06/14/2026
On This Flag Day...
History of the Confederate Battle Flag
As students of the history of 1861-1865, we have learned some things about the Confederate Battle Flag. We probably know that Confederate battle flag was not, in fact, “the Confederate flag” and was not known as the “Stars and Bars.” That name properly belongs to the First National Flag of the Confederacy. If you studied the war in the Western and Trans-Mississippi theaters, you learned that “Confederate battle flag” is a misnomer. Many Confederate units served under battle flags that looked nothing like the red flag with the star-studded blue cross. That flag is properly referred to as the ANV or Army of Tennessee or Navy Jack flag, and it is the one we will be focusing on today.
The flag as we know it was born not as a symbol, but as a very practical banner. The commanders of the Confederate army in Virginia (then known at the Army of the Potomac) sought a distinctive emblem as an alternative to the Confederacy’s first national flag—the Stars and Bars—to serve as a battle flag. On February 9, 1861, the Confederate Congress, then meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, established the Committee on the Flag and Seal. Chaired by William Porcher Miles, a former U.S. congressman from South Carolina, the committee considered various designs for a national flag and weighed the advantages of modeling the banner after the Stars and Stripes of the United States. Some thought such a move would be good politics. "Although I have not much more veneration than you for the stars & stripes, there are many who have, whose feelings, or fancies have a right to be respected," one Southerner wrote to Miles. The chairman disagreed and argued that the United States flag represented tyranny.
Even in the superheated political atmosphere of secession, Miles's view was not in the majority, and on March 4 the Confederacy adopted its first national flag. (It was a symbolic date on which to unveil a new national symbol: March 4 was the day of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln's inauguration.) The first national, which came to be known as the Stars and Bars, was rectangular with three horizontal bars alternating red, white, and red. In the upper left was a portion of blue and a circle of white stars representing each Confederate state—at first seven, then eleven, and finally thirteen.
A few weeks later, on April 30, the Virginia Convention of 1861 adopted a new state flag modeled on a different Confederate symbol: the Bonnie Blue Flag. Featuring a single white star on a field of blue, the Bonnie Blue Flag had flown over the short-lived Republic of West Florida, whose territory was eventually divided into the Deep South states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. The flag had flown over Mississippi's capitol when the state seceded in January 1861, and a song, written in its honor, was soon popular across the South. Virginia's flag, meanwhile, featured the commonwealth's seal in a white circle against a blue background.
The Stars and Bars, which the Confederate Congress had adopted in March 1861 because it resembled the once-beloved Stars and Stripes, proved impractical and even dangerous on the battlefield because of that resemblance. (That problem was what compelled Confederate commanders to design and employ the vast array of other battle flags used among Confederate forces throughout the war). When the Confederate Army of the Shenandoah, under Joseph E. Johnston, and the Confederate Army of the Potomac, under Pierre G. T. Beauregard, met Union forces at the First Battle of Manassas on July 21, 1861, their troops flew an assortment of flags, both state and national. States' rights was a founding principle of the Confederacy and influenced the attachment many units had to their state flags. Some Virginia and North Carolina soldiers refused to fly anything but their state flags. The Stars and Bars' resemblance to the U.S. flag, combined with similarities between the two sides' uniforms and the general confusion of battle, contributed to an incident at First Manassas in which Confederate forces fired on a Confederate infantry brigade commanded by Jubal A. Early. Shortly after, Johnston and Beauregard resolved to establish a new, sufficiently distinctive flag for their troops, and they consulted one of Beauregard's aides, the same William Miles who had opposed the original flag in the first place.
Miles resurrected what had been his preference for the national flag, a design of his own that featured a blue saltire, or X shape, with a white border and white stars (again, one for each state) on a field of red. The Committee on the Flag and Seal had rejected it the first time, suggesting that it looked "like a pair of suspenders," and now the members rejected it again. Johnston and Beauregard decided to use it anyway, with Beauregard proposing to Johnston two Confederate flags: "a peace or parade flag, and a war flag to be used only on the field of battle." This second flag, the so-called battle flag, would be the one Miles designed, and the two generals and their lieutenants met at Fairfax Court House in September 1861 to work out the details. At Johnston's urging, a square design was adopted, and each branch of the army was assigned a different size: forty-eight inches square for infantry, thirty-six inches square for artillery, and thirty inches square for cavalry.
