Talk:William Tappan Thompson

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Good evidence that Second National Flag ("Stainless Banner") designed at suggestion of General Beauregard

“Richmond, Saturday, May 2 ….Gen Beauregard suggested the flag just adopted, or else a field of blue in place of the white.”

-Charleston Mercury ("Letter from Richmond"), May 5, 1863, p. 1, c. 1

"In the month of April, [1863], there was some question in the Confederate Congress about changing the form and arrangement of their flag, and in reference to it, Beauregard, on the 24th of April, wrote to a friend: 'Why change our battle-flag, consecrated by the best blood of our country on so many battlefields? A good design for the national flag would be the present battle-flag as Union Jack, and the rest all white or all blue.' This idea was adopted by Congress, on the 1st of May, and thenceforth the Confederate flag was a white field,—-the length double the width, with the union to be a square of two-thirds the width of the flag, having the ground red, thereon a broad saltire of blue, bordered with white, and emblazoned white mullets or five-pointed stars, corresponding in number to the Confederate States."

-William Parker Snow, Southern Generals: Who they are, and what they have done (1865), 246. [1]

Two more editions of the same work were titled- Southern Generals: Their Lives and Campaigns (1866) and Lee and his Generals (1867).

Beauregard letter to Congressman Villere, April 24, 1863.[2]

Historians John Coski (Museum of the Confederacy) and Robert Bonner (Professor of History, Dartmouth) have published books and articles on the Confederate flag. Neither of them give Thompson credit for designing the second national flag.

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"General Beauregard, whose earlier penchant for practicality had established the precedent for visual distinctiveness on the battlefield, proposed that 'a good design for the national flag would be the present battle-flag as Union Jack, and the rest all white or all blue.' This measure--placing the star-cross design in the upper corner of an otherwise monochromatic flag--would allow the civilian ensign to signal distress while incorporating that image that had been, in Beauregard's words, 'consecrated by the best blood of our country on so many battle-fields.' The final version of the second national flag, adopted May 1, 1863, did just this: it set the St. Andrew's Cross of stars in the Union Jack with the rest of the civilian banner entirely white.

Not surprisingly, the Confederate editors, poets, and songwriters who had done the most to shape flag culture applied their energies in the spring of 1863 to making sense of this new national flag. The Savannah Morning News had lobbied for the white banner as a sign that 'we are fighting to maintain the Heaven ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race,' predicting that it would 'be hailed by the civilized world as THE WHITE MAN'S FLAG.' Yet these racial connotations of whiteness were displaced by the flag's almost immediate association with the death of Stonewall Jackson, whose martyrdom would imbue this banner with the same sort of solemnity that the death of civilian James Jackson in the defense of the Stars and Bars had elicited. The unveiling of the new flag at Stonewall Jackson's funeral earned the colorless field the nickname of 'the Stainless Banner.'"

-Bonner, Robert E., "Flag Culture and the Consolidation of Confederate Nationalism." Journal of Southern History, Vol. 68, No. 2 (May 2002), 318-319.

Beauregard proposed and the Savannah Morning News lobbied. Lobbying is far from designing. He doesn't even mention Thompson by name. -BorderRuffian

References