident truths laid out by the Founders and salutes our progress toward an egalitarian society.

That is worth celebrating.

References:

Picture Credits:

  • Featured Image: The America 250 logo.
  • Images 3 to 5: The bicentennial logo was created by Bruce Blackburn for the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration(ARBA).
  • The Vehicle Assembly Building: From NASA.org, cleaned up by Lumo (from Proton).

A Flag for the Fourth

Happy Independence Day!

We’ll begin in our usual way. To mark the occasion this year, we’re flying the “Bunker Hill Flag” which is a bit different from our usual July 4th flag; its not one of the variations of the stars and stripes. It’s famous for flying at the Battle of Bunker Hill the first major conflict of the Revolutionary War, except that it isn’t. I’ll explain. It’s a story reminiscent of the history of the Bennington Flag.

The Bunker Hill Flag, so named because many believe it was flown by the colonists at its eponymous battle, has a blue field with the red St. George Cross on a white background in the canton. In the upper left hand corner of the canton is a pine tree which to the colonists symbolized liberty.

There are no contemporary accounts of this flag being flown at the battle and most likely the colonists flew what is known as the colonial flag; a red ensign with a pine tree shown in the canton. Both of these flags are modeled on British flags with only the addition of a pine tree because at the time, many colonists still believed that reconciliation with Great Britain was possible.

The evidence that the blue Bunker Hill flag was flown at Bunker Hill consists entirely of a painting done by Jonathan Trumbull, an eye witness to the battle, and an interview of the daughter of a veteran of the battle.

But the daughter’s account only said that her father claimed to have raised a blue flag at the battle while an earlier version of Trumbull’s painting showed the blue flag colored red; that painting is considered to be evidence that the Continental Flag was used.

https://imgc.allpostersimages.com/img/print/u-g-PC9CCH0.jpg?w=550&h=550&p=0

There’s one piece of direct evidence that the Bunker Hill Flag was actually flown at the battle, a book published early in the 19th century. The book contained a picture of the flag but the description described it as red rather than blue. This is generally considered to be a printing error.

Despite it’s questionable origins, the Bunker Hill Flag became a symbol of both the Revolution and of New England. It remains in use as a flag of New England today.

This seems fitting. Despite Bunker Hill being the original objective of both the Americans and the British, most of the fighting occurred a third of a mile south on Breed’s Hill. Some even cal it “The Battle of Breed’s Hill.”

References

The Serapis Flag

The Serapis Flag

There are many variations of the United States Flag that were used in the early days of the republic. One of the more interesting is the Serapis Flag which we are now flying. Its existence is intimately tied to the Battle of Flamborough Head fought 240 years ago 0n 23 September 1779.

John Paul Jones

The story of the Serapis flag begins with the story of John Paul, a ship captain. Paul fled his native Scotland after killing a crewman who mutinied over wages, presumably refusing to trust his fate to an Admiralty Court. Paul emigrated to the colonies, renamed himself “John Paul Jones” and befriended Benjamin Franklin. He joined the Continental Navy, rose through the ranks and became the United States’ first famous naval commander. He is sometimes called the Father of the U. S. Navy. By 1779, Jones was in command of the Bonhomme Richard, named in honor Franklin’s pseudonym from Poor Richard’s Almanac.

The Serapis vs. the Bonhomme Richard

Bonhomme Richard was a former merchant ship that had been armed and upgraded to a ship of war. It led, under Jones’ command, a small squadron of ships. Near Flamborough Head, Yorkshire, this squadron encountered a British convoy under the protection of the HMS Serapis. Conflict ensued and Bonhomme Richard took severe damage from the better armed Serapis. When the British captain asked if the Richard had struck her colors (meaning that they had lowered their flag as a sign of surrender) Jones is said to have replied with the famous “I have not yet begun to fight!” The flag, in fact, had been destroyed in the battle.

Eventually, the tide of the battle turned and Jones managed to lash Bonhomme Richard to the Serapis. The American crew was able to board and capture the British ship while their own ship, badly damaged and on fire, sank into the North Sea.

But what does this have to do with the Serapis Flag? Only this. Jones, now in command of the Serapis, put into a neutral Dutch port for repairs. British officials accused Jones of being a pirate and demanded his arrest. He was, after all, sailing a captured ship which was not flying the colors of any known nation. Bonhomme Richard’s flag, remember, had been blown into the sea. A flag was hastily created for Jones’ ship and entered into the Dutch records, allowing the Dutch to officially recognize the captured ship.

The Serapis Flag was created according to a description of United States flag that was provided by Benjamin Franklin, who was then Ambassador to France.

“It is with pleasure that we acquaint your excellency that the flag of the United States of America consists of thirteen stripes, alternately red, white, and blue; a small square in the upper angle, next the flagstaff, is a blue field, with thirteen white stars, denoting a new constellation.”

The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States

And thus, this slightly garbled recounting of the Flag Resolution of 1777 is responsible for the distinctive look of the Serapis Flag. Because of this, the flag is also known as the Franklin Flag. It remains popular today and is frequently used in historical displays because of its uniqueness and its recognizably American character.

References:

Picture Credits: