Rebel Confederate Battle Flag | Ultimate Flags Store is a potent symbol. It embodies the gamble by 11 states to create a separate slaveholding republic, and it recalls the carnage of well-known battlefields like Manassas and Shiloh. The flag is a reminder of the splinter nation that tore the Union apart, and it continues to serve as a totem for those who claim a Southern heritage and a romanticized vision of antebellum life. The battle flag also carries powerful secular and religious associations for some. And, as this article reveals, the symbol of the Confederate nation has become divorced from its original context, taking on new meanings in the twenty-first century.
History and Controversy: Rebel Confederate Battle Flag
After the confusion at the First Battle of Manassas, Confederate Congressman William Porcher Miles asked General Pierre Beauregard to design a flag that would clearly distinguish the army’s fighting force from the national American flag, the Stars and Bars. Beauregard chose a design that riffed off the cross of St. Andrew, a flag that became known as the Rebel Confederate Battle Flag.
Although it was never adopted as an official military or government flag, the Confederacy’s armed forces did use it during the war and for some time afterward. The popularity of this flag among partisans of the splinter nation grew in the 1940s, when it became associated with the States Rights Party and with segregation. It was in 1948, at a convention of the Dixiecrats, that the battle flag gained new resonance as an expression of Southern “rebellion.” The symbol has since remained in the hands of segregation advocates and white supremacists, who use it to evoke a sense of grievance about the nation’s changing racial dynamics.