Flag Symbol Analysis

Perhaps the best description of the powerful mystique associated with the colors comes from a noncombatant. In December 1862 Walt Whitman visited his brother George, a lieutenant in the 5lst New York, after he had been wounded at Fredericksburg. Finding his wartime vocation, Walt Whitman stayed in Washington as a volunteer nurse, learning as much about soldiers as anyone outside that fraternity could learn. In April 1864 he described to his mother a regimental flag he had received from a wounded soldier he tended. “It was taken by the secesh in a cavalry fight, and rescued by our men in a bloody little skirmish. It cost three men's lives, just to get one little flag, four by three. Our men rescued it, and tore it from the breast of a dead Rebel—all that just for the name of getting their little banner back again….There isn't a reg't…that wouldn't do the same.”

Confederates who professed to fight for the same goals as their forebears of 1776 would have been surprised by the intense conviction of Northern soldiers that they were upholding the legacy of the Revolution. A sergeant in the lst Minnesota proudly told his parents that he fought for “the same glorious ensign that floated over Ticonderoga, [and] was carried triumphantly through the Revolution.” A schoolteacher with several children of his own, who had enlisted in the 20th Connecticut on his thirty-sixth birthday, celebrated his thirty-seventh by writing that he had never regretted his decision to fight for “those institutions which were achieved for us by our glorious revolution […] in order that they may be perpetuated to those who may come after.” An Illinois farm boy whose parents had opposed his enlistment in 1862 asked them tartly a year later: “Should We the youngest and brightest nation of all the earth bow to traters and forsake the graves of our Fathers?”