Robert E. Bonner teaches American history at Michigan State University. He is the author of Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South (Princeton, 2002).

In 1861, the skies of New York were filled with red, white, and blue cloth, waving defiantly at enemies of the United States. The Confederate assault on Fort Sumter might have been bloodless, but it produced the same flag-draped mixture of anger, sorrow, and anxiety brought on by the nearly three thousand deaths on September 11, 2002. At the outset of the Civil War, as in the months following 9/11, America was ready to follow Walt Whitman and "see but you, O warlike pennant" and to "sing you only, / Flapping up there in the wind."

Patriotic fervor of the spring of 1861 reached a high point on April 20, when the oversized Stars and Stripes, recently evacuated from Fort Sumter, arrived in Manhattan. During a "monster rally," U.S. commander Robert Anderson carried this banner into Union Square and placed it in the sculpted hands of George Washington himself. A photographer captured the scene by positioning himself above both the crowd and the first president's huge equestrian monument. In this blurry image, the throng looked upward, gazing towards an emblem that would soon be carried into war.

A few weeks after this spectacle, Henry Ward Beecher tried to make sense of the incessant Union flag waving. "Our Flag carries American ideas, American history, and American feelings," he explained, which had "gathered and stored" the idea of liberty ever since the colonial period. If Beecher overstated the Stars and Stripes' age, he still captured the main sources of its appeal. Weaving together abstract values, past events, and passionate emotions, the American flag had already become a nearly religious presence across the North. By the end of this war, it would generate an even more powerful aura, which would be perpetuated through America's uniquely flag-centered patriotism.

In recent years, the American flag's mystical power has never been far from sight. Pledges from schoolchildren, pre-game renditions of the "Star Spangled Banner," and never ending controversies over flag desecration all testify to Americans' regard for patriotic cloth. During periods of crisis, Americans' flag passions rise to their highest levels of intensity. The past year and a half has made this clear, whether one considers the flag-draped coffins of New York or the Pentagon or the thousands, if not millions, of banners hung from windows and porches in the fall of 2001. In this most recent resurgence of patriotism, flags with special associations have generated the most attention, just as they did in 1861. A flag pulled from the Ground Zero rubble missing twelve of its stars gained headlines by traveling to the World Series, to the Super Bowl, and, in its last and most controversial public appearance, to the opening ceremonies of the 2002 Winter Olympics. Another, emblazoned with comments written directly on its cloth by visitors to the World Trade Center site, went via navy ship to Afghanistan, where United States troops raised it over Kabul.

It is worth considering why Americans have invested their flags with such importance and how the United States has become more saturated with patriotic color than any other country in the world. The comparative intensity of American loyalties is less noteworthy than the country's fixation on a single symbol, which has come to be associated with a remarkably wide range of emotions. Americans' devotion to patriotic cloth has its taproot in the American Civil War, when the cult of the Stars and Stripes intensified just as it broadened its range of associations. During the war for the Union, the flag merged popular energies with government power, while sanctifying the country's idealism with the shedding of blood. As in the Union Square pairing of flag and founder, the national banner in these years also threaded together present emergencies with the country's imagined past.

America's emotional attachment to flags attests the country's penchant for patriotic spectacle. But flag culture had larger significance, especially in helping the country modify the European path to nationhood. What made the United States' case special, if not wholly exceptional, was that its flag cult helped to build collective authority on willing sacrifice rather than on sheer national strength. It was a combination of blood and cloth, rather than of blood and iron, that accounted for the star-spangled sentiment of the 1860s. This mixture gained potency as it was passed down to later generations, who would continue to use the flag both as a sign of inspiration and as an all-too-effective instrument against dissent.

Today's patriots tell a very particular story about the history of the American flag. In this story, Flag Day marks the anniversary of the banner's "birth," with Betsy Ross its mother. The flag's thirteen stripes document the initial size of the Union, just as its fifty stars tell of the nation's growth. The flag's story is always accompanied by rousing music and streaming banners, as the flag not only leads Americans through war but also presides over defining experiences like immigrants' arrival at Ellis Island, African-Americans' quest for voting rights, and Neil Armstrong's landing on the moon. As omnipresent as Woody Allen's Zelig, the Stars and Stripes seems to have missed few truly important events in American history.

It took considerable energy to create this tapestry of flag images and icons. In many cases, patriots had to retrospectively drape the past with stars and stripes, especially when portraying the flag's earliest years. The Founders' own comparative neglect of their new national symbols required later generations to fabricate—out of whole cloth, one might say—a series of legends that could project flag passions back in time. The best-known case was the Betsy Ross story, which was first presented to the American public in the 1870s. Other famous patriotic images, such as Emmanuel Leutze's 1855 Washington Crossing the Delaware or Archibald Williard's slightly later The Spirit of '76, were part of this same process.

Specialists on American flag culture agree that the earliest roots of star-spangled sentiment lay not in the Revolution but in the country's second war with England. The war's most notable creation was Francis Scott Key's "Star Spangled Banner" which would give the flag a name and the country a national anthem. Less lasting, though no less important to the 1810s, was Joseph Rodman Drake's poem, "The American Flag," which focused not on a particular scene, but on this symbol's mystical origin, imagining the flag's first heavenly appearance:

When Freedom from her mountain height
Unfurled her standard to the air,
She tore the azure robe of night
And set the stars of glory there.
She mingled with its gorgeous dyes
The milky baldrick of the skies,
And striped its pure celestial white
With streakings of the morning light.

Drake's association of the flag with the "Freedom" of heavenly stars lasted through the secession crisis, when his first stanza was placed directly beneath the 1861 lithograph Our Heaven Born Banner. The soldier in this picture, and all the viewers who were implicitly asked to follow his gaze, confronted a mystical image that was meant to change the way they saw the colored cloth suddenly waving in nearly every public place.

At the same time that Drake's poem was accompanying new images, Key's more famous tribute from the war of 1812 was generating criticism. Richard Grant White led a committee in 1861 to choose a more appropriate national song than the "Star Spangled Banner," which he and other genteel critics associated with spread-eagle expansionism and anti-immigrant nativism. "Who cannot but wish that the spangles could be taken out," White asked, "and a good, honest flag be substituted for the banner!" What the country needed, he believed, was a set of patriotic tunes and rituals that were less specific in their associations and less warlike in their imagery and tone. In 1861, Henry Ward Beecher echoed this view in associating the flag not with armies but with the noble ideas associated with its "bright morning stars of God" and "beams of morning light."

While American soldiers nurtured a martial flag cult within their own ranks before the Civil War, the larger public tended to associate the national flag primarily with the country's ideas rather than its armies. Significantly, the first attempt to bloody the Stars and Stripes came not from those hoping to glorify the flag but from abolitionists who sought to discredit American hypocrisy. The poet Thomas Campbell began the conversation in 1838, calling out from England:

United States, your banner wears
Two emblems--one of fame;
Alas! the other that it bears
Reminds us of your shame.
Your banner's constellation types
White freedom with its stars,
But what's the meaning of the stripes?
They mean your negroes' scars.

Garrisonian abolitionists picked up this image and made the sinister associations of the red, white, and blue part of their campaign against slavery. Their shift of attention from the flag's heavenly stars of divine hope to its bloody stripes of guilt pricked at national pieties as effectively as their public burnings of the Constitution.

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.

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. 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."

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.

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.

Copyright © 2003 Common-place The Interactive Journal of Early American Life, Inc., all rights reserved.