Our First Flag

Think that the first patriots of the American Revolution carried a striped flag with five-point stars on a field of blue?  No, that famous flag sewn by Betsy Ross wasn’t adopted until June of 1777.

It was the Grand Union Flag, known as the Continental Colors, that our troops carried. Introduced to the men by General George Washington on New Year’s Day, January 1, 1776, the Grand Union featured those seven red and six white alternating stripes representing the Thirteen Colonies with a 1606 British Union Flag in the canton. He raised it onto a 76-foot ‘Liberty’ pole on Prospect Hill over Boston where he and his army were encamped.

Until this time there was no united banner, the colonies created and carried their own state flags. Why the British Union flag? At this early stage of the revolution, most still considered themselves the be subjects and hoped for reconciliation. As those hopes faded, Congress went looking for a flag that would represent the new union, and we first saw the ‘Stars and Stripes.’ 

It was actually the British who caught first glimpse of the new flag a month earlier. At the end of 1775, the Continental Congress authorized the creation of an army and navy, and a banner was needed to designate American vessels and garrisons. The first ‘Grand Union’ was commissioned from another Philadelphia milliner, Margaret Manny and hoisted above the USS Alfred by naval hero John Paul Jones in the city’s harbor in the Delaware River in December of ’75.

The Revolutionary War produced many flags for the states and individual battalions to show their independence, many lost to us.  In 2025 the Museum of the American Revolution presented a rare collection of these flags and their history in ‘Banners of Liberty,’ available to view online.