Long-lost file sheds light on first flag

[AGDLynn]

I'm not posting this to discuss the merits of past, current or future Georgia flags...I just thought that this was an incredible example when something gets misfiled, lol! Guess they can't fire whoever misfiled it.....

7/3/03

By JIM GALLOWAY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution


State Archives
This recently discovered illustration was presented by former ranking Confederate military officers in 1878 in a flag proposal to the governor. (sorry, I don't know how to post pics.)

The first bit of campaign literature for next year's state flag referendum has been let out of the box. Finally.

It's been lost for 125 years, and consists of a batch of state documents misfiled under "Mining" instead of "Military."

The records were discovered in state archives last month and detail the origins of the first official Georgia flag, adopted in 1879. They include a striking pen-and-watercolor drawing that looks something like the new banner now being raised across the Georgia -- which will be one of two candidates in the March 2004 vote.

More important, historians say the documents prove the flag was designed and approved by Confederate veterans.

Such lineage is important to supporters of the new flag -- they include Gov. Sonny Perdue -- who are anxious to seize the historical high ground from those still angered by the elimination of the Confederate battle emblem from the statewide vote. The only other flag on the ballot is the blue flag adopted in 2001 at former Gov. Roy Barnes' urging.

"This is documented proof, in the words of the Confederate soldiers of Georgia, of the flag they preferred," said state Sen. George Hooks (D-Americus), who helped design the current flag.

Much of the fervor was knocked out of the flag fight in the spring when the Legislature dropped the 1956 state banner with its dominant battle emblem from the referendum -- but installed a new state flag based on the Stars and Bars, the first national flag of the Confederacy.

"Heritagists" vow a last-ditch fight to restore the battle emblem to the ballot when the Legislature meets in January -- arguing that the St. Andrew's cross was added as a tribute to Confederate soldiers, not as a protest to federal-ordered desegregation.

Proposed by officers

Other Southern history buffs have countered that Confederate veterans made their own choice in 1879 -- when the Legislature adopted a state flag with a vertical blue band, and alternating horizontal bars of red, white and red. It was a variation of the Stars and Bars.

But no one could find the paperwork behind the 1879 flag, and some battle emblem enthusiasts questioned its pedigree.

"We never had the story of how that flag came about," said Ed Jackson, the state's leading expert on flags and a senior academic at the Carl Vinson Institute of Government in Athens.

At least, not until last month.

Joanne Smalley, senior archivist at the Georgia Archives in Clayton County, said a researcher pawing through Georgia's mining history came across a file belonging to the Legislature's Committee on Military, generated in the late 1870s. Hooks, to whom the find was first reported, said the files had probably been mislaid since the 1880s or 1890s.

U.S. troops were withdrawing from the South, bringing an end to Reconstruction. One of Georgia's first responses was to re-establish its militia. The Georgia Volunteers was composed largely of Confederate veterans. It was the forerunner of the modern National Guard.

Georgia had never had an official state banner. In November 1878, a board of volunteers officers -- all former ranking Confederates -- wrote Gov. Alfred Colquitt, requesting a state flag: "Not only do the troops of the state need it, but citizens of Georgia now have upon the ocean some of the finest steamships in the American marine; to say nothing of numerous small craft -- which have no means of making themselves known upon the seas as ships of Georgia."

They provided their own proposal in two drawings of a square banner, one on crude, lined paper that might otherwise have been used in a country schoolhouse. The other was more elaborate.

"The documents are the pedigree," said Beryl Diamond, a historian for the Georgia National Guard.

"There can be no question," said Jackson, the Athens historian -- though he said the papers warrant further study.

That design was approved by the Legislature in 1879, with the support of two African-American lawmakers, and it went through a number of minor changes over the next 70 years.

During that period, the Stars and Bars was largely forgotten, while the battle emblem picked up in popularity as the fight over civil rights became more strident.

By the time the state flag was replaced in 1956, at the height of attempts to preserve Jim Crow laws, those who wanted the Confederate battle emblem on the state banner had dismissed the 1879 flag as bland and meaningless.

But the Confederate officers who designed it in the 1870s thought otherwise: "All that is needed is a flag significantly striking, but simple, so as to be suitable both for maritime and military purposes. The design we submit appears to combine these requisites, besides possessing the advantage, so far as we know, of being entirely unique."

A tough choice

Jack Bridwell, commander of the Georgia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, admits that his group is between a rock and a hard place. Regardless of its pedigree, Bridwell said, the new state flag -- a closer version of the Stars and Bars -- has been foisted on the public without a popular vote. But the only alternative -- at this point -- is the Barnes banner.

"Are we going to take a side? Probably," Bridwell said. He just doesn't know what it will be.