Grand Union flag
The first American flag of thirteen red and white stripes, with the British Union Flag in the canton where the stars later went. The Continental Navy flew it from December 1775, and it remained the unofficial flag until Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes on 14 June 1777.
Meaning
The stripes stood for the Thirteen Colonies, and the canton was blue with the red cross of St George for England and the white cross of St Andrew for Scotland, the House of Representatives’ history “Our Flag” says: the Union Flag King James I created in 1606. Its red saltire for Ireland, on today’s Union Flag, came only in 1801. “Our Flag” lists its other names as the Congress Colors, the First Navy Ensign and the Cambridge Flag; the vexillologist Peter Ansoff calls it the Continental Colors, because papers of the time call it by many names and none of them “Grand Union”. Records of early 1776 describe it as a “union flag with thirteen stripes in the field emblematical of the thirteen United Colonies”, and a ship chandler’s bill of 8 February 1776 charges for “1 Union Flag 13 Stripes Broad Buntg and 33 feet fly”, the historian Byron DeLear found. “Our Flag” also notes that the British East India Company’s flag looked the same. Each New Year’s Day a ceremony in Somerville, Massachusetts, hoists it on the monument on Prospect Hill, with re-enactors and a horseman in the costume of Washington; DeLear filmed it there in 2011.
Origin and history
On 3 December 1775 John Paul Jones, then a lieutenant, raised it aboard Esek Hopkins’s flagship Alfred on the Delaware River, “Our Flag” records. On 1 January 1776, the day the new Continental Army formally came into existence, a union flag went up on the 76-foot pole of the signal station on Prospect Hill, near Washington’s headquarters at Cambridge. Washington wrote to Joseph Reed three days later that “we had hoisted the Union Flag in compliment to the United Colonies; but behold! it was received in Boston as a token of the deep impression the Speech had made upon us, and as a signal of submission”. The speech was King George III’s to Parliament of 27 October 1775, which said the colonies now openly avowed their revolt. The National Archives’ own blog retells the episode as the day Washington accidentally ended the war. After the resolution of 14 June 1777, the British union came out of the canton and stars on blue took its place.
What was the first American flag?
For a flag of the whole colonies, this one: “Our Flag” calls it the first flag of the colonists to have any resemblance to the Stars and Stripes, and it flew on the Navy’s flagship in December 1775. The Stars and Stripes came by Congress’s resolution of 14 June 1777 (see the Betsy Ross flag). The historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Harvard would not name any one flag the first: the 1777 resolution set no shape, no arrangement of the stars and no size for the canton, and the stars and stripes, she writes, “had multiple parents and dozens of siblings”.
Was it raised on Prospect Hill?
Historians disagree. All the eyewitness accounts call the flag on Prospect Hill “the Union Flag”, and Peter Ansoff argued in Raven, the North American Vexillological Association’s journal, in 2006 that they meant the plain British Union Flag. Washington’s point to Reed, as Ansoff reads it, was the irony of hoisting the King’s flag just before the King’s hostile speech arrived, and the idea that Boston took it as a sign of surrender was later historians taking a jest seriously. He traces the striped flag on Prospect Hill to Frothingham’s 19th-century history of the siege of Boston.
Byron DeLear answered in the same journal in 2014 that “union flag” in the language of the time also meant the striped flag. His evidence includes the letter of Lieutenant William Carter of the 40th Regiment of Foot, dated Boston, 26 January 1776, which says the Americans “hoisted an union flag (above the continental with the thirteen stripes) at Mount Pisga”, the British nickname for the hill. Ansoff read that as two flags; DeLear reads it as one flag with the union above the stripes.
Where the name “Grand Union” comes from
From a copying slip, Ansoff argues. The Pennsylvania Gazette of 17 January 1776 reported that “the great Union Flag was hoisted on Prospect Hill, in compliment to the United Colonies”. Preble’s history of 1872 quoted it as “the grand union flag”, and because his work was taken as the definitive history, the name spread. Neither “Grand Union” nor “Great Union” appears as the flag’s name in papers of the Revolution, by Ansoff’s reading.
Where you’ll see it today
whatdoesthissymbolmean.comFlag of the United KingdomThe Union Flag in its canton, before the saltire of St Patrick was added in 1801.Read next
- Next in Historical flagsBennington flagA flag of thirteen stripes, white at the top and bottom, with “76” under an arch of stars in the blue canton, long said to have flown at the Battle of Bennington in 1777. The Bennington Museum, which owns it, dates it to between 1812 and 1830, because it is made entirely of cotton.
- The same shape in Celtic symbolsSt Brigid’s crossA small cross woven from rushes or straw on the eve of St Brigid’s Day, 1 February, and hung over the door or in the roof for the saint’s blessing and protection through the year. The four-armed form is the best known, but Irish crosses come in many shapes.
See also
Betsy Ross flag, Serapis flag, Appeal to Heaven flag, Jolly Roger, Blackbeard’s flag, Calico Jack’s flag.
Sources
- Our Flag (H. Doc. 100-247), section 1, House Document 100-247, Our Flag: “The History of the Stars and Stripes”, U.S. House of Representatives (via NPS History), The Grand Union Flag
- The Flag on Prospect Hill, Peter Ansoff, “The Flag on Prospect Hill”, Raven: A Journal of Vexillology 13 (2006), pp. 77–100, North American Vexillological Association (via Philosophy Documentation Center), pp. 77–79, 81, 83–84, 91–92
- Revisiting the Flag at Prospect Hill: Grand Union or Just British?, Byron DeLear, “Revisiting the Flag at Prospect Hill: Grand Union or Just British?”, Raven: A Journal of Vexillology 21 (2014), pp. 19–70, North American Vexillological Association (copy hosted by the New Hampshire Society of the Sons of the American Revolution), pp. 19–20, 34, 37, 43–44
- A funny thing happened on the way to the Revolutionary War, Rob Crotty, “A funny thing happened on the way to the Revolutionary War”, Pieces of History (National Archives blog), 14 June 2010, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, post text
- How Betsy Ross Became Famous, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “How Betsy Ross Became Famous: Oral tradition, nationalism, and the invention of history”, Common-place, Common-place: The Journal of Early American Life, article text
The same shape elsewhere
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 14, 2026. How we research
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