A January 1776 Sketch of the Flag on Prospect Hill

We have two remarks from British observers inside besieged Boston about the flag the Continentals raised on Prospect Hill in what’s now Somerville in January 1776.

Peter Force’s American Archives included a letter from the captain of a British ship to his employers in London, dated 17 January, which says:

I can see the rebels’ camp very plain, whose colors, a little while ago, were entirely red; but on the receipt of the king’s speech, which they burnt, they hoisted the union flag, which is here supposed to intimate the union of the provinces.

Richard Frothingham’s History of the Siege of Boston quoted a British officer:

Lieut. [William] Carter...was on Charlestown Heights, and says, January 26: “The king’s speech was sent by a flag to them on the 1st instant [i.e., of this month]. In a short time after they received it, they hoisted an union flag (above the continental with the thirteen stripes) at Mount Pisgah; their citadel fired thirteen guns, and gave the like number of cheers.”

Back in 2006 in the vexillogical journal Raven Peter Ansoff argued that if the “union flag” meant the British flag, then perhaps “the continental with the thirteen stripes” was a second banner flown below it.

In 2013 Byron DeLear responded in favor of the traditional understanding that the army was flying the new Continental Navy banner, including examples of “union flag” as a blanket term for many banners with a Union Jack canton.

Fortunately, we also have an image from a British officer of the flag flying over the Continental fortification. It’s dated 4 Jan 1776—the same day that Gen. George Washington wrote about the flag to his former military secretary, Joseph Reed.

That image was sketched by Lt. Archibald Robertson as part of a multi-page panorama view from his posting on Bunker’s Hill. His notebook is now owned by the New-York Public Library, which digitized those pages. Back in 2015 Boston 1775 reader Marc Shelikoff pointed out how Robertson had shown Prospect Hill.

And here is the sketch:

That’s a detail from this page.

No wonder the British in Boston thought the Continentals were ready to surrender—they were flying a white flag!

Well, not really. Obviously Robertson simply sketched the outline of the union flag that others mentioned. He was an engineer, interested in topography and fortifications rather than flag design.

But Robertson’s drawing still contributes to our understanding of the Prospect Hill flag. First of all, this strongly suggests it was a single banner, not one over another. Second, it was big! That’s probably what Washington meant when he referred to a “great Union Flag.”

TOMORROW: The Pennsylvania Packet sources.

More Questions on the “Grand Union Flag”

Back in January I wrote a couple of posts about the flag that the Continental Army raised in Cambridge in early January 1776. Gen. George Washington referred to that banner in a letter as “the union flag.”

By the late 1800s, that phrase had evolved into “the Grand Union Flag,” which became the standard label for the design pictured at right: a banner with the British union flag as a canton and thirteen red and white stripes.

This month, flag scholar Peter Ansoff alerted me to “The Flag on Prospect Hill,” an article he wrote for the 2006 issue of the journal Raven, published by the North American Vexillological Association. The nicely illustrated article is available for downloading at the top of this index. Peter argues that the flag Washington watched go up in January 1776 “was not, in fact, the so-called ‘Grand Union’, but simply a British Union flag.”

Interesting. I strongly agree with Peter that in early 1776 the Continental Congress and army commanders still saw and presented themselves as fighting for traditional British liberties, not yet for American independence.

At the same time, people within the siege lines saw the 2 Jan 1776 flag-raising as significant, implying it represented some change from whatever banner they had seen flying on Prospect Hill before. Even Washington, without describing the flag itself, said that “the day...gave being to the new army,” and the flag was raised “in compliment to the United Colonies.” So he was trying to signal something “new,” whether or not the signal itself was new.

Of the two witnesses in the British forces, a sea-captain said the “union flag” was a change from an “entirely red” banner. Lt. William Carter of the 40th Regiment wrote that the Continentals “hoisted a union flag (above the continental with the thirteen stripes).” Peter writes, “it seems fairly clear from [Carter’s] phrasing that he is talking about a Union Flag flying above another, striped flag,” as opposed to a Union canton over stripes within the same banner.

