Flags of the Confederate States of America

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The flags of the Confederate States of America tell a story that never quite resolved. Three official national flags flew over the Confederacy between 1861 and 1865, each one a response to the failures of the last. Yet the flag most people recognize as "the Confederate flag" was never once an official national flag. It was a battle flag, rejected as a national symbol, and it has outlasted the country that produced it by more than a century and a half.

  What made the first Confederate flag so reviled by its own people that soldiers called it "universally hated"? Who designed the crossed-star symbol that became so contested? And how did a flag rejected by the Confederate Congress become the most recognized symbol of the Confederacy? Those questions run through the whole strange history of Confederate heraldry.

• 2. Stars and Bars

  ›

  On the 4th of March 1861, the day Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as U.S. president, Letitia Tyler raised the first Confederate national flag over the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery. The date was not accidental. The Confederate Congress set it as a deadline so the South could signal to the world that it was truly sovereign.

  Two men claim credit for designing that flag. Prussian-American artist Nicola Marschall, from Marion, Alabama, had long been credited with the design. Evidence now supports that Oren Randolph of Louisburg, North Carolina, likely produced a similar design at the same time. Both Alabama and North Carolina certified that theirs was the original, and an investigation found evidence supporting both claims.

  The flag's seven white stars in its canton stood for the seven states that first composed the Confederacy: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. As more states joined, stars were added, two for Virginia and Arkansas in May 1861, two more for Tennessee and North Carolina in July, and eventually two for Missouri and Kentucky, bringing the total to thirteen.

  Marschall also designed the Confederate army uniform, giving him an unusual double credit in Confederate material culture. The flag itself was made in a rush, with the first copy credited to what one account described as "fair and nimble fingers."

  Trouble came almost immediately. At the First Battle of Manassas, near Manassas, Virginia, the Stars and Bars looked so much like the Union's Stars and Stripes that battlefield commanders could not tell the two sides apart. Regiments relied on flags to help commanders observe and assess battles. At a distance, in still air with a flag hanging limply on its staff, the two looked nearly identical.

  The ideological complaints followed close behind. Writing for the Southern Literary Messenger in January 1862, George William Bagby reported that "everybody wants a new Confederate flag" and that the existing one was "universally hated." By April 1863, William T. Thompson, editor of a Southern newspaper, stated that he disliked the flag "on account of its resemblance to that of the abolition despotism against which we are fighting." The Stars and Bars, intended to inspire loyalty, was inspiring resentment instead.

• 3. The Battle Flag's Origins

  ›

  After the confusion at First Manassas, General P. G. T. Beauregard resolved to have the national flag changed or to adopt a separate battle flag entirely different from any state or federal flag. He turned to his aide, who happened to be William Porcher Miles, the former chairman of the Confederate Congress's Committee on the Flag and Seal.

  Miles had already designed a flag during his time as committee chairman, one his colleagues rejected. A congressman mocked it as looking "like a pair of suspenders." But Beauregard liked it. Miles described his design to the general, and Beauregard proposed sending the idea upward.

  The committee rejected the idea of changing the national flag by a narrow vote. Beauregard then proposed a two-flag system in a letter to his commanding general Joseph E. Johnston: a parade flag for peace and a war flag for the battlefield, so that soldiers could tell "our friends from our Enemies."

  Miles's design had a direct predecessor. According to Museum of the Confederacy director John Coski, it was inspired by a flag flown at the South Carolina secession convention in Charleston in December 1860: a blue Latin cross on a red field, bearing fifteen white stars and adorned with palmetto and crescent symbols. Charles Moise, described as "a Southerner of Jewish persuasion," liked the design but asked that a symbol of a particular religion not become the symbol of the nation.

  Miles took the feedback seriously. He removed the palmetto and crescent and replaced the upright cross with a diagonal one, an "X" shape known in heraldry as a saltire. He argued the diagonal cross was "more Heraldric than Ecclesiastical" and avoided religious objections from Jewish and many Protestant communities. He also noted it did not "stand out so conspicuously as if the cross had been placed upright."

  Another designer, James B. Walton, submitted a nearly identical flag but with an upright Saint George's Cross. Beauregard chose the diagonal version. General Johnston then suggested making the flag square rather than rectangular, to conserve material, and specified different sizes for different military units.

  Generals Beauregard and Johnston and Quartermaster-General Cabell approved the Confederate Battle Flag's design at the Ratcliffe home near Fairfax Court House in September 1861. President Jefferson Davis arrived by train at Fairfax Station soon after and was shown the design. Three women, including Constance Cary Harrison, made the prototypes. One prototype now resides in the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond; the other is in the Confederate Memorial Hall Museum.

