"Women's involvement in the Civil War cult of the Stars and Stripes broadened the range of daring war experiences while it also tinged this symbol with a distinctly domestic hue."

Star-spangled Sentiment
Robert E. Bonner

IV. So loved! O you banner leading the day, with stars brought from the night . . .

If the wartime Stars and Stripes began to resemble earlier martial flag cults, it never lost its wider associations with the national promise of liberty. Sacrificing on behalf of popular government and emancipation was, from the perspective of most Unionists, every bit as important as their own valor under arms. Just as importantly, the involvement of women in flag culture imbued the flag with other new meanings, creating a distinctly domestic allure evident in a skirt-clad "Michigan Bridget's" supposed role as flag bearer in a contemporary illustration.

Fig. 5. "Michigan Bridget" from Mary Livermore, My Story of the War. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Women's involvement in the war involved a wide range of flag activities, most of which were far less martial than those of Michigan Bridget. Female patriotism was staged with the greatest fanfare at flag presentation ceremonies, when local women unveiled cloth gifts of their own construction and, in many cases, of their own design. One writer noted that it was through such events that the "reverence for the flag amounting almost to worship" acquired a "human face or word." Elaborately staged ceremonies were meant to give soldiers a set of memories that might sustain them under more trying circumstances. Marching off to war with a gift from home helped them to personalize devotion to country, cause, and their own sense of soldierly honor.

In an array of subsequent efforts, Union women took control of the flag's sentimental meanings, which would coexist with the same symbol's evocation of men's willing sacrifice. They celebrated it in a flood of flag-related poetry in the daily press and in popular magazines. They made it a prominent part of the visual landscape by displaying it from windows in both cities and towns. John Greenleaf Whittier's Barbara Frietchie was even bold enough to shame Stonewall Jackson into respecting the American flag his troops attempted to shoot from the second story of her home in western Maryland. As Whittier recounted, in a refrain that echoed into the twentieth century:

Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff 
Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf;   
She leaned far out on the window-sill, 
And shook it forth with a royal will. 
"Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country's flag," she said.

The legendary daring of Michigan Bridget and Barbara Freitchie were matched by more secretive, if far less celebrated, efforts of loyal women in the deeper South to harbor American flags behind enemy lines. At the conclusion of the war, such contraband cloth was pulled out of hiding to prove that faith in the Union cause had never waned. The Vermont native Cyrena Stone waved her miniature Stars and Stripes when Sherman's troops arrived in Atlanta. She had kept this sacred memento throughout the war, hiding it in jars of fruit and in her sugar container when not sharing it with her larger circle of Atlanta Unionists. Press reports also told of how an unnamed black woman in 1865 electrified a Virginia crowd by producing a banner that she too had hidden, at the risk of far greater reprisals, from white Confederates fighting for their freedom to keep her in slavery.

Women's involvement in the Civil War cult of the Stars and Stripes broadened the range of daring war experiences while it also tinged this symbol with a distinctly domestic hue. Brought within Union households, American flags became part of the civics lessons that mothers had incorporated into the patriotic education of American children. A contemporary writer noted the ultimate effects of making the Stars and Stripes into a "household idol in every Northern home." Children exposed to such shrines at home were "imbibing a strange love for [the flag] that will tell upon their devotion to country in their future history." In a telling prediction, he also noted that a symbol "planted in the hearts of men" would be "readily received by them calling forth their love and veneration" thereafter.

After the war, women took on added flag responsibilities in grieving dead soldiers. Patriotic color was a centerpiece of commemorative activities that began in 1865, when black Unionists decorated the graves at the Charleston racetrack. In the tradition of Memorial Days that followed, flags that had been soaked with blood became imaginatively doused with tears. Female groups took the lead in the ceremonial bereavement that shaped how both Unionists and the Confederate would honor their dead. Such rituals depended for their power on the Victorian association of heaven with the virtues of home. But it also perpetuated what would become an instinctive reliance on flags to give solace during times of national tragedy.

Flags' ever expanding uses in the postbellum period coincided with the growth of a United States' bunting industry. Patriotic cloth entered nearly every aspect of Americans' life in these years, with female consumers leading the way. Love for colors accordingly came to depend as much on the flag's ubiquity as its special associations. This trend continued, despite efforts to protect patriotism from the effects of commercialization. Some feared that the cult of the flag might be diluted if the symbol was not harbored away except in the most solemn occasions. They need not have worried. In the first years of the twenty-first century, Americans have continued to treat the cloth form of flags with nearly religious respect, even while they have been busy pasting its image to every conceivable form of T-shirt, bumper sticker, or household decoration.