Thus the suggestion for the further alteration was ready to hand. The similarity of one portion of the design already existing could not fail to have been noticed, for the stripes on the Washington coat-of-arms were alternately red and white, as were also those on the Grand Union.
It had been suggested that the idea of the "new" constellation was derived from the analogy of the "old" constellation of Orion containing thirteen stars, and that the form of the stars was taken from a seal said to have belonged to John Adams, one of the committee for designing the flag.[115]
[115] "Magazine of American History," Vol. XIX., p. 151.
Reference to the details of this seal shows an eagle bearing in its claws the lyre of Orion, both being surrounded by a circle of thirteen stars; but the stars on the seal are all shown as sidereal six-pointed stars, and not five-pointed as are the Washington stars.
The stars which were inserted in the flag when the Union Jack was withdrawn were not the six-pointed stars which would be used heraldically if representing a "sidereal constellation," but are the five-pointed stars of the Washington armorial bearings.
So it happened that the stars and stripes of the coat-of-arms of the old loyalist English family, to which the successful Revolutionary general belonged, and of the seal with which he had attested the commissions which his officers had received from him, formed the basis for the design of the new American flag, and through them the memory of the great leader and first President of the United States is indissolubly connected with the Stars and Stripes, the national ensign (Pl. III., fig. 3) of the nation which he brought into existence.
The American had good right to be proud of that Jack, in whose glories he had so valiantly borne his part, and when as Englishmen battling for the rights of Englishmen the united colonies formed their colonial ensign they had rightly placed the Union Jack in its upper canton as evidence of those glories and of that claim.
Afterwards, when their new nation had been framed, and the Washington stars had marked the new allegiance, the thirteen stripes of the old thirteen English colonies still remained to attest to himself and to the world the Americans' share in the preceding centuries of Anglo-Saxon adventure and their heritage in all the liberties and literature of the English tongue. The rights won by the Barons from John, the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, are still theirs by hereditary right, and the thirteen Anglo-Saxon stripes in his national emblem proclaim this to the American of to-day as they did to his forefathers in the thirteen colonies who first placed them in his union ensign.