Flag culture and the consolidation of confederate nationalism.

AS WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL'S TRAIN RUMBLED THROUGH NORTH Carolina on April 15, 1861, the celebrated diarist of the London Times spotted his first Confederate flag, waving atop a pine tree stripped of its branches. By the time he witnessed a similar banner floating over Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, the Englishman had seen countless versions of the new "Stars and Bars" displayed in forests, settlements, towns, and cities along his route. "All was noise, dust, and patriotism" in communities readying themselves for war, he reported, observing that "true revolutionary furor" was "in full sway." The activity that buzzed around the flags caused him to marvel how "[t]hese pieces of coloured bunting seem to twine themselves through heart and brain." (1)

Though Russell was impressed by the initial enthusiasm of such flag waving, he sensed that this Confederate frenzy was fueled by novelty rather than tree devotion. He suspected that loyalties to the new republic would face sterner tests in the future, as the excitement of secession gave way to the grimness of war. Soon enough, the new republic's symbols would have to be judged by their ability to sustain morale on the battlefield and to capture the popular imagination, in the same way that the American flag would be judged in the North during the early 1860s. Russell went so far as to suggest that the rebellion might even succeed if southerners could endow their own banners with the same sort of mystical aura that clung to the Star-Spangled Banner. "If ever there is a real sentiment du drapeau got up in the South," he noted, "it will be difficult indeed for the North to restore the Union." (2) Russell's musings about Confederate flag devotion call to mind several recent attempts to reframe the perennial issue of the quality of southern nationalism during the American Civil War. His suggestive comments implied, as Drew Gilpin Faust would state more forcefully in 1988, that Confederate nationalism was not merely a reserve of earlier loyalties, nor could it be quantified during the secession crisis by those who speculated about likely Confederate fortunes. (3) Russell anticipated contemporary scholarship in his understanding of nationalism as an ongoing set of cultural innovations that would be undertaken by white southerners during the war itself. While Confederates would build their sentiment du drapeau upon earlier celebrations of flags in American patriotic life, they would also invent a broad range of rituals, literary productions, and musical efforts. Such cultural activities, which Faust's Creation of Confederate Nationalism put on the research agenda for Civil War scholars, represented the sort of "large-scale, identity-forming collective discourse" to which modern scholars of nationalism have increasingly turned their attention. (4) In this context, earlier attempts to sketch the "deficiency" of southern loyalties at the time of secession have given way to studies concerned with how southern citizens became attached to the larger Confederate effort through the crucible of their own wartime initiatives. (5)

In focusing attention on how the flag, specifically, might sustain the rebellion, Russell presaged an even more recent emphasis on the martial orientation of Confederate nationalism. Though Faust touched on this theme, Gary W. Gallagher has gone much farther toward offering a more explicit battle-centered perspective in his The Confederate War. This volume, which appeared in 1997, highlights the crucial importance of generals, and especially of Robert E. Lee, as symbols of motivation and inspiration for Confederate patriots. Taking issue with Faust at many points, Gallagher presents evidence of a healthy and vital Confederate nationalism, though his own evidence qualifies, at least in part, some of his conclusions. (6) Even so, his study establishes beyond doubt the allure of military glory and sacrifice to Confederates and thus helps to explain the power that military symbols such as battle flags wielded in war. The profound martial strain in Americans' reverence for their flags remains readily visible in the present-day United States. The Star-Spangled Banner retains its identification with an anthem filled with battle imagery, while Americans still imagine flag desecration as an act of violence not only to a piece of cloth, but to the memory of soldiers who died defending their "colors" from their country's enemies. (7) While the basis of such martial understandings of flags was present in 1861, the Civil War itself would solidify the links between bloodshed, the flag, and the national community. (8) In the case of the Confederacy, the military associations of flags were perhaps even more pronounced because the country's most popular emblem, the Southern Cross, was a banner specifically designed for use in combat.

This consideration of wartime flag culture in the South builds on the interpretations of both Faust and Gallagher, who together have given new life to a recurring debate over the nature of Confederate morale and purpose. By the end of the war, a flag-centered model of Confederate patriotism provided a striking example of Faust's insight about the constructed nature of nationalism and of Gallagher's attention to the inspirational power of a successful army. But the flag phenomenon also revealed more popular involvement in the forging of Confederate purpose than either of these scholars acknowledged. The citizenry's understanding of flags--and by extension of the wartime effort itself--repeatedly frustrated attempts by politicians, generals, and clergymen to adopt their own favorite designs. Perhaps more than any other public issue, questions of flag design and use engaged the creative energies of ordinary men and women willing to devote their efforts to a new and uncertain cause, thereby becoming a popular means of defining Confederate nationhood. The making of a sentiment du drapeau ultimately depended on those white citizens whose everyday actions in celebrating flags Russell spied from his railroad car. In a variety of locales, these men and women did more than just resist or reject hegemonic ideologies that were fraught from the outset with internal contradictions. These citizens also stamped their own imprimatur on what the experience of celebrating a new country, and of fighting and dying for it, meant on the most visceral level. (9)

In towns and byways across the slave states, as well as atop public buildings, in the pages of newspapers, in the tune of popular songs, and at the head of military units, it was ordinary Confederates who were most committed to unfurling new banners early in 1861. Within months they had influenced their Provisional Congress to select an official symbol derived from the American flag, and they had begun to sanctify it with associations of patriotic martyrdom and battlefield valor. As a vibrant Confederate flag culture flowered in the ways that Russell predicted it might, devotion to the new flag became a well-known theme that lasted for the rest of the proslavery republic's brief existence. (10) From a notable formlessness that characterized the earliest stages of choosing and publicizing initial designs, increasingly familiar symbols and motifs took shape over the course of four years of war. The steady attention given to the national banner produced a powerful set of messages about citizens' support for the new federation, the identity and mission of their new government, the quasi-religious meaning of sacrifice for home and country, and the country's ultimate dependence on God.

The development of a flag culture not only involved many participants and invoked many themes; it also played itself out in a remarkably wide range of forms. Along with the flags themselves, which often bore complex messages, there appeared printed material that, in the oral, visual, and aural media that followed, generated a dense, yet commonly recognized, understanding of the meaning of flag designs and of the significance of flag-related activities. Though the Stars and Bars initially drew the most attention, an alternative design, the so-called Southern Cross, would eclipse the official national standard in scarcely over a year. With this battle flag's incorporation into the national emblem in 1863, the diagonal cross of stars on a red field became a readily identifiable icon of the cause and the most familiar object of attachment among its supporters. As a result, the Southern Cross reflected, as well as shaped, the wartime consolidation of Confederate nationality. It persisted as a relic of the Lost Cause and as a logo for "southern pride" well beyond the Confederacy partly because of the deep roots that had been laid in wartime.

Some of the details of the wartime adoption of civilian and military flags are well known, even if the full context and significance of banners' selection, celebration, and sanctification remain largely unexplored. The story of the three national flags of the Confederacy has drawn great interest during the 1990s as controversies over their public display have proliferated. (11) Several books have explained how long-held southern devotion to the Star-Spangled Banner influenced congressmen to select, early in 1861, a flag closely modeled on that of the United States. The choice of more distinctive banners for use in battle has become a well-recognized part of Confederate lore. The growing popularity, beginning in late 1861, of the St. Andrew's Cross design that had come to be associated with Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia led to the decision to redesign the national flag in 1863 to include this diagonal cross on a field of white. The subsequent addition, late in the conflict, of a red stripe on the end of the banner completed the lineage of what have since been the best-known emblems of the Confederate republic. (12)

Missing from this story, however, is any sustained investigation of the range of cultural meanings associated with these new flags or any broader consideration of their part in a larger nationalist project. Addressing these topics requires going beyond genealogical approaches to adopt a set of contextual concerns regarding how and why flags were used and honored by Confederates and how these practices changed over time. Confederates, no less than their counterparts in the Union, focused an enormous amount of energy on designing flags, waving banners, and cheering them publicly. Flag culture also involved such diverse activities as petitioning, sewing, blessing, presenting, fighting, and most of all, singing. It was in the verse that circulated throughout the South that Confederates most often explained to one another how a very special piece of cloth should be protected, embraced, hoisted, kissed, and bled upon. (13)

In first raising the Stars and Bars in Montgomery, Alabama, Confederates worked to displace loyalties to an old symbol, the Star-Spangled Banner, by using the same techniques that had put that flag of red, white, and blue at the center of the United States's patriotic universe. On March 4, 1861, the very afternoon that Abraham Lincoln became president of the United States, a crowd gathered around the Alabama statehouse to witness the display of a flag that, just hours earlier, leaders of the Provisional Congress had adopted. Seven young women--representing each of the new Confederacy's states--were chosen to carry the banner to the dome of the capitol as a band played the tune of "Dixie." When the granddaughter of former president John Tyler unfurled the new banner, Confederates made their clearest signal yet that they intended to become a nation among nations. But the ceremony also hearkened back to more traditional themes. The presence of the young Tyler was the most explicit gesture toward the American past, but the conjunction of the flag with a national song, the affirmation of federalism with representatives from each of the states, and the inclusion of a strong female presence all built upon the vibrant flag culture nurtured in the United States over the previous generation. Creating a scene at once familiar and revolutionary embodied the cultural situation that Confederates initially faced. Their ceremonies and symbols, like their national life more generally, attempted to establish the proper degree of change and continuity for a country that had not fully decided which aspects of its collective undertaking were more important. This dilemma saturated the early months of the new republic, as cultural innovators in the Confederacy searched for ways to combine tradition and a radical break from earlier loyalties. (14)

The banner at the center of this ceremony, whose design had been a topic of intermittent concern for several weeks prior to its first display, was particularly well suited to balancing change and tradition. Many suggested that the new country should, in leaving the Union, remain as much like the former United States as possible. The New Orleans Crescent applied such arguments to the matter of a new flag with its plea to retain both the long-revered Stars and Stripes of the United States and Francis Scott Key's famous "Star-Spangled Banner" anthem as the "property" of the new country. These intertwined aspects of American patriotism were much more appropriate to a new government than the revolutionary "Marseillaise" and tricolored revolutionary banners then in vogue, the paper argued. Since the American symbols "first burst upon the world when the whole country was a slaveholding country," the paper reasoned, the South should "claim them as our own legitimate property" and as "a proud portion of our birthright." The New Orleans Commercial Bulletin also urged the southern congress to "make as little alteration in the starry banner as the circumstances will permit--not enough to destroy its American character, or the thousand recollections of patriotic devotion, pride and enthusiasm that are inseparably bound up with, and must ever remain a part of it." It concluded, "There is power in that banner, and glory; and if the stars may not be so numerous, they may be as brilliant; their radiance may stream as far and with as pure, beautiful, steady and clear a light. Let it wave over the Confederate States." (15)

