As at the early dawn the stars shine forth even while it grows light, and then, as the sun advances, that light breaks into banks and streaming lines of color, the glowing red and intense white striving together and ribbing the horizon with bars effulgent, so, on the American Flag, stars and beams of many-coloured light shine out together. And wherever this flag comes, and men behold it, they see in its sacred emblazonry no ramping lions and no fierce eagle, no embattled castles or insignia of imperial authority; they see the symbols of light. It is the banner of dawn. It means Liberty; and the galley slave, the poor oppressed conscript, the downtrodden creature of foreign despotism, sees in the American Flag that very promise and prediction of God: “The people which sat in the darkness saw a great light; and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death light is sprung up.”

In 1777, within a few days of one year after the Declaration of Independence, and two years and more after the war began, upon the 14th of June, the Congress of the Colonies, or the Confederated States, assembled, and ordained this glorious National Flag which we now hold and defend, and advanced it full high before God and all men as the flag of Liberty.

It was no holiday flag gorgeously emblazoned for gaiety or vanity. It was a solemn national signal. When that banner first unrolled to the sun, it was the symbol of all those Holy truths and purposes which brought together the Colonial American Congress.

Our flag carries American ideals, American history, and American feelings. Beginning with the Colonies, and coming down to our time, in its sacred heraldry, in its glorious insignia, it has gathered and stored chiefly this supreme idea: Divine Right of Liberty in man. Every color means liberty; every thread means liberty; every form of star and beam or stripe of light means liberty; not lawlessness, not license, but organized institutional liberty—liberty through law, and law for liberty.

Accept it, then, in its fullest meaning. It is not a painted rag. It is a whole national history. It is the Constitution. It is the government. It is the free people that stand in the government on the Constitution.