The Confederate quartermaster ordered a model of the flag made and then contracted Constance Cary and her cousins Hetty and Jennie Cary—members of a refugee family from Baltimore then living in Richmond—to produce silk prototypes. (Constance Cary's flag went to Confederate general Earl Van Dorn, Hetty Cary's to Johnston, and Jennie Cary's to Beauregard.) An additional 120 silk flags were sewn for the quartermaster by seventy-five Richmond women and issued to Beauregard's and Johnston's armies in October and November, with a formal presentation at Centreville, Virginia, on November 28, 1861. The silk flags were quickly replaced by those made of wool bunting, which was better suited for the field. Beauregard and Van Dorn were eventually transferred to the Western Theater, but their attempts to introduce the flag into the Confederate armies there were less successful. Still, by the end of the war, when Johnston and then another veteran of the East, John Bell Hood, were leading the defense of Atlanta and the Carolinas, the Confederate battle flag had become more common.
By 1862, many Southern leaders scorned the Stars and Bars for the same reason that had prompted the flag’s adoption the year before: it too closely resembled the Stars and Stripes. Matthew Fontaine Maury called the Stars and Bars a "servile imitation" of the Stars and Stripes. As the war intensified and Southerners became Confederates, they weaned themselves from symbols of the old Union and sought a new symbol that spoke to the Confederacy’s “confirmed independence.” That symbol was the Confederate battle flag. Historian Gary Gallagher has written persuasively that it was Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, not the Confederate government, that best embodied Confederate nationalism. Lee’s stunning victories in 1862–63 made his army’s battle flag the popular choice as the new national flag. On May 1, 1863, the Confederacy adopted a flag—known colloquially as the Stainless Banner—featuring the ANV battle flag emblazoned on a white field. For the remainder of the Confederacy’s life, the soldiers’ flag was also, in effect, the national flag.
However, the "Stainless Banner," as the new flag was called, introduced another problem. In the rare instance where it was used on the battlefield, it looked too much like a flag of truce, so on March 4, 1865, a vertical red strip along the fly edge was added, making it the "Blood-Stained Banner."
In the meantime, the battle flag slowly transformed into an important national symbol independent of the national flags. For a time it was referred to as "Beauregard's flag," and when Beauregard's and Johnston's armies combined into a new Army of Northern Virginia in March 1862, it became closely associated with that force and its longtime commander, Robert E. Lee. As the Army of Northern Virginia became an important national symbol, so did the battle flag. Confederate nationhood was not independent of Lee's army and its success—as suggested by Johnston's distinction between peace and war flags—but, in fact, dependent upon it.
Still, even as it became an important national symbol, the various meanings contained by the battle flag were complicated and sometimes ironic. Miles's original design was inspired by a South Carolina secession flag, which featured a blue St. George's cross, populated by fifteen white stars, on a field of red. In the upper left were a white crescent and a white palmetto. However, a Confederate Jew complained that the cross invested the flag with inappropriate religious symbolism, and Miles replaced it with what in heraldic terms is known as a saltire. Ironically, the X-shaped saltire is identical to a St. Andrew's cross, named for the Christian martyr and patron saint of Scotland. In that way, a flag that was intended to be secular took on powerful religious associations for some. Meanwhile, a flag not originally intended to be a national symbol has come to powerfully represent, more than any of the national flags, the Confederate nation.
Finally, during the twentieth century, the battle flag was often mistakenly referred to as the Stars and Bars, linking it to the first national flag, whose design Miles had found so objectionable. A flag that has come to symbolize Confederate independence is often called by the name of a flag designed to emphasize the Confederacy's connection to the United States.
By the end of the Civil War, the battle flag had become imbued with a religious and patriotic meaning hinted at in Union general and Gettysburg hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain's description of "flags made sacred by heroic service and sacrifice of noble manhood," flags—in this instance at Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House—that were "battle-torn and smoke-dimmed, draped in sorrow, but some of them blazoned with a crimson deeper than their red, touching the stars."
The flag never ceased being the flag of the Confederate soldier and still today commands wide respect as a memorial to the Confederate soldier. Unfortunately, it did not remain exclusively the flag of the soldier. The history of the flag since 1865 is marked by the accumulation of additional meanings based on additional uses. Within a decade of the end of the war (even before the end of Reconstruction in 1877), white Southerners began using the Confederate flag as a memorial symbol for fallen heroes. By the turn of the 20th century, Southerners formed organizations, erected and dedicated monuments, and Confederate flags proliferated in the South’s public life. The United Confederate Veterans (UCV) issued a report in 1904 defining the square ANV pattern flag as the Confederate battle flag, effectively writing out of the historical record the wide variety of battle flags under which Confederate soldiers had served. The efforts of the UCV and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) to promote that “correct” battle flag pattern over the “incorrect” rectangular pattern (the Army of Tennessee’s or the naval jack) were frustrated by the public’s demand for rectangular versions that could serve as the Confederate equivalent of the Stars and Stripes. What is remarkable looking back from the 21st century is that, from the 1870s and into the 1940s, Confederate heritage organizations used the flag widely in their rituals memorializing and celebrating the Confederacy and its heroes, yet managed to maintain effective ownership of the flag and its meaning. The flag was a familiar part of the South’s symbolic landscape, but how and where it was used was controlled.
