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Armies have carried flags on parade fields and in battle since almost the beginning of warfare. As emblems of local or national identity, flags serve as rally points during combat and as treasured symbols of shared valor and sacrifice by veterans everywhere. More often than not a unit’s banner is the most visible embodiment of its history and experiences in war. When the General Assembly created the Missouri State Guard in the aftermath of the “Camp Jackson Massacre” of May 10, 1861, the legislation neglected to mandate a distinctive flag for use by Guard units, and Missouri had not adopted an official state flag before the war began. The issuance of Missouri State Guard General Order No. 8 on June 5, however, corrected the legislative oversight. The order provided that each regiment should adopt a flag made of blue merino, measuring six feet by five feet, with the state coat of arms emblazoned in gold gilt on each side. Additionally, the law required that each mounted company carry a guidon consisting of white merino, three feet by two feet in size, with the letters “M. S. G.” in gilt on each side. Flags and guidons were to be attached to a pike nine feet in length, including spear and ferrule.[i] The incorporation of the state coat of arms into the official flag is not surprising, as militia units, especially in the St. Louis area, had used that emblem on their flags for several years.
Pursuant to
General
Order No. 8, Brigadier James Harding, Quartermaster-General of the
Guard,
employed M. M. Flesh, a Jefferson City painter and paperhanger, to sew
and
paint ten of the regulation flags for distribution to newly created
units.
Flesh quickly completed the task and turned over his painted works of
art to
Harding, who thereafter presented the first stand of the colors to the
First
Regiment of Rifles, a Sixth Division unit commanded by Colonel John
Sappington
Marmaduke.[ii] The regiment likely
carried the flag at the
battle of Boonville on June 17, 1861, the Guard’s first engagement, and
perhaps
at later fights as well. Harding
regrettably left no record of what disposition, if any, he made of the
nine
remaining flags. It
may well have been
one of these flags that the Guardsmen hoisted after compelling the
Federals to
surrender at Lexington on September 20, 1861, for one Missourian
present on
that occasion wrote that “at six o’clock p.m. the “stars and stripes”
were
lowered and the blue flag of the State and the Confederate flags were
raised
from the College building.”[iii] Other flags of the Guard likewise incorporated the Missouri coat of arms, although several of these banners differed in significant respects from the flag mandated in General Order No. 8. When M. Jeff Thompson rallied troops in northwest Missouri just weeks before the Camp Jackson incident, he flew a flag over his encampment that he described as “a plain White flag, with the Coat of Arms of Missouri painted on it in Black.”[iv] As district inspector of the militia in the area, he instructed all units to display a like banner; he also observed “we can hereafter paint as many stripes [on it] as we please with the blood of our invaders.”[v] Perhaps some 5th Division units of the Guard carried this flag when they mustered into state service later that year.
In mid-October, 1861, four months after the Guard had taken the field, a Mrs. S. A. Brett of Hernando, Mississippi presented a flag to the First Division of the Guard. Lieutenant Colonel Matthew H. Moore, the division quartermaster, then situated in Memphis, Tennessee seeking supplies, wrote Mrs. Brett a letter of appreciation, complimenting her painting of the state coat of arms as an example of the “finest style of the art”. The ladies of the St. Agnes Academy, presumably in Memphis, also presented Moore a “magnificent flag with the coat of arms of Missouri richly embroidered upon a field three feet square,” while the wife of Captain John Decker, a Guardsman from St. Louis living in Memphis, made several banners for the Division.[vi] Lastly, Moore acknowledged the “making of three banners” by C. E. W. Miller and Isadora Miller, both from the vicinity of Oxford, Mississippi. He provided no description of those flags, but since he had previously volunteered to furnish proper materials and instructions to anyone willing to make flags for the Division, it seems very likely that these flags probably reflected the design and color prescribed in General Order No. 8.[vii] Oddly enough, there is evidence that the headquarters flag of Major General Sterling Price, overall commander of the Guard, did not comply with General Order No. 8. Once observed by Private Ephraim McD. Anderson, a Third Division soldier, he later penned the following description of the flag:
Some Guard
units
carried flags that employed the state coat of arms in a decidedly
individualistic manner. The
banner of
the Saline Jackson Guards featured a white field, bordered in blue, and
displayed a centered coat of arms in blue as well. Further, the corners
of the
flag included the names of the local ladies who made the banner. The
Guards
attached their colors to a staff decorated with a blue cord and tassels.[ix]
Elements of Colonel Martin E. Green’s command of the Second Division hoisted still another variant of a Missouri flag over the courthouse at Edina after they occupied the town on August 1, 1861. That flag reportedly bore three stripes, fifteen stars, and displayed the grizzly bears of the state coat of arms.[xi] Other evidence supports the popularity of incorporating the state coat of arms into the flags Guard units carried. Following the battle of Boonville on June 17, 1861, Thomas Knox, a reporter for a northern newspaper, recorded his observations regarding the flags captured by the Federals there:
There was
a
Rebel flag, with the
State arms in the center, and there was one Rebel flag of the regular
pattern.”