Sentiments for continuity influenced the official congressional debates over the flag as well. One of the few issues not discussed in secret session, the choice of a new flag seemed far more important to the public than to the assembled representatives, a perception bolstered by the influx of over one hundred proposals from across the South. (16) In introducing one of the scores of designs sent to the Congress, the former Unionist Walker Brooke of Mississippi cautioned that "in revolutionary times it is desirable to make as little change as possible in those things to which the people have long been accustomed." Though many of his colleagues vehemently disagreed with this assessment, members were nonetheless forced to accept the popular preference for tradition in the matter of the flag, just as they adopted a constitution based closely on the one framed in 1787. The Provisional Congress retained traditional elements of the U.S. flag within a new syntax, reducing the number of red and white stripes from thirteen to three "bars" of red, white, and red. The blue field in the upper corner also remained, as did the five-pointed stars that, in representing each of the states, grew from a group of seven in Montgomery to an eventual field of thirteen (see Illustration 1). (17) William Porcher Miles, chairman of the Committee on the Flag and Seal, expressed a common sentiment among representatives that "something was conceded by the committee to what seemed so strong and earnest a desire to retain at least a suggestion of the old `Stars and Stripes.'" But the modestly revamped banner thrilled most who publicly commented on the selection. The Athens Watchman congratulated Congress for choosing a model that bore "a sufficient resemblance to the old one to keep in everlasting remembrance the glorious deeds achieved beneath its fold," while the Augusta Chronicle and Sentinel joined the chorus of those "rejoicing to know the old emblems float over us" since it was "under them [that] our commerce has sought all seas, and our soldiers and sailors have encountered victoriously all dangers." (18)

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By reconfiguring the design of the United States's constellation, Confederates built upon older themes that had long allowed federal and national interpretations of the American flag to coexist. Mexican War hero Jefferson Davis, like countless other Americans in the 1850s, expressed his patriotic devotion by praising a flag that he had defended in combat and that waved reassuringly over the American domain. "I love the flag of my country with even more than a filial affection," Davis often affirmed in the late 1850s. Understandably he expressed his "deep sorrow" during the secession crisis at the prospect "of taking a last leave of that object of early affection and proud association, feeling that henceforth it is not to be the banner which, by day and by night, I am ready to follow, to hail with the rising and bless with the setting sun." Yet there was one tiny white speck on the larger flag to which Davis, along with many other white southerners, pledged his ultimate allegiance. In relinquishing the cherished American flag in 1861, Davis acted out a pledge made three years earlier: sooner than see his own state's star shine less brightly, he would "tear it from its place to be set even on the perilous ridge of battle as a sign round which Mississippi's best and bravest should gather to the harvest-home of death." (19) Davis was only the most prominent figure to rely on this cliche of removing the stars of each state from the American flag and re-establishing them in a new banner. This way of retaining the elements of the Union while changing their arrangement became a standard part of early Confederate attempts to work through the difficult issue of continuity and change, seen especially in the wildly popular song "The Bonnie Blue Flag," by Harry Macarthy. Its verses listed in order how each of the Confederate states had, in seceding, plucked its own star from the Star-Spangled Banner. (20)

Yet while the new Stars and Bars sustained traditional federalist messages, it also allowed individuals and groups to proclaim a radical break from their former commitments to the centerpiece of American patriotic culture. As William Howard Russell had observed, Confederate partisans eagerly replaced the familiar U.S. flag with their new country's banner after the Montgomery ceremony introduced it to the world. This flag dotted the southern landscape and provided a focal point for elaborate public rituals that often involved stirring music and vows to defend the new country. Elected officials encouraged such flag use. Georgia's governor Joseph E. Brown, for instance, promised in the spring of 1861 to award new, oversized flags to those communities able to mobilize for war quickly. Most efforts to make and display the Stars and Bars, however, resulted from individual initiatives, as Confederates competed with one another to win the honor of first bringing the new design to their local communities. This enthusiasm sometimes caused controversy; George Junkin, the president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, chose to resign his post rather than allow students to raise the new flag over the school's main building. (21)

The Confederate press played an important role in regularly recirculating notices of such spirited flag-raisings, presenting them as proof that the new nation had support not only in the Deep South but in the wavering border states as well. The Richmond Daily Dispatch, the most popular paper in Virginia, reported the first local display of the Stars and Bars on March 9, five days after its adoption in Montgomery and nearly six weeks before any of the border states passed ordinances of secession. In twenty-two out of the next twenty-three issues, the paper reported how Virginia-made copies of the flag appeared on ever higher poles in town squares, in front of militia companies, and above colleges and schools. The constant barrage of news about these ceremonies allowed the paper to conclude at the end of March that the emblem's popularity across the state was evidence of nothing less than a "Popular Revolution" at odds with the conservatism of the Virginia convention that delayed radical action on secession. "Thus county after county of the Old Dominion is gravitating to the true centre of its sympathies and interests in the Southern Union," it wrote. Two weeks later it added that the proliferation of flags showed that "secession is making rapid progress in localities heretofore strongly attached to the Union." The Dispatch continued to cover flag-related activity after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, as it carefully tracked the use of the new flag on mail trucks and railroad cars, above newspaper offices, courthouses, and hotels, until finally, on April 29, the Stars and Bars appeared above the state capitol as "a glorious symbol of a new order of things." (22)

In addition to describing local ceremonies, the press also conveyed visual and aural representations of the Stars and Bars that were circulating throughout the Confederate South. Schematic drafts of the new design appeared with precise specifications for those who wished to copy them in cloth and silk, while the flag's image became a familiar presence on patriotic envelopes, handbills, broadsides, and the mastheads of several Confederate newspapers. There also appeared by the late spring of 1861 a veritable avalanche of flag-related music and poetry, much of which first appeared at local flag-raising ceremonies and then was disseminated through the Confederate media. Several of these poetic efforts sought to bestow on the new flag an anthem to rival Francis Scott Key's "Star-Spangled Banner," the song that had made music and flags inseparable in American life by at least the late Jacksonian period. Others were less ambitious, but no less influential, in establishing the flag as an object worthy of veneration. In one of the most widely reprinted verses, Susan Blanchard Elder confided her own emotions directly to the flag, providing a model for other patriots to follow. She sang, clearly with the hopes others would join her:

   Bright Banner of Freedom! with pride I unfold thee,
   Fair flag of my country, with love I behold thee,
   Gleaming above us in freshness and youth,
   Emblem of Liberty, symbol of truth.

Elder rendered the proper respect that the new flag should receive as an object to be handled and gazed upon, while she also predicted, in a phrase reminiscent of Francis Scott Key, that "this flag of my country in triumph shall wave / O'er the Southerners' home and the Southerners' grave." Her depiction relied on the distinctive elements of the Confederate design to assert that both the size of the federation and the resonance of the country's new symbol would likely increase in the near future. "All bright are the Stars that are beaming upon us, / And bold are the Bars that are gleaming above us," she observed, adding that "The one shall increase in their number and light, / The other grow bolder in power and might." This flag's traditional aspects reached to the past, while its distinctive ones promised a new stature in the world and in the hearts of its defenders that was still in the process of formation. (23)

The use of verse to express such sentiments followed a pattern of musical innovation that students of Confederate culture have recognized for its emotional impact and breadth of propagation. This tendency had been a hallmark of popular patriotism in the United States and across the Atlantic world during an age of revolution. The appeal of the French "Marseillaise" and the growing popularity of the "Star-Spangled Banner" among Americans were only the two most spectacular examples that had given new life in the nineteenth century to the old aphorism that "if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he :need not care who should make the laws of a nation." By the time of the American Civil War, an evident tension had developed between grassroots efforts to praise the nation and official attempts to standardize anthems from above. Such struggles demonstrated that in music, no less than in plans for monuments, holidays, or flags, there were important opportunities for those outside of the official realm of power to influence a larger nationalist project. (24)

Significantly, Confederate verse, whether contained in newspapers, broadsides, or sheet music, addressed the "old" American flag almost as often as it hailed the Stars and Bars. Many of the most popular songs explained how the former banner had been degraded by its new association with a defiled Union, now governed by abolitionist fanatics and their unprincipled, despotic president. In one typical effort an anonymous poet took Key's tune and mimicked his opening, sighting the old flag waving not over fortresses of defense but those installations "where freemen they dare to enslave" as political prisoners. At the end of the verse, the poet could only wonder, "Oh! Say has the star-spangled banner become / The flag of the Tory and the vile Northern scum?" With the old flag dishonored by the "hands of base minions," Confederates should "trample it down, as our forefathers trod / On the red cross of England they long had defended." The predictable final charge was to make sure that the "bright stars and broad bars" should "wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!" Not all Confederate verse about the old flag matched the disgust of this particular song. Defiant humor, melancholy longing, and continuing outrage over Yankee claims to a flag whose glory had been established by southern heroism were among the responses in efforts to musically bid "Farewell to the Star Spangled Banner," as the title of one of them put it. (25)

Tributes to the new Confederate flag often explicitly built from earlier devotion to the Stars and Stripes. Several claimed that southerners were fighting for a new and improved "red, white, and blue." Yet it also became routine to seize upon the minor changes made in the new Confederate flag to indicate larger differences between Confederates and their former associates in the United States. The three wide "bars" allowed a range of commentators to compare the narrow "stripes" of red and white on the U.S. flag with the oppressive effects of physical beating. Some southern patriots went further still by turning the "striped" wounds of lashes into deadly snakes:

   The flag which they bear
   Is a snare:
   Its Stripes writhe as snakes upon the air;
   And its Stars, no longer bright,
   Tell of chaos and of night,
   As of how they yet
   Will set
   In despair.

Whatever the metaphor, the degradation that the American flag had suffered from Yankee despoliation became a major theme of patriotic reflection. The ubiquity of the Stars and Stripes in the Confederate imagination suggests that relinquishing former loyalties remained a pressing and troubled issue, regardless of the tone adopted. (26)

It was one thing for Confederates to transfer their patriotic feelings to a slightly different standard through ceremonies and songs; it was another to recognize their new and untested banner as the sort of object that would be, as other national flags had become, a symbol worth dying for. Until the new banners could elicit such sacrifice, they paled beside the potency of the Stars and Stripes. (27) Nothing did more to first sanctify the national flag than its connection with the death of James Jackson of Alexandria, Virginia, in the late spring of 1861 (see Illustration 2). Soon after the northern public reacted with outrage to the firing on the Star-Spangled Banner over Fort Sumter, Jackson raised above his hotel, the Marshall House, a sixteen-by-thirty-foot Stars and Bars banner that reportedly could be seen across the Potomac River from the White House itself. Colonel Ephraim Elmer Ellsworth's successful attempt to lower the flag on May 24 resulted in both his and Jackson's death. (28) Unionists recognized the young and daring Ellsworth as their first tree hero, while Confederates also cried, "The blood of the first Martyr has flowed." In Portsmouth, Virginia, a young female Confederate mourned how a "Virginia citizen, defending the flag of his country, has been cut down by the murderous minions of despotic power." From Texas James Wright Simmons lauded Jackson's death on behalf of "[t]he banner of a mighty race," writing that "Patriot! t'was thine-- / To guard those matchless colors, given / By hand Divine!" A North Carolina editor began a campaign, soon echoed across the country, to erect a monument to the Confederate patriot and to provide for his family. Given this publicity, it was little wonder that in late June a Louisiana paper reported that during a fast-day ceremony, "the eyes of many were wet with briney tears when mention was made of the heroic Jackson, whose name has now become inseparably connected with fame and his bleeding country...." (29)

[ILLUSTRATION 2 OMITTED]

Having "died to show us how to die," in the words of one poet, Jackson's sacrifice became a model for a flag-centered patriotism across the new country. "[I]f we want to know how flags are loved," Miss Louisa A. McKerall of Franklin, Louisiana, explained during the presentation of a banner to the St. Mary's Light Artillery, "look at the manner the noble Jackson avenged the insult offered to that floating over his house." She expected that "[i]f our own beloved state is invaded," there would be "one hundred Jacksons" among her listeners ready "to avenge any insult offered to their flag." To one Louisiana priest, Jackson's martyrdom demonstrated a variety of "Spartan valor" in defense of "the sacred emblem of fatherland." His death, another poet explained, testified to the deep personal commitment Jackson had made, as "his patriotic heart had pledged / Its faith as to a bride" to the new symbol. In commemorating his death, most commentators also reflected on the sacred associations and elevated status that the emblem had attained through its baptism of blood. Whatever the flag's elements of stars, bars, and colors might signify on an abstract level, the banner also acquired after Jackson's death a memorable history that honored the sacrifice of ordinary citizens. Poets immediately placed him as a charter member of a national pantheon, predicting that "The living shall enshrine his fame, / And little children, yet unborn, / Will learn to lisp the martyr's name." (30)

As even more deaths appeared imminent in the early summer of 1861, flag ceremonies and songs became less concerned with representing the new nation, the issue that had dominated early discussions. Instead of petitioning Congress, Confederate songwriters appealed directly to citizens, explaining the intimacy that should properly characterize their relationship to the colors--and by extension to their country. John H. Hewitt, one of the most prolific composers, explained how the flag had become the object that would

   ... lead our battalions through carnage and fire,
   While the dying its beauty shall bless;
   And beneath its proud folds shall the free soul expire,
   While his lips the bright galaxy press.

