Are there cases of U.S. Founding Fathers burning flags of other nations?

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Accepted answer

There are isolated instances of flag desecration in America's colonial and revolutionary past, but the perpetrators were not especially influential.

Although a scattering of flag desecration incidents speckled American history prior to the twentieth century, none of them aroused any form of institutionalized legal response until shortly before 1900. Perhaps the earliest case occurred in 1634, when Captain John Endicott, the commander of a military company in Massachusetts Bay Colony, defaced part of the red cross of the King's colors in protest of its alleged connection with the papacy. In a 1783 incident during the American Revolutionary War, a British flag was torn to pieces in New York. (Goldstein, p.37)

This occurred shortly after the British left New York. Perhaps the most important Revolutionary burning occurred after the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence on July 8th, 1776. Pennsylvania militiamen stormed into what is now Independence Hall, tore down George III's coat of arms, and burned it.

There are isolated instances of Confederates burning and burying the flag during the Civil War, and one man in Union-occupied New Orleans was executed after conviction of treason for stealing and then dragging an American flag through the mud.

Goldstein suggests that flag desecration may have been relatively rare because veneration of the flag was much milder than it would be in the 20th century. For example, there's a photograph of Lincoln and McClellan using a flag as a tablecloth. Almost all flag-related laws were passed in the 20th century. The Star Spangled Banner was declared the national anthem by Congress in 1931; Stars and Stripes Forever was only declared the national march in 1987; Flag Day was established in 1949; Flag Week in 1966; and the government endorsed the Pledge of Allegiance and codified flag etiquette for the first time in 1942.

State laws prohibiting flag desecration date back to 1897, but the federal government passed its first flag desecration law in 1968 (36-37). Interestingly, Mittlebeeler suggests that the first anti-desecration laws were due to "popular outcries against the use of the flag for advertising" (888) and its common use as clothing for black face minstrels, prize fighters, and circus clowns. Profanation and cheapening were the original threats to the flag, not physical destruction.

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