Colors of the Confederacy?

[KarinTimour]

Folks:

Katie Vogel posted a note about a scarf that has red and white stripes in it that she found at work. There isn't clear provenance for the exact year that it was knit.

IF the wearer was a Confederate soldier.
and
IF the stripes are meant to represent the red/white/red of the Confederate colors;
then
Knowing when those colors were chosen as the "official" ones of the Confederacy might date the scarf within the period after the war was started.

Here's my question:

When did red/white/red become the official colors of the Confederacy? I've looked in the books I've got here, and I'm coming up blank. Would one of the flag or politics guys here have the answer? Miss Vicki would this have been in the newspapers?

Thanks for any and all help,
Karin Timour
Atlantic Guard Soldiers' Aid Society
Email: Ktimour@aol.com

[Hank Trent]

Re: Colors of the Confederacy?

When I was looking in Vicki Betts' archives for this a while ago, the earliest reference I came to was March of 1862: "The ladies of Baltimore, notwithstanding Lincoln's proclamation, appeared daily in the streets, in secession colors, to wit, 'red, white and red.' Bonnets are so constantly trimmed with a red, a white, and again, a red rose, that even the manufacturers have been prohibited from making these rebellious flowers, in order 'to support the government.' "

When South Carolina first seceded, there was a fad for secession bonnets in black and white, without mention of red/white/red. Upon the announcement that the state had seceded, "the side-walks were crowded with ladies wearing secession bonnets made of black and white Georgia cotton, decorated with ornaments of Palmetto-trees and lone stars." (John William Draper, History of the American Civil War, http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/)

So unless the SC ladies knew about red/white/red but deliberately chose not to use it, that at least gives a narrower time frame to search in--after the first secession and before March 1862.

Here's a second question. Has anyone seen a reference to red/white/red being worn by *men* as a symbol of the Confederacy? I haven't looked for it specifically, but I keep running into it on women's things. And another problem with dating something based on red/white/red is that it was a common enough color combination that not even everyone at the time realized its significance when they used it. Also in Vicki Betts' archives is the story of a woman from Peoria visiting in St. Louis, who got detained by the provost for having Confederate colors on her bonnet (presumably red/white/red, though it's not mentioned). However, she had no clue what the colors meant and was wearing them accidentally. That was in March of 1863.

Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net

[KarinTimour]

Re: Colors of the Confederacy?

Dear Hank:

Thanks for the legwork on the newspaper articles, it does narrow down the timeframe quite a bit for the identification of when those colors were identified as the Confederate ones. You're absolutely right -- at this point we have no way of knowing if those stripes were meant as a patriotic statement when the scarf was made.

I've since heard from Katie that the scarf is from a historic house museum in Michigan, which lessens the chances that they were. Don't know if they have provenance on the scarf and it's maker. It might have been taken from a Southern home and worn or sent home by a Union soldier, but again, we'll probably never know if that's the scarf's story.

In terms of men wearing red and white, I have seen knitwear made for Confederate soldiers that was made of red and white twilled yarn -- where one strand of white and one strand of red were intentionally spun together. If you held out a piece of this yarn, it would appear to have candy-cane like stripes running it's length. I assumed that this was a patriotic statement, because it would have been much less trouble to either leave it all one color, dye it a uniform color either in the yarn or after making the item.

I suspect the reason we hear of few newspaper accounts of men wearing red/white/red is that Union forces would be much more likely to arrest or be extremely harsh to men than to women.

With regard to the woman who was arrested for wearing the bonnet with red and white who plead ignorance of their meaning -- perhaps she didn't know the meaning of the colors because she had lived in a Union area and simply didn't know that the Confederacy had those colors.

Thanks again for the great examples,
Karin Timour
Atlantic Guard Soldiers' Aid Society
Email: Ktimour@aol.com

, and while it might have been taken by a Union veteran as a trophy, the chances that