Other songwriters echoed Hewitt's call for the "stalwart and brave [to] round it rally" and "press to their lips every fold," charging the colors with a spiritual presence and an unmistakable romantic quality. Such overtones drew upon flags' association with women, an ingredient of earlier American flag culture that, if anything, intensified in Confederate flag culture. As female patriots took the initiative in flag design and sanctification, they urged male protectors both to cherish the banners and to value them more than the bodies they would risk in war. Transferring the message of James Jackson's death to the duty of every soldier, women instructed their men to imagine the comforts that a familiar emblem might provide in their dying moments. At one presentation ceremony, recipients of a banner were urged, "Let death to dust reduce your form / Let scars upon your persons be, / But keep your flag, your country free." If the men did so, the poet concluded, "Then shall these fair, these gentle ones, / With smiles, with joy, sing: welcome home." (31)

Across the South, farewell ceremonies to send off troops into battle made flags nearly as central as they had been in earlier organized efforts to hoist the new symbol over town squares, villages, and plantations. The climactic moment of these events was the presentation of a battle flag, usually by a group of local women who had crafted it, and the banner's blessing, usually by a local clergyman. The Adams Light Guard of Natchez, Mississippi, enjoyed a typically grand reception of a banner seven feet high and five feet wide before two thousand spectators one Tuesday night in mid-1861. In an elaborate ritual that included remarks by the flag's designer, Mrs. G. M. Hillyer, and a prayer by the Rev. Dr. Watkins, the company commander affirmed that "we go to fight in a holy cause" and that "we march under a sacred flag to defend our homes and our firesides from the cruelties of a relentless enemy." In countless similar ceremonies local women solidified their connection with flags by bestowing the "colors" as a token that they expected to be cherished as a comforting and quasi-holy emblem. As one Tennessee woman put it when presenting a flag, "it would be difficult to render a compliment more delicately conceived, more potent in its moral influence, than for the women of their hearts to present them with a banner around which in the thickness of the battle, will cluster the fondest memories of their firesides." (32)

Ceremonies like the one in Natchez also introduced new symbols of the cause, including some of the first incorporations of the Southern Cross design into actual flags. The arrangement of the federation's states in the pattern of a cross had been suggested during the South Carolina secession convention; it had subsequently become the preferred alternative to continuity at the Montgomery Congress. In advocating this design before Congress, Christopher Memminger argued that the gesture would make clear that it was "by the aid of revealed religion"--particularly the southern reliance on the Bible in defending slavery--"that we have achieved over fanaticism the victory which we this day witness." George W. Bagby, editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, was another staunch advocate of placing on the flag the "emblem of that pure and holy religion which has been reviled, trampled and spit upon in the interest of Abolitionism." Not only did Bagby lobby for the cross (even while his own state of Virginia was in the Union), his publication of an anthem by St. George Tucker furnished Confederates with what would become one of the most popular songs of the entire secession crisis. Though set to the melody of the "Star-Spangled Banner," Tucker's lyrics relied much more heavily on religious imagery than had Key's. It described how "Like the symbol of love and redemption its form," the new flag would give the "promise of peace, or assurance in war[.]" The song also invoked the example of Constantine's cross, which had parlayed devotion to a Christian redeemer into military victory. Tucker's ode to the "Cross of the South, which shall ever remain / To light us to Freedom and Glory again" was widely reprinted in newspapers, broadsides, sheet music, and in songbooks, causing many to adopt the cross of stars as a symbol to rally around and, at the local level, to place on battle flags. (33)

As historians of the flag have long noted, the Southern Cross overcame early objections to its use by having one important advantage over the Stars and Bars. Opponents of the cross had regularly criticized its exclusive religious nature: De Bow's Review considered it "suggestive of ... Catholic Rule"; the Richmond Whig offered the even more common complaint that it was "religiously offensive to a large and patriotic class of citizens (Israelites) who do not recognize the cross as the symbol of their creed." Other critics had considered it not only too much of a departure from familiar forms but inaccurate in its depiction of a constellation that could only be seen from the Southern Hemisphere. Yet even though these aspects had doomed the chances of the cross in Montgomery, the chaos of the First Battle of Bull Run made many reconsider it as an option. That conflict proved a point that champions of the Southern Cross had earlier made--that the resemblance of the Stars and Bars to the enemy flag would be a "political and military solecism." However successful poets were in describing the differences between bars and stripes, the heavy smoke of gunfire called for more distinctive elements. This practical need allowed supporters of the cross to achieve their first real success late in 1861. (34)

The adoption of the Southern Cross by the eastern Confederate troops commanded by P. G. T. Beauregard and Joseph E. Johnston in the first fall of the war has been a favorite topic among postwar flag enthusiasts since it marked the first large-scale use of this best known of all Confederate symbols. After the confusion at Bull Run, Beauregard collaborated with Congressman Miles and Hetty, Jennie, and Constance Cary to mass-produce, with great fanfare, a new army emblem for Confederate troops in Virginia. While this genesis has become a well-known story, crucial aspects of the episode are generally overlooked. (35) For instance, some of the most energetic advocates of the Southern Cross launched their campaign on its behalf prior to the battle of Bull Run rather than in its wake. The day before that encounter, the Charleston Mercury claimed to "speak the sentiments of three-fourths of the Southern people" when it noted that "the Confederate Flag has not only failed to satisfy, but has greatly disappointed them" by its imitation of the American flag. Most advocates of a new banner continued to speak about greater distinctiveness in ideological terms rather than in strictly practical terms of battlefield necessity. For many, the final days of the Provisional Congress, scheduled to adjourn early in 1862, seemed an appropriate time to choose a replacement for what the New Orleans Delta characteristically denounced as a "hybrid bunting in use during our transition state from attempted to confirmed independence of the country of whose flag it is a plagiary." More and more Confederates, then, began to reconsider the gesture of continuity that popular pressure had accomplished in the first place. As a result, they despaired of ever ridding their flag of the "taint" of its model and went so far as to place blame for the situation on the very congressmen who had publicly backed distinctive symbols. The Richmond Dispatch, once the leading champion of the first official emblem, printed a plea for change late in 1861 that concluded that the flag was "like a marriage ring after a divorce for infidelity. When we hate the marriage, we hate all its mementos." With the likelihood that war would continue, an earlier consensus for continuity shifted increasingly towards new departures. (36)

The significance of the new flag's presentation has also been underappreciated by scholars, even though the ceremony at the Centerville, Virginia, army camp nationalized a form that had first developed at the local level. One correspondent present with the Virginia troops described how the day began with the "imposing display" of a "solid mass of bayonets" that "extended for nearly half a mile." After a review with "spirited airs" from the band, soldiers marched to form an area surrounded on three sides by thousands of troops, within which the largest flag sanctification yet would occur. Just as in local ceremonies, a chaplain blessed the cross banner, during which "every head was uncovered and every voice hushed." Then the adjutant general announced:

   A new banner is intrusted to-day, as a battle-flag, to the safe keeping of
   the Army of the Potomac. 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 dishonor, 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 honor and renown for yourselves--or death.

With the contribution of only a few women turned into a proxy for all soldiers' female kin, the Southern Cross banner became part of a powerful tradition that had already marked the experience of many men departing for war. Though standardized from above, the presentation of uniform battle flags still attempted to draw from widely dispersed memories and vows made while far from the battlefront. Future adoption of regimental colors by other Confederate armies would follow this same procedure, making the military ritual a nationalistic experience with religious connotations. Perhaps even more than its central symbolic device of the cross, the manner of this banner's presentation attempted to establish it as a holy object to defend and preserve. (37)

Yet it is important to note that official proponents of the cross were frustrated, at least in the short run, in their calculated effort to make a change to the new government's civilian standard. Chairman Miles stressed his attempts to defuse earlier controversies by choosing a less conspicuous diagonal design rather than an "upright" emblem, so that the new banner might avoid "the religious objection about the cross (from the Jews and many Protestant sects)." Despite such sensitivity to opponents, familiar charges against the cross remained potent in the popular world of the press and petitions. When the Richmond Dispatch opened a new round of flag debate in December 1861, it found the sideways cross nearly as objectionable as the Stars and Bars, as did countless other opponents of the design. They agreed with the assessment, if not the conclusion, of Countryman editor Joseph Addison Turner, himself a supporter of a religious emblem. "Put a constellation of stars in the shape of the cross upon our banner," Turner wrote early in 1862, "and no one will have to be told what language that image speaks. It will not have to be said to any one that, in adopting the cross as their standard, the Southern people recognize Christ and him crucified, and his precious teachings as the foundation of their constitution, laws, and religion." This sectarian message made Congress reluctant to consider the cross as a suitable national symbol, and they focused their energy on a range of alternatives. Spurred on by a continuing barrage of petitions for a new flag, congressmen sporadically considered a set of proposals that included what George Bagby ridiculed as "all sorts of bars, triangles, suns, moons, stars, comets, nebulas, and hideous colors and figures." None of these received either significant popular support or a majority of congressional votes. The delay in changing the flag was nonetheless tolerated since there was a widespread desire that Congress "not be in too great a hurry to fix another abortion on us," as the Richmond Examiner put it. That paper summed up a pervasive sentiment in baldly asserting, "Public taste cannot be compelled." There were severe limits to dictating flag sentiments from above, especially since so much of the energy already expended on the topic had been generated at the local level, and by ordinary citizens. (38)

