Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 38.djvu/268

254 "The committee appointed to select a proper flag for the Confederate States of America, beg leave to report that they have given this subject due consideration, and carefully inspected the designs submitted to them.

The number of these has been unknown, but they all may be divided into two great classes: First, those which copy and preserve the principal features of the United States flag, with slight and unimportant modifications. Secondly, those which are very elaborate, complicated, or fanatical. The objection to the first class is that none of them, at any considerable distance, could readily be distinguished from the one which they imitate.

Whatever attachment may be felt, from association, for the Stars and Stripes (an attachment which your committee may be permitted they do not all share), it is manifest that, in inaugurating a new government, we cannot retain the flag of the government from which we have withdrawn with any propriety, or without encountering very obvious practical difficulties. There is no propriety in retaining the ensign of a government which in the States composing this Confederacy had become so oppressive and injurious to their interests as to require their separation from it.

It is idle to talk of keeping the flag of the United States when we have voluntarily seceded from them. It is superfluous to dwell upon the practical difficulties which would flow from the fact of two distinct and probably hostile governments, both employing the same, or very similar, flags. It would be a political and military solecism. It would lead to perpetual disputes. As to the glories of the old flag, we must bear in mind that the battles of the Revolution, about which our fondest and proudest memories cluster, were not fought beneath its folds; and although in more recent times, in the war of 1812, and in the war with Mexico, the South did win her fair share of glory, and shed her full measure under its guidance and in its defence. We think the impartial pages of history will present and commemorate the fact more imperishably than a mere piece of striped bunting.

When the colonies achieved their independence of the mother country (which up to the last they fondly called her.), they did not desire to retain the British flag:, or anything at all similar to