She eloped
to New Jersey and married her first husband John Ross in a bar. Her church then
promptly excommunicated her. He belonged to a different denomination, and he
may have been mentally ill. When Ross died shortly thereafter, she wasted no
time in marrying again. And when that man died in a foreign prison, she married
the man who had told her the bad news.
She was
Betsy Ross of Philadelphia, and she was her own woman. She ran her own business—a
rarity for the time. In her final years, she loved nothing more than dipping
snuff while sitting with the Bible in her lap.
Did she
invent the design of the first American flag? Probably not. Did she sew the
first American flag? Maybe. But as an exemplar of a courageous woman ahead of
her time, she fits the bill.
In the
early days of the American Revolution, the colonials dreamed up different
flags. Some showed a British Union Jack on a red field. Other had a Union Jack
with stripes. A coiled rattlesnake appeared on one flag above the words "Don't Tread on Me."
General
Washington loathed all American flags containing the Union Jack. Said the
future President: "“I presume [the British soldiers] begin to think it
strange [upon seeing those flags] that we have not made a formal surrender of
our lines.”
In June
1777, the Continental Congress passed a law mandating that the new nation’s
flag consist of thirteen alternating red and white stripes with a blue field
containing 13 stars. Lawyers being lawyers, the law said nothing about how the
design would be arranged.
"Modesty and Self-Reliance"
Nearly 100
years later in 1870, William Canby, Ross’s grandson, told a Pennsylvania
historical society a remarkable story, all the more so because he was only 11
when she died.
"Sitting
sewing in her shop one day with her girls around her, several gentlemen
entered. She recognized one of these as the uncle of her deceased husband, Col.
George Ross, a delegate from Pennsylvania to Congress. She also knew the
handsome form and features of the dignified, yet graceful and polite Commander
in Chief, who, while he was yet Colonel Washington had visited her shop both
professionally and socially many times (a friendship caused by her connection
with the Ross family) they announced themselves as a committee of congress, and
stated that they had been appointed to prepare a flag, and asked her if she
thought she could make one, to which she replied, with her usual modesty and
self-reliance, that “she did not know but she could try; she had never made one
but if the pattern were shown to her she had not doubt of her ability to do
it.”
At the
time, Ross was an upholsterer. It was a different profession than the one we
know today. She would have been sewing blankets and tents, repairing uniforms,
and making cartridges colonial soldiers used their muskets. (These were paper
tubes in which musket balls were wrapped.) Upholsterers also made flags.
Historians
agree that it is likely the visitors, whoever they were, showed her a proposed
design. Her family's account says that she liked the design except that the flag
had six-pointed stars. Ross said they were too much trouble to sew. The
gentlemen disagreed, but by swiftly folding a piece of paper and making a few
deft cuts, she showed them how easy it would be for her to manufacture such stars.
Apparently, they agreed, the resulting evidence being on every American flag.
(Recent
research has determined that Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of
Independence who represented New Jersey at the Continental Congress, created
the design that she saw.)
Born
Elizabeth Griscom on January 1, 1752, she was the eighth of 17 children. Her
family liked to say she was “born on the first day of the month, the first day
of the year, the first day of the new style," for the new Gregorian calendar
had just been adopted. It kept better track of leap years.
She was a
Quaker. Her first husband was Episcopalian. They had apprenticed together in
the same upholstery shop for five years. For whatever reasons, they made their
away across the Delaware River and were married in Hugg's Tavern in New Jersey,
and their marriage license was signed by Ben Franklin's son.
As a
Quaker, she was forbidden to marry outside of her church. When the elders asked
her to meet with them, she refused to admit she had done anything wrong by
marrying an Episcopalian. What's more, she told them she would be attending his
church from then on. Her parents were censured for their inability to control
her, and they apologized. The local Quaker records describe Ross as being
"undutiful" and "Disorderly."
Luckily for
Ross, if the traditional story is true, she met Washington during Episcopal
church services. Some accounts have her making embroidered ruffles for his
shirts and their cuffs. No one knows whether this is true or not, just as there
is no independent record of Ross and Washington ever meeting. Ross's daughter
said that the he "had often been in her house in friendly visits, as well
as on business," though she was yet to be born at that time.
Two years
later in 1775, John Ross was dead. Some say he died in a gunpowder explosion
while guarding a munitions at a wharf. Unfortunately, there is no records of
any such disaster. When Betsy was elderly, she made cryptic references to her
late husband's questionable sanity; indeed, his mother spent years in a lunatic
asylum.
After the
passage of only a year and a half, Ross married ship captain Joseph Ashburn in
1777. While he was at sea, the British surrendered to Washington at Yorktown in
1781. Then in April 1782, she picked up a newspaper which contained a list of the
names of men captured at sea by the British during the winter of 1780. Her
husband's name was on that list.
One Common Thread
How he died
no one knows, though an account says he "bore with amazing fortitude
retaining his senses till the last moment of his life."
Strangely,
John Claypoole, the man who would become her third husband, informed Ross of
his death. He had also gone to sea and had also been imprisoned with Ashburn. She
married him in 1783 after being a widow for only 14 months. He was Quaker, and
together they ran an upholstery shop.
One common
thread, so to speak, in Ross's life was her work as an upholsterer. She sewed
for six decades. Her shop did more than make clothes. In those days
establishments such as hers sold fine furniture, wallpaper, textiles,
mattresses, and curtains. It was a stable—and lucrative—profession. After her
husband had a stroke, she was the family's sole breadwinner, and she had with four
daughters at home under the age of 16.
She
regularly attended Quaker meetings, though towards the end of her life, there
were so few members—only her and one other person—that the congregation
disbanded.
The last
three years of her life she was blind. The cause is unknown. Perhaps the
extreme demands of finely detailed sewing ruined her vision She died in her
sleep at the age of 84.
MORAL: Keep people in
stitches,
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