Ritual, community and war: local flag presentation ceremonies and disunity in the early Confederacy.

In the early hours of Monday, April 22, 1861, "the greatest activity" could be seen in the streets of Charleston, South Carolina. Soldiers of the First Regiment of the South Carolina Volunteers had risen early in the hotels where they had been quartered during and after the siege of Fort Sumter. They busied themselves packing trunks and carpetbags full of the clothes, blankets and other necessities they would need in Virginia during the following months. They had volunteered almost to a man to serve at the anticipated seat of war, despite the fact that they had been recruited and organized only to defend their home state from a federal attack. Now they piled luggage, overcoats, knapsacks and canteens into heaps in the vestibules of Charleston's hotels. Later, their baggage would be collected and forwarded to the appropriate trains already waiting at the station. Then the soldiers slowly made their way in knots of three or four or five to the depot of the Northeastern Rail Road. (1)

A little after eleven o'clock, the soldiers formed themselves into a square at the railroad depot to receive a regimental flag. By this time, a large crowd had assembled to witness the departure, including "a number of ladies" which "seemed to inspire the troops with additional enthusiasm." In short order, Colonel Gregg, commander of the regiment, and his staff and officers of the various companies "advanced to the front" where they met Mrs. D. H. Hamilton, "in company with a number of other ladies." Mrs. Hamilton then handed over a flag that had been sewn by "the patriotic ladies of Charleston" to a certain W. D. Porter who was requested "to present it to the Regiment on their behalf." Porter did so after giving a short speech in which he explained that the flag was "intended," among other things, as "an incentive" for the soldiers "to stand steadfast and true, in whatever extremity may befall them." He also told the soldiers that "by request of these ladies" he delivered this flag into their hands as a "sacred charge," meaning that "you cannot return without it." And when the soldiers of the First Regiment did make their way back to Charleston, Porter continued, the flag must be either crowned with wreaths of laurel in the Roman fashion or surrounded "with a rampart of their bodies." To this last remark, the crowd responded with "great applause." (2)

Afterwards, the flag "was placed in the hands of Colonel Gregg" and then "cheer after cheer went up both from the Regiment and the assembled spectators." Colonel Gregg, for his part, remained "for some moments ... unable to speak, but at length replied" with a short speech of his own. He began by thanking "these ladies of Carolina" for "this beautiful flag," and noting that he would consider it a great "incentive" to his soldiers, if such an incentive "were wanted," to persuade them to "perform their duty to their State." Colonel Gregg then explained the political value of the banner. "It is my hope and it is my expectation that the men of Virginia will receive the flag with favor, and will look kindly upon the Regiment which bears it, for the sake of those ladies of South Carolina who have sent it." Finally, he explained that he and his soldiers would carry the flag where ever they went, including into battle, with the aim of "maintaining this flag in honor in the field." Colonel Gregg then handed the flag over to a subordinate officer who would supervise its care thereafter, and afterwards he turned to Porter and bade him to tender his regiment's "most hearty farewell to the fair of Charleston." This was followed by three cheers from the soldiers "for the ladies of Charleston," and then by three cheers "by the crowd for the First Regiment of the South Carolina Volunteers." Afterwards, Colonel Gregg dismissed his troops until three in the afternoon when they were to return and board the train for Richmond and beyond. (3)

Hundreds of flag presentation ceremonies like this one took place throughout the South from April until November of 1861, only a very few being held in the last three years of the Civil War. (4) As early as January 1861, informal ceremonies had been held to honor companies of volunteers in upcountry South Carolina who were about to depart for the fight in and around Charleston, but these rituals included no flags or presentations. At the time, Charlestonians, however, found themselves awash in a variety of flags and banners. Two or three artists in the city who before 1860 had specialized in making signs for shops and banners for special occasions now took advantage of the standoff over Fort Sumter. They produced a number of large banners for businesses in Charleston that wished to trumpet their solidarity with fellow South Carolinians who, of course, were also customers. (5) Finally, in April 1861, departure ceremonies and flags combined in South Carolina to produce flag presentations, but only after a problem had developed. About that time, the governor of South Carolina offered troops stationed on the state's coast to the Confederate government for service in Virginia. But these soldiers had signed on to defend their state, and they had made no commitment to any nation except the South Carolina Republic. In short, the men of the First Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers needed some "incentive," although Colonel Gregg denied it. Similar incentives became the focus of flag presentation ceremonies throughout the South during spring and summer of 1861. (6)

Early historians of the Civil War ignored flag presentation ceremonies held in the early months of the Confederacy with one notable exception--that indefatigable reader of local newspapers where these ceremonies are fully documented, Bell Irvin Wiley. In his classic study of Confederate soldiers, The Life of Johnny Reb, Wiley devoted two pages to the phenomenon and correctly identified the basic elements of the ritual--the flag made by local well-to-do matrons, the presentation of the flag itself, the presentation speech on behalf of a group of elite white women by a locally prominent white man, the reception speech by an officer representing the soldiers, the presence and cheers of a crowd, and the immediate departure of soldiers on foot or by train. But why all this occurred and what it meant Wiley left largely unexplored. Perhaps he thought it too obvious a manifestation of Southern patriotism to need any explanation, flag presentations seeming merely to form an inevitable and enthusiastic background to the actions of the Confederate government and its armies. (7)

Bell Irvin Wiley could tell his story of flag presentations without any further comment or interpretation because it fit easily into a larger narrative of war that, by the time Wiley wrote his book, had come to dominate thinking about the Confederacy. Constructed after the fact in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Southern elites, this version of the Civil War claimed that all white Southerners joined eagerly in the fight against Yankees from secession forward to the last minute at Appomattox. Men volunteered to serve in the Confederate Army, not in order to secure slavery as a Southern institution, but to fight for Southern rights and against Northern aggression. In doing so, each man acted out of duty to family, community and the new Confederacy. Women, for their part, supported men through their personal sacrifice of husbands, fathers, brothers and cousins to death or injury in battle, and by their hard work at home--both women's work such as sewing uniforms for the troops and men's work that might include plowing fields or keeping the books in a business. In this narrative, flags played an important role as symbols of Confederate sacrifice and unity. Confederate battle flags never fell to the ground in combat, and thereafter were treasured because each hole or tear told a story of blood and bravery. Confederate national flags such as the Bonny Blue or the Stars and Bars came to symbolize the loyalty of all Southerners to the Confederate nation. (8) After 1920, however, as professional historians began to work the story of the Confederacy over, the focus on people--specifically one's ancestors--in the war was replaced with an obsessive attention paid to battles and politics. Narratives of the sacrifice of individual men and women and their flags took a back seat to accounts of the Confederate government and its armies, except in the works of Bell Irvin Wiley.