Hesitant to proceed too quickly, Congress allowed the division between an army and a civilian standard to continue for nearly a year and a half. The Stars and Bars still appeared in civilian life and over garrisons, forts, and army headquarters, while soldiers fought primarily behind whichever standard their commanding officer had decided they should carry into battle. (39) This variety of official standards inevitably reduced the effectiveness of any one of these symbols. The Union's "Old Glory" had gained much of its appeal from its multipurpose use, floating above armies and government buildings as well as school houses and churches, and appearing on patriotic envelopes and in illustrated magazines. The familiarity of the American flag turned fighting hundreds of miles from one's residence into the defense of something personal; it helped to produce the "synchrony of public and private lives" that historian Reid Mitchell has identified as a crucial component of northern soldiers' motivation. When the Stars and Bars was both the civilian and military standard, the New Orleans Picayune explained that these flags were not only rallying points for battle, "but bulwarks for the security of everything which is worth preserving, without which we feel that all which makes a country worth having would be irretrievably lost." Since Americans' fabled mania for the United States flag had depended on the link between battlefield and home front, the existence of two competing Confederate symbols hindered the emotional appeal of either. Despite the flag culture of ritual, song, and sacrifice, it would be well into 1863 before Confederates consolidated their patriotism in a single icon that could be comparable to the Star-Spangled Banner in its power or identification. (40)

With two competing flags to choose from, the public ultimately shifted its preference in popular culture from the Stars and Bars to the increasingly battle-scarred flag of the Virginia army. Poets pointed out that this emblem was "No silken toy to flaunt in joy, / When careless shouts are heard," as those flags waved during the euphoric days of secession had been. The martial device was the object of greater seriousness: "Where thou art borne all scathed and torn, / A nation's heart is stirred." (41) Hearts seemed more moved by individual battlefield sacrifice for the flag than by the showy presentations like those Beauregard had staged. A range of popular media turned attention away from such Napoleonic spectacles to the image of a single wounded soldier receiving solace from a flag described as "The soldier's beacon-light through toil / The load-star of the Christian brave!" The figure of the noble standard-bearer, bravely defending the troops' colors, became a favorite theme of Confederate sentimentalists. The risks that came with this position often transformed common soldiers into heroes. Their patriotism was affirmed in songs that praised their willingness to be vulnerable and that celebrated their happy deaths under the colors that all true soldiers should learn to love. One popular tune depicted the exploits of a young standard-bearer, who refused, even after his sacrifice, to relinquish his enthusiasm. As he lay dead on the field, observers (and listeners) could witness that:

   A ray of light was in his eye,
   A smile upon his mouth,
   While to his death-chilled breast he clasped,
   The banner of the South! (42)

Given the elevated status of the Southern Cross battle flags in popular imagery of war, the decision of Congress to adopt it as a defining feature of the new national flag in May 1863 was anticlimactic. When first suggested for the national banner late in 1861, the cross motif had "no solitary association in the history of our people, nor root nor fibre in their hearts," as the Richmond Dispatch had put it. Yet a year and a half later Confederates recognized, in the words of the Richmond Enquirer, that "the crimson battle flag with its starred St. Andrew's Cross of Blue" now had "claims upon us." On the battlefield, as well as in a growing body of popular verse and memory, "soldiers have died with one last look upon its dear cross; and in the hour of victory it has seemed transfigured into something God-like, when the rapturous shouts of our Southern soldiery shook its folds like a storm." Having acquired such associations, it seemed clear to the Southern Illustrated News that "the baptism of blood and fire has made the battle-flag of General Johnston our national ensign," regardless of its delayed official recognition. The only difficulty in adopting it immediately was its inability to signal distress, since inverting the banner did not change its appearance. General Beauregard, whose earlier penchant for practicality had established the precedent for visual distinctiveness on the battlefield, proposed that "a good design for the national flag would be the present battle-flag as Union Jack, and the rest all white or all blue." This measure--placing the star-cross design in the upper corner of an otherwise monochromatic flag--would allow the civilian ensign to signal distress while incorporating that image that had been, in Beauregard's words, "consecrated by the best blood of our country on so many battle-fields." The final version of the second national flag, adopted May 1, 1863, did just this: it set the St. Andrew's Cross of stars in the Union Jack with the rest of the civilian banner entirely white. (43)

Not surprisingly, the Confederate editors, poets, and songwriters who had done the most to shape flag culture applied their energies in the spring of 1863 to making sense of this new national flag. The Savannah Morning News had lobbied for the white banner as a sign that "we are fighting to maintain the Heaven ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race," predicting that it would "be hailed by the civilized world as THE WHITE MAN'S FLAG." (44) Yet these racial connotations of whiteness were displaced by the flag's almost immediate association with the death of Stonewall Jackson, whose martyrdom would imbue this banner with the same sort of solemnity that the death of civilian James Jackson in defense of the Stars and Bars had elicited. The unveiling of the new flag at Stonewall Jackson's funeral earned the colorless field the nickname of "the Stainless Banner." The combination of the cross, the "pure" field of white, and the association with the battlefield martyrdom of one of the country's most pious men endowed the banner with potent religious associations. Anthems to this new flag would use these themes to make the flag simultaneously a holy object worthy of sacrifice and a signal to place the country's faith in a higher power. One song gloried how the banner showed that "Our trust is in God, who can help us in fight, / And defend those who ask Him in prayer," while another described how the "blood-stained crest" of the banner would witness "the soldier's trembling prayer, / Before he sunk to rest." (45)

The official adoption of this second national flag did not necessarily mean a complete acceptance of the Christian nature of the Confederate cause, however. By 1863 Confederate religiosity had become routine through the experience of fast-days, an expanded chaplain corps, and large-scale army revivals--not to mention the consecration of battle flags by clergy and women back home. The adoption of a Christian flag was thus part of a larger program rather than its chief signal. (46) More importantly, however, the St. Andrew's version of the cross had become associated with a different type of faith altogether. Devotion to female gifts from home outweighed allegiance to a particular creed, while the sacrifices of soldiers on the battlefield now seemed more significant than remembering the Christian Savior upon the cross at Calvary. What St. George Tucker had presented in verse as "the emblem of peace" early in 1861 had unmistakably become an emblem of war in the subsequent two years, as national sacrifices beneath this banner endowed the flag with a quasi-religious significance of its own. Earlier religious connotations may have retained their potency for some, but they were increasingly linked to the sort of "totemic" power that Emile Durkheim has associated with even those flags invoking explicitly secular themes. Each soldier's sacrifice in defense of his army's flag was as important as traditional religious meanings in convincing survivors to see larger purpose in their cause. They knew that a fallen comrade had not "sacrificed himself to a piece of cloth," as Durkheim framed the devotion to flags more generally, but for the transcendent spirit that the totem represented. Battlefield sacrifice thus made a controversial symbol more palatable by expanding the religious dimensions of the cross design beyond one particular faith. (47)

The once objectionable geographical features of the Southern Cross underwent even more fundamental change after 1861. The earlier complaints that this constellation only appeared in the Southern Hemisphere virtually disappeared. Moreover, while the inclusion of thirteen stars did convey a not-so-subtle message that Missouri and Kentucky were full-fledged members of the confederation, the flag's "extra" stars rarely sparked popular reflection about claims to the border states. Instead, the flag conjured up battlefield victories and defeats at locales like Manassas, Antietam, and Fredericksburg; its geographical referents became more historical than territorial. In 1864 the Alabama poet A. B. Meek wrote a series of lyrics for the Southern Soldier's Prize Songster that dramatized this transformation. Using common themes, he assured the troops that "Neath the flag of the Cross, / With its stars all aglow, / We'll swoop on the ranks / Of the infidel foe!" He also invoked the example of Constantine's achieving victory by carrying the Christian God's banner into combat. Yet Meek's lengthiest consideration of the flag emphasized its ongoing association with specific battles, as he reminded soldiers, with some overstatement, that:

   Thrice it shone on grim Manassas,
   Like a meteor from afar;
   Through Virginia's mountain passes,
   It was aye our guiding star;
   Sharpsburg's blood-shot eyes beheld it,--
   Richmond, with her Seven Days;
   Chickamauga's breezes swelled it,--
   Charleston still its fold displays. (48)

As Meek's references to Tennessee and South Carolina make clear, more and more battlefields witnessed the diagonal cross, as the St. Andrew's symbol became the chief feature of the civilian banner and the distinctive element of a growing number of army standards both within and beyond Virginia. Beauregard and Johnston did most to spread the flag to western commands, a process that began with the former's relocation to the West early in 1862 and was completed by Johnston's introduction of the famed Virginia battle flag, slightly modified from its original square design, to nearly all of the Army of Tennessee in the spring of 1864. In the last year of the war, the Southern Cross would lead most soldiers supporting the Confederate government in the major armies as well as its navy, which began to fly the cross in 1863. It would also be a prominent civilian symbol for the rest of the war, both in the Stainless Banner and in the final Confederate national flag of 1865, whose only modification was a red stripe added to the end so that the flag's "pure white" would not be mistaken for the traditional sign of surrender. With the cross the makers of Confederate flag culture forged a symbol with overlapping messages of wartime sacrifice, popular mobilization, and loyalty to a national government that extended over a considerable portion of an entire continent. Though the battle flag had initially entered the collective consciousness as a rival to the civil ensign of the Stars and Bars, its incorporation into the national flag helped to merge state, army, and southern nationality under a single design. By the end of the war, the popularity of this easily recognized symbol led to the inclusion of the Stainless Banner on Confederate money and of the cross itself on the buttons of uniforms. (49)

The proliferation of the Southern Cross design in the last two years of war represented one important aspect of the consolidation of Confederate nationalism. Those who wonder how this achievement might ultimately matter should consider how it revises standard judgments about the Confederacy's failure to develop a meaningful symbolic program. The attention Confederates gave to flags challenges Drew Gilpin Faust's claim that there were "no evident southern equivalents of such popular French symbols as the liberty tree," while the changing subtexts of the Southern Cross also undermine her conclusion that paper shortages and other printing difficulties "inhibited [Confederate nationalism] in its ability to grow and change." No one would deny that in the sparseness of prints and engravings the country was "iconographically deprived," as a trio of recent scholars have put it. But white southerners made up for these shortcomings not only by relying on the traditional modes of oral culture and the sorts of wartime painting that Faust herself has explored with great insight, but also by disseminating the icon that has represented the Lost Cause ever since--a Rebel flag ubiquitous among Confederates by the end of the war. The fascination that the Southern Cross evoked in newspapers and sheet music, as well as on the battlefields, in the streets, and in the villages of the wartime South, increased rather than declined after 1863 in large part because of the many songs and poems that were penned, in the spirit of Francis Scott Key, to this quasi-sacred image. If scholars have used iconographic shortcomings as part of the reason for Confederate defeat, evidence of success in symbol-making should be taken every bit as seriously for what it reveals about larger questions. The status of the American flag as what one scholar has termed "the most pervasive national monument in our visual environment" should make attention to wartime flag culture even more important. (50)

The consolidating tendencies of the Southern Cross encompassed three related aspects beyond its most basic figural sense: the symbol's role in attaching the nation to its citizens, linking the Confederate cause to a national army, and facilitating the transformation of the new republic from a confederacy into a nation. The first of these issues is the most difficult to gauge. The majority of the rituals and songs involving banners attempted to turn flag devotion into a means of producing an emotional tie between individuals and the new republic. Evaluating the relative success of such measures would be difficult, even if an exhaustive survey of private diaries and letters were undertaken. There are enough reflections that a persuasive case can be built to show directly opposite conclusions: the same sources have led some scholars to emphasize the achievements of Confederate nationalism, and many others to document its shortcomings. One of the best-known critiques, contained in the multiauthored Why the South Lost the Civil War, concluded from a survey of such material that "[t]he Confederate nation was created on paper, not in the hearts and minds of its would-be citizens." This assessment rested on the lack of adequate devotion, as recorded privately, to sustain Confederate nationalism past the setbacks of 1863. (51)

