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By Root 1803 0

of major cities, each shop and office “successively ran up its colors like a fleet of ships on the eve of the action.” On village greens and town squares—places where it had never previously occurred to anyone that the national emblem belonged—citizens gathered for solemn ceremonies around hastily erected poles. (And from that day to this, there would scarcely be a single American hamlet, no matter how tiny, that did not display the Stars and Stripes in its most conspicuous available spot.) Artists and intellectuals were swept up in the moment as well. The painter Frederic Church, previously known for producing landscapes of exquisite delicacy, now daubed a canvas with a garish piece of patriotic kitsch: a sunrise scene in which the clouds formed red and white stripes, with a square patch of stars twinkling against blue sky in the upper left. (This was quickly transformed into a best-selling lithograph.)119

For a century and a half, historians have struggled to explain exactly why the attack at Charleston struck such a transformative chord. Even Bruce Catton, one of the Civil War’s greatest twentieth-century chroniclers, was left scratching his head: “In the strangely revealing light of the exploding shell,” he wrote, Americans “saw something that was to carry them through four years of war. It is hard to say just what it was, for no one bothered to be explicit about it and time has dimmed it anyway.” George Bancroft, America’s most revered historian in the 1860s, did try to be explicit, and came up with a tortured explanation involving navigation rights on the Chesapeake and Mississippi. But in any case, he remembered of that April, “I witnessed the sublimest spectacle I ever saw.”120

Perhaps there was an explanatory power in the flags themselves. Two weeks after Sumter’s surrender, Henry Ward Beecher gave a sermon at his Brooklyn church to bless the colors that two local volunteer companies were carrying with them to war. With characteristic theatricality, the great preacher eulogized the flag in Christlike terms:

It was upon these streaming bars and upon these bright stars that every one of that immense concentric range of guns was aimed, when Sumter was lifted up in the midst, almost like another witnessing Calvary.… And do you know that when it was fallen, in the streets of a Southern city, it was trailed, hooted at, pierced with swords? Men that have sat in the Senate of the United States ran out to trample upon it; it was fired on and slashed by the mob; it was dragged through the mud; it was hissed at and spit upon; and so it was carried through Southern cities! That our flag … should, in our own nation, and by our own people, be spit upon, and trampled under foot, is more than the heart of man can bear! … It is not a painted rag. It is a whole national history. It is the Constitution. It is the government. It is the free people that stand in the government on the Constitution.121

Whitman expressed the same idea in plainer language—although the simple words masked deeper complexities—when he wrote: “The negro was not the chief thing: the chief thing was to stick together.”

The attack on Sumter forced Americans everywhere to pick sides: to stand either with the flag or against it—and overwhelmingly, perhaps for a multitude of individual reasons, Northerners chose to stand with it. And that expression of national unity, in turn, became the strongest possible argument for the Union itself: for the idea that the flag could shelter beneath its folds Americans of many opinions and temperaments, and that disagreement need not mean disunion. The pure wordless symbolism of a piece of cloth could represent both the deepest traditions of American radicalism and those of American conservatism. For people like Garrison and Phillips, it had become a pledge to stand firm against the slave power and uphold what they saw as the purest distillation of America’s commitment to liberty, as embodied in the Declaration. To more orthodox minds, it was a summons to defend the nation and the Constitution.

Even Emerson, the great apostle