William Canby's account of Betsy Ross sewing the first American flag appeared in Harper's Monthly, spreading the legend nationwide.
In the July 1873 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, William J. Canby's account of his grandmother Betsy Ross's alleged role in creating the first American flag reached a vastly wider national audience than his original 1870 address to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
Harper's Monthly was among the most widely circulated periodicals of the era, and its publication of the story cemented the Betsy Ross narrative in American popular consciousness well before the nation's 1876 centennial celebrations, which further amplified patriotic mythologizing of the Revolutionary period.
The article presented the story largely as established fact, recounting the alleged 1776 meeting between Ross, George Washington, and a congressional committee, despite the absence of corroborating archival evidence. Its circulation via a respected national magazine gave the tale an air of historical legitimacy that oral family tradition alone could not have achieved.
This publication represents a pivotal moment in the transformation of Betsy Ross from a little-known Philadelphia upholsterer into an enduring symbol of American patriotism and women's contributions to the Revolution—a transformation historians have since worked to critically reassess, distinguishing the documented facts of her professional flag-making career from the embellished legend that Harper's helped popularize.