11-Star “Stars and Bars” Confederate States of America Flag.

$9,800.00

Item Number: 133072

Rare Civil War era Confederate States of America Flag, in use between July 2 and November 28, 1861 commemorating the admittance of Tennessee and North Carolina into the Confederacy. Cotton, hand-sewn and double-sided. The entire piece measures 36 inches by 50.5 inches. In near fine condition.

The Confederacy's first official national flag often called the Stars and Bars, flew from March 4, 1861, to May 1, 1863. It was designed by Prussian-American artist Nicola Marschall in Marion, Alabama, and is said to resemble the Flag of Austria, with which Marschall would have been familiar. The original version of the flag featured a circle of seven white stars in the navy blue canton, representing the seven states of the South that originally composed the Confederacy: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. As the Confederacy grew, so did the numbers of stars: two were added for Virginia and Arkansas in May 1861, followed by two more representing Tennessee and North Carolina in July, and finally two more for Missouri and Kentucky (neither of these two states seceded, but partisan factional "governments" declared secession without achieving control of substantial territory or population in either case). "While Civil War flags escaped much of the mortal rigidity of mechanical mass production, their artistic merit was more particularly due to the delicate design relationship of the elements and to numerous subtle details - such as the directions of the arms of the stars, which we never entirely regimented, as they are on modern flags. And truly no modern replica can either do justice to the artistic character, or render the ‘patina’ of one of these antique flags” (Mastai & Mastai, 124).