"Specialists on American flag culture agree that the earliest roots of star-spangled sentiment lay not in the Revolution but in the country's second war with England. The war's most notable creation was Francis Scott Key's "Star Spangled Banner" which would give the flag a name and the country a national anthem."

Star-spangled Sentiment
Robert E. Bonner

II. Out of reach — an idea only . . .

Today's patriots tell a very particular story about the history of the American flag. In this story, Flag Day marks the anniversary of the banner's "birth," with Betsy Ross its mother. The flag's thirteen stripes document the initial size of the Union, just as its fifty stars tell of the nation's growth. The flag's story is always accompanied by rousing music and streaming banners, as the flag not only leads Americans through war but also presides over defining experiences like immigrants' arrival at Ellis Island, African-Americans' quest for voting rights, and Neil Armstrong's landing on the moon. As omnipresent as Woody Allen's Zelig, the Stars and Stripes seems to have missed few truly important events in American history.

It took considerable energy to create this tapestry of flag images and icons. In many cases, patriots had to retrospectively drape the past with stars and stripes, especially when portraying the flag's earliest years. The Founders' own comparative neglect of their new national symbols required later generations to fabricate—out of whole cloth, one might say—a series of legends that could project flag passions back in time. The best-known case was the Betsy Ross story, which was first presented to the American public in the 1870s. Other famous patriotic images, such as Emmanuel Leutze's 1855 Washington Crossing the Delaware or Archibald Williard's slightly later The Spirit of '76, were part of this same process.

Specialists on American flag culture agree that the earliest roots of star-spangled sentiment lay not in the Revolution but in the country's second war with England. The war's most notable creation was Francis Scott Key's "Star Spangled Banner" which would give the flag a name and the country a national anthem. Less lasting, though no less important to the 1810s, was Joseph Rodman Drake's poem, "The American Flag," which focused not on a particular scene, but on this symbol's mystical origin, imagining the flag's first heavenly appearance:

When Freedom from her mountain height
Unfurled her standard to the air,
She tore the azure robe of night
And set the stars of glory there.
She mingled with its gorgeous dyes
The milky baldrick of the skies,
And striped its pure celestial white
With streakings of the morning light.

Drake's association of the flag with the "Freedom" of heavenly stars lasted through the secession crisis, when his first stanza was placed directly beneath the 1861 lithograph Our Heaven Born Banner. The soldier in this picture, and all the viewers who were implicitly asked to follow his gaze, confronted a mystical image that was meant to change the way they saw the colored cloth suddenly waving in nearly every public place.

Fig. 3. Our Heaven-Born Banner, 1861. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

At the same time that Drake's poem was accompanying new images, Key's more famous tribute from the war of 1812 was generating criticism. Richard Grant White led a committee in 1861 to choose a more appropriate national song than the "Star Spangled Banner," which he and other genteel critics associated with spread-eagle expansionism and anti-immigrant nativism. "Who cannot but wish that the spangles could be taken out," White asked, "and a good, honest flag be substituted for the banner!" What the country needed, he believed, was a set of patriotic tunes and rituals that were less specific in their associations and less warlike in their imagery and tone. In 1861, Henry Ward Beecher echoed this view in associating the flag not with armies but with the noble ideas associated with its "bright morning stars of God" and "beams of morning light."

The "Star Spangled Banner" survived the Civil War, of course, though it would be joined by wartime flag music that, while just as bellicose, would lend a new sense of purpose to the violence associated with flags. The only blood of Francis Scott Key's anthem was that of invading soldiers and slaves, which, as Key explains in his largely forgotten third stanza, "wiped out their foul footstep's pollution." Drake had similarly emphasized how the American flag could blot out violence, as he urged the banner to "ward away the battle-stroke" and to turn soldiers' eyes upward so that they might look away from "the life-blood, warm and wet" that had "dimmed the glistening bayonet." In contrast to such lyrical gestures, Civil War poets like Julia Ward Howe focused far less on the triumph of killing the enemy than on honoring patriotic martrydom. By the end of the war, the patriotic ideal of looking upwards towards higher ideals would be joined to an even more solemn task of gazing downwards on fallen bodies.