Betsy Ross and Oral Tradition
When debunkers pulled Paul Revere from his horse, historians enlarged his story, turning one ride into many and a single act of patriotism into a complex narrative of revolutionary activity. In like manner, historians of Plymouth used the mythical character of the First Thanksgiving to introduce a more complex narrative of migration, settlement, and cultural transformation. So far, the story of Betsy Ross has been left to the mythmakers. As a consequence, the argument over her story hasn’t moved an inch from its nineteenth-century beginnings. Now, as then, Betsy’s defenders pit the power of oral transmission against a scholarly fixation on written sources. “It is not a tradition,” Canby wrote George Preble in 1871, “it is [a] report from the lips of the principal participator in the transaction, directly told not to one or two, but a dozen or more living witnesses, of whom I myself am one, though but a little boy when I heard it.”
The semi-official Betsy Ross Website continues in the same vein. To the question, “Can Canby be trusted?” they respond, “Can Betsy Ross herself be trusted?” They argue that since Canby got his story straight from the source, the real question is, “Did Betsy, a known flagmaker, embellish the truth by saying she made the first one?” Surely Betsy, the patriotic Quaker, could not have told a lie. To the argument that “Congress did not adopt an official flag until June 1777, a full year after Betsy claimed to have made the flag,” they respond, “Congress acting within one year! Not bad.” For them, the controversy remains what it was in 1870, a quibble between those who insist upon written documents and those willing to listen to living witnesses. The authors conclude confidently, “Historians, to their credit, always want source documentation. However, in this case, the circumstantial evidence has to be weighed. We find that it overwhelmingly supports Betsy Ross as the maker of the first flag.”
They have a point. Family traditions often convey information that would otherwise be lost. It is worth remembering that until DNA testing forced them to reconsider, many scholars dismissed the family stories that identified Thomas Jefferson as the father of Sally Hemings’s children. But unlike Ross, Hemings did not become a national icon. Popular history chooses its own company. It is not enough to tell a good story. That story must be something other people want to hear.
The debate over Betsy Ross exposes the difficulty of including women in a national narrative constructed around the biographies of leading figures. To defend Betsy Ross as Everywoman means abandoning her as heroine. But what if we really paid attention to those nineteenth-century stories, listening not for what they tell us about the first flag but for what they tell us about women’s perceptions of their own history?