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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