"Since the Civil War, Americans' flag patriotism has rested on the uneasy coexistence of freedom and sacrifice, sentimental love, and supreme authority."

Star-spangled Sentiment
Robert E. Bonner

V. Valueless, object of eyes, over all and demanding all . . .

The Stars and Stripes emerged from the Civil War with a wider range of associations than any other national symbol.  A vibrant flag culture honored the country's ideals, its history, its fallen men, and its patriotic women. The war for the Union also bolstered the flag's status as a symbol of supreme national authority. From the secession crisis through the final collapse of the Confederacy, flag-waving Unionists called on government power to suppress an internal threat. When Confederates surrendered, the same flag presided over the loyalty oaths that brought rebels back into a national community of the red, white, and blue.

Fig. 6. Paroled Confederates taking loyalty oaths under a Stars and Stripes canopy. Courtesy New York Historical Society.

The dynamics of rebellion, coercion, and sentimental reunion were as long-lasting as any aspect of Civil War flag culture. The Confederate threat against the United States passed quickly enough, aided by Northern whites' fateful preference for national harmony over racial justice. But by the 1890s, the flag was taken up against the perceived threats posed by immigrants, political radicals, and other suspected dissidents. Civil War veterans played a key role in bringing the flag into the public schools and in popularizing new patriotic rituals such as Francis Bellamy's Pledge of Allegiance. This period saw considerable innovation in matters of organization and codification, which would become a permanent part of how Americans subsequently treated their banners. Yet despite such innovations, the prevailing blend of martial drill, sentimental tributes, and historical tableaux of the 1890s clearly echoed trends first established thirty years earlier.

Francis Bellamy marveled during this late-century patriotic revival that the Stars and Stripes had "as great a potency to Americanize the alien child as it has to lead regiments to death." Here Bellamy identified the crucial element of voluntarism enshrined in the country's cult of the flag. By focusing on the willing sacrifices of soldiers, banners had both glorified and obscured wartime violence. The flag-draped repentance of former Confederates rested on a double evasion, turning attention away from the force used to suppress their rebellion and from the brutal racial order that accompanied the growth of sectional amity. Flag rituals meant to "Americanize the alien child" similarly replaced the coercive elements of nationality with a simpler, happier story. In each of these instances, Americans conceived individuals free from outside pressure succumbing to the flag's inevitable tug upon their heart.

Idealizing patriotic consent has never meant an unwillingness to use coercion, of course. Blood was a vital part of America's path to nationhood, even if the country's love of cloth became a national ideal in the way that its blunt use of iron would not. When the country has come under attack, star-spangled sentiment may have brought solace and comfort. But it also has fanned the flames of war. The intimate relationship between patriotic pride, the thirst for vengeance, and the squelching of dissent, has been evident enough in the year and a half since September 11, 2001. On a practically daily basis, we are reminded of that imaginative color line that equates outward display with inner conviction.

Since the Civil War, Americans' flag patriotism has rested on the uneasy coexistence of freedom and sacrifice, sentimental love, and supreme authority. Yet if the 1860s established these themes, it neither fixed their meaning nor established their relationship to one another. This has been clear in the long-running dispute over the flag's sanctity that has roiled local authorities, the courts, and politicians for much of the twentieth century. Such recurring conflicts have raised basic questions about state-sponsored patriotism and the limits of dissent. In these, banners have both roused emotions and, ironically enough, marked the boundaries of government power by helping to establish official protection for even the most controversial forms of symbolic speech.

The latest flag flap has concerned the Pledge of Allegiance, and specifically the phrase "under God" that was added to Bellamy's composition during the Cold War. This episode, which was as fierce as it was short-lived, tended to obscure the true nature of the flag cult's religiosity. American patriots, both now as in the past, have regularly invoked the Almighty. Even Francis Scott Key ended his anthem with the rousing charge, "In God is our Trust" (words every bit as forgotten as the rest of his second, third, and fourth stanzas). Yet popular reverie for the flag has depended, in the end, on a more secular, if no less mystical, communion between the living and the dead.

What makes the American flag a religious object is evident less in the words of pledges and the lyrics of anthems than in the national rituals that frame such professions. These moments' half-conscious gestures dramatize a transaction that temporarily makes a gathering of strangers into a community of sentiment. The red, white, and blue cloth that centers attention receives the praise of patriotic voices and the collective gaze of patriotic eyes. Yet in raising their hands to their chests, participants in these ceremonies acknowledge an even deeper set of commitments involved in America's flag cult. As has been true at least since the 1860s, a flag-waving nation has expected something more than the loyalty of their citizens' bodies and the devotion of their minds. It has also sought, with a success that earlier generations could scarcely have imagined, the love of their citizens' hearts.

Further Reading:

George Henry Preble's voluminous The History of the Flag of the United States (Boston, 1880) has long been the starting point for understanding America's nineteenth-century flag cult. His explicitly patriotic approach should be read along with Scot M. Guenter's more analytical The American Flag, 1777-1924: Cultural Shifts from Creation to Codification (Rutherford, N.J., 1990), and with the more theoretical approaches of Caroline Marvin and David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (New York, 1999) and of Albert Boime The Unveiling of National Icons: A Plea for Iconoclasm in a Nationalist Era (New York, 1998). The following (which are listed in order of the periods they survey) provide historical context for the flag's place in American patriotic expression: Charles Royster, "A Nation Forged in Blood," in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Arms and Independence: The Military Character of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, 1984); Mark Wahlgreen Summers, "'Freedom and Law Must Die Ere They Sever': The North," in Gabor S. Borrit, ed., Why the Civil War Came (New York, 1996); Mark E. Neely, Jr. & Harold Holzer, The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North (Chapel Hill, 2000); Robert E. Bonner, Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South (Princeton, 2002); Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill, 2001); Gaines Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause and the Emergence of the New South (New York, 1987); David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Cecilia O'Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton, 1999); Stuart McConnell, "Reading the Flag: A Consideration of the Patriotic Cults of the 1890s," in John Bodnar, ed., Bonds of Affection: Americans Define their Patriotism (Princeton, 1996).