The following article, published in 1915, shows that the designer of the Confederate flag was in dispute among Confederate veterans and that it basically came down to a committee and votes to decide who would get credit for the flag’s design.
There were many different stories about how the Confederate flag came into being. This is just one of them.
The Vexed Question of Who Designed Confederate Flag
One of the acts of the late Confederate reunion at Richmond was an official determination that the credit for having designed the Confederate flag belongs to the late Maj. Orren Randolph Smith of Louisburg, N.C. The controversy as to who designed the flag of the Confederate states will probably go on forever, but the Confederate veterans have recorded themselves as believing that Maj. Smith was the author of the design of the flag.
There have been various claimants in connection both with the design and making of the Confederate flag and it is believed that all the claimants had some good ground to base their claims on. So far as was in their power to do so, the Confederate veterans have adjusted the dispute, but the decision is but a human decision. The decision of the question was intrusted to a committee of veterans, and of that committee Gen. C. Irvine Walker of Summerville, S.C., was chairman. It was he who presented the report.
Among the claimants for the honor of early connection with the making of the Confederate flag were Miss Jessica R. Smith, daughter of Maj. Orren Randolph Smith, and Nicola Marschall, an artist, who was a resident of Marion, Ala., in 1861, and who is now living in Louisville. The report of the flag committee, though not as emphatic as it might be, leaves no room for doubt that the evidence submitted to it favored Maj. Smith as the author of the flag.
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The committee in its report said: “Your committee is not, from the evidence before it, convinced that Mr. Marschall ever submitted a design for the flag. Your committee is convinced that Maj. Smith did submit a deesign. As the design which the congressional committee submitted with its report, which was adopted, the evident most clearly shows to be the same as Maj. Smith’s design, it is reasonable to conclude that Maj. Smith submitted the design of the stars and bars flag of the Confederate states.”
There have been numerous stories of the adoption of the Confederate flag – that is, the stars and bars flag, which has generally been called the battle flag of the Confederaby. One of the stories, and it would appear to be a plausible one, is that the flag was agreed on at a village within a few miles of Washington, Fairfax Court House.
The story goes that it was at a conference at that village between Gen. Beauregard, Gen. Johnston, and Gen. W.L. Cabell, who was chief quartermaster under Beauregard, that the flag was agreed on and adopted. And that was late in the summer of 1861, after some very bloody fighting between the troops of the north and the south.
It may be that the Confederate authorities at Montgomery, Ala., to whom the flag design of Maj. Smith was submitted, themselves submited the matter to military officers in the field for their report before recommending adoption. In this way the flag matter may have come before Gens. Beauregard, Johnston, and Cabell, who were at Fairfax Court House after the battle of the first Bull Run.
Officers and men in the field had felt the need of a distinctive flag for the southern troops. State flags were being largely used by southern regiments, and there was a Confederate flag containing stars and bars, which in the dust and smoke of the battlefield was easily confounded with the Stars and Stripes. To reduce the danger of this confusion, Confederate soldiers at the battle of Bull Run, three days after the engagement at Blackburn ford, wore badges of red flannel pinned to the left shoulder.
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Beauregard and Johnston seem early to have had an idea that a flag with a red field, with a blue St. Andrew’s cross, containing white stars, would make an excellent and effective symbol. Where they got that idea and when and how it came to them has not been recorded.
After getting together they agreed that it would be a good flag, and the next thing the army knew was that they were being issued. It is a matter of record that Gen. Cabell, the quartermaster general of the Army of Northern Virginia, issued an address to the ladies of the south, requesting them to send to Capt. Collin McRae Selp, quartermaster at Richmond, such red and blue silk dresses as they could spare, that they might be made into battle flags.
A large number of ladies of the south were at work in Richmond making flags, and among them were the Misses Carey of Baltimore. It is said that the first of the flags of the battle design – the red field and blue St. Andrew’s cross inset with stars – was made by these women out of their silk dresses, and that this flag was sent to Gen. Beauregard and used by him. That flag went through the war, and is a treasured relic in Confederate Memorial Hall at New Orleans.
The making of battle flags out of silk was not carried on for long. Soon they were made of blue and red bunting, blue and red cloth, and any other fabric of the proper color that came handy.
Source: Evening star. (Washington, D.C.), 20 June 1915.
