The Forgotten History of the Confederate Flag
The Confederate battle flag is, as John Coski of the
Museum of the Confederacy titled his book on the subject, “America’s most embattled
emblem.” Recent polls show that Americans are split down the middle on the
flag: half view it as a symbol of heritage, half as a symbol of hatred, and an
overwhelming majority are against tearing it down from public places. For all
the outraged opinions, however, the true story of the Confederate flag – how it
came to be and what it meant to those who made it and bore it – does not fit
the narrative.
The first “Confederate”
flags appeared in South Carolina in the months leading up to her secession
convention. These early flags typically featured the Carolinian palmetto and
crescent moon on blue or white fields. One such flag, which appeared in
Columbia as the convention assembled, included an open Bible with the words,
“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in time of trouble;
therefore we will not fear; though the earth be removed, and though the
mountains be carried into the sea. The Lord of Hosts is with us, the God of
Jacob is our refuge.” When the convention relocated to Charleston, a banner
featuring John C. Calhoun holding the broken tablets of “Truth, Justice, and the
Constitution,” with the caption, “Behold Its Fate,” hung just down the street
from the hall. Another Charleston banner depicted all the seals of the Southern
States rising above a pile of the Northern States’ seals, with the caption,
“Built From The Ruins.” When South Carolina declared her independence from the
Union, a new flag for the newly sovereign commonwealth was needed. TheCharleston
Mercury described one of
these sovereignty flags: “The flag is a red field, expressive of defiance,
traversed by the blue cross of Carolina, with the lone star at the
intersection. The inner and upper quarter of the field bears the word ‘ready’
surmounted by the palmetto.” The Charleston
Daily Courier described
another: “When the first gun, ‘Old Secession,’ announced the secession of the
State, they flung to the breeze the beautiful flag which now floats over their
gymnasium. It is a red field, quartered with a blue cross on which is a lone
star (others will be added as States come into the Southern Constellation). On
the upper quarter is the Palmetto, on the lower a savage-looking tiger head.”
The flag which South Carolina officially adopted, however, was a blue field
with a white palmetto in the centre and a white crescent in the upper-left
corner, just like South Carolina’s flag to this day.
As more States seceded from the Union, sovereignty flags began
cropping up everywhere. At the Alabama Secession Convention, the flag which
hung in the hall featured lady liberty dressed in red holding a sword and
shield with the caption, “Independent Now and Forever.” Most States’ sovereignty
flags, however, were modeled after the U.S. flag, the “Stars and Stripes,” as
Southerners believed that they were the ones truly loyal to the foundational
principles of American freedom. Indeed, just as the Montgomery Convention,
where the seceded States met to unite in a new Southern Confederacy, adopted a
Constitution which was modeled after the U.S. Constitution – though it more
strictly limited the power of the central government – it also adopted a
national flag which was similar to the Stars and Stripes, “the Stars and Bars.”
The Stars and Bars was a flag of two red stripes, a centre white stripe, and a
blue field with a circle of stars (one for each Confederate State). Letitia
Tyler, the granddaughter of U.S. President John Tyler (now a Confederate
Congressman) was given the honour of raising the flag for the first time. Harry
Macarthy, the author of “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” composed “The Origin of the
Stars and Bars,” a song which mourned the fall of the old Union and the Stars
and Stripes while cheering the rise of a new Confederacy and the Stars and
Bars. The idea of a “Southern Cross,” however, stemming from South Carolina’s
early sovereignty flags, which were also considered in Montgomery, remained
popular with the people.
William P. Miles, Confederate Congressman from South Carolina
and Chairman of the House Military Committee, was the first to envision what
would eventually become the Confederate flag. Miles regarded the Stars and
Stripes as a symbol of “tyranny” and believed that the Confederacy should have
a new flag. He designed a red flag with a blue “saltire,” or “St. Andrew’s
Cross,” lined with white stars. Red, white, and blue were “the true
republican colors,” explained Miles, respectively representing valour, purity,
and truth. The saltire, according to Miles, was “significant of strength and
progress.” In fact, the saltire is the oldest symbol of sovereignty in Western
Civilisation, first used by the Romans in Britain to mark the limits of their
territory. Miles also found the Latin Cross of the sovereignty flags to be too
“ecclesiastical,” potentially offending Christians against religious imagery in
war as well as alienating the Confederacy’s sizable Jewish population; the
saltire, by contrast, was “heraldric.” The House Military Committee rejected
Miles’ Southern Cross as a Confederate battle flag, but at the Battle of First
Manassas, it became clear that the Stars and Bars, when draped, was easily
mistaken for the Stars and Stripes. This confusion led to some embarrassing
incidents of friendly fire and nearly cost the Confederates the victory. As a
result, the military became aware of the need for a new battle flag.
General P.G.T. Beauregard liked Miles’ idea of a Southern Cross
for the Confederate battle flag, and convinced his superior, General Joseph E.
Johnston, to avoid the bureaucracy of the War Department and create new battle
flags themselves. Johnston ordered his chief quartermaster, Maj. William L.
Cabell, to deliver 120 battle flags for each regiment. “My recollection is that
it was an army affair,” Johnston explained after the war. “and when questioned
on the subject, I have always said so.”
Cabell put his aide, Lt. Colin McRae Selph, an officer familiar
with the environs of Northern Virginia, in charge of the new flags. After
purchasing the red, white, and blue silk, Lt. Selph approached Mary Henry Lyon
Jones, probably having met her acquaintance in one of Richmond’s ladies’
hospitals, established to tend to wounded Federals and Confederates. Mary sewed
a prototype of the battle flag, which General Johnston promptly approved. Selph
returned to Mary and requested her to rally all the ladies she knew to sew the
needed 120 flags.