If we treat Confederate nationalism as a system of symbols and public responses rather than as merely an aggregation of individual attitudes expressed in private writings, the status of the flag, and of Confederate patriotism generally, can be more fully appreciated. Here, the Richmond Examiner's decision early in 1864 to use this emblem to stave off defeatist attitudes is perhaps as revealing as a mass of unpublished material. As southerners rallied their energies for a new season of campaigning, the paper put aside basic issues of defense of home, farm, or the institution of slavery until it had expounded at great length about the emotional impact of relinquishing "[o]ur Confederate Flag, that has blazed in the front of twenty pitched battles." After explaining how it would be "formally lowered, officially torn, trampled, and abolished forever" in favor of the "accursed Stars and Stripes," the paper imagined "[s]ome maimed and battle-worn Confederate who should be standing by, a witness to that formality." It asked readers to:

   conceive his deep wrath and despair as he gazes on the deed of shame! A
   hundred times he has stood in the line of battle under that Southern Cross;
   has seen its fiery folds flashing almost with a living passion, as LEE or
   JACKSON rode along the front on the morning of some bloody day; has seen
   its fierce, incarnate glow, as it flashed deep into the enemy's lines, and
   has followed it throughout, mayhap with naked feet, but with love and
   devotion in his heart, because he associated the triumphs of that banner
   with a secure and peaceful home and an honorable future for his country[.]

With such "horrors of Peace," the Examiner predicted that defeat would bring to the South "all the evils that ever lay heavily on a conquered nation.... "Despite military setbacks, then, Confederates should still take pride in the fact that "[t]he free air of their native hills still blows upon our soldiers' brows, and lifts the proud folds of their banners." The paper's extended lament and its recommended solace suggest that if anything had power late in the war to inspire citizens to remain: true to the cause, it was a Confederate flag, whose honor and survival had become linked to the fate of the republic. That its degradation was at the center of "What Subjugation Means" testified to its centrality in Confederate public culture and in the emotional lives of its defenders. This plea reminds us that Confederate nationalism existed not merely in the dichotomous worlds of "paper" and of citizens' "hearts and minds." It also manifested itself in pieces of cloth and silk, whose glorification in song and ceremony helped to span the emotional gap between profession and belief. (52)

There is more conclusive evidence that the adoption of an army flag as a national symbol increased the salience of military life in Confederate self-understanding. This was the exact opposite trend than that experienced by the United States, whose own Stars and Stripes, originally a civilian banner to be flown above ships, forts, and garrisons, only gradually became part of the Union's combat regalia. A full twenty years passed between the time the Star-Spangled Banner was named, during the second war with England, and its adoption by artillery units in 1834. It was then adopted for infantry use in 1841 but was not approved as the official emblem of the federal cavalry until 1862, when the civilian emblem finally accompanied all of the United States forces into battle. The Confederate Southern Cross, by building on its initial combat-related fame to later become a civilian symbol, thus distinguished itself from its predecessor. The flag's genesis as an army standard also tends to support Gary Gallagher's contention that after mid-1862 "Lee and his army" became "critical agents that engendered unity and hope" among white southerners loyal to the Confederacy. The incorporation of the Virginia army's flag into the nation's most important civilian symbol was also an important agent in instilling popular identification with the army. Specialists on Confederate iconography have noted that Lee "did not emerge as a pictorial subject until after he had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant." Given the absence of Lee's own image, the widely honored flag of his army must have been at least as important as his image in the visual imaginations of southern whites. The adoption of the military symbol in the national flag, then, did not just result from this glorification of the army as the most important manifestation of the nation but was itself a force in making the association even stronger in the last two years of combat. (53)

The distinctive flag's growing association with a national army muted the overt message of the banner's individual stars, which, as so many early songs explained, showed that the Confederacy was first and foremost a collection of sovereign states, each voluntarily entering a new constellation. In selecting the first flag at Montgomery, the Alabama delegate J. L. M. Curry had warned against even calling the Stars and Bars a "national flag," fearing that the label might compromise the republic's devotion to its citizens' respective states. Yet by declaring fealty to a single object of devotion, Confederates developed a patriotism across state lines, just as Americans in the Jacksonian period had solidified American nationalism by developing a cult of the Star-Spangled Banner. For Confederates, this process began with the adoption of the Stars and Bars, after which even the crustiest leaders of South Carolina, like Governor Francis W. Pickens, looked beyond their state's borders to announce that "wherever the Confederate Flag floats, there too is our country, now and forever!" The forging of an even more popular symbol, the Southern Cross, appropriately began in localities across the South; then the design became associated with the main Virginia army, which, by maintaining a more even geographic distribution of troops throughout the war than its western counterpart, was the most fitting representative of a truly national military force. The Arkansas poet Albert Pike, who transformed "Dixie" from a minstrel tune to a war hymn by deleting the words "way down south in Dixie" and adding the charge, "Advance the flag of Dixie," had earlier recognized the nationalizing effects of a popular flag and army. Before turning his attention to a new national anthem, he reflected that no American had ever served under the Stars and Stripes "who did not for the time feel, with a conviction more potent than all the arguments and logic of statesmen could produce, that we were one nation, in name, fame, and destiny." He added, "Every war we engaged in would have made the feeling of oneness more and more irresistible." This phenomenon had characterized the development of nationalism in the United States both before and after the Civil War. In the 1860s it also manifested itself in consolidating a second American confederacy into a nation, in part through its fascination with a nearly holy emblem for patriots to revere. (54)

Efforts to sustain flag culture on its military, nationalist basis continued until the very end of the war, when a Confederate nation forged through war and its quasi-religious flag faced their final crisis. On March 4, 1865, four years to the day after the Montgomery convention had first flown the Stars and Bars, poetic appeals to "[f]ling wide the glorious banner" and to join the cause still appeared in the Richmond papers. It hardly needs to be said that men who had managed to stay out of the army for four years needed more incentive than stirring poetry to enter the trenches around Petersburg and Richmond, where the waving of banners had ceased to be a prominent aspect of combat. But both to those who still served and to those who imagined their service, sacrifice for the flag still made sense. In the week before Richmond fell, the songwriter John Hewitt wrote of a soldier who, with "pale lips quiver[ing] to the pang / Of bleeding wound," looked instinctively to his flag. "I die for thee," the imaginary Confederate affirmed, making sense of his mortality in exactly the way men had been taught for the previous four years to value a piece of cloth and the nation it represented over their own bodies. Conflating the future of the homeland with the defense of its most valued object, he declared:

   I die for thee--proud banner of the South! Freely I pour the red tide of my
   heart Upon my country's altar. Be she free And I will die that she may live
   in light.

Such sentiments were also expressed in the ranks. In retreat from Richmond with the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia in early April 1865, William Gordon McCabe praised the "superb courage" of the commitment to the colors in the last months of the war, writing that the troops under his command "will go with Genl. Lee as long as the Battle-Cross floats on the field." The way that the "Battle-Cross" image connected combat, Christian symbolism, and the "cause," testified to the creative and evolving quality of nationalism in the Confederacy. (55)

The defiantly waving national flag encouraged many Confederates to assume that as long as there were soldiers marching behind the same righteous banner that had led so many to their deaths, their country retained the hope of God's ultimate favor and His intervention in their own holy cause. But their history, of course, was not that of Emperor Constantine. Confederates' belief in the association between symbol, army, and divine purpose included a vitally important corollary that demonstrates the difficulties of equating the consolidation of Confederate nationality with either the "strength" or "weakness" of citizens' determination to win political independence at any cost. With the country's identity intertwined with that of its regular armies, most people accepted the fact that hopes for Confederate independence, however fiercely defended during war, would expire with defeat on the battlefield. By 1865 Confederate flag culture supported this notion that divine judgment would be registered by the fate of the country's armies. Despite what their leaders might say about battling under all conditions, poets had long since ceased to glory in civilian resistance. Odes to the hotelkeeper Jackson and the Stars and Bars he protected were eclipsed in patriotic verse by the deaths of enlisted soldiers under a piece of cloth readily identified with the country's organized fighting forces. A cover of sheet music, showing a kneeling soldier under the Stainless Banner inscribed with an appeal to God, provided a lasting image of how flag culture helped to establish the ultimate authority of providential judgment, as decided through regular combat (see Illustration 3).

[ILLUSTRATION 3 OMITTED]

In defeat, white southerners would demonstrate little interest in the sort of intermittent guerrilla struggle that would become the hallmark of successful nationalist causes in the next century. Lee's transfer of his sword and his army's surrender of their flags symbolized the demise of the Confederacy to most of its former supporters, even if some soldiers chose to destroy their cherished emblems rather than allow them to pass to enemy hands. Even though many experienced great angst, their flag devotion was not applied to further nationalist resistance. One soldier found it "hard to think that our glorious old Confederate banner--which we have borne high aloft unconquered so long--must now be furled." Yet amid sorrow, there was resignation, as the same writer echoed the religious themes of the Southern Cross, hoping that "in his own good time God will give us a new & more beautiful one which shall float proudly and wide over all of our foes." (56)

In the process of surrender, the Southern Cross played nearly as important a role as it had during war. The once consolidated nationality underwent a fundamental transformation to become not a symbol of future struggle but a reminder of glorious defeat. The most lasting expression of Confederate failure and acquiescence was written the day after Lee's surrender to Grant, with the plea to fold the battle flag according to protocol:

   Furl that banner, softly, slowly, Treat it gently--it is holy-- For it
   droops above the dead; Touch it not, unfold it never, Let it droop there,
   furled forever, For its people's hopes are fled.

