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Saturday, March 8, 2014

The Flag tells its own story



Examining the flag as an artifact would seem to contradict Louis Toomer Moore’s conclusion that this flag was at a meeting on February 1, 1861. 

Counting Stars

The official U.S. flag had 33 stars when South Carolina seceded from the United States on December 20, 1860.  

On February 8, 1861, six states signed a provisional constitution for the Confederate States of America, and by February 18, 1861 Jefferson Davis was President of the Confederate States of America.  By the time the Confederate States created a flag, a seventh state had joined the confederacy, so the flag had seven stars, one to represent each state.

National flag of the Southern Confederacy; Detail from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, March 30, 1861, p. 292

The stars for those 7 states remained on the U.S. flag, reflecting the Union position that states could not secede.

And yet, Cape Fear Museum's U.S. flag has 34 stars.

On January 29, 1861, Kansas became the 34th state of the Union. The Wilmington Daily Herald noted on that day that the Senate had passed the Kansas Bill and reported two days later, on January 31, that the president signed it.

So the Union was made up of 34 states on February 1, 1861.  But the 34 star flag became the official U.S. flag on July 4, 1861, months after North Carolina seceded from the Union.  (It remained the official flag until July 4, 1863, until West Virginia became a state.)
It therefore seems unlikely (although I guess technically possible) that Mr. Covell would have had a 34 star flag for sale in his store on February 1, 1861, the day after Kansas became a state.  

And our flag's construction suggest that even if it were feasible to add a star to an existing flag over night, our flag was not modified.  The the position of the stars on the flag as well as the condition of the material of the stars suggest that they were all made and attached at the same time.   The fact that the row with 6 stars are evenly spaced, and so are the other rows seems to provide additional proof that they were all sewn on at the same time.  The state of the color and fabric of the stars does as well.





That said, since the CFM flag is handmade, it could easily have been produced between January 29th and April/May when it seems Covell left Wilmington.  And even though the flag was not official until months after North Carolina succeeded from the United States, 34 star flags did fly before that official date. 

Still, there was no mention of Covell or his flag in the two local papers, so it cannot be independently placed in town. 

And, as the 34 star flag was the flag of the U.S. until July 4, 1863, it is technically possible (albeit rather unlikely) that Covell purchased the flag in Rhode Island and misremembered having it with him in North Carolina.  

Even though it is not possible to definitively confirm that Covell flag was in Wilmington in the run up to North Carolina’s exit from the United States, the circumstantial evidence seems to strongly suggest that it was.  

There is no obvious reason that Mr. Covell would have made up the story – a Northern Civil War era U.S. flag surely would have been as valuable a family memento to a Rhode Island merchant as one with a Southern history.  (Although as a counter argument, maybe it makes a more exciting family story to have him spiriting the flag off north….)    

Much of the circumstantial evidence fits the family lore– William K. Covell, Jr. was a ship’s chandler, and flags were very much a part of the maritime world so he would have had flags at his shop, or had access to a flag maker who could provide them to him. Newspaper accounts show pro Union members of the community did fly U.S. flags at meetings, so it seems reasonable that someone could have asked Covell to bring one to a meeting. 

By the time he left Wilmington, flags were freighted with symbolic meaning on both sides of the divide.  These sheet music covers give you a sense of  how flags had become to mean more than the sum of their stitches. (and you can look at my older blog for more on that, too....Civil War Redux). 

Courtesy of Library of Congress


Image of sheet music courtesy of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University

 And since William K. Covell identified with the North, he would likely have taken a flag back North to “protect” it from the Secessionists.  

Taking all this together, it’s not hard to believe that this flag was in Wilmington in the Spring of 1861, and that perhaps it made an appearance at an election rally as the vote for secession (end of February, 1861) was taking place.  Perhaps it came out at a later meeting to discuss the Peace Conference (early March).  Or perhaps it was just a part of Covell’s shop stock.  In the absence of definitive evidence, we will never really know. 

Thursday, March 6, 2014

One Hundred years later, the flag returns to Wilmington



FLAG STORY TWO

On February 1, 1961, a little less than one hundred years after the start of the Civil War, the Covell flag officially returned to Wilmington.

According to the January 13, 1960 City Council minutes, “The Manager advised Council for information that he has written Mr. Covell, who recently informally presented to Council through Mr. Louis T. Moore, an 1861 America Flag, and had received reply to same; also a letter from Mr. Moore making suggestions to further handling of the formal flag presentation.  He further advised that the flag had been properly wrapped and had been placed in the city’s vault for safe-keeping.”  