[xii]
Further details of the make-up of one the flags Knox saw appeared in a newspaper following its capture at Boonville. The flag described as bearing the state coat of arms surrounded by fifteen stars reportedly “represented the Southern states with two broad red bars on the outside and one white bar in the center.” The banner, made of cotton cloth, measured six feet by two feet and was painted in oil colors.[xiii] Other flags of the Guard have been identified as “Missouri” flags without further descriptive detail, but a reasonable assumption would be that the coat of arms was the logical emblem associating those flags with the state. In 1897 a former trooper of the First Iowa Cavalry Regiment reported that he had in his possession a “Missouri” flag made by the ladies of Sarcoxie and presented to an Eighth Division unit. He alleged that Guardsmen carried the flag at the battles at Carthage, Wilson’s Creek and Lexington.[xiv] Likewise, a Miss Minnie Withers, among others, made “a beautiful Missouri flag” for Captain Henry L. Routt’s mounted company in Clay County before that unit reported for duty at the state capital in May.[xv] And on June 11, 1861, Captain Dick Campbell and his Independent Scouts Company of the Seventh Division raised a “Missouri” flag over the courthouse at Springfield in Greene County.[xvi] Finally, when the Guard fought the Federals at Carthage on July 5, 1861, a Fort Scott, Kansas newspaper reported "The rebels had three flags, one of the State of Missouri, which was unharmed, and two secession flags, which were twice shot down and raised no more."[xvii] In addition to the flags that displayed the state coat of arms, sources reveal a variety of other designs adopted by local Guard units. Captain William Brown’s cavalry company, a Saline County organization, proudly carried a banner that bore fifteen stars on a blue canton, while the remainder of the flag was white.[xviii]
A unique flag captured by the Fremont Rangers in Bollinger County in the fall of 1861, the ensign of a company of the 1st Cavalry Battalion in General M. Jeff Thompson’s First Division, consisted of a red cross on a black silk banner.[xix]
Some
ladies of
California, in Moniteau County, presented the visiting Howard County
Volunteers, a Third Division outfit, a “beautiful flag with a single
star,”
while the Polk County Rangers of the Eighth Division, having returned a
United
States flag previously presented to them, received a flag from the
young ladies
of Bolivar that consisted of “three stripes with fifteen
stars.” [xx]
Other flags
with
distinctive patterns include a banner captured by Illinois troops at
Utica, in
Livingston County, that had been made for the 1st
Cavalry Regiment
of the Fourth Division. White with a red border, it featured a centered
palmetto tree, bearing two shields, at the base of which were five
arrows and a
rattle snake, and bore the motto “Constitutional Rights”.[xxi] In an
elaborate
ceremony in Plattsburg, the “southern ladies” presented Colonel John T.
Hughes’
command with a banner very similar to the Confederate first national
flag that
consisted of three wide bars, two red and the center one of white
satin, with a
canton of blue bearing seven bright silver stars.[xxii]
Another variant of the Confederate first national, captured at the engagement at Athens, Missouri, on August 5, 1861, from an element of Colonel Martin Green’s 1st Cavalry Regiment of the Second Division, featured two red stripes and center white one, with a blue canton containing a number of white stars. The motto “Southern Rights” appeared on the center white stripe in red lettering.[xxiii]
A
Guard flag,
attributed to Colonel James J. Clarkson’s 5th
Infantry Regiment of
the Eighth Division, displays many of the characteristics of a type of
flag
carried by United States troops in the war with Mexico.
A large hand-stitched silk flag, measuring
70 inches on the fly and 38 inches on the staff, Mary Wilson and
Virginia
Willick of Independence presented it to the regiment. The flag,
although now
terribly faded, appears to have had six white stripes, divided by seven
pieces
of red edging. The
dark blue canton,
seventeen inches square, contains a gold and black spread eagle and
twenty-seven
gold stars. It is
likely that this particular
banner was a Mexican War relic or other pre-war issue.[xxiv]
One final flag, allegedly carried by Lieutenant Colonel Theodore T. Taylor’s 1st Infantry Battalion of the Seventh Division, was a United States flag with all of the stars removed save one.[xxv]
Thus, it is apparent that the flags of the Missouri State Guard included many that employed the state coat of arms in their design, and several others imitated the Confederate first national flag, but other banners adopted by Guard units were as diverse as the men who made up that army. While few of the Guard flags survive, sufficient information is available to preserve, at least in word pictures, the banners around which the Guardsmen rallied in the fight for Missouri in 1861.
