On New Year’s Day, 1776, George Washington ordered the first American flag raised to the top of a 76-foot liberty pole at the summit of a hill in Charlestown (now Somerville), Mass. Standing in formation on the hillside, several thousand soldiers watched the red, white and blue flutter against the sky. Redcoats saw it from the ships at anchor in the harbor and from their quarters in Boston, across the Charles River. The town’s inhabitants, patriot and loyalist alike, could see the flag, and so could the country people in the snow-covered fields beyond the hill.
Grand Union Flag
One after another, 13 cannon boomed, and the troops on the hillside let out loud “huzzahs!”
The soldiers no longer belonged to a colonial militia, but to the Continental Army. Washington ordered the first American flag raised to recognize the birth of the national fighting force.
It had been a difficult birth, and it almost didn’t happen. Washington himself thought it a near-miracle that the untrained, undisciplined militias had kept the British holed up in Boston for six months. If they somehow won the siege, Washington told John Hancock, he would view it as the luckiest thing that ever happened to him.
The First American Flag
The flag wasn’t the Stars and Stripes, but it was the first to represent all 13 colonies. Until then, each colony used its own flag. Massachusetts flew the Taunton flag, which bore the motto “Liberty and Unity.”
The Taunton Flag, adopted by the people of Taunton in 1774
New York raised the George Rex flag, which got in an anti-Catholic dig: “GEORGE III REX and the LIBERTIES of AMERICA NO POPERY.”
The George Rex Flag
The flag that flew over Prospect Hill that day was probably the “Grand Union Flag.” It had the Union Jack in the canton—the joined crosses of St. Andrew and St. George—and 13 red-and-white stripes. Some historians believe the flags expressed the colonists’ desire to reconcile with Britain. The 13 stripes showed the 13 colonies united, but the Union Jack acknowledged Britain’s sovereignty. After all, it was six months before the Declaration of Independence. Many colonists simply wanted Parliament to treated them on a level with other British subjects.
Some expected King George III to take up their cause with Parliament. But that hope would soon be dashed. The British had just distributed printed copies of the King’s speech to Parliament in October. A messenger would deliver it to Continental Army officers under a flag of truce.
The speech did not suggest the King supported the rebellion. King George instead announced he was sending more troops and ships to the colonies. They would suppress the “desperate conspiracy.” He also said he received “the most friendly offers of assistance” to put a “speedy end” to the revolt.
Redcoats Misinterpret the First American Flag
The British thought the colonial army had gotten the news about the King’s speech. What they apparently didn’t know was that the colonials would burn the speech on Prospect Hill. And so, they thought Washington had raised the flag to signal a willingness to surrender.
George Washington Before the Battle of Trenton by John Trumbull
Washington later wrote,
We gave great Joy to them (the red Coats I mean) without knowing or intending it, for on that day, the day which gave being to the New Army (but before the Proclamation came to hand) we had hoisted the Union Flag in compliment to the United Colonies. But behold! it was received at Boston as a token of the deep impression the speech had made upon us, and as a signal of submission. By this time, I presume, they begin to think it strange that we have not made a formal surrender of our lines.
The New Continental Army
What were Washington’s thoughts as he watched the first American flag raised on that snowy hill? Probably both relief and trepidation.
Washington takes command.
Washington had taken command of the armed forces—a collection of colonial militias and volunteers—on July 2, 1775, two weeks after the Battle of Bunker Hill. He’d expected 20,000 troops, but after a week of counting he discovered he only had 16,500. They were undisciplined, insubordinate, untrained and slovenly—and 2,500 weren’t even fit for duty.
However, the colonial forces held strong positions in the hills surrounding Boston. For example, 3,500 fighting men camped on Prospect Hill, nicknamed “The Citadel.” The heavily fortified hill had such commanding views that Washington frequently visited from his headquarters to check out British troop movements.
But Washington had no hope of attacking the British. The men had inferior weapons and almost no artillery. They had so little gunpowder that Washington ordered spears issued to them.
They also had little firewood, and as winter set in the men had to eat their rations cold. As the months dragged on, the patriotic fervor inflamed by the Battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill subsided. Nearly all enlistments expired on or before December 31. The army began to melt away. By early December, only a few thousand men had signed up beyond New Year’s Eve.
John Hancock by John Singleton Copley
Washington summarized their desperate situation in a letter to Hancock:
It is not in the pages of History perhaps, to furnish a case like ours; to maintain a post within Musket Shot of the Enemy for Six months together, without—and at the same time to disband one Army and recruit another, within that distance, of Twenty odd British regiments, is more probably than ever was attempted; But if we succeed as well in the last, as we have heretofore in the first, I shall think it the most fortunate event of my whole life.
As luck would have it, the British had no clue about the miserable condition of the colonial forces that besieged them. A deserter had gone over to Gen. Thomas Gage, the British commander, and described the colonials’ dire straits. Gage found the description so incredible he treated it as a stratagem of war and the informant as a spy.
The Army at the First American Flag Raising
Not all the new Continental Army watched the first American flag raised on Prospect Hill. Thousands would enlist in the coming months. Ten thousand had marched to Quebec, only to suffer defeat on Dec. 31, 1775 (Washington didn’t know it yet).
Continental Army foot soldiers.
Washington had concerns about the army’s discipline as well as its size. In his general orders on the day the first American flag flew over Prospect Park, he said:
This day giving commencement to the new army, which, in every point of View is entirely Continental, . . . His Excellency hopes that the Importance of the great Cause we are engaged in, will be deeply impressed upon every Man’s mind, and wishes it to be considered, that an Army without Order, Regularity and Discipline, is no better than a Commission’d Mob.
Prospect Hill today
‘United States of America’
The day after the flag raising, Stephen Moylan, Washington’s aide-de-camp, wrote a letter to his friend Joseph Reed. In it, he used a phrase that showed the rebellious colonists not only thought themselves as united, they no longer thought of themselves as colonists.
Moylan thought the colonies could use an ambassador to Spain. He knew the country and thought he could do the job. And so he wrote to Reed in Philadelphia. The letter included the line,
“I should like vastly to go with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain.”
Washington and others may have said “United States of America” in conversation. But no one has found an earlier reference to those four words.
Celebrating the First American Flag Raising
Every year, the City of Somerville commemorates that first flag raising on Prospect Hill. (Click here for information about this year’s event.)
This year, the celebration kicks off Revolution 250, Massachusetts’ year-long anniversary party for the semiquincentennial of the American Revolutionary War. The 250th is being celebrated throughout the country. Don’t miss out on the exciting events scheduled in New England. The New England Historical Society’s “Revolutionary War Sites in New England” has up-to-date listings of Revolutionary events, as well as a complete guide to historical sites linked to the War for Independence.
Click here to order your copy today.
Images: Grand Union Flag By Mmangan333 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=132392902. Prospect Hill Tower (view) by Eric Kilby via Flickr, CC by SA 2.0.
