Photograph courtesy of James D. Julia Inc., a division of Morphy Auctions, www.morphyauctions.com.

The captured battle flag of the 45th Pennsylvania Infantry

A Seized Banner Pays Off

The Artifact

The captured battle flag of the 45th Pennsylvania Infantry

Condition

The flag, which has been professionally conserved and framed, is in very good condition, as is the flagstaff, whose inscription is quite discernible.

Details

On September 30, 1864, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant launched simultaneous attacks against the flanks of the Army of Northern Virginia’s defenses outside Petersburg. During the westernmost assault, the Union IX Corps was supposed to support the main attack, but failed to link up with the line of the nearby V Corps, leaving it exposed. A Confederate counterattack hammered the IX Corps and forced the surrender of one of its brigades, which included the 45th Pennsylvania Infantry. While the 45th’s division commander would later report that the regiment had destroyed its flag so that it wouldn’t fall into enemy hands, in truth soldiers from the 9th or 10th Virginia Cavalry had seized the banner. Their commander, Major General W.H.F. “Rooney” Lee, son of General Robert E. Lee, kept it as a trophy.

Twenty-five years later, Rooney Lee, then a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Virginia, gave the flag to Launcelot Blackford, the principal of Alexandria’s Episcopal High School, hundreds of whose students had joined the Confederate army during the Civil War. Upon the staff he had inscribed the words, “May You Ever Inspire Our Southern Boys to Greatness.” The flag, which Blackford passed along to teacher Patrick Henry Callaway, remained on its staff for years, until Callaway took it down and stored it in a box, where it remained until his death in 1995 at age 100.

Quotable

From the regimental history of the 45th Pennsylvania Infantry: “[A]ccording to Sergeant J.D. Strait of Company I, who was with the colors [on September 30, 1864] and ought to know, … [he and] Sergeant Joe Reigle, the color bearer, … became separated from their comrades and were making their way through the brush and timber, as they supposed, into our own lines, [when] they were suddenly confronted at close quarters by a line of dismounted Rebel cavalry. There was no time or opportunity to destroy the flag or do anything else but surrender when summoned to do so or be shot down, and that, under the circumstances, would have been a useless sacrifice.”

Value

$57,500 (price realized at James D. Julia Inc. in Fairfield, Maine, in March 2016). Noted John Sexton, longtime consultant and cataloger for James D. Julia, at the time of the sale: “Regulation American battle standards are exceedingly rare outside of museum collections, much less such historical flags with applied battle honors that were thought lost.”