The Confederate flag, during the Civil War, never made it to the United States Capitol – but a rowdy carried one on Wednesday

The Confederate flag, during the Civil War, never made it to the United States Capitol – but a rowdy carried one on Wednesday

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One of the protesters – a goatee man with a widow’s beak – was dressed more for a trip to the bar than for a revolution, but what stood out was the pole he carried, higher than himself, carrying a banner flown in the rebellion confederate against the nation 160 years ago.

The man was not identified. Where he went after the photographers took his picture is unknown. Although dozens of arrests took place on Wednesday, it is not clear whether the man is among them.

The capital’s defenses were “poorly manned”

Although versions of the Confederate flag appeared in legitimate displays at the country’s legislative headquarters, the closest a rebel carrying a Confederate flag came from the Capitol was about 6 miles, during the Battle of Fort Stevens on July 11 and 12, 1864.
To be clear, the Beauregard battle flag – the red flag with the starry blue cross commonly abbreviated as “the Confederacy flag” today – was not the official flag of the 1861 uprising. The 13-star design was used by the Second Navy Confederate and other military factions before being included in several iterations of the so-called national flag.

The version of the flag displayed at the Capitol on Wednesday was not so directly associated with the Confederacy in general until the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the Dixiecrats retreated with the notion of civil rights and racial equality. White supremacists later adopted it as one of their emblems of choice.

However, it was not until 2021 that an insurgent carried a flag of rebellion in America’s “citadel of freedom” to borrow the currency of the new US president.

The Battle of Fort Stevens is the closest the Confederacy has come to conquering Washington DC, according to Smithsonian Magazine. The South was struck, but on July 11, 1864, Confederate Lieutenant General Jubal Early mounted his horse outside Fort Stevens, the dome of the Capitol in his view, and determined that the city’s defenses were “weakly armed”, reported the magazine. He was not wrong.

Early commanded the Second Corps of the Northern Virginia Army, which fought under a square version of the Confederate battle flag commonly flown today.
His commander, General Robert E. Lee, was suffering a slow and bloody defeat, and attacking the Union capital could offer Lee some relief, or at least convince General Ulysses S. Grant to divert some of his troops, who were hammering Lee’s forces, reported the Smithsonian.

Grant’s troops return while Early’s men falter

Early ordered the commander of his main division to start the attack on the capital of the United States. The thousands of cavalry, artillery and infantry – armed with 40 cannons – began their assault.

Grant, who relocated many of Washington’s reinforcements, taking them to battle in Petersburg and Richmond, Virginia, heard about Early’s charge and ordered 17,000 troops to return to the capital, the magazine said. Commanders gathered injured ambulances and officials to pick up rifles and join the remaining untrained reserves to defend the city.

At one point, one of Early’s commanders found a defensive gap that could have provided an avenue for the federal shipyard and its ships, the US Treasury and food, medicine and ammunition warehouses, but Early had a problem: after beat Union forces in Lynchburg, Virginia, and Frederick, Maryland, in the hot, dry summer, their troops were exhausted, too tired to walk, according to Smithsonian.

The hooligan passes portraits of slave owner John Calhoun, on the left, and abolitionist Charles Sumner.

“General Early rode along the loose formations, telling the staggering, sweaty, dust-soaked men that he would take them to Washington that day. They tried to raise old Rebel Yell to show they were willing, but he came out cracked and weak,” the magazine.

Before the men could muster their forces, some of Grant’s men managed to return to the city and open a counterattack. Early and his men regrouped on the evening of the 11th, and before dawn, Early took out his binoculars to inspect the federal fortifications.

Instead of the new, sharp uniforms worn by staff and traveling wounded, he now saw men in faded, war-worn sky blue, and “everywhere he saw battle flags flying,” said Smithsonian.

“I therefore had to reluctantly give up all hopes of capturing Washington after seeing the Capitol dome,” Early wrote in his autobiography.

President Lincoln makes history

While Trump released a video on social media on Wednesday that required fact-checking, President Abraham Lincoln traveled to the front line, although after Early resigned himself to defeat. Still, snipers’ rifles cracked and the cannons exploded. Lincoln “jumped onto the ledge”. Generals and other military leaders begged him to protect himself as the bullets “hit the landfill,” said Smithsonian Magazine.

Legend has it that one of these leaders was Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the future Supreme Court judge of the United States, who, not recognizing the slim Lincoln as his commander-in-chief, shouted at the president: “Get down, you moron!”

It was the only time that an acting president of the United States was attacked in combat, according to the National Park Service.

Early ordered his men to stay in place, looking dangerous, and after dark on the 12th, sometime after 10 pm, he and his army fled back to Virginia. And therefore, no Confederate flags reached 6 miles from the Capitol.

“Although he was unable to capture the National Capital, the campaign apparently pleased him, as reported by Major Henry Kyd Douglas,” said the park service, which maintains Fort Stevens partially restored in the Northwest Washington neighborhood of Brightwood.

“On the night of July 12, 1864, after deciding to withdraw from Washington, General Early assembled his staff and declared, ‘Major, we don’t take Washington, but we scared Abe Lincoln like the devil!'”

He was soon released from command in March 1865, and after the war, he fled to Mexico, Cuba, Canada, before returning – promise of amnesty in hand – to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he resumed his pre-war occupation as a lawyer and helped “elaborate the Lost Cause narrative,” said the park service.

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