Congress sets the flag: thirteen stripes, thirteen stars, "a new constellation"
Two years into a war with no guaranteed outcome, the Second Continental Congress paused long enough to define what its armies were fighting under. On June 14, 1777, meeting in Philadelphia, the Congress passed the Flag Resolution: thirteen stripes, alternate red and white, with thirteen stars on a blue field — "representing a new constellation." The resolution named no designer, specified no arrangement of the stars, and gave no guidance on which stripe color came first. It was less a grand proclamation than a brief administrative order, and it has outlasted nearly everything else that Congress ever produced.
The Flag Resolution of June 14, 1777 launched a design that has been revised officially twenty-six times — most recently in 1960, when Hawaii's admission required a new arrangement drawn by a seventeen-year-old Ohio student. The fifty-star flag has now flown longer than any previous version, outlasting the original thirteen-star design by more than a century. What began as a naval identification tool became the most recognized national symbol in American life.
QWho is the most credible candidate for designing the original Stars and Stripes — and why did Congress refuse to pay him?
Francis Hopkinson of New Jersey — a signer of the Declaration of Independence and chairman of the Continental Navy Board's Middle Department — submitted a detailed invoice to Congress in May 1780 requesting payment for designing the U.S. flag and several other government devices. Congress rejected his claim on the grounds that he had not been the sole designer and that he already received a government salary. The dispute was never resolved, and Hopkinson died in 1791 with the question still open. His name rarely appears in popular accounts of the flag's origin, largely because the Betsy Ross legend, which emerged in the 1870s, crowded out the documentary record.
QWhat did the soldiers at Fort Stanwix use to make the first Stars and Stripes flown in battle?
When British and Loyalist forces besieged Fort Stanwix in upstate New York on August 3, 1777, the garrison had no official flag. Soldiers assembled one from materials scavenged inside the fort: white shirts were cut into white stripes, red flannel petticoats provided the red stripes, and a blue coat was fashioned into the star field. The improvised flag flew over the fort throughout the siege — the first documented instance of the Stars and Stripes in combat. The gap between the Flag Resolution's passage on June 14 and this first battlefield appearance was less than seven weeks.
QHow vague was the original Flag Resolution — and what did that vagueness cost later flag makers?
The Flag Resolution of June 14, 1777 ran to a single sentence. It specified thirteen alternating red-and-white stripes and thirteen white stars on a blue field but gave no instruction on the arrangement of the stars, the number of points on each star, the orientation of the flag, or even which stripe color — red or white — appeared at the top. Early flags varied considerably as a result: some had stars in rows, others in circles, some with six-pointed stars, others with five. It was not until the early nineteenth century that any standardization took hold, and even then, it was informal. Congress did not mandate a specific star arrangement until 1912.