However, that begs the question of what “the continental with the thirteen stripes” would have been. Peter notes that by January 1776 the Continental Congress had planned a naval ensign that Richard Henry Lee described as “a Jack [sic] with the Union flag, and striped red and white in the field”—in other words, the “Grand Union.” But he feels that flag hadn’t yet made its way to Cambridge headquarters yet. It’s not mentioned in Washington’s correspondence with the Congress.

Definitely more for flag scholars to think about.

Did the Union Flag Disappoint Boston’s Loyalists?

Yesterday I quoted Gen. George Washington’s January 1776 report that Loyalists in Boston were hopeful that the Continental Army’s new Great or Grand Union Flag (shown at right, as available from FlagandBanner.com) indicated that American soldiers had heard George III’s admonitory speech and decided to capitulate. But was that report well founded?

I rounded up my usual sources from inside the besieged town: selectman Timothy Newell, Col. Earl Percy, Capt. John Barker, merchant John Rowe, and the Boston News-Letter, which was the one newspaper still being printed there. And I found no discussion of the Continentals’ new flag or a renewed hope that they had decided to surrender. And that seems like the sort of thing those people might mention.

In fact, three British reports about the American activity on 2 Jan 1776 indicate that people saw nothing in it but continued defiance. Peter Force’s American Archives includes a letter from the captain of a British ship to his employers in London, dated 17 January, which says:

I can see the rebels’ camp very plain, whose colors, a little while ago, were entirely red; but on the receipt of the king’s speech, which they burnt, they hoisted the union flag, which is here supposed to intimate the union of the provinces.

At the end of the year, the Annual Register, Edmund Burke’s London news round-up, reported (perhaps based on that very captain’s letter):

The arrival of a copy of the king’s speech, with an account of the fate of the petition from the continental congress, is said to have excited the greatest degree of rage and indignation among them; as a proof of which, the former was publicly burnt in the camp; and they are said upon this occasion, to have 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.

We can gauge the popularity of the Annual Register from the fact that nearly the same sentence, word for word, appeared in James Murray’s An Impartial History of the Present War in America (1780); Robert Beatson’s Naval and Military Memoirs of Great Britain, from 1727 to 1783 (1804); and R. Thomas’s A Pictorial History of the United States of America (1847). Plagiarists cannot hide from Google Books. Schuyler Hamilton’s History of the National Flag of the United States of America (1853) quoted both those sources, with citations. George Henry Preble’s 1872 history of the flag had a short and inaccurate quotation of the Annual Register passage, to match its short and innaccurate quotations of other sources; those, in turn, were reprinted in a number of later flag histories.

Finally, Richard Frothingham’s History of the Siege of Boston quoted a British officer.

Lieut. [William] Carter...was on Charlestown Heights, and says, January 26: “The king’s speech was sent by a flag to them on the 1st instant [i.e., of this month]. In a short time after they received it, they hoisted an union flag (above the continental with the thirteen stripes) at Mount Pisgah; their citadel fired thirteen guns, and gave the like number of cheers.”

None of these British sources hint that people in Boston saw the new thirteen-stripe flag as a sign of imminent American capitulation. And why would they have done so? The Continentals had been flying a flag with a Union Jack in the corner and a red field—a traditional British flag. This new “great union flag” shifted a little away from that standard by adding symbols of the thirteen colonies. Its Union Jack canton still displayed the Whigs’ allegiance to traditional British rights, but it was now a banner exclusive to America.

Granted, those three British reports all date from two weeks or more after the new flag appeared, so there might have been time for Loyalist hopes to rise and fade. But as far as I can tell, our only source for the belief that people inside Boston expected a surrender is the one anonymous person who came out of the town on 3 Jan 1776 and told Washington something the commander-in-chief was pleased to hear. The whole anecdote might have been based on nothing more than a short conversation between a couple of guys.

“Huh. New flag. What do you think it means?”

“Maybe they’re giving up.”

“You really think so?”

“Well, we did just send them the king’s speech.”

“I guess. Still, that’s a lot to hope for.”

“We’ll see in a few days, I’m sure. You coming for dinner Thursday?”

“Thursday? You know, I might be out of town...”

[ADDENDUM: But a flag expert has raised questions about the traditional interpretation of these sources—did the “Grand Union Flag” even exist?]