Betsy Ross and the Making of America by Marla Miller

The book opens with a number of qualifiers. Despite Betsy Ross' wide renown as the maker of the first U.S. flag, there is actually very little evidence for that beyond family legend. What we have to offer is that no one else has been as successful at making such a claim. This is the first scholarly biography of her life, not because she is an unknown or uninteresting person, but because so little documentation about her exists. She was married three times, in relatively rapid succession, and had mostly daughters.

The lack of information about our early flags doesn't stop at the documentation. We just don't have many of them, period. Recently four flags from this era were sold at auction for over $17 million. They had been captured from American troops by a swashbuckling Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton during the Revolutionary War and taken back to England after the battle at Yorktown. That Britain had valued these battle standards more than we had is remarkable, and may go a ways towards explaining why the Betsy Ross story is so similarly murky.

Miller uses what is known about Betsy Griscum Ross Ashburn Claypoole from the record, and blends it with what is know about tradeswomen of the time, what was going on in Philadelphia, and the nation at that time. She avoids a typical blunder I have seen in Revolutionary War period literature of over-emphasizing the war and what led up to it, and rather focuses on how the events unfolding from 1770 onward would have affected an upholsterer in Philadelphia--the price and availability of fabric, the need for imported goods, and how that might have affected the Ross' public versus private support for the war, and how the subsequent expansion of industry in the United States post-war would have helped.