"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."

Star-spangled Sentiment
Robert E. Bonner

III. [Y]et furiously fought for, risking bloody death —

Civil War bloodshed brought the American flag down to earth and made the cloth repository of national ideas into a powerful means of commemorating sacrifice. Caroline Marvin and David Ingle have recently explored this aspect of American flag culture from a sociological perspective, drawing attention to how death has endowed the Stars and Stripes with its sacred qualities. Their analysis helps to explain why veterans and their families have regularly taken the lead in protecting the sanctity of American symbols.

The roots of America's blood-soaked flag cult lay in the ancient martial ideal of sacrificing one's body for a banner. There was nothing distinctively American about soldiers' willingness to be "sabred into crow's meat" for "a piece of glazed cotton," as Thomas Carlyle had put it in 1831. Indeed, for Victorian observers, this death-defying martial heroism was distinct from national loyalty and perhaps even in tension with it. John Stuart Mill considered that single-minded "devotion to the flag" was evidence that a country lacked other cohesive and inspiring ideas. With the Austrian Empire in mind, he denounced armies held together only by the colors of battle as "executioners of human happiness" whose "only idea, if they have any, of public duty is obedience to orders."

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.

Fig. 4. Masthead of the Liberator. Note the Stars and Stripes, upper left, waving over the slave market. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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 flag would be changed more radically by the torrent of bloodshed that ended slavery's massive violence. Through this crucible, white Americans imagined far more intensely than ever before how their country's commitment to liberty rested on a set of violent underpinnings. Abraham Lincoln lent a vocabulary to this "new birth of freedom" which involved both a revolutionary dedication to principle and martyred soldiers' dedication to a republic that they had valued above their own lives. In language tinged with the Christian hope of redemption through death, it was soldiers' blood that regenerated the republic and allowed it to live up its own founding propositions.

An ever expanding cult of the American flag was a key part of imagining this secular counterpart of the Christian passion. During the spectacle of combat, banners inspired soldiers to acts of death-accepting patriotism, which were made a national ideal through poetry, song, and images. Common soldiers, and especially the mythically brave flag bearers, came to occupy a central place in the popular imagination. As casualties mounted, flags commemorated the heroism of those who had carried them into battle. Banners brought back from the front torn and tattered, covered with smoke, and riddled with bullets were cherished as sacred relics. A mystical aura even emanated from enemy banners, since it was only through acts of courage that these had become captured trophies.

African Americans best appreciated how Civil War bloodshed transformed the United States flag from a symbol of betrayed idealism to an emblem of liberation. Shortly after Confederate surrender, the Reverend E. J. Adams of Charleston drew the attention of former slaves to "the bloody crimson stripes" on the American flag to make a larger point. "Once emblematic of the bloody furrows ploughed upon the quivering flesh of four million of slaves," he explained, these stripes became thereafter "emblematic of the bloody sacrifice offered upon the altars of American liberty."