No recent historian of the Civil War either has taken notice of flag presentation ceremonies except Robert Bonner who treats the subject very briefly as a part of his larger study of flags in the Confederacy. The difficulty with Bonner's approach to flag presentation ceremonies is that he focuses mostly on the values embodied in flags and the emotional reaction of viewers to those flags--what he calls "flag culture"--while ignoring the social circumstances that made those values and emotions possible and indeed needful for local Confederates early in the war. As a result, he has difficulty differentiating the flag culture of the Confederate nation state that focused on the Stars and Bars, essentially symbolizing a political commitment to States Rights and secession, from local uses of flags that were grounded in the social structure of family, home and community. Bonner thereby conflates two kinds of "flag cultures," to use his phrase, that in fact differed profoundly, and he therefore is unable to account for either the emergence or demise of local flag presentation ceremonies early in the Confederacy. This is particularly unfortunate because the difference between these two "flag cultures" points to a fundamental conflict in the Confederacy between community and nation that bedeviled Confederate partisans throughout the war. (9)

What can we learn from rituals such as flag presentation ceremonies if they, in fact, did not constitute public affirmations of the Confederacy and its politics? Can these rituals be connected to other issues raised by the Civil War? We can begin by asking why, if Southerner white men were so eager to serve in the Confederate army, did flag presentation ceremonies arise at all? Should not Southern white men have just done their duty and joined up quietly? Why all the fuss? A young lieutenant who in April 1861 had just accepted a flag on behalf of his company from the ladies of Bagwell's Old Field in the Spartanburg District of South Carolina put his finger on the reason when he told the assembled crowd: "The spirit of patriotism ... like the stone of Sisyphus, has a continual tendency to roll down the hill, and requires to be forced up again by the most unceasing efforts of succeeding moralists and divines." (10) In short, flag presentation ceremonies need not be viewed as simple expressions of Confederate patriotism. The ceremonies themselves raise doubts about the unity of white Southerners in the Confederacy by implying that some Southern white men at least needed something to persuade them to join the rebel army and go to battle. Flag presentations also suggest that the usual methods of persuasion in wartime had failed early in the war, and that Confederates therefore needed to develop new means of motivating both young men who were reluctant to go to war and families and friends who hesitated to send them, means that relied less on political arguments and more on social rituals.

Social ritual, however, might appear to be a somewhat problematic concept with which to analyze flag presentation ceremonies. Both historians of ritual and anthropologists who have documented such behavior tend to think of ritual as a timeless sort of social activity. Scholars often assume without examining their assumption closely that rituals form part of the deep structure of social life that transcends ordinary events and daily conflicts. Indeed, anthropologists in particular often think of ritual as an antidote to conflict, local ritual mediators functioning as a kind of court of last resort for social conflicts that might otherwise destroy the basic social bonds and institutions that glue a society together. (11) But to think in such terms renders rituals an expression of the structure of a society divorced from the actions of the members of that society, a product of the long term experience of society brought to bear on transient difficulties. Nothing could be further from the truth in the early Confederacy. Flag presentation rituals had never existed before April 1861, and were specifically invented to solve a particular problem. Moreover, when that problem had been solved by other means, specifically conscription by the Confederate government, the ritual disappeared. This suggests that ritual should not be considered transcendent but rather immanent, a possibility brought forth when needed whether in a revitalization of older rituals or by means of entirely new social inventions. In this sense, the idea of ritual can still prove useful. (12)

Confederates in the South organized literally hundreds of community flag presentation ceremonies early in the Civil War, so many in fact that by July 1861 most Southern newspapers stopped printing full accounts of the rituals, and simply noted in a line or two in the local news column when one had taken place. The editor of the Keowee Courier in South Carolina, for example, told readers, "The flag presentations have been so numerous that we cannot mention all ..." (13) Hundreds and sometimes thousands of people turned out to witness flag presentations in cities and towns and country crossroads throughout the Confederate states. A flag presentation in Bruale Landing, Louisiana, for example, drew a crowd of "not less than 1000 ladies and gentlemen." (14) These ceremonies also often included an enormous meal that no doubt helped account for the large turnouts. A dinner given for the Shieldsboro Rifles in connection with a flag presentation in Pass Christian, Louisiana, was laid out on "tables, two hundred feet in length" and "arranged in a very tasteful and inviting manner." The tables had been loaded by the ladies of the parish with five hundred pounds of roasted beef along with ten pigs, ten sheep, two hundred chickens, twenty turkeys, forty ducks, and ten hams. (15) South Carolina and Louisiana appear to have been the epicenters of this phenomenon, with lesser numbers of such ceremonies held in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Mississippi.

Just as important as flag presentations themselves, however, were the narratives that came to be circulated widely about these ceremonies. Local editors, at least early in the war, often allotted two or three full columns in a local newspaper to each flag presentation, and sometimes more. These accounts included minute descriptions of the ceremony, a detailed record of the names of all participants, a list of officers and soldiers in the regiment or company, and a careful description of the flag that occasionally included a discussion of the meaning of its iconography. Sometimes newspapers also printed verbatim accounts of speeches given in these ceremonies, accounts that often appear to have been provided to the editor in a written copy by the speaker. (16) Finally, newspapers in nearby counties often copied narratives of flag presentations, as did newspapers with a regional circulation, especially in Charleston and New Orleans. In short, flag ceremonies proved to be important not only as events involving hundreds or thousands of people in a given community, but also as narratives of Confederate loyalty with a wide circulation outside those communities.