Father Abram J. Ryan, the Irish American priest who wrote this most influential of all "Lost Cause" verses, performed a similar function at the end of the war as those clergy who had sanctified the flags in 1861. He assured white southerners that a defeated banner would be no less holy and that they should remember that their now-furled flags had never been deserted nor defiled, but honorably surrendered. This important message was not completely inconsistent with earlier instructions, since those Confederate soldiers who gave up their flags could deny ever having irresponsibly abandoned them. As Lee himself explained in his oft-quoted farewell to his troops, they seemed to have honorably resisted a much more powerful enemy for as long as they possibly could. Flags that had been defeated and surrendered on the battlefield subsequently became part of a campaign that Ryan, among others, would launch to protect "the traditions, and memories and glories of the struggle," and to make sure that the Confederate past be kept "alive and aglow" in white southerners' hearts and minds rather than in its armies and governments. It was for the sake of heritage, rather than for any future plans for an independent republic, that beaten Confederates would "owe it to the past to preserve the story of our struggle," as Ryan put it in 1868. (57)

Confederates' most successful wartime creation--the recognizable Southern Cross "rebel flag"--would not remain furled forever. But as Father Ryan had suggested, its religious aura would be fundamentally different once it became the emblem of a lost cause and a noble memory. The days of the flag as totem passed with the dispersal of the army that it had increasingly stood for and that had occupied Confederates' attention during the final months of combat. From the postwar "road to reunion" through the 1990s, the flag would serve different sorts of political ends than it had when rallying separatist aspirations. As in war, the specific functions that the symbol served would profoundly shape the meaning of its design. As the centerpiece of memorial services, battlefield parks, and historical societies, frayed battle flags became relics to be honored and preserved rather than military instruments that might inspire future efforts to challenge the United States government. Rebel flags after the war would be emblems of memory rather than of destiny, regardless of how the politics of their display might change and how tensions over their meaning might escalate, as they have in recent years. In a series of postbellum Confederate flag cultures, which must all be judged comparatively tepid in relation to their wartime predecessor, the fate of a South securely within the Union has been almost uniformly accepted. (58)

The flag retained a mystical quality after the fall of the Confederacy in part because of the attention that earlier rituals and songs had placed on this special piece of cloth. In passing from totem to relic, the flag continued to serve as an agent of cultural organization, but these "Conquered Banners" would inspire far more elegies than anthems. (59) In their postwar range of meanings, Confederate flags would connect the present to the past rather than to the future and would divide southerners along lines of race rather than split the Union along territorial frontiers. The central cross designs would generally lose their associations with Christianity and, for most Americans, take on other connotations, at times sinister, at other times merely defiant. The flags have elicited an extraordinary range of support and of condemnation, as recent scholarship has documented. Such a variety of connotations demonstrates that more than any other controversial symbol, such as the Nazi swastika, the Soviet hammer and sickle, or the Japanese "Rising Sun," the Confederate battle flag is perhaps best characterized by its stubborn indeterminacy, an aspect that frustrates efforts by both enemies and supporters to establish its true meaning.

Present-day admirers of the Confederate flag trace their reverence for it to wartime pride and to the sacrifices made by ancestors to die for a banner that rivaled, if only for a time, the governing power of the Stars and Stripes. They rarely note that this flag, while generally without explicit racial messages, was the primary signal of an embattled slaveholding republic or that its citizens had much greater, and far more reactionary, ambitions than merely taking a stance for exalted principle or for defending home. (60) Wartime efforts to create a nationalist sentiment du drapeau have been obscured, as motivation has been taken for granted and the sharper edges of the Confederate cause have been smoothed. Once support for a separate southern republic all but vanished, it was hard to remember the fundamental fact that Confederate fortunes were to depend, in the end, on the willingness of citizens not only to honor flags, but to die for them and to kill for them. The absence of nationalist imperatives after 1865 makes clear that, even in the matter of the Confederate flag, that best known of all southern icons, the case for discontinuity over continuity in southern history remains the most convincing.

(1) William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South (Boston, 1863), 91-96 (first, second, and third quotations on p. 92; fourth quotation on p. 91).

(2) Ibid., 91.

(3) Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge and London, 1988).

(4) Craig Calhoun, "Nationalism and the Public Sphere," in Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar, eds., Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy (Chicago and London, 1997), 100 (quotation). For two other overviews of recent scholarship on nationalism that both stress the move from "primordialist" to constructivist perspectives, see Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, "Introduction: From the Moment of Social History to the Work of Culture Representation," in Eley and Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York and Oxford, 1996), 3-37, esp. 6-7; and Rogers Brubaker, "Myths and Misconceptions in the Study of Nationalism," in John A. Hall, ed., The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism (Cambridge, Eng., and other cities, 1998), 272-306. The public nature of early American nationalism, and especially its celebratory rites and its manifestation in print, is the theme of David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill and London, 1997).

(5) Compare Kenneth M. Stampp, "The Southern Road to Appomattox," in Stampp, The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (New York and Oxford, 1980), 246-69; and Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still Jr., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens, Ga., and London, 1986); to Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill and London, 1996); Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1997); Reid Mitchell, "Nationalism," in Richard N. Current, ed., Encyclopedia of the Confederacy (4 vols.; New York and other cities, 1993), III, 1111-16; George C. Rable, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics (Chapel Hill and London, 1994); and Harry S. Stout, "The Life and Death of the Confederate Jeremiad," James A. Gray lectures at Duke University, 1992 (unpublished manuscript in the possession of the author).

(6) Gallagher, Confederate War; Robert E. Bonner, "Rebels with Causes, Now and Then," Reviews in American History, 27 (June 1999), 234-42.

(7) Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge, Eng., and other cities, 1999). This volume takes issue with the very influential argument of Benedict Anderson, whose Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983) linked nationalism to print culture and the rise of the modern novel. Marvin and Ingle redefine the nation as a community of shared sacrifice and blood rather than of text-based imagination and print. The experience of Civil War-era flag devotion bears out their critique only in part, since the messages disseminated about blood sacrifice for flags were embodied not only in cloth objects but in the print culture that both Anderson and Faust, in Creation of Confederate Nationalism, have explored.

(8) Scot M. Guenter, The American Flag, 1777-1924: Cultural Shifts from Creation to Codification (Rutherford, N.J., and other cities, 1990). Flag practices of the antebellum and Civil War periods were less developed than they would later be, resting more on individual initiative than careful codification and regulation. Compare Guenter's material for these early years with the official efforts to develop a cult of the flag, as described by Cecelia Elizabeth O'Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton, 1999); and Stuart McConnell, "Reading the Flag: A Reconsideration of the Patriotic Cults of the 1890s," in John Bodnar, ed., Bonds of Affection: Americans Define Their Patriotism (Princeton, 1996), 102-19.

(9) Faust, Creation of Confederate Nationalism, 82-85. Alice Fahs focuses on popular attitudes, often expressed in poetry and verse, to illuminate the disjunction between popular culture and the perspectives of leading intellectuals in "The Sentimental Soldier in Popular Civil War Literature, 1861-65," Civil War History, 46 (June 2000), 107-31. Other studies of the popular use of flags and banners include Arundhati Virmani, "National Symbols under Colonial Domination: The Nationalization of the Indian Flag, March-August 1923," Past & Present, 164 (August 1999), 169-97; James A. Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790-1850 (New York and Oxford, 1994); and Harry Saker, The South African Flag Controversy, 1925-1928 (Capetown, Oxford, and other cities, 1980).

(10) Scot M. Guenter develops the notion of "flag culture" in American Flag, esp. 44-65.

(11) Recent works addressing contemporary controversies over the Confederate flag, which intensified in the early 1990s, include Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (New York, 1998); George Schedler, Racist Symbols and Reparations: Philosophical Reflections on Vestiges of the American Civil War (Lanham, Md., and other cities, 1998), esp. Part One; and J. Michael Martinez, William D. Richardson, and Ron McNinch-Su, eds., Confederate Symbols in the Contemporary South (Gainesville, Fla., and other cities, 2000).

(12) The most helpful brief overview of the basics of flag design and selection is Devereaux D. Cannon Jr., The Flags of the Confederacy: An Illustrated History (Memphis, 1988). George Henry Preble, History of the Flag of the United States of America (Boston, 1880) remains very helpful, especially 494-531.

(13) In the process of researching "flag culture," I located over one hundred separate pieces of music and verse directed primarily to the Confederate flag, a number that falls far short of the total amount of material that appeared in newspapers, sheet music, broadsides, songsters, and later anthologies. From this sample it is clear not only that the flag was the single most popular topic for songwriters, but that verse became, over the course of the war, the most significant venue for considering the meaning of various flags and their status in the new country. The words of verse often changed from newspapers to the anthologies that appeared both during and after the war. A very helpful overview (though one that is far from complete) is Esther Parker Ellison, The Southern War Poetry of the Civil War (Philadelphia, 1918).

(14) This ceremony is described in full in William C. Davis, "A Government of Our Own ": The Making of the Confederacy (New York and other cities, 1994), 241-44; it was also reported in the Montgomery Advertiser, March 6, 1861, p. 1; and Charleston Mercury, March 8, 1861, p. 1, c. 4. The dialogue between continuity and change is a major theme of Faust, Creation of Confederate Nationalism. The prominent role Confederates had played in the United States provides a glaring contrast to the dynamics involved in symbolic borrowing in India, analyzed in Virmani, "National Symbols under Colonial Domination," 169-97.

(15) New Orleans Crescent quoted in Augusta Daily Chronicle and Sentinel, January 3, 1861, p. 2, c. 1; New Orleans Commercial Bulletin, February 20, 1861, p. 2, c. 2.

(16) One hundred twenty-six designs that were saved by members of the Montgomery Congress are now housed in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., in "Designs for Flags," v. TR-4, War Department Collection of Confederate Records, Record Group 109.

(17) New Orleans Daily Picayune, February 19, 1861, p. 8, c. 3 (Brooke quotation). The sociologist Karen A. Cerulo stresses the importance of "syntactic structure" in national flags in Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of a Nation (New Brunswick, N.J., 1995), 2-3. Her approach helps clarify how the Stars and Bars's change of syntax simultaneously conveyed continuity and departure from the Stars and Stripes. Displaying thirteen stars in the Stars and Bars was a nod toward the states of Missouri and Kentucky, whose Confederate governments-in-exile sent representatives to the Richmond Congress.

(18) William Porcher Miles, report of the Committee on the Flag and Seal, March 4, 1861, in Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States of America (7 vols.; Washington, D.C., 1904), I, 101-2 (quotation on p. 102); Athens Watchman, March 13, 1861, p. 2; Augusta Daily Chronicle and Sentinel, March 9, 1861, p. 2, c. 1 (emphasis in original). The Flag Committee report is partially reprinted in "The Southern Confederacy: The Confederacy Flag," De Bow's Review, 30 (April 1861), 486. For a detailed discussion of the congressional decision and the competing opinions on the first design, see Cannon, Flags of the Confederacy, 7-13; and Preble, History of the Flag, 501-7.

(19) Speeches of the Hon. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, Delivered During the Summer of 1858 (Baltimore, 1859), 55 (first quotation), 56 (fourth quotation); Jefferson Davis, "Remarks in the Special Message on Affairs in South Carolina. Jan. 10, 1861," in Jon L. Wakelyn, ed., Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860-April 1861 (Chapel Hill and London, 1996), 135 (second and third quotations). For another southern vow to pluck "dishonored stars" from the American flag see Fleetwood Lanneau, Oration Delivered Before the Cincinnati, and the '76 Association, July 4, 1857 (Charleston, 1857), 6.

(20) For the context and the words of Macarthy's song see E. Lawrence Abel, Singing the New Nation: How Music Shaped the Confederacy, 1861-1865 (Mechanicsburg, Pa., 2000), 52-66. "The Bonnie Blue Flag" was issued in at least three broadside editions and fourteen sheet music editions, as listed in T. Michael Parrish and Robert M. Willingham Jr., Confederate Imprints: A Bibliography of Southern Publications from Secession to Surrender (Austin, Tex., and Katonah, N.Y., 1987), 547, 577-78, while its reprinting in the Confederate press and in later songsters circulated it even further. Its presentation of reconfigured stars inspired such imitations as Robert F. Carlin, Southern Constellation (Macon, Ga., 1863); and "The Flag of the Free Eleven," in Songs of the South (Richmond, 1863), 50-51. There were songs and poems written to individual state flags as well, like "The Tree, the Serpent and the Star," in Newberry (S.C.) Rising Sun, January 30, 1861, p. 2, c. 1; and William Gilmore Simms, "Now Wave the Green Palmetto," in Newberry (S.C.) Rising Sun, February 6, 1861, p. 1, c. 2.

