“The grand union flag of thirteen stripes was raised…”

In 1852 the British magazine Notes and Queries published a letter asking about the origin of the U.S. flag and then a response from America.

In addition to answering the first letter’s question, that response described earlier American flags:

ORIGIN OF THE STARS AND STRIPES.

(Vol. ii., p. 135.) [the original query]

JARLTZBERG wishes to know the origin of the stars and stripes in the American flag. . . .

The grand union flag of thirteen stripes was raised on the heights near Boston, January 2, 1776. Letters from there say that the regulars in Boston did not understand it; and as the king’s speech had just been sent to the Americans, they thought the new flag was a token of submission.

The British Annual Register of 1776 says: “They burnt the king’s speech and changed their colours from a plain red ground, which they had hitherto used, to a flag with thirteen stripes, as a symbol of the number and union of the colonies.”

A letter from Boston about the same time, published in the Penna Gazette for January, 1776, says: “The grand union flag was raised on the 2nd, in compliment to the united colonies.” . . .

T. WESTCOTT.
Philadelphia, U. S. A., June 5, 1852.

I believe this letter came from Thompson Westcott (1820–1888), a lawyer, journalist, and local historian.

This was, as far as I can tell, the first use of the phrase “grand union flag.” Westcott appears to have come up with that phrase by mistake. He cited the Pennsylvania Gazette, and indeed on 17 Jan 1776 that newspaper reprinted the item from the Pennsylvania Packet that I quoted yesterday. But that article said “great Union Flag.”

Later in 1852 Westcott was probably pleased to see his Notes and Queries letter reprinted in Arthur’s Home Magazine, based in Philadelphia, and in several American newspapers.

The text made the newspaper rounds again in 1857, also appearing in Things Not Generally Known: A Popular Hand-book of Facts Not Readily Accessible in Literature, History, and Science by David A. Wells (1857).

The article was handy patriotic filler for editors, so it even showed up in The American Mining Gazette and Geological Magazine (1866) with no credit to the original source.

In 1872 George Henry Preble (1816–1885, shown above) published Our Flag: Origin and Progress of the Flag of the United States of America. Without citing the Notes and Queries letter, which he might not have seen directly, Preble quoted and paraphrased it in his discussion of the 1776 flag.

One of those uses was: “A letter from Boston in the Pennsylvania Gazette, says: ‘the grand union flag was raised on the 2d, in compliment to the United Colonies,’…” Preble thus replicated Westcott’s error in transcribing the newspaper article, replacing “great” with “grand.”

Preble also wrote:

An anonymous letter, written under date Jan. 2, 1776, says: “The grand union flag of thirteen stripes was raised on a height near Boston. The regulars did not understand it, and as the king’s speech had just been read as they supposed, they thought the new flag was a token of submission.”

No one has found the original of that letter from 1776 because it wasn’t written in 1776. Those are Westcott’s own words for Notes and Queries, stating his findings.

Preble thus both relied on the Notes and Queries letter and mangled it. To his credit, he also collected other sources about the 1776 flag, including Gen. George Washington’s letter to Joseph Reed, observations by British officers, and a passage from Carlo Botta’s History of the American Revolution (1809).

Soon after that, around the Centennial of 1876, newspaper editors summarizing Westcott and/or Preble began to capitalize “Grand Union Flag.” That became the semi-official name for the design the Continental Congress had actually established for its new navy. Based on the misquotations, people believed the term was used in 1776, but it was really only a quarter-century old.

TOMORROW: A British officer’s sketch of the flag on Prospect Hill.