This was particularly important early in the war because in many Southern communities loyalty to the secessionist cause had become a serious political concern for Confederates. Throughout the South Confederate partisans fretted about enemies both from without and within the new nation. The Memphis Avalanche, for example, warned against a possible infiltration of the South by Northern spies who might influence Southerners. (17) More worrisome still to Confederates were Southern white men, free blacks and slaves who might engage in sabotage. The Tennessee legislature, dominated by Confederates in May 1861, approved legislation that authorized circuit judges to immediately organize special court sessions to deal with any person, "free white man, slave, or free negro," in a community "engaged in advising, aiding or abetting an insurrectionary movement," by which, of course, they did not mean the Confederacy itself. (18) Indeed, insurrection occurred from time to time in the early Confederacy. In White County, Arkansas, for example, at least three white men and several blacks plotted in May 1861 to "commence a regular system of wholesale murder, plunder and house burning." Local authorities who discovered the plot summarily hanged two of the white men and three blacks, and ran another white man out of the community. (19) Confederates worried about their fellow Southerners for good reason, and therefore turned to flag presentations in an effort to mobilize communities in support of the Confederate cause.

Early in the war, flag ceremonies differed only slightly from any ordinary political meeting organized by secessionists during the previous decade. This was so because many white men joined Confederate military organizations before the full horrors of battle became widely known. (20) Recruiters therefore had little difficulty in persuading volunteers to serve. On March 6, 1861, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, for example, a meeting to recruit local men into the Calhoun Guards featured a flag raising and a speech afterwards, but no presentation. Several things should be noted in this event. First, the flag had not been made by the "ladies" in Spartanburg, but had been purchased by a local notable for the use of the company. It therefore represented the largess of a Spartanburg planter or merchant, an expression of his political and economic power in the local community, not a marker of the sentiment of the community as a whole. Second, the Reverend J. S. Ezell who chaired the meeting gave a standard political speech that had been heard countless times in South Carolina about defending "our rights" against the North. A second speaker followed who discoursed at length about "the present crisis, its causes, and originators ..." These speeches essentially called men to arms to defend secession. Finally, there was the flag itself, a variation on the flag of the South Carolina Republic, the Palmetto Flag. But at this ceremony the flag also included seven stars on the side opposite the Palmetto in order to tie the state and its soldiers directly to the new Confederacy just then forming. Spartanburg's early flag ceremony then focused on loyalty to established leaders, secession, and the new nation--an excellent strategy for attracting committed secessionists into the ranks. (21)

The problem for Confederates after an initial burst of volunteering, however, lay in the fact that many men in the Southern states had no enthusiasm for secession or the new Confederate nation, and thus had little motive for joining the Confederate army after all the committed secessionists had volunteered. A newspaper in Vicksburg, Mississippi, for example, felt compelled in May 1861 to print a small announcement saying: "There will be a meeting of the young ladies of Warren County, to be held at Bovina, Thursday, 18th instant, for the purpose of forming themselves into a Home Guard, for the protection of those young men who will not volunteer for their country's cause." (22) Similarly, in Knoxville it was reported that a "company of ladies" had been organized, and "desire to perfect themselves in the use of fire-arms for the purpose of rendering themselves efficient as a Home Guard, for the protection of the young gentlemen whose physical or moral infirmities incapacitate them for service in the glorious cause of Tennessee's honor and Southern Independence." (23) In Leesburg, Virginia, a local writer complained that, after an effort had been made in his neighborhood to organize a company of volunteers, "This call has NOT been responded to. "Inducements," he went on, "have been held out" but only "one fourth the number required have come up." (24) In Milton, North Carolina, an editor complained, "We don't like to see young men strutting the streets in kid gloves, and flying around the girls, who ought to be in the army." (25) In Cleaveland County, North Carolina, a lieutenant in the local company of volunteers chastised the "many married gentlemen" thereabouts whom he thought guilty "of excusing themselves from volunteering upon the plea of having families to take care of...." (26) Finally, even near the capital of the Confederacy, "the ladies of the county of Essex" adopted resolutions that complained about how "weakly the fire of noble pride" was "flickering in the bosoms of Virginia's sons." (27)

Confederate partisans therefore sought in the late spring of 1861 to address a specific problem--a lack of volunteers, white men who did not find states rights and its implied defense of slavery a compelling cause. But how to do so? Perhaps flag ceremonies could be transformed from political events into ritual performances. Returning to the example of Spartanburg, South Carolina, the community there organized a second such flag ceremony just three weeks after the first event had been held, but this one included an elaborate presentation of a flag to the Spartan Rifles. In this ceremony the main speaker, Professor Warren DuPre from nearby Wofford College, breathed nary a word about politics or the Confederacy, choosing instead to speak about the "manly qualities" of these soldiers and their determination to defend their "altars and their hearths," themes that by June would become staples in flag presentations throughout the South. (28) The advantage in developing these three themes--manhood, faith, and community--lay in the fact that all Southern white men could be motivated by them, not just committed secessionists. Manhood, faith and community after all formed the basis upon which Southern white men had constructed their personal identities and secured their social positions for generations.