(21) Richmond Daily Dispatch, May 28, 1861, p. 1, c. 4; Mary Price Coulling, Margaret Junkin Preston: A Biography (Winston-Salem, N.C., 1993), 113-16.

(22) These conclusions are based on a survey of all issues of the Richmond Daily Dispatch from March and April 1861; see especially March 9, 1861, p. 1, c. 6; April 5, 1861, p. 2, c. 1 (first and second quotations); April 16, 1861, p. 2, c. 3 (third quotation); and April 30, 1861, p. 1, c. 5 (fourth quotation). David Waldstreicher has established the important role that the press had in mediating local celebration in In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes and in "Rites of Rebellion, Rites of Assent: Celebrations, Print Culture, and the Origins of American Nationalism," Journal of American History, 82 (June 1995), 37-61. A good overview of the Confederate press is provided by J. Cutler Andrews, "The Confederate Press and Public Morale," Journal of Southern History, 32 (November 1966), 445-65.

(23) [Susan Blanchard Elder], The Confederate Flag. Written by Mrs. C. D. Elder of New Orleans. Music by Sig. G. George, of Norfolk, Va. (New Orleans, 1861). See also Harry Macarthy, Our Flag, or the Origin of the Stars and Bars (New Orleans, 1862).

(24) Faust discusses the importance of music in Creation of Confederate Nationalism, 18-19, while Richard B. Harwell's definitive Confederate Music (Chapel Hill, 1950), especially 64-78, and E. Lawrence Abel's more recent Singing the New Nation, especially chaps. 3 and 5, both document attention to the flag. The quoted aphorism, attributed to Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, appeared as an epigraph to "Bohemian," ed., War Songs of the South (Richmond, 1862); similar sentiments also appeared in "National Ballads," Southern Literary Messenger, 15 (January 1849), 10-15. The tensions between popular creation and official approval of patriotic music is a primary theme of Laura Mason, Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787-1799 (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1996), while George L. Mosse stresses efforts to orchestrate song from above in The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York, 1975), 137-40.

(25) The Stars and Bars, undated broadside in the John P. Nicholson Collection (Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.). Similar expressions of disgust are apparent in "The Flag," by "A Lady of South Carolina," in Baltimore South, June 8, 1861, p. 1. More restrained examples are Farewell to the Star Spangled Banner: Respectfully Dedicated to the Army and Navy of the C.S.A. (Richmond, [186-]); Ella D. Clark, Adieu to the Star Spangled Banner Forever (New Orleans, 1861); M. F. Bigney, "The Battle-Field of Manassas," and J. R. Barrick, "The Confederate Flag," both in Frank Moore, ed., Rebel Rhymes and Rhapsodies (New York, 1864), 77-86, 183-84. For two quite different presentations of similar thoughts about Yankee claims to the flag, contrast A. J. Requier's playful "The Stars and Bars," in Bohemian, ed., War Songs of the South, 104-5, with the mournful tone of Ellen Lloyd Key Blunt, "The Southern Cross," in Moore, ed., Rebel Rhymes and Rhapsodies, 287-88. The latter author was Francis Scott Key's daughter, a native Marylander who supported the Confederacy while living in Europe throughout the war.

(26) J. S. Prevatt, The Confederate Flag--Red, White, and Blue, undated broadside in the Nicholson Collection; [Theodore] Von La Hache, The New Red, White and Blue (New Orleans, 1862); T. B. Russell, Hurrah for Our Flag! (Macon, Ga., 1864); Bigney, "Battle-Field of Manassas," 78 (block quotation).

(27) For a full discussion of how the totemic power of the United States flag has elicited the willingness to die on its behalf, see Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, esp. 29-40.

(28) The most complete Confederate account of the Alexandria episode is Life of James W. Jackson, the Alexandria Hero, the Slayer of Ellsworth, the First Martyr in the Cause of Southern Independence (Richmond, 1862); an early story about the huge flag's appearance can be found in the Richmond Daily Dispatch, April 19, 1861, p. 2.

(29) Richmond Daily Dispatch, May 27, 1861, p. 2, c. 2 (first and second quotations); J. Wright Simmons, "The Martyr of Alexandria," in Bohemian, ed., War Songs of the South, 100-102 (third and fourth quotations on p. 101); Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer, May 28, 1861; Attakapas (La.) Register, June 20, 1861, p. 2, c. 3 (fifth quotation). Among the many poems were William H. Holcombe, "Jackson, the Alexandria Martyr," Southern Literary Messenger, 33 (August 1861), 148; M. B. Wharton, "Stand By Your Flag," in Richmond Daily Dispatch, May 31, 1861, p. 4, c. 1; Andrew Devilbliss, To the Memory of Jackson, of Alexandria, Va. ([New Orleans, 1861]); and T. F., "Jackson, our First Martyr," in Savannah Daily Morning News, June 3, 1861, p. 1, c. 4. Jackson was glorified by Confederates through 1862, when Simmons, "Martyr of Alexandria," reprinted from the New Orleans Crescent, and Nanny Gray, "Sons of Freedom," first published in the Richmond Whig, appeared in Bohemian, ed., War Songs of the South, 100-102, 149-50. The Richmond Daily Dispatch printed the last of its many odes to "Dead Jackson" on September 27, 1862, p. 4, c. 1.

(30) Devilbliss, To the Memory of Jackson (first quotation); Attakapas (La.) Register, June 20, 1861, p. 2, c. 2 (McKerall quotations), July 25, 1861, p. 2, c. 4 (seventh and eighth quotations); Holcombe, "Jackson, the Alexandria Martyr," 148 (ninth quotation); Wharton, "Stand By Your Flag" (tenth quotation).

(31) John H. Hewitt, Give Our Flag to the Breeze! A New National Song ([Richmond, 1861]) (first quotation); J. H. H., "Southern Song of Freedom," Richmond Enquirer, May 14, 1861, p. 2, c. 4 (second and third quotations); Attakapas (La.) Register, July 18, 1861, p. 2, c. 6 (fourth and fifth quotations).

(32) Natchez Daily Courier, May 25, 1861, pp. 2-3; Nashville Union and American, December 22, 1861. For other examples of ceremonies where both women and clergy took part see Columbus (Ga.) Enquirer, July 20, 1861, p. 3, c. 1; and Marshall Texas Republican, December 21, 1861, p. 2, c. 5. A contemporary discussion of "Regimental or Battalion Colors" appeared in the Charleston Mercury, May 25, 1861, p. 1, c. 4. Presentation ceremonies are also discussed in George C. Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana and Chicago, 1989), 47. Drew Gilpin Faust explores the meaning of sewing as a patriotic activity in Mothers of Invention, 24-25.

(33) Preble, History of the Flag, 502 (Memminger quotation); [George W. Bagby], "Editor's Table," Southern Literary Messenger, 32 (January 1861), 75; St. George Tucker, "The Southern Cross," Southern Literary Messenger, 32 (March 1861), 189. Tucker's reprinted hymn appears to have been an important means of popularizing the unofficial cross design from February 1861 until its adoption as a battle flag late in the year. Its chorus appeared as part of the Natchez ceremony discussed above and in the Charleston Mercury's appeal for a new flag on July 20, 1861, p. 1, c. 7.

(34) "Editorial Miscellany," De Bow's Review, 30 (March 1861), 381; Richmond Whig, August 29, 1861, p. 4, c. 1; Miles, Flag Committee report, Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States, I, 101 (last quotation); Richmond Daily Dispatch, December 10, 1861, p. 2, c. 2. The geographic argument was rebutted in [George W. Bagby], "Editor's Table," Southern Literary Messenger, 34 (January 1862), 68, in which Bagby explained, "The truth is, we shall see the Southern Cross" in the near future: "the destiny of the Southern master and his African slave" did not "stop short of the banks of the Amazon"; the new slaveholding republic, he implied, would in time certainly extend all the way to Brazil.

(35) William Porcher Miles himself was one of the first to popularize the now familiar account of the collaborative adoption of the Southern Cross in his remarks to the Confederate Congress, May 1, 1863, reprinted in "Proceedings of the First Confederate Congress, Third Session in Part: March 20-May 1, 1863," Southern Historical Society Papers, 49 (new ser., 11) (May 1943), 272. Constance Cary wrote of the part she and her cousins played in the flag design in "A Virginia Girl in the First Year of the War," Century Magazine, 30 (August 1885), 609-10. See also Cannon, Flags of the Confederacy, 51-52.

(36) Charleston Mercury, July 20, 1861, p. 1, c. 7; New Orleans Daily Delta, December 21, 1861, p. 1, c. 1; Richmond Daily Dispatch, December 9, 1861, p. 2, c. 2. Women who spoke out on behalf of the Southern Cross can be seen in the petition of Fredericksburg women in the Richmond Daily Whig, August 24, 1861, p. 2, c. 4; and Lucy Virginia French, "The Confederate Flag," in Georgia Crusader, October 17, 1861.

(37) This ceremony was covered in great detail in the Charleston Mercury, December 10, 1861, p. 1, c. 3-4 (first five quotations); Adjutant General Thomas Jordan's "Order No. 75," November 28, 1861, is reprinted in Alfred Roman, The Military Operations of General Beauregard in the War Between the States, 1861 to 1865 (2 vols.; New York, 1884), I, 481 (sixth quotation). Jordan's earlier directive for regimental commanders to "accustom their men to the [new] flag, so that they may become thoroughly acquainted with it" is in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (70 vols. in 128; Washington, D.C., 1880-1901), Ser. I, Vol. V, 969; hereinafter cited as Official Records.

(38) William Porcher Miles to P. G. T. Beauregard, August 27, 1861, reprinted in Preble, History of the Flag, 514. The Richmond Daily Dispatch issued a series of flag-related articles on December 7, 9, and 10, 1861, that were noticed across the country and were followed up by the paper's display of a variety of new designs for public consideration. [Joseph Addison Turner], "Our New Flag," The Countryman, March 4, 1862; [George W. Bagby], "Editor's Table," Southern Literary Messenger, 34 (January 1862), 67; Richmond Examiner, March 29, 1862, also reprinted in John M. Daniel, The Richmond Examiner During the War (New York, 1868), 46. The Committee on the Flag and Seal received forty-seven separate designs for a new flag between the fall of 1861 and the adjournment of the Provisional Congress in February 1862. An additional fifty-two proposals were received by the Permanent Congress before final action was taken to adopt a new flag in the spring of 1863. A partial narrative of their deliberations appears in Cannon, Flags of the Confederacy, 14-21, while the number of designs is calculated from the Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States for the appropriate years. A fuller account can be found in Robert E. Bonner, Colors and Blood.' Flag Passions of the Confederate South (Princeton, 2002; forthcoming).