That control began to disappear in the early 1940s, as the flag began to appear on college football fields and among US military members. In 1948, student delegates from Southern colleges and universities waved battle flags on the floor of the "Southern States Rights Party" convention. The so-called “Dixiecrat” Party formed in protest to the Democratic Party convention’s adoption of a civil rights plank. The Confederate flag became a symbol of protest against civil rights and in support of Jim Crow segregation. It also became the object of a high-profile, youth-driven nationwide phenomenon that the media dubbed the “flag fad.” Confederate heritage organizations correctly perceived the Dixiecrat movement and the flag fad as a profound threat to their ownership of the Confederate flag. The UDC in November 1948 condemned use of the flag “in certain demonstrations of college groups and some political groups” and launched a formal effort to protect the flag from “misuse.” Several Southern states subsequently passed laws to punish “desecration” of the Confederate flag. All those efforts proved futile. In the decades after the flag fad, the Confederate flag became, as one Southern editor wrote, “confetti in careless hands.” Instead of being used almost exclusively for memorializing the Confederacy and its soldiers, the flag became fodder for beach towels, t-shirts, bikinis, diapers and baubles of every description.
While the UDC continued to condemn the proliferation of such kitsch, it became so commonplace that, over time, others subtly changed their definition of “protecting” the flag to defending the right to wear and display the very items that they once defined as desecration. As the dam burst on Confederate flag material culture and heritage groups lost control of the flag, it acquired a new identity as a symbol of “rebellion” divorced from the historical context of the Confederacy. Meanwhile, as the civil rights movement gathered force, especially in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, defenders of segregation increasingly employed the use of the battle flag as a symbol of their cause. Most damaging to the flag’s reputation was its use in the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. Although founded by Confederate veterans almost immediately after the Civil War, the K*K did not use the Confederate flag widely or at all in its ritual in the 1860s and 1870s or during its rebirth and nationwide popularity from 1915 to the late 1920s. Only with a second rebirth in the late 1930s and 1940s did the battle flag take hold in the Klan. The flag’s use as a symbol of white supremacy has framed the debate over the flag ever since.
To those of us who know, understand, and revere what has come to be known as the Confederate Battle Flag, we understand what it stood for - and that meaning does not include the actions of a handful of misguided individuals. The Battle Flag was never the National Flag of the Confederacy. It didn't fly over slave quarters, it flew in front of brave soldiers who were fighting for freedom, independence, and the right to take its place among nations. It never flew over one single slave ship. It is far from being a symbol of white supremacy, although we are told today that the Southern Confederate soldier was part of a treasonous act of rebellious states that fought to the death to retain slavery, and that the flag is symbolic of that. Nothing could be more untrue, and this is supported by facts that have been available since before the first shots were fired and are still available today if one chooses to read. To say that secession, and subsequently the war, was about slavery is to greatly oversimplify the multiplicity of issues that led to secession of the Southern States. In fact, it would be fair to say that if all the South was fighting for was slavery, they were given many opportunities by the Federal government to keep it in perpetuity, all they had to do was to lay down their arms and return to the Union. To us, the flag is symbolic of something totally different: the valor and sacrifice of our Southern ancestors in their quest to gain independence and recognition as a sovereign nation.
It symbolizes the noble spirit of the Southern people, the rich heritage and traditions of the South and the dynamic and vigorous Southern culture, those who dared to stand up and say “NO” to an overbearing and overreaching Federal Government. It is the last flag to represent the concept of local control of one’s life in America. It represents honor, faith, courage, dignity, integrity, chivalry, patriotism, self-reliance, and belief in the free enterprise system. It is an internationally recognized symbol of resistance to tyranny. That is why it was flying over the Berlin Wall when it was being torn down in 1989 and has been flown by numerous countries or provinces seeking independence both before and after that.
The Confederate Battle Flag was, is, and will continue to be the flag of the region Southerners call home, the Southland. We are Americans, true, but we are also proud Southerners.
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