Oddly enough, manhood--a subject usually developed in flag presentations as a figure imbued with bravery, in short, a hero--was the least well developed of the three usual themes in flag presentation ceremonies. (29) Indeed, in 1861, stem-winding speeches designed to motivate prospective volunteers seldom included the usual tropes of heroism--detailed stories of killing an enemy on the battlefield, or of privation and suffering, or references to specific iconic heroes in previous American wars such as Andrew Jackson or George Washington. Instead, speakers offered abstractions. As John Manning, by then a former governor of South Carolina, put it in a speech at a flag presentation ceremony in Charleston: Your purpose, he told new volunteers, "is to battle for your civilization and your homes; it is to battle for the rights of your wives and your children; it is to battle for the glorious heritage left you by your ancestors; it is to leave a noble inheritance to your posterity." (30) Similarly, a certain Captain Davis, speaking to volunteers in Rutherfordton, North Carolina, waxed eloquent about the "bravest of the brave" who he expected to "be rewarded for their toils and perils by the hands and the hearts of the fairest of the fair." He, like Governor Manning, did not, however, go on to explain what those perils might include during the coming months. (31)

Why? The speaker in Concord gives us a clue: "The cry, to arms! was made" in this place, "and many noble sons of Cabarrus [County] responded. Laid aside their numerous vocations; forsook their quiet homes of ease and plenty; bid adieu to their friends and neighbors--gave a last kiss to their wives and children ..." (32) To be brave in war meant forsaking all the ordinary duties of manhood--support and protection of women, children, home and community. In doing so, soldiers abandoned kin and community to the privations and dangers of war--economic hardship when crops failed to be planted or harvested, disease when food became scarce and medicine unaffordable, abuse by merchants who hoarded needed supplies, homelessness produced by landlords who demanded payment of rents even after money had become scarce, or Union soldiers should they get that far south. Moreover, the death of a soldier meant that such dangers would become a permanent condition, depriving the soldier's family of both the labor and protection of its men forever. The speaker in Concord thought this was a fine idea, but many others did not, especially the wives, children and other relations who relied on their head of household to provide an income for them. As one South Carolina women put it shortly after secession: "I do not approve of this thing ..." "What," she continued, "do I care for patriotism? My husband is my country. What is country to me if he be killed?" (33)

As a result of these concerns, Southern white women proved crucial--as representatives of the dependents in households about to be abandoned by their heads--in convincing young Southern white men to volunteer. (34) As a Charleston newspaper put it, perhaps indulging in a bit of wishful thinking, in July 1861, ""Our women have given their husbands, and sons and brothers to their country with cheerful readiness. They have bade them haste to the battle with voice firm and clear words of sublime counsel...." This same newspaper went on to claim perhaps with some exaggeration, "Under the noble promptings of patriotism, wives have divorced themselves from husbands who have united with the base creatures who would despoil the South of honor, and liberty, and property, and life," in a word, those men who refused to join the Confederate army. (35) I have found no instance of such politically motivated divorce, but the implication remains clear. Local Confederates expected mothers and sisters and wives to pressure their sons and brothers and husbands into volunteering even to the extremity of permanently breaking the very social bonds that made a Southern white man's social position possible in the first place.

As spring passed into summer 1861, however, the focus of flag presentation ceremonies shifted from the female relatives of prospective volunteers to possible brides, and hence to the question of young men forming households of their own. It was no accident that by June most flags were presented by two elite white women--an older married one and the other younger and unmarried--and sometimes only by a young woman. Newspapers usually identified the latter as in her mid-teens and invariably referred to her as the "fair" sex, a term never applied to older white women in accounts of flag presentation ceremonies. These reports also often devoted considerable space to rather graphic verbal portraits of these young women. An account appearing in the Memphis Daily Appeal of a flag presentation ceremony held in Holly Springs, Mississippi, for example, described a young woman who presented a flag to the Jeff Davis Rifles in these words: "Her fine figure and beautiful face were set off to the greatest advantage by a close fitting dress of gray cloth trimmed in black--the uniform of the Rifles...." (36)

By drawing attention to physical beauty, published accounts of flag presentations urged young men to volunteer so as to have a chance of marrying these sexually desirable young white women. This was made plain in an article published in a newspaper in Dalton, Georgia: "All the Misses are perfectly enthusiastic and self-denying, and many of them aver that they will encourage no young men's visits who is not ready and willing to go forth and do battle for their homes and firesides." (37) One group of women in St. Joseph, Louisiana, went so far as to make the possibility of an honorable marriage manifest in the flag itself that they had sewn for some local volunteers, a "most elegant flag, the white silken folds of which have already caused it to be called the 'virgin flag.'" (38) No one could mistake the message. If a soldier wanted to marry a beautiful young virgin and establish a new household, he had no alternative but to join the Confederate army and fight the Yankees. Here flag presentation ceremonies would seem to serve both local and national purposes, uniting community and Confederacy, but a soldier's commitment to the Confederacy need not have been wholehearted or political in nature. For most soldiers at a flag presentation ceremony, service to the Confederacy was a means to an end, the goal being preservation of family and community and the possibility of reproducing both in the next generation.

Mothers, sisters, wives and potential brides, however, were by no means themselves always enthusiastic about sending their men to war. Organizers of flag presentation ceremonies therefore often focused on assuaging the guilt of the female relatives and friends of newly recruited soldiers. The Reverend DuPre, for example, did so by introducing into his speech the character of the Spartan Mother, a symbol--an argument in a brief and compelling form--that codified reasons for sending men into battle. Specifically, DuPre informed his audience that Spartan Mothers always presented their sons with a shield before they went off to battle, and then told them either to come back with the shield themselves having fought bravely or to be carried back on it dead. This injunction implied that any failure to fight would bring social death to a soldier--the destruction of all existing relations between him and his kin, friends, and neighbors. The Reverend DuPre may have been the first to deploy the figure of a Spartan Mother in Southern flag presentation ceremonies. He did, after all, address the Spartan Rifles in the town of Spartanburg, and so the phrase Spartan Mothers had a particularly poignant double meaning. It referred both to the ancient Spartan women who sent their sons to war without hesitation and to local Spartan women who were being asked to do the same. But the figure would come to be used commonly in flag presentation ceremonies throughout the early Confederacy, and later its usage would shift onto the mothers of young Southern white men responsible for motivating their sons to go to war. (39)