In addition to Mary, Lt. Selph also approached the Cary girls,
who were all something of local celebrities. Constance Fairfax Cary had taken
refuge in the Confederate camp after her ancestral estate was chopped down for
firewood by the invading Federals. There, Constance met her cousins, Hetty and
Jennie Cary, forced to flee from Baltimore when it fell under Federal controul.
In fact, their cousin, the editor of the Baltimore
Sun and grandson of the
author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was arrested for criticising Abraham
Lincoln. In turn, Jennie set the words of “Maryland, My Maryland,” the pro-Confederate
ballad which is now the State anthem, to the tune of “O, Tannenbaum,” and
Jennie sang the song from her balcony in the presence of Federal troops. The
Cary girls were daughters of the vaunted “First Families of Virginia” –
Constance descended from the ninth Lord Fairfax and Hetty and Jennie from the
Jeffersons and the Randolphs. Hetty and Jennie were given the honour of
drilling the troops and even formed “the Cary Invincibles,” a group of the
social elite in the Confederate army.
The ladies of Richmond, organised mainly by churches, set to
work sewing immediately. Once the flags were complete, Lt. Selph took them to
chemists and artists to have the stars painted. Selph’s orders were to keep the
project confidential, but as one lady remarked, “How could General Johnston
expect four or five hundred female tongues to be silent on the subject?”
After a month of sewing, the ladies completed the battle flags.
On 28 November 1861, the new flags were unveiled before the Confederate army.
One by one, General Johnston and General Beauregard presented a battle flag to
the colonel of each regiment, who in turn presented the flag to his color
guard. Thomas Jordan, Adjutant General of the First Corps, made the following
announcement:
Soldiers: Your mothers, your wives, and your sisters have made
it. Consecrated by their hands, it must lead you to substantial victory, and
the complete triumph of our cause. It can never be surrendered, save to your
unspeakable dishonour and with consequences fraught with immeasurable evil.
Under its untarnished folds beat back the invader, and find nationality,
everlasting immunity from an atrocious despotism, and honour and renown for
yourselves – or death.
The Confederate soldiers loved the ceremony. “It was,” recalled a
South Carolinian, “the grandest time we have ever had.” He remembered that “the
noise the men made was deafening” and that “I felt at the time that I could
whip a whole brigade of the enemy myself.” A Virginian described the flag as
“the prettiest one we have.”
In addition to the mass-produced flags for the Confederate
regiments, the Cary girls made special flags for their favorite commanders.
Hetty chose General Johnston, Jennie chose General Beauregard, and Constance
chose General Earl Van Dorn. Along with her flag to Beauregard, Jennie included
an admiring note:
I take the liberty of offering the accompanying banner to
General Beauregard, soliciting for my handiwork the place of honour upon the
battlefield near our renowned and gallant leader. I entrust to him with a
fervent prayer that it may wave over victorious plains, and in full confidence
that the brilliant success which has crowned his arms throughout our struggle
for independence is earnest of future triumphs yet more glorious. In my own
home – unhappy Baltimore – a people writhing ‘neath oppression’s heel await in
agonised expectancy “the triumph-tread of the peerless Beauregard.” Will he
not, then, bear this banner onward and liberate them from a thralldom worse
than death?
In his reply, General Beauregard expressed his gratitude and
swore that Baltimore would be hers again:
I accept with unfeigned pleasure the beautiful banner you have
been kind enough to make for me, accompanied with the request that it should
occupy near me the place of honour on the battlefield. It shall be borne by my
personal escort; and protected by a just Providence, the sanctity of our cause,
and the valour of our troops, it will lead us on from victory to victory until
you shall have the proud satisfaction of waving it with your own fair hands as
a signal of triumph, from the top of the Washington Monument in your own native
city – Baltimore.
General Beauregard kept Jennie’s flag for the rest of his life
and had it draped over his coffin at his funeral.
Constance gave her flag to one of General Van Dorn’s staff
officers with a note of her own. “Will General Van Dorn honour me,” Constance
asked, “by accepting a flag which I have taken great pleasure in making, and
now send out with an earnest prayer that the work of my hand may hold its place
near him as he goes out to a glorious struggle – and, God willing, may one day
wave over the recaptured batteries of my home near the downtrodden Alexandria?”
Van Dorn’s reply brimmed with chivalry:
The beautiful flag made by your hands and presented to me with
the prayer that it should be borne by my side in the impending struggle for the
existence of our country, is an appeal to me as a soldier as alluring as the
promises of glory; but when you express the hope, in addition, that it may one
day wave over the recaptured city of your nativity, your appeal becomes a
supplication so beautiful and holy that I were craven-spirited indeed, not to
respond to it with all the ability that God has given me. Be assured, dear
young lady, that it shall wave over your home if Heaven smiles upon our cause,
and I live, and that there shall be written upon it by the side of your name
which it now bears, “Victory, Honour, and Independence.”
In the meantime, I shall hope that you may be as happy as you,
who have the soul thus to cheer the soldier on to noble deeds and to victory –
should be, and that the flowers want to blossom by your window, may bloom as
sweetly for you next May, as they ever did, to welcome you home again.
According to Constance, General Van Dorn’s staff officer told
her that when he received her flag, he and his men all drew their swords and
swore that they would honour her request, like knights of old.
The true meaning of the
Confederate battle flag is not in the various ways which it has been abused
over the years. Indeed, the Confederate flag is as innocent of its abuses as
are other symbols which have been used for evil, including the U.S. flag, the
Cross, and perhaps even the Crescent. The true meaning of the Confederate flag
is in the women who made it and the men who bore it into battle. To them, the
flag was not a symbol of racial hatred, but of independence and honour. To the
descendants of those men and women, that is what it still means and will always
mean.
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