• 4. The Stainless Banner

  ›

  On the 1st of May 1863, the Confederate Congress adopted the second national flag. The design placed the battle flag in the upper corner against a field of white so large it dwarfed the canton.

  The question of who originated the design sparked immediate dispute. On the 23rd of April 1863, Savannah Morning News editor William Tappan Thompson, with assistance from Confederate blockade runner William Ross Postell, published an editorial championing a battle flag on a white background. Thompson called it, in his own words, "The White Man's Flag," a name that never caught on publicly. He explained the white background by writing that the white field would be "emblematical" of the Confederate cause of maintaining, in his words, "the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race."

  The day after Thompson's editorial, the 24th of April 1863, a design similar to what was eventually adopted arrived in a letter to a Confederate congressman from General Beauregard. Beauregard proposed "the present as Union Jack, and the rest all white or all blue."

  The Confederate Congress debated details: whether the white field should have a blue stripe, whether it should be bordered in red. When Thompson learned the Congress had included a blue bar, he published a second editorial on April 28 calling the stripe "in bad taste, and utterly destructive of the symmetry and harmony of the design." Confederate Congressman Peter W. Gray's amendment gave the flag its plain white field. Gray stated the white stood for "purity, truth, and freedom."

  The flag's first official use came twelve days after its adoption. On the 12th of May 1863, the Stainless Banner draped the coffin of General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson as it lay in state. That association gave it an alternate nickname: the "Jackson Flag."

  The praise did not last. Military officers complained the white field made the flag look too much like a flag of truce, especially aboard naval vessels where it became easily soiled. One observer noted it was essentially a battle flag mounted on a flag of truce, sending a mixed message. Some Confederate soldiers cut away the white portion of the flag entirely, leaving only the canton.

• 5. The Blood-Stained Banner

  ›

  The Flag Act of 1865, passed by the Confederate Congress near the war's end, created the third and final national flag. It added a red bar across the outer half of the white field, running the full width of the flag. The new design was intended to eliminate the truce-flag confusion that had plagued the Stainless Banner.

  The man who lobbied for this change, Rogers, defended the redesign as symbolizing the primary origins of the Confederate people. He pointed to the saltire of the Scottish flag and the red bar from the flag of France, and noted the design had, in his words, "as little as possible of the Yankee blue."

  Very few of these third national flags were ever manufactured or seen in the field. The timing left almost no time for production before the Confederacy dissolved. The flags that were made by the Richmond Clothing Depot used a square canton from the second national flag rather than the slightly rectangular one the law specified.

  Also in 1865, the last Confederate flag lowered in the entire Civil War came down not in the American South but in Liverpool, England. On the 7th of November 1865, the naval ensign of the commerce raider CSS Shenandoah was hauled down in Liverpool harbor. It had been the only Confederate battle ensign taken around the world.

• 6. Legacy and Controversy

  ›

  An estimated 500-544 Confederate flags were captured by Union forces during the war and sent to the War Department in Washington.

  After the war, the battle flag's legacy grew through the veterans' organizations that adopted it. The Army of Northern Virginia battle flag became the copyrighted emblem of the United Confederate Veterans. The Sons of Confederate Veterans and related female-descendant organizations continued its use, building the association with what became called "the soldier's flag." A marker declaring Fairfax, Virginia, as the birthplace of the Confederate battle flag was dedicated on the 12th of April 2008, near the intersection of Main and Oak Streets.

  The battle flag eventually appeared in the official state flags of Georgia and Mississippi. Georgia removed it in 2003; Mississippi removed it in 2020. After Georgia changed its flag in 2001, the city of Trenton, Georgia, adopted a flag design nearly identical to the previous version, keeping the battle flag. Georgia's current flag still references the original Stars and Bars design of an earlier Georgia flag.

  Polling data from 2020 and 2021 shows the flag's contested meaning in concrete terms. A YouGov poll of more than 34,000 Americans in 2020 found that 41% viewed the flag as representing racism and 34% viewed it as symbolizing Southern heritage. A Politico-Morning Consult poll of 1,996 registered voters in July 2021 found that 47% viewed it as a symbol of Southern pride and 36% viewed it as a symbol of racism. A 2017 scientific article on the psychology of the flag's supporters found three primary reasons for support: Southern regional patriotism, political conservatism, and White American racial biases against African-Americans. The authors also noted that the majority of supporters did not tend toward racial biases as their primary reason.

  The name most people use for the battle flag is itself a historical error. Calling it the "Stars and Bars" is incorrect. The Stars and Bars was the first national flag, the one Confederate soldiers called universally hated, the one they demanded be replaced. The battle flag they actually fought under was the design William Porcher Miles drew after a congressman called his earlier version "a pair of suspenders."