Given the divisive nature of questions raised by appeals to manhood, it should not be surprising that organizers of flag presentation ceremonies often sought to dwell instead on a soldiers' duty to God, a subject upon which surely all Southerners could agree. Ministers, for example, who spoke at flag presentation ceremonies almost always evoked sacred authority to justify the actions of Confederate soldiers in the field. A certain Reverend Gierlow, for example, told the members of the Baton Rouge Fencibles at a flag presentation, "The Lord reineth; and under His banner you may manfully fight with the hope of success. With arms in your hand, look to God as your refuge, and hope, and pray." (40) It is important to note that speakers at flag presentations--whether clergymen or lay persons--carefully avoided mentioning Jesus, the son and peacemaker that might have brought the legitimacy of the war itself into question. Ministers speaking at flag presentations also seldom invoked the presence of the Holy Spirit because that might have drawn attention to the romantic soul in which the Holy Spirit dwelt in the nineteenth century, and hence to individualism which was portrayed by Southern speakers as a Northern vice. Instead, most ministers called on a very specific personification of God--the God of Battles, His most manly, patriarchal form--when appealing for divine favor. At a flag presentation ceremony in Jackson County, North Carolina, for example, a speaker there concluded his remarks by saying, "We verily believe that the God of Battles will go with the volunteers, who trust in Him, to victory and to peace." (41) In short, flag presentation speakers called upon God the patriarch, the head of Southern families and communities, who like any good head of household would defend his dependents, an approach that, of course, reinforced abstract invocations of manhood and heroism.

The emphasis in flag presentations on seeking the favor of God, however, created a potential problem for Confederates in most parts of the South--sectarianism. Every Southern community had its Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, and in some places Lutherans or Quakers or Catholics, each of whom had their own theological ideas and liturgical practices that might offend believers of another sect. Therefore religion had to play a vague role in flag presentation ceremonies, essentially confirming a widespread commitment to Christianity throughout the region but glossing over serious differences that might defeat the unifying purpose of flag presentation ceremonies themselves. In most parts of the South, local notables, in fact, conducted flag presentation ceremonies as civil services, usually in the open air at a railroad station or a picnic grounds, and if a minister participated it was only to lead a prayer in which members of the community communicated directly with God, presumably in the approved manner of their own church. Occasionally, however, a minister would preach a sermon at flag presentation, but only if all the men in locally recruited company came from the same church which was not uncommon in the antebellum South. Rural communities were often organized around a single neighborhood church to which all residents belonged at least nominally (42)

It was in Louisiana where religion played the most conspicuous role in flag presentation ceremonies, precisely because a single church dominated the southern part of that state and therefore there was little chance of religious discord arising during flag presentation ceremonies. In early June, for example, the Archbishop of New Orleans consecrated the flag of a local company "with imposing ceremonies" beneath a vast awning spread over Jackson Square in front the statue of Andrew Jackson. Earlier that week in New Orleans the Bienville Rifles enjoyed a dinner and flag presentation ceremony at the home of a Mrs. Huard, after which soldiers and spectators adjourned to St. Peter's Church "where the ceremony of consecrating the flag was performed...." (43) Similarly, in Natchitoches, Louisiana, Confederates took part in a formal military mass during which each soldier took communion before the priests blessed a company flag, a ceremony that locals contended "dates as far back as the ninth century." Although corrupted in France, presumably during the Revolution, the ceremony still, they claimed, preserved "a character truly religious." (44) The consecrated flag then became a holy thing, representative not only of the soldier's family and friends, but also of God himself. This was possible only because most residents of southern Louisiana could agree on the nature of God and His church and its rituals and beliefs. (45)

Given the difficulties in uniting Southerners around manhood and religion, Confederates turned to community, something all Southern men and women valued, an appeal that came to be most clearly and concisely expressed in the iconography of the flags themselves. Flags sewn for locally-raised companies of soldiers relied, for the most part, on symbols that had little to do with the national icons just then being developed to represent the Confederacy. Most did not carry the national colors--red, white and blue. And most made no reference to the Southern Cross, nor did most local flags include stars to remind viewers of the new Confederate states. Instead, these flags utilized a visual vocabulary based on symbols that referred specifically to the local community. Indeed, so new and novel did these icons prove to be that flag presentation speakers often devoted a considerable portion of their discourse to explaining the exact meaning of these symbols. In other words, these icons as yet had developed no community of meaning that would allow viewers to instantly identify and understand what the symbols meant. That community of meaning would be produced in part by the flag presentation ceremonies themselves, and thereafter constituted not only a common understanding of those symbols but a set of social connections--a group united by their sharing of a particular understanding of new local icons.

Consider, for example, a flag presented in April 1861 to Company Raiborn in a neighborhood located in Laurens County, South Carolina. This flag consisted of five iconic elements--three short pieces of text on one side and two representational pictures on the other. On the textual side of the flag viewers noticed three phrases ranging from top to bottom. The first was the "name of your corps," as the speaker at the flag ceremony, W. L. Hudgens, said, meaning presumably Company Raiborn, "which will ever remind you of your firesides and your altars of your homes and the dear ones left there residing on the waters of that stream [Raiborn Creek] from whence comes your name." The second was "the inscription 'December 20th, 1860,'" the day the South Carolina Republic declared its independence, "which will ever keep fresh in remembrance that memorable day when every tie that bound us to an accursed Union was forever severed...." Third was "the chivalric motto, 'none but the brave deserve the fair'" which the speaker reminded the young soldiers before him "is woman's eloquent tribute to valor." In short, the textual iconography here constantly kept before the soldiers from the Raiborn Creek neighborhood a vision of three communities to which they belonged--neighborhood, state, and household. (46)

On the opposite side of the Company Raiborn flag the "matrons and lovely daughters" of the community had stitched two visual icons, the first a gamecock in the middle of the flag, and the second a wreath of oak leaves that surrounded the gamecock. No doubt the wreath was meant to remind listeners of the laurel wreaths placed upon the heads of Roman generals who returned home with a victory, an understanding that any elite white man or woman in the South would have possessed as a result of their familiarity with the classics, especially Roman history, that was taught in every country academy. But the fact that the leaves on this flag were oak rather than laurel perhaps signifies two things. First, oak, of course, was a tree native to South Carolina and therefore emphasized the homegrown nature of the honor that victory would bestow upon any soldiers who might bear this banner home in triumph from Northern battle fields. Second, oak, of course, was the tree in the Southern forests that produced the hardest and most durable wood, and therefore made reference to the strength and endurance of the men who would bear this flag.