Note:
The flags depicted here are not drawn to scale and are merely the
author’s
concept of their appearance based upon word descriptions provided in
the
available sources. The
actual flags
doubtless differed from these depictions in various details, some
significant
and others minor.
[i]
General Order No. 8, Letter and Order Book, Missouri State Guard,
1861-1862,
Missouri State Museum, Jefferson City, Mo., 7-8. [ii]
James E. McGhee, ed., Service With the Missouri State Guard:
The Memoir of
Brigadier General James Harding (Springfield, Mo.: Oak Hills
Publishing,
2000): 22-23. [iii]
Unknown to Editor, Democratic Herald, Louisiana,
Mo., October 10, 1861. [iv]
Donal J. Stanton, Goodwin F. Berquist and Paul C. Bowers, eds. The
Civil War
Experiences of General M. Jeff Thompson (Dayton, Ohio:
Morningside House,
Inc., 1988): 52. [v]
General Order No. 1, 4th Military District,
April 23, 1861, in History
of Caldwell and Livingston Counties, Missouri (St. Louis:
National
Historical Co., 1886): 174. [vi]
Memphis
(Tenn) Daily Appeal, October 19, 1861. [vii]
James E. McGhee, Voices of the Swamp Fox Brigade:
Supplemental Letters,
Orders and Documents of General M. Jeff Thompson’s Command, 1861-1862
(Independence, Mo.: Blue & Grey Book Shoppe, 1999): 14-15,
24-25.
[viii]
Ephraim McD. Anderson, Memoirs: Historical and Personal,
Including the
Campaigns of the First Missouri Confederate Brigade (Dayton,
Oh.: Press of
the Morningside Bookshop, 1972): 47. [ix]
History of Saline County, Missouri (St. Louis:
National Historical Co.
1888): 276. [x] Joe
Lee Bomar, “The
Audrain County Flag,” Confederate
Veteran, 36 (1928): 98-99. [xi]
History of Lewis, Clark, Knox and Scotland Counties,
Missouri
(Marceline, Mo.: Walsworth Pub. Co., 1981. Reprint of 1887 edition):
678. [xii]
Thomas W. Knox, Camp-Fire and Cotton Field: Southern
Adventures in Time of
War (Philadelphia: Jones Brothers & Co., 1865): 49.
[xiii]
Detroit (Mi) Daily Tribune, July 20, 1861. [xiv]
Carthage (Mo) Press, July 12, 1887.
The Baltimore (Md) Sun, June 25,
1861, described the flags captured
from the Guard at Boonville as consisting of “one secession flag, one
lone star
flag, and one State flag with 15 stars.” [xv]
Liberty (Mo) Weekly Tribune, May 24, 1861. History
of Clay and Platte
Counties, Missouri (St. Louis: National Historical Co.,
1885): 202. [xvi]
History of Greene County, Missouri (St. Louis:
Western Historical Co.,
1883): 286. [xvii]
Quoted in Howard Michael Madaus, “The Missouri State Guard and Other
“Secession
Flags” in Missouri, 1861.” Monograph
found at www.confederateflags.com.
See
also Baltimore (Md) Sun, July 12, 1861. [xviii]
History of Saline County, Missouri, 277. [xix]
Lindsay Murdoch, “Narrative of the Services of Lindsay Murdoch in the
War of
the Rebellion from 1861 to 1865, and some Subsequent Services in the
Interests
of Honesty in the Business of Government.”
Unpublished typescript.
University Archives, Kent Library, Southeast
Missouri State University,
Cape Girardeau, Mo., 4. [xx]
California (Mo) News, May 18, 1861; Bolivar
(Mo) Weekly Courier,
May 4, 1861. [xxi]
Morning Constitution, Chillicothe, Mo., March
13 & 20, 1890. John
Schmale to James E. McGhee, e-mail,
September 15, 2003. This
flag is
currently in possession of the State of Illinois and is preserved in
Memorial
Hall at Springfield. It
may be viewed
online at www.civil-war.com/index.html. [xxii]
Florence May Porter, “Our First Flag,” in Missouri Division of the
United
Daughters of the Confederacy, comp., Reminiscences of Women
of Missouri
During the Sixties (Jefferson City, Mo.: United Daughters of
the
Confederacy, 1911): 10-14. [xxiii]
The remnant of this flag is in the possession of the State Historical
Society
of Iowa and may be viewed on its website at www.iowaflags.org/. Part of the flagstaff
portion of the flag is
missing, making it impossible to determine the exact number of stars in
the
canton, but from what has been preserved it appears that it was likely
thirteen
or fifteen.
[xxiv]
Ron Field, “The Flag of the Missouri State Guard,” Journal of
the
Confederate Historical Society, 18 (Spring 1990): 14; Greg
Biggs e-mail to
James E. McGhee, 17 December 2001. This flag is currently on display at
the
General Sweeney Museum, Republic, Missouri. *
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