Thursday, September 14, 2017

Thimble Pleasures


            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,
and they'll always remember you.

Buy the book "Courage 101: True Tales of Grit & Glory" at Amazon!

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