Freedom's Flag

Freedom. It started so small. So small, in fact, that we can't be sure where it started at all.

Freedom and fear are at war.
—George W. Bush, Sept. 20, 2001

Freedom.

It started so small. So small, in fact, that we can’t be sure where it started at all.

It may have been in Lexington, Mass., on April 19, 1775. Jonathan Harrington crawled off the town common that day to die in the lap of his wife—one of eight colonists killed when the embattled farmers stood and fired the shots heard ’round the world.

It was an accident almost. A band of minutemen was trying to disperse in the face of 600 British regulars, somebody fired a shot, and a revolution for freedom was on. The battle was over in minutes.

Freedom started so small.

Within months, the colonies had their first flag, the Continental Flag. It combined the British Colours (where our stars are today) with 13 stripes for the colonies. Another year passed before anyone would dream of a Declaration of Independence from England, but they did.

On June 14, 1777, the Continental Congress passed the Flag Act: “Resolved, That the flag of the United States be made of thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation.”

A constellation, they wrote. They reached high.

During the War of 1812, the British sailed up Chesapeake Bay, invading and capturing Washington, D.C., on Aug. 24, 1814. They set fire to the Capitol and the White House, the flames visible 40 miles away in Baltimore.

America under attack; the White House and Capitol blackened. Imagine that.

At Fort McHenry in Baltimore, the post commander the year before had asked for a flag so big “the British would have no trouble seeing it from a distance.” The job went to Mary Pickersgill, a “maker of colours.” She and her daughter, Caroline, 13, working in an upstairs bedroom of their Baltimore home, used 400 yards of wool bunting. They cut 15 stars measuring two feet across. The 30-by-42-foot flag was so big they had to sew it together on the floor of Claggett’s Brewery.

It would come to be known as The Star Spangled Banner.

On the morning of Sept. 13, 1814, after sacking the White House and Capitol, the British attacked Baltimore by land and sea, shelling Fort McHenry where the big flag flew. Aboard the British flagship Tonnant, a young lawyer named Francis Scott Key had come aboard to offer himself in exchange for a prisoner, an elderly physician named William Beanes, whom Key and others feared would be hanged. The British detained them both and ordered them placed under guard to wait out the battle in a sloop behind the British fleet.

America hung in the balance; the bombardment continued all day and into the night. The British fired shells with lighted fuses designed to explode when they reached their target. It was a new technology; they often blew up in midair. They also fired rockets that traced wobbly arcs of red flame across the sky.

Both Key and Beanes watched the attack on Fort McHenry with what must have been overpowering dread. As long as the shelling continued, Fort McHenry was ours. If it stopped, we had surrendered. And long before daylight came silence. The shelling had stopped.

What Key and Beanes didn’t know was that the British land assault on Baltimore and the naval attack had been abandoned. British officers had decided the attack would cost too many troops and ordered a retreat. In predawn darkness, Key waited to see if the star-spangled banner (as he called it) still flew. Daylight came, and it did. He wrote a poem, later made into our national anthem.

Freedom. Alive and well under a banner sewn at Claggett’s Brewery.

Freedom is a Little League game, kick the can, and hide-and-go-seek.

Freedom is Donald McCaig leaving Madison Avenue to raise sheep and border collies, and write books in Highland County, Va.

Freedom is buying a hot dog and soda pop at the Kiwanis Club’s annual July Fourth “Freedom Has a Birthday” concession stand in Laramie, Wyo.

Freedom is trout fishing in Green River in Idaho, boiling down maple sap in Vermont, rooting for Auburn on an autumn Alabama afternoon.

Freedom is having a choice to worship, to learn, to work, have a home, and food on the table—and being able to share the blessings of life without fear of our lives.

Whether the symbol of freedom is our flag, the Liberty Bell, or monuments dedicated to lives lost in the defense of freedom around the world—or even the Statue of Liberty which so many passed in their journey to become Americans—freedom has always been more than any symbol. It is a reality and a goal forever.

One newcomer to freedom arrived from Russia in 1920 and wrote back to her family and village that year to tell what she found.

“First I come to tell you that I am well and in good health. Secondly, I am telling you that my sun is beginning to shine in America. Thirdly, I come to tell you, white bread and meat I eat every day, just like millionaires. Fourthly, my dear children, I have for myself a separate room, with a closed door, and before anyone can come to me, he must knock, and I can say, ‘Come in,’ or ‘Stay out,’ like a king in a palace.

Lastly, my darling family and people of the village of Sukovoly, there is no czar in America.”

—Anaia Yezierska, How I Found America, 1920

Freedom is a separate room.

The year Anaia Yezierska found new life, America had entered the roaring ’20s, living high, while Germany was in ruins a world away—devastated by war, with a foreclosed economy, few jobs, and massive inflation. Into this desperation and hopelessness came a man and his extremist group, posing as a national savior: Adolph Hitler and his Nazi party.

Finally, after World War II, America knew that welcoming the world’s destitute to our shores past the Statue of Liberty wasn’t enough any more. We had to make house calls. We had to feed a starving Berlin by airlift, rebuild Europe with the Marshall Plan, and help rebuild Japan. It was, in many ways, our finest hour. Worldwide we fed the hungry, tended the sick, gave hope to the victims of flood and famine in Africa, Asia, and places the American flag had never been.

And we defended freedom for others. Every place our banner flew—from Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to Pork Chop Hill in Korea to Khe Sanh in South Vietnam—was an outpost of freedom.

It wasn’t just military or political. Americans went overseas with their churches and charities, with the Red Cross, CARE, UNICEF, Heifer Project International, with hospital medical teams, and universities, and countless others enlisted in sharing the fruits of our freedom with others.

Mother Theresa left her life in Yugoslavia in 1928, at age 18, to become a missionary in India. Twenty years later, in 1948, the year of the Berlin airlift, the woman who later won the Nobel Peace Prize came across a half-dead woman of low caste lying on the street outside a hospital in Calcutta. Mother Theresa stayed with the woman, holding her until she died, and from that moment on she served the poorest of the poor.

On the town common in Lexington, or in the streets of Calcutta, or on Calvary, freedom may be nothing more than a lap to die on.

 

Whatever else our nation now does in rooting out the infection of terrorism, we can only pray that our flag of freedom also arrives in time over the lands of the world’s most destitute, sick, hopeless, and frightened—where the seeds of terror arise.

This is both our history and our destiny. Our flag has withstood revolution, civil war, world wars, depression, famine, plagues, racism, unequal rights, and even prosperity. Now it is time once again to unfurl it in defense of freedom—a precious and delicate thing.

Let us pray now that we once again have not only the strength to defend freedom here and around the world, but—as it’s been with this destiny of ours—that we re-dedicate ourselves to giving hope to the hopeless, food to the starving, medicine to the sick, and rebuild that which needs rebuilding, that this may be once again our finest hour.

A constellation, we called our flag in 1777. We reached high.

Peter Fossel is executive editor of American Profile magazine.

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