Today in History: USA flag changed to fifteen stars and 15 stripes

I don't know if you are aware of this, but the design of the USA flag's stripes isn't just to look pretty but it actually means something. The present day 13 stripes represent the original 13 colonies of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. The "States" looked very different then than they do today of course and two of the stripes were later removed for reasons I do not know, probably because it became untenable to add another stripe every damn time a new state was established.

The year was 1794

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They needed to make space for the representations of two additional colonies that were Vermont and Kentucky and this wouldn't remain the official flag for very long as it was changed again in 1818. I would imagine that was a pretty exciting and scary time to be involved in the United States because everything was new and people didn't really have much of a grasp as to how much land actually existed to the west of them. As far as they knew it just kept going and going and every time they went over a hill I would imagine they were thinking there could be another ocean just whenever.

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Louisiana was slightly larger back then

Because nothing happens in government without involving a ton of paperwork and hundreds of people in the process, a monument of inefficiency that grows ever-larger by the day, this change to the flag was disputed and fussed over by bureaucrats for I presume was a very long period of time. The Flag Act of 1974 was signed into law by President George Washington.

States were getting added like hotcakes as the US continued moving west and south and there were no stars or stripes added for the 16th through the 19th states: Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, and Indiana got the finger from the government and were not represented on any flag until 1818 even though at that point Tennessee had been a state for over 20 years. I'm guessing that they didn't really give AF but when the Flag Act of 1818 was signed into law it was determined that "look guys, these stripes are going to get out of control here and our seamstresses can only do so much, let's go back to 13 stripes and just save this area up top for the stars..ok?"

At least that is how I imagine the wording being in Congress.

It is really pretty remarkable how many states continued to be added over the next 80 years as by the end of the 19th century 45 of the states were already included in the Union.

By 1912, USA had reached the Pacific and had run out of states to add until nearly the 1960's when they got their last 2, Hawaii and Alaska within just a few months of one another. They decided to let Mexico keep what they have and out of respect for the French and because it is too friggin cold up there, they didn't go any further north either (I totally made that information up but it's probably something like that)

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I think they were able to see this becoming an ongoing problem as far as adding more stars was concerned over the years because the Flag Act of 1818, in a presumed effort to stop needing a new act every time the states bought or conquered another territory, that the stars for new states would automatically be added every year on the 4th of July. I wish this sort of sensibility existed in modern-day governance but I wouldn't get your hopes up about that ever happening again.

Was it s a special day in history? I dunno, I guess so because it was the only time the flag had more than 13 stripes... but it all happened today, 227 years ago!

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