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Dr.
John M. Coski
Historian and Director of Library & Research
Museum of the Confederacy
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When
Gen. Beauregard & Johnston approved the first Confederate
Battle Flag in Fairfax in Sept 1861, it had 12 stars,
but only 11 states were then in secession. Who was the
12th state? Later the flag gained a 13th star. Which
state did it represent?
- M. Shumaker, Fairfax, Virginia
Dr.
John Coski answers: While the discussions
to adopt the flag pattern occurred in September,
the first prototypes were not made and presented
until early November 1861. According to Constance
Cary, one of three Cary girls who made the famous
prototypes (based in turn on a prototype by a
woman named Mary Lyons), she sent hers to Gen.
Earl Van Dorn on November 10, 1861. A pro-southern
faction of the Missouri legislature voted to secede
on October 28, 1861, making it the 12th state.
Kentucky became the 13th state when a pro-Southern
faction of its legislature voted to secede in
late November 1861.
Our
library collection contains a letter dated September
27, 1861 from William Porcher Miles, congressman
from South Carolina and the man usually acknowledged
as the patron of the battle flag. In that letter,
he sketched out his design for the flag (in an
oblong or rectangular pattern, not the square
as eventually adopted). His sketch included 16
asterisks for stars -- obviously just to give
an idea about the general look of it, not to signify
the number of states in the Confederacy. |
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Courtesy
of The Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond,
Virginia
A
silk Army of Northern Virginia pattern
battle flag with 12 stars made as a prototype
by Hetty Cary in the fall of 1861 and
presented in December 1861 to Gen. Joseph
E. Johnston, who used it as his headquarters
flag. It is one of the three prototypes
made by the Cary girls.
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For more information:
Confederate
Flag Prototypes
Selected
publications by this author:
The
Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled
Emblem
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005)
Capital
Navy: The Men, Ships and Operations of the James River
Squadron
(Campbell, California: Savas-Woodbury, 1996 [Paperback:
Savas-Beatie, 2005])
White
House of the Confederacy: An Illustrated History
[coauthor] (Richmond: Cadmus Communications, 1993)
The
Army of the Potomac at Berkeley Plantation: The Harrison’s
Landing Occupation of 1862
(Richmond: Dietz Press, 1989)
Four
Centuries of the Southern Experience: Charles City County
from the Earliest Settlement through the Modern Civil
Rights Movement
Coedited with James P. Whittenburg (Salem, WV: Don
Mills, 1989)
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