Flag Day, June 14: What does the Flag mean?

After the Continental Army’s victories at Trenton and Princeton in Dec. 1776 and Jan. 1777, General George Washington and his men rested and regrouped. This gave Washington an opportunity to focus on something that his army and the American people needed: a new flag.

Washington had learned the hard way that their unofficial flag, the Grand Union flag, was too British. When he had flown the Grand Union flag as he successfully had driven the British military from Boston in March 1776, the British had thought that he was flying a British flag. Why? Despite its 13 stripes, the Grand Union Flag featured the British flag in the upper left quadrant.

This confusion exposed a need for a new flag that distinguished America in its new, non-British identity.

Washington discussed the flag matter with members of the Continental Congress and others. Months later, the Continental Congress passed a resolution on June 14, 1777, describing the first official flag of the United States of America.

“In CONGRESS, June 14, 1777. Resolved, That the FLAG of the United States be THIRTEEN STRIPES alternate red and white; that the union be THIRTEEN STARS white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.”[i] The public first learned about it when the Pennsylvania Evening Post reported on Aug. 30, 1777, the minutes from Congress’s June 14 meeting.

Gone were the Union Jack and the Grand Union flags. Gone, too, were the thirteen British colonies. Replacing them were America’s new thirteen states, which both the flag’s stripes and stars represented. In this way, the new flag reflected the Declaration of Independence, which Congress had passed nearly a year earlier on July 4, 1776.

These states were more than just separate entities. Whereas the colonies had often acted as separate nation states disjointed from each other, these new united states were united into one nation. The flag’s purpose was to symbolize not just a new nation, but a united nation.

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