Less obvious, however, was the reference to a gamecock, and therefore Hudgens took some pains to explain the significance of this figure. "I trust I may also be allowed to indulge the hope," he continued, "that in the hottest of the contest you will turn your gaze upon this striking emblem, and recall to recollection him who was styled the 'Game Cock of the Revolution,' and who ... kept alive in the swamps of our own State, the almost expiring flame of liberty, and taught the minions of British power and tyranny, as I trust you will soon ... teach the minions of Abraham Lincoln of what kind of stuff Carolinians are made." (47) The phrase "Game Cock of the Revolution," of course, referred to General Thomas Sumter who led the South Carolina militia successfully against a numerically superior foe and thereby defeated Banestre Tarlton. But there is a more primal referent here. The gamecock, Hudgens argued, was "ready for his adversary--emblematical of true pluck and bravery, and may I not add also, typical of the character of your Company." Gamecocks were roosters that fought to the death in a cock fight, a popular blood sport among all South Carolina men that involved gambling and was the epitome of a manly recreation. The figure of the gamecock then embodied two ideas: first, the heroism of men who would fight against a superior foe, and second, a connection between bravery and manhood that extended to a willingness to fight to the death. By subsuming these ideas in a single iconic reference to Thomas Sumter, Hudgens succeeded in making these general statements specific to South Carolinians, and by implication to the men of Company Raiborn.

Locally-made flags in the early Confederacy, in short, served as mnemonic devices that reminded soldiers in camp and in battle of connections to their own particular community, not to the Confederacy or secession or Southern Rights. The icons in these flags also caused soldiers to recall their commitment publicly affirmed in a flag presentation ceremony to fight for that community and its flag. As one soldier said in a speech after receiving a flag on behalf of the Sharon Riflemen in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, this flag shall "wave over us, and recall ... the memories of those who are dear to us." Or as another speaker put it to soldiers at a flag presentation ceremony, "wherever you may go cherish your flag as a household God, and ever remember that woman's prayer follows it...." (48) Organizers of flag presentations also hoped that these banners would continue to serve long after they were returned home from the battlefield. A speaker at a flag presentation ceremony for the Washington Light Infantry of Charleston, for example, told his listeners that "future generations of our company shall gather around this flag, and honor and reverence and cherish it for the deeds you will have done." The speaker had a particular reason, in this case, to believe that this would be so because he had brought a regimental flag used in the American Revolution, called the Eutaw flag, to the ceremony, a banner whose history seemed to demonstrate the point. (49) In this case, the Eutaw flag had been carried into battle by South Carolinians, preserved by the adjutant of its regiment, and it was this adjutant whose name had been adopted by the Washington Light Infantry and whose son now displayed the flag. However convoluted the connection, the speaker hoped to remind the volunteers how battle flags and all they symbolized, presumably including the soldiers themselves and their deeds, would be remembered by succeeding generations, and how that memory might come to play an important part in community events even in the distant future.

Locally-made flags did indeed increase in significance after the Civil War as the speaker in Charleston had hoped, but not so soon and not for the reasons he envisioned. In fact, the effects of flag ceremonies ceased almost immediately after their conclusion. As one Southern soldier wrote in 1874 of his wartime experiences: "That," meaning a flag presentation ceremony in which he had participated, was "certainly the only time we," meaning he and his comrades in arms, "can remember when citizens walked along the lines offering their pocketbooks to men whom they did not know; that fair women bestowed their floral offerings and kisses ungrudgingly and with equal favor among all classes of friends and suitors; when the distinctions of society, wealth, and station were forgotten, and each departing soldier was equally honored as a hero." (50) This was so, of course, because flag ceremonies had accomplished their purpose once local recruits boarded a train to the front. Even after the war, local flags and their presentation ceremonies meant little in most local communities; few were preserved or honored on patriotic holidays. "It was a long time," recalled one veteran in the 1870s, before "the flags borne in battle became objects of special veneration, or gathered about them the sentiment which grew into a passion as the war neared its close." In sum, locally-made flags became not so much reminders of specific individuals and communities as they had during the spring and summer of 1861 than markers of new Confederate identities built upon a foundation of imagined heroes created in the New South. (51)

By November 1861, community flag presentations ceased to be held in most places in the South, and thereafter the number of men who volunteered for service in the Confederate army decreased. (52) Partly this was so because the efficacy of the ceremonies and symbols of flag presentations did not survive the first battle of the war. After soldiers in the Confederate army got a good look at the carnage left by the Battle of Manassas, word spread quickly among prospective recruits that the elephant had been seen and it was not an attractive sight. By September 1861, an editor in Nashville, Tennessee, complained about "young, healthy and able bodied men who will talk loud and long in favor of Southern rights and privileges, and denounce the Yankees as the vilest people on earth, and that no punishment is too bad for them and they hope the South will succeed in chastising them; yet all their zeal ends in talk--there is no action. They like to see others going to whip the Yankees, but they go not themselves." (53)

Just as important, however, soldiers and their friends and relatives back home realized that deaths on the battlefield impacted not only individual soldiers, but also the family and community from which they came. The reluctance of men to volunteer became a matter of public discussion as early as August 1861 after the Confederate Secretary of War had called for an additional three hundred thousand men. (54) In North Carolina, for example, a local newspaper reported that a group of men drilling at a militia ground in the second week of August were asked by their captain, "If their services were needed would they go; if so step forward, and every man stood still." (55) War, in short, destroyed the very thing--community--that Southern communities had sent their sons and husbands and fathers with flags in hand to the battlefield to defend in the first place. (56)

Flag presentations then proved to be a widespread and important phenomenon in the early Confederacy. Originally, Confederate partisans devised the ceremonies to address a specific problem in South Carolina, the unwillingness of South Carolina state troops to fight in Virginia. But flag presentations soon spread to all parts of the South where young white men proved reluctant to volunteer for Confederate service, less from a desire to remain in their home states, like the South Carolinians, than from a lack of political motivation. What then could persuade these men to put their lives in jeopardy? Certainly not patriotism for the new Confederacy which in the spring of 1861 was an ill-defined entity at best. The solution lay in convincing Southern white men that what they held most dear--manhood, faith, and community--had been, in fact, threatened by the Federal government when many Southerners believed that it had not been. But how could Confederates accomplish that aim?