The Museum’s accession file includes information that suggests that, in the late 1950s, one of Mr. Covell’s descendants contacted the Reverend Mortimer Glover in Wilmington and offered the flag to the city of Wilmington.  The reverend got the City, and the New Hanover Historical Commission, involved in the negotiations.   

At that time Louis T. Moore became involved in the story. 


Louis Toomer Moore, about 1950
1981.013.0003


Chamber of Commerce Letter signed by Moore, 1929
1988.016.0010


A member of a longstanding Wilmington family, Louis Toomer Moore (1885-1961) wore many hats.  He had worked for a newspaper and had been in the paint business for a brief time. 

He was involved in Wilmington's Chamber of Commerce for decades, as this 1929 letter suggests.










 Moore was also an amateur historian and by the time William Covell's family offered the flag to the city, he was Chairman of the New Hanover Historical Commission.   So, when Covell's descendents offered the flag to the city, it's not that surprising to find that Louis T. Moore was involved in the proceedings. 
What is fairly surprising (well it surprised me), is that Moore changed the family's story in significant ways.

The Covells apparently wanted to donate the flag to the city on the centennial of the date of the original meeting where it was supposedly displayed.  But they didn't know when that was, so they asked if that could be found out.  Mr. Moore set about finding the date, but looking in the newspaper.  And what he found led him to state the flag was used on February 1, 1861.


Perhaps based on the fact that the flag in question was a U.S. flag, Moore altered the family’s story so that their story of a flag at the “meeting” where secessionists won out in the state became his story of a flag present at a “Union meeting” on February 1, 1861.  Then his story became the official story.


Moore was quite right that there was a Union meeting in the city on that date. A few years ago, I did the very same thing that Mr. Moore did.  I went to the library, and looked at the newspapers.  And I found the meeting he did: in both the pages of the Wilmington Daily Journal and in the pages of the Wilmington Daily Herald.


The  Herald even spoke about the United States flag: declaring that local businessment Oscar G. Parsley "..made a few remarks declaratory of his attachment to the flag of his country, his unwillingness to surrender it, and his hope that it would continue to wave in triumph through all time."




 But it didn't mention that there was a flag at the "union" meeting, and it wasn't by any stretch the last time that townspeople got together and talked about what the state of North Carolina should do in the run-up to the Civil War.

Since North Carolina didn't secede until May 1861, it seems highly unlikely that this was the last time a U.S. flag was flown at a meeting in town.

Moore's story seems, to me at least, to be less believable than the original family story.

And I believe that, as a historian, if you're going to change someone's story you need some evidence to do so.  Evidence corroborating Moore's switch from secession meeting to union meeting is in short supply. 


Quite why Louis T. Moore decided to reinterpret the family story may always be unknown.   




A document in the Museum's accession file does, however, hint at an intriguing albeit unverifiable possibility.

According to an undated mimeographed piece in the Museum accession file, “The flag to be presented by Mr. Covell will illustrate the fact that the War Between the States really started at Wilmington with the capture of Fort Caswell by military companies of New Hanover and Brunswick counties on January 10, 1861 – (three weeks prior to the Union meeting on February 1, 1861 in the Wilmington court house), and the one given by Mr. and Mrs. Lathrop is emblematic of the fact that the War Between the States really ended at Wilmington, since closure of the port as an avenue of supply for General Lee’s armies, January 15, 1865, was followed in about three months with Lee’s surrender to Grant in Virginia.”

This characterization of start of the war is misleading:  it is true that Fort Caswell was seized in January 1861, but it was also almost immediately returned to federal control on the order of North Carolina Governor Ellis.  And the idea that the war "really ended at Wilmington" is something that it seems fair to say is a bit of an overstatement.

Still, this story of the wartime events does, perhaps, suggest a motivation for Moore's decision to change the Covell's original story.

We can never really know why a person does something.  Still, to me, Louis T. Moore’s characterization of the U.S. flag and the events surrounding its return to the City seem to suggest that his desire to promote Wilmington trumped his desire to tell an historically accurate story.  Chamber of Commerce Moore beat out Historian Moore.

Regardless of whether he was conscious of how he moulded the story despite the evidence, events in 1861 pretty clearly don't line up with his version of how the flag was used, or how it came to leave town. 

Instead, the 1961 story seems best thought of as a booster's tale. 
Wilmington News, page 1, February 1, 1961


 


Efforts to promote Wilmington seem to have been second nature for Moore.  And in February 1961, he successfully persuaded folks around him that his version of the flag's story was the right one. He worked with a local centennial commission and city leaders, helping organize an event, and they even persuaded the North Carolina Confederate Centennial Commission to recognize Wilmington's flag ceremony as "...the first event to be commemorated in North Carolina during the Civil War Centennial."






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