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In March 1862, Driver wrote despairingly, “Two sons in the army of the South! My entire house estranged.and when I come home.no one to soothe me.” One can only imagine the tensions between the Salem-born and Nashville-born Drivers, whose relations may have already been strained by first- and second-family rivalry. Two of his sons were fervent Confederates and enlisted in local regiments one of them would later die of his wounds at the Battle of Perryville. In 1860, according to Roland, he and his wife and daughters repaired it, sewing on the additional ten stars, and Driver himself appliquéd a small white anchor in the lower right corner to signify his career.īut as secession neared, Driver’s flag became a source of contention, and by the outbreak of the war, Driver’s own family was bitterly riven. It was so large that he attached it to a rope from his attic window and stretched it on a pulley across the street to secure it to a locust tree. Only 34 years old, he quickly remarried the next year, choosing a Southern girl less than half his age, Sarah Jane Parks, and started a second family that grew to nine children.ĭriver flew his flag on holidays “rain or shine,” according to one of his Nashville-born daughters, Mary Jane Roland.
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Driver decided to settle in Nashville, where his three brothers had opened a store. In 1837, Driver gave up seafaring after his wife, Martha Silsbee Babbage, died from throat cancer, leaving him with three young children. He took a piece of his home with him wherever he went.” He was taking a bit of America to uncharted territories and he felt very proud that this was the symbol he flew under.
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#When did the gay flag come out free#
“He carried it with him and it was the pride of this independent free spirit. “The flag embodied America as he knew it at that point, going across the world,” says NMAH curator Jennifer Locke Jones. Family memoirs tell stories of him seizing the wheel of his ