BETSY ROSS AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA

A full-length biography of an American icon.

Miller (History/Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst) paints a detailed portrait of the woman credited with the creation of the Stars and Stripes. In fact, the story of George Washington’s visit to Betsy Ross (1752–1836), in which she showed him that five-pointed stars were easier to make than the six-pointed ones he wanted, is impossible to verify. The documentary record shows only that Ross, who earned her living as an upholsterer, was one of several Philadelphians paid by the Continental Congress to make flags for the American forces during the Revolution. With so little evidence for Ross’s main claim to fame, Miller digs into colonial and early federal history to examine the life of a working-class woman of the era. She covers Ross’s Quaker upbringing, her apprenticeship in the trade she would follow all her life, her three marriages, the impact of the Revolution on daily life and the growth of the young republic. Ross’s circle of relatives and acquaintances gives the author plenty of fodder for a survey of the changes in politics, religion, domestic life, social customs and economic trends of the time. For example, we get a look at conditions in an English prison where captured American sailors, including her second and third husbands, were held during the war; at controversies within the Philadelphia Friends meeting, which had expelled the young upholsterer for marrying outside the fold; and at the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793, in which she lost her father and her sister. With copious notes and an extensive bibliography, Miller provides an exhaustive picture of the life of a craftswoman in colonial times, though readers with only a casual interest in the subject may find it long-winded and digressive.

Sometimes stiff, but more often rewarding.