By Chris Carola, The Associated Press
In this June 8, 2011 photo, Sarah Stevens, a textile conservator for New York state, does restoration work on a 7th New York Regiment Armory flag in Waterford, N.Y. Eight Civil War flags will go on exhibit at the Capitol in Albany on July 12 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the war. (AP Photo/Mike Groll)
WATERFORD, N.Y. — A Confederate flag with links to president Abraham Lincoln and the first Union officer killed in the Civil War will be the centrepiece of an exhibit featuring New York’s large collection of banners from the conflict, state officials said Thursday.
The flag Col. Elmer Ellsworth was carrying after removing it from the roof of the Marshall House in Alexandria, Va., on May 24, 1861, will be part of an eight-flag exhibit opening July 12 in the “War Room” on the second floor of the state capitol. It’s believed to be the first time the banner will be on public display since the war, according to Christopher Morton, assistant curator at the New York State Military Museum.
Ellsworth, the 24-year-old leader of a New York infantry regiment, was shot and killed by innkeeper James Jackson. Ellsworth had just descended from the roof of Jackson’s hotel where the staunch secessionist had been flying the flag since shortly after the war broke out in April 1861. A Union soldier fatally shot Jackson after the innkeeper fired a shotgun into Ellsworth’s chest.
With the war’s first major battles still weeks away, Ellsworth became the North’s “first martyr,” while Jackson received equal billing in the South.
Adding to the notoriety of Ellsworth’s death — and the Marshall House flag — was his status as a close friend of Lincoln and his family. The young officer had spent time playing with the president’s young sons at the White House, where Lincoln, using a spyglass, could see the large Confederate flag flying in neighbouring Virginia, which had seceded from the Union on May 23. A day later, Lincoln ordered Union troops to cross the Potomac River and occupy Alexandria.
Ellsworth and a small detachment headed to the Marshall House, where he was shot on a stairway inside the inn while holding the bundled-up flag.
“It has an appeal to both the North and the South,” Morton said of the banner, which has large swaths missing thanks to souvenir hunters who cut out pieces in the aftermath of Ellsworth’s death. “I can’t say it’s the most important flag for the whole war, but it’s certainly up there.”
The Capitol exhibit, “1861: Banners for Glory,” features seven other flags unfurled that year. It runs through June 2012, the first of five such exhibits commemorating the 150th anniversary of the war.
State textile conservators have been working on the banners in the exhibit as part of New York’s decade-long effort to conserve its collection of 2,000 battle flags dating back to the War of 1812. About 900 are from the Civil War. Most are from New York units, although a handful of Confederate flags are among the collection.
Many of the flags are ripped and holed from bullets and shrapnel. A few still show blood stains, a vivid reminder of the terrible toll colour bearers suffered on the 19th-century’s smoke-obscured battlefields, where flags were used to mark a regiment’s position and serve as a rallying point.
Sarah Stevens, one of the state experts who works on the flag collection, said she tries to push aside thoughts of the men who held the historic flags she’s conserving, but the condition of many of the 150-year-old relics doesn’t make it easy.
The Marshall House flag is “stained with blood” believed to be Ellsworth’s, Stevens said. The banner is an example of an early Confederate flag known as the “Stars and Bars,” a forerunner to the better-known rebel battle flag typically used by Southern armies later in the war.
Stevens, associate conservator at the state’s Peebles Island Resource Center in Waterford, works in the climate-controlled warren of spacious rooms in a converted textile mill on an island where the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers meet north of Albany. Owing to the fragile conditions of the Civil War banners, the painstaking preservation process and last year’s state budget cuts, they’ve conserved only about 500 flags.
The cost of the Capitol exhibit was covered by a $30,000 grant from the Coby Foundation, a New York City organization that funds projects in the textile and needle arts field. Another $13,000 in private donations from historic groups and individuals paid for the banners’ preservation, according to the state parks department, which operates the Peebles Island facility, the headquarters of the state Bureau of Historic Sites.
New York’s collection of Civil War battle flags is the largest in the United States, Morton said.
“It not just the quantity … it’s the quality, the historic significance, the relevance that makes the New York state collection the most grand in the nation,” he said.
New York began collecting flags from its state regiments while the war still raged. The first ones arrived in Albany in 1863, and an official flag presentation ceremony was held two years later on July 4, nearly three months after the conflict ended.
By then, the Marshall House flag was already in the hands of New York state, Morton said. Like hundreds of others, it remained furled around a staff and displayed in tall wood-and-glass cases in the Capitol, where more than a century’s exposure to humidity and light caused further deterioration of the banners.
Some of the flags remain in the Capitol displays, awaiting their turn at the conservators. Others are stored at Peebles Island or the military museum in Saratoga Springs, 50 kilometres north of Albany. Morton said the state hopes to someday have the entire collection under the same roof.