The answer lay in ritual, a ceremony of social action and symbols that left little room for either choice or argument. (57) In practice, a flag presentation mobilized the entire community into a visual spectacle that demonstrated an overwhelming demand by friends, neighbors, and relatives that young men volunteer and serve bravely in the Confederate army. Otherwise they were promised social death--exclusion from the community, and especially its women and thereby the possibility of forming a household of their own. At the same time, flags that had been presented to new volunteers served as mnemonic devices that continually placed a sign before them of commitments made by them to their communities. That was accomplished partly though the labor of women who were crucial in this coercive exercise, labor embodied in the design and fabrication of the flag itself that symbolized the social bonds soldiers would surely forfeit if they did not fight. Company flags also motivated young men by means of local icons that women sewed into their flags seeking to bind men symbolically to their own community. Nowhere in this ritual could opponents of the war find room for debate; nor was there an honorable option made available to young men short of going to war. Similarly, flag presentation ceremonies allowed no place for women who did not wish to send their sons and brothers and fathers and husbands into battle. In sum, the grand spectacle of a flag presentation effectively marginalized all those in a Southern community who wished to protect interests that might be damaged by war, leaving them to resist as individuals and in secret if they raised any opposition at all. (58)

In the end, however, the very desire encouraged by flag presentation ceremonies to protect one's manhood, faith, and community became a compelling reason to avoid service in the Confederate army once the real chances of surviving a Civil War battle became known. Afterwards, the Confederate government would rely less on ritual and local communities to recruit troops than arrests and bureaucracy, specifically conscription. The symbols and rituals thereafter deployed in the Confederacy would become national in scope, uniformly encouraging loyalty to the Confederate government, its army, and its leaders. Herein lay the origins of an avalanche of patriotic songs, national days of prayer, and memorials that would serve the same purpose for the Confederacy as a whole as flag presentations had done for Southern communities early in the Civil War. Flag presentation ceremonies held in the spring and summer of 1861 then created a forced coalescence of white Southerners around the Confederate cause, but only so long as the ritual succeeded, and when it failed the ceremonies disappeared. In the end, that failure sowed at least some of the seeds of internal conflict that would help lead to the abrupt end of that ill-fated regime.

Department of History

Cincinnati, OH 45221-0373

ENDNOTES

1. Charleston Daily Courier, April 23, 1861.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. The earliest newspaper report I have found of a flag presentation ceremony appeared in the Spartanburg Express, February 27, 1861; it documents a ceremony held in Charleston on February 22, 1861.

5. Stephen Rockenbach, "Commercial Banners and Sentimental Standards: The Politics of Flags in Charleston, South Carolina, November 1860-March 1861," seminar paper, University of Cincinnati, June 2000. On the commercial flag and banner business see also the Daily Nashville Patriot, August 29, 1861, and Memphis Daily Appeal, April 18, June 13, 1861.

6. I have found only one reference to a flag presentation before the Civil War in the South, and that was a presentation made in 1857 to the militia in Fayetteville, North Carolina. See Mary Langdon O'Hanlon Speeches, 1856-1857, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina Library.

7. Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Baton Rouge, 1943), 22-23.

8. On flags and Confederate memory after the Civil War see especially David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, 2001). On the creation of Confederate narratives after the war see also Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South (New York, 1987); and Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens, 1980), especially chapter 1.

9. Robert E. Bonner, Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South (Princeton, N.J., 2002), 74-82.

10. Spartanburg Carolina Spartan, April 18, 1861.

11. See for examples of this structural-functionalist position, N. Ross Crumrine, "Ritual Drama and Culture Change," Comparative Studies in Society and History 12 (Oct. 1970): 361-72, especially the conclusion on page 372; Max Gluckman, Rituals of Rebellion in Southeast Africa (Manchester, 1954); and Clifford Geertz, "Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example," American Anthropologist 59 (Feb. 1957): 32-54.

12. For the literature on ritual as social practice see especially John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan, "History, Structure, and Ritual," Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1990): 119-50; Edward L. Schieffelin, "Performance and the Cultural Construction of Reality," American Ethnologist 12 (Nov. 1985): 707-24; and Clifford Geertz, "Religion as a Cultural System," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), especially p. 90.

13. Keowee Courier (South Carolina), March 16, 1861.

14. See for example the Baton Rouge Weekly Gazette and Comet, June 1, 1861.

15. The Daily Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana), April 21, 1861.

16. See any example from a local newspaper cited elsewhere in this article.

17. Article reprinted in the Carolina Spartan, May 23, 1861.

18. Brownlow's Knoxville Whig, May 9, 1861.

19. Natchez Daily Courier, May 29, 1861. Reprint of an article from the Memphis Bulletin.

20. See, for example, John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney, The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2000), ch. 3; Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb, ch. 2.

21. The Spartanburg Express, March 6, 1861. For similar efforts by Confederates to motivate Southerners see, Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge, 1988).

22. Charleston Daily Courier, May 25, 1861. Article reprinted from the Vicksburg Whig.

23. Brownlow's Knoxville Whig, July 6, 1861. For a similar example from Tennessee, see an article titled "Sympathy for the Young Men of Nashville--Meeting of the Young Ladies of the City," Daily Nashville Patriot, August 28, 1861.

24. Leesburg, Virginia, Democratic Mirror, June 26, 1861.

25. Charlotte Western Democrat, September 17, 1861. This report reprints a portion of an undated article from the Milton Chronicle published in Milton, North Carolina.

26. Charlotte North Carolina Whig, June 11, 1861.

27. Democratic Mirror, April 3, 1861. For other similar articles see Daily Nashville Patriot, August 28, 1861, September 4, 1861; Memphis Daily Appeal, June 13, 1861; The Daily Picayune (New Orleans), May 12, 1861, referring to Monroe, Louisiana. On the literature detailing opposition to Confederates in the South, see especially William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York, 2001). The many other accounts of opposition to Confederates and the Confederacy, for the most part, skip over the early part of the war and focus instead on the last two years of the Confederacy, and therefore are not germane to the story told here.