(39) Armies in the West likewise chose distinctive battle flags for the same practical reason of distinguishing their troops from Union forces, though they produced no alternatives as popular as the diagonal cross. For western battle flags, some of which included the cross (either of a St. Andrew's or St. George's variety), see Cannon, Flags of the Confederacy, 51-65. Histories of battle flags have expanded in recent years to include Glenn C. Allen and Wayne C. Piper, The Battle Flags of the Confederacy (Rushville, Ind., 1975); Howard Michael Madaus, The Battle Flags of the Confederate Army of Tennessee (Milwaukee, Wisc., 1976); Joseph H. Crute Jr., Emblems of Southern Valor: The Battle Flags of the Confederacy (Louisville, Ky., 1990); Echoes of Glory. Vol. II: Arms and Equipment of the Confederacy (Alexandria, Va., 1991); Alan K. Sumrall, Battle Flags of Texans in the Confederacy (Austin, Tex., 1995); and Richard Rollins, "The Damned Red Flags of the Rebellion ": The Confederate Battle Flag at Gettysburg (Redondo Beach, Calif., 1997). A wealth of information is also contained in Rebecca Ansell Rose, Colours of the Gray: An Illustrated Index of Wartime Flags from the Museum of the Confederacy's Collection (Richmond, 1998).

(40) Reid Mitchell explains how the Union soldier's presence in an alien and hostile South could still be considered a defense of home loyalties in The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York and Oxford, 1993), esp. 18-37 (quotation on p. 18); New Orleans Daily Picayune, April 27, 1861, p. 2, c. 2.

(41) "The Southern Cross," in Moore, ed., Rebel Rhymes and Rhapsodies, 106-8 (quotations on p. 106). Earlier poems celebrating the Stars and Bars for its use in combat include "The Flag of the South" and "To the Troops of Virginia" in Richmond Daily Dispatch, April 16, July 31, 1861, p. 4, c. 1. Battle imagery intensified after the Southern Cross replaced the Stars and Bars as a combat emblem, as seen in Our Battle Flag/ Words by R. H. D. Composed by James Pierpont (New Orleans, 1862); and The Stonewall Banner/ Dedicated to the Glorious "Old Stonewall Brigade" (Richmond, [1862]).

(42) Eustanzia, The Banner of the Starry Cross (New Orleans, 1863), in the Charles T. Abell Collection (Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.) (first quotation); The Standard Bearer. Words by Major T. N. P., C. S. A. Music by N. S. Coleman (Richmond, 1864) (second quotation). The risks and rewards that marked the life of flag-bearers are discussed in Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Indianapolis and New York, 1943), 81-82; and Madaus, Battle Flags of the Confederate Army of Tennessee, 11-15. For the Napoleonic use of martial glory see Matthew Truesdell, Spectacular Politics: Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and the Fete Imperiale, 1849-1870 (New York and Oxford, 1997); for American emphasis on the experiences of individuals see Fahs, "The Sentimental Soldier in Popular Civil War Literature," 107-31.

(43) Richmond Daily Dispatch, December 10, 1861, p. 2, c. 1 (first quotation); Richmond Enquirer quoted in Charleston Mercury, March 13, 1863, p. 1, c. 2 (second, third, and fourth quotations); "Our Flag and Seal," Southern Illustrated News, 1, no. 28 (March 21, 1863), p. 2 (fifth quotation); Richmond Enquirer, April 24, 1863, p. 2, c. 2; Charleston Daily Courier, May 5, 1863, p. 1, c. I (Beauregard quotations).

(44) Savannah Daily Morning News, April 23, 1863, p. 2, c. 2 (first quotation), April 28, 1863, p. 2, c. 1 (second quotation). Two earlier references to racial themes include, first, William Porcher Miles's observation in his initial report that the American flag had been "pilfered and appropriated by a free negro community and a race of savages" after a variant was adopted by Liberia and Samoa; and second, the call by Charleston Mercury for a flag containing "a big black splotch, signifying the nigger, on a white field, signifying the cotton field," in December 1861. Miles, Flag Committee report, Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States, I, 102; Charleston Mercury, December 14, 1861, p. 1, c. 2. Racial topics were common in Confederate culture and verse, but there is little indication that such associations were very important in popular Confederate celebrations of or musical reflections about any of the flags that were actually adopted.

(45) The new flag's appearance at Jackson's funeral was reported in the Charleston Daily Courier, May 16, 1863, p. 1, c. 3; the quoted verses appear in "Subaltern," The Star Spangled Cross and the Pure Field of White (Richmond, 1864) (first quotation); and E. V. Sharp and J. H. Hewitt, Flag of the Sunny South (Augusta, Ga., [1864]) (second and third quotations). Other poems that suggest that the white banner was a sign of holiness include "Our Country's Ensign," in The Southern Soldier's Prize Songster (Mobile, Ala., 1864), 49-50; "The Flag of the Free Eleven," in Songs of the South, 50-51; and [Margaret Junkin] Preston, "Hymn to the National Flag," in Richmond Sentinel, January 17, 1865. Though the new civilian standard was not a combat device, it was still presented as a battle flag in John D. Phelan, "The Good Old Cause," in William Gilmore Simms, ed., War Poetry of the South (New York, 1867), 70-72; and on the cover of F. W. Rosier, The Virginian Marseillaise (Richmond, 1864).

(46) The religious basis of Confederate nationalism is a major theme of Faust, Creation of Confederate Nationalism, esp. 22-40; and Harry S. Stout, "The Life and Death of the Confederate Jeremiad."

(47) Tucker, "Southern Cross," 189 (first quotation); Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York and other cities, 1995), 228-31 (second quotation on p. 230; third quotation on p. 229).

(48) A. B. Meek, "Land of My Fathers," 56-58 (first quotation on p. 57), "The Blue Cross," 25-27, and "The Lifting of the Banner," 35-37 (second quotation on p. 36), all in Southern Soldier's Prize Songster. Meek's claim that the Southern Cross appeared at all three battles of Manassas was clearly an error, given the infamous history of the Stars and Bars at the first encounter there. The listing of battles in which the flag was flown recalled the practice of inscribing battle names on the flags of each unit, which is documented in full in Madaus, Battle Flags of the Confederate Army of Tennessee.

(49) Madaus, Battle Flags of the Confederate Army of Tennessee, 7-10; Preble, History of the Flag, 530; Alphaeus Homer Albert, Buttons of the Confederacy: A Descriptive and Illustrated Catalog of the Buttons Worn by the Troops of the Confederates [sic] States of America, 1861-65 (Nashville, 1952; Hightstown, N.J., 1963). Most of the works on battle flags listed in n. 39 emphasize the variety of emblems, a judgment that applies much better to the first part of the war than the final year and a half. The most important corps to resist the cross design was commanded by Patrick Cleburne, who chose to retain the blue and white pattern introduced by William J. Hardee, even after Johnston's transfer to the Army of Tennessee in 1864. For details on this pattern see Madaus, Battle Flags of the Confederate Army of Tennessee, 91-100.

(50) Faust, Creation of Confederate Nationalism, 17-18, 91 n. 28 (first quotation on p. 91 n. 28; second quotation on p. 18); Mark E. Neely Jr., Harold Holzer, and Gabor S. Boritt, The Confederate Image: Prints of the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill and London, 1987), 9 (third quotation); Albert Boime, The Unveiling of the National Icons: A Plea for Patriotic Iconoclasm in a Nationalist Era (Cambridge, Eng., and other cities, 1998), 18 (fourth quotation).

(51) Gallagher's Confederate War represents the most sustained attempt to stress the accomplishments of Confederate nationalism; it takes direct issue with the quoted claims of Beringer et al., Why the South Lost the Civil War, 64.

(52) Richmond Examiner quoted in "What Subjugation Means," Charleston Mercury, January 12, 1864, p. 1, c. 2-3.

(53) Information about the U.S. Army's gradual turn to the Stars and Stripes is from Milo M. Quaife et al., The History of the United States Flag: From the Revolution to the Present (New York, 1961), 87-93; Gallagher, Confederate War, 85 (first and second quotations); Neely, Holzer, and Boritt, Confederate Image, 55 (third quotation).

(54) New Orleans Daily Picayune, March 5, 1861, p. 8, c. 1 (Curry quotation); Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer, May 6, 1861 (Pickens quotation); "The Original `Dixie,'" in H. M. Wharton, comp., War Songs and Poems of the Southern Confederacy, 1861-1865 (Philadelphia, 1904), 59-60; Albert Pike, "Dixie," in Simms, ed., War Poetry of the South, 92-94; Albert Pike, State or Province? Bond or Free? ([Little Rock], 1861), 24 (fourth and fifth quotations; emphasis in original). Richard M. McMurry documents the greater geographical diversity of the Virginia army in Two Great Rebel Armies: An Essay in Confederate Military History (Chapel Hill and London, 1989), 87-90.

(55) S. H. S., "The Rally," in Richmond Sentinel, March 4, 1865, p. 1, c. 7; John H. Hewitt, "The Confederate Flag," in Richmond Evening Courier, March 29, 1865; Gallagher, Confederate War, 107 (McCabe quotations).

(56) Gallagher, Confederate War, 164 (quotations). John H. Worsham reported the destruction of his company's flag before Appomattox in Worsham, One of Jackson's Foot Cavalry, edited by James I. Robertson Jr. (Jackson, Tenn., 1964), 182. The lack of interest among Confederates in guerrilla warfare is a theme of both Gallagher, Confederate War, esp. 140-44; and George M. Fredrickson, Why the Confederacy Did Not Fight a Guerrilla War After the Fall of Richmond: A Comparative View (Gettysburg, Pa., 1996).

(57) [Abram J.] Ryan, "The Conquered Banner," in Emily V. Mason, comp., The Southern Poems of the War (2d rev. ed.; Baltimore, 1868), 427 (first quotation); Robert E. Lee, "General Orders, No. 9," April 10, 1865, in Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. XLVII, Pt. III, 744; Augusta Banner of the South, March 21, 1868 (second, third, and fourth quotations). Gaines M. Foster discusses the context and impact of Ryan's poem in Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York and Oxford, 1987), 36. Compare Ryan's noted resignation in addressing Confederates to the quite different tone he took regarding Irish exiles in "Erin's Flag," found in Edwin Anderson Alderman and Joel Chandler Harris, eds., Library of Southern Literature (16 vols.; Atlanta and other cities, 1908-1913), X, 4629-30.

(58) For the disavowal of political separatism by former Confederates see Paul H. Buck, The Road to Reunion, 1865-1900 (Boston, 1937); Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy; Jack P. Maddex Jr., The Reconstruction of Edward A. Pollard: A Rebel's Conversion to Postbellum Unionism (Chapel Hill, 1974); Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens, Ga., 1980); and Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill and London, 1993).

(59) Flag poetry that, in the spirit of the "Conquered Banner," emphasized the final defeat of the Confederacy included "The Confederate Flag," in Mason, comp., Southern Poems of the War, 440-41; Louise Wigfall Wright, "The Confederate Flag: `Requiescat in Pace,'" in Wright, A Southern Girl in '61: The War-Time Memories of a Confederate Senator's Daughter (New York, 1905), 249-50; and Eron Opha Gregory, "The Returned Battle Flags," in The Flags of the Confederate Armies, Returned to the Men Who Bore Them ... (St. Louis, 1905).

(60) denial of politics--whether racism or treason--is a major theme of neo-Confederate defenses of the flag, as expressed, for instance, in Don Hinkle, Embattled Banner: A Reasonable Defense of the Confederate Battle Flag (Paducah, Ky., 1997).

MR. BONNER is an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University.