28. The Spartanburg Express, March 27, 1861; Carolina Spartan, August 28, 1861.

29. For examples of the use of the figure of the hero see Charleston Daily Courier, June 15, 1861, and Wadesboro North Carolina Whig, June 11, 1861.

30. Charleston Daily Courier, April 26, 1861.

31. Spartanburg Express, June 12, 1861. Reprint of an article from the Rutherford Press.

32. The Carolina Flag (Concord, North Carolina), May 14, 1861.

33. Margaret Crawford Adams, "Tales of a Grandmother," in South Carolina Women in the Confederacy, ed. Mrs. Thomas Taylor, Mrs. A. T. Smythe, Mrs. August Kohn, Miss M. B. Poppenheim, and Miss Martha Washington, 2 vols. (Columbia, S.C., 1903), 1: 210, quoted in Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, 1996), 13.

34. On the support white women gave the Confederacy see especially, David H. McGee, "'Home and Friends': Kinship, Community, and Elite Women in Caldwell County, North Carolina, during the Civil War," North Carolina Historical Review 74 (1997): 363-88; William A. Strasser, "'Our Women Played Well Their Parts': Confederate Women in Civil War East Tennessee," Tennessee Historical Quarterly 59 (2000): 89-107; and Robert E. May, "Southern Elite Women, Sectional Extremism, and the Male Political Sphere: The Case of John A. Quitman's Wife and Female Descendants, 1847-1931," Journal of Mississippi History 50 (1988): 251-85. In more general terms, the role of elite white women in the Confederacy is explored in a rapidly growing literature. See especially, Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, 1996), and "Alters of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War," in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds. (New York, 1992), 171-99; and Catherine Clinton, Tara Revisited: Women, War, and the Plantation Legend (New York, 1995).

35. Charleston Daily Courier, June 12, 1861.

36. Memphis Daily Appeal, March 29, 1861.

37. Harrisburg, Virginia, Rockingham Register and Advertizer, May 17, 1861. This report was written for the Rockingham Register and Advertizer by a correspondent in Dalton, Georgia, and was dated April 30, 1861.

38. The Natchez Daily Courier, June 18, 1861. This account was reprinted from the St. Joseph, Louisiana, Gazette, June 14, 1861, and was written by a correspondent in Waterproof, Louisiana, and was dated June 11, 1861.

39. The Spartanburg Express, March 27, 1861. See for other examples the Charlotte North Carolina Whig, April 30, 1861; Charlotte Western Democrat, July 23, 1861; and The Daily Picayune (New Orleans), May 19, 1861, which reported on a similar tableau of "beautiful young ladies, clad in pure white muslin."

40. Baton Rouge Weekly Gazette & Comet, June 5, 1861.

41. Keowee Courier (South Carolina), July 13, 1861.

42. See for example, Raleigh North Carolina Standard (weekly edition), June 12, 1861.

43. New Orleans Bee, June 3, 1861.

44. Natchitoches Union, November 28, 1861.

45. For other examples of flag consecration ceremonies see The Daily Picayune (New Orleans), April 4, 8, 1861.

46. Laurensville Herald, April 19, 1861. For the date of South Carolina's secession see E.B. Long, The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac, 1861-1865 (New York, 1971), 12-13.

47. Laurensville Herald, April 19, 1861.

48. Charleston Daily Courier, May 23, 1861.

49. Keowee Courier (South Carolina), March 16, 1861.

50. Wiley, Life of Johnny Reb, 22-23.

51. John B. Gordon, Reminiscences of the Civil War (New York, 1904), 27. On the creation of Confederate culture after the Civil War see especially Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South (New York, 1987); Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens, GA, 1980); and Richard Starnes, "'Rule of Rebs': Confederate Historical Memory and White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1865-1870," Southern Historian 17 (1996): 45-66. On the literature on Confederate flags in the twentieth century see especially, John Shelton Reed, "The Banner That Won't Stay Furled," Southern Cultures 8 (2002): 76-100; Gerald R. Webster and Jonathan I. Leib, "Whose South Is It Anyway? Race and the Confederate Battle Flag in South Carolina," Political Geography 20 (2001): 271-99; and Jonathan I. Leib, Gerald R. Webster, and Roberta H. Webster, "Rebel with a Cause? Iconography and Public Memory in the Southern United States," Geojournal 52 (2000): 303-10.

52. Callaloo 24 (2001), 22-23. The last flag presentation ceremony I have found occurred in Natchitoches, Louisiana, in late November 1861. See Natchitoches Union, November 28, 1861, but the number of ceremonies appears to have begun declining after mid-July 1861. Occasionally later in the war, women made battle flags for men from their community, but I have no evidence of a presentation ceremony. See Frank A. Montgomery, Reminiscences of a Mississippian in Peace and War (Cincinnati, 1901), 139.

53. Daily Nashville Patriot, September 4, 1861.

54. See, for example, "Will There Be a Draft?" The Carolina Flag, August 16, 1861.

55. Ibid.

56. For an example of how the war undermined family and community thereby turning some Southerners against the Confederacy, see Gordon B. McKinney, "Women's Role in Civil War Western North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review 69 (1992): 37-56.

57. On ritual as coercive see Edward L. Schieffelin, "Performance and the Cultural Construction of Reality," American Ethnologist 12 (1985): 709. Also see Roy A. Rappaport, "Ritual, Sanctity, and Cybernetics," American Anthropologist 73 (Feb. 1971): 59-76 for a discussion of how the "sanctity" of rituals shuts down discussion of any facts relevant to the ritual, what he calls the "non-discussive basis of sanctity."

58. On opposition to Confederates that had been driven underground see, for example, Thomas G. Dyer, Secret Yankees: The Union Circle in Confederate Atlanta (Baltimore, 1999).

By Wayne K. Durrill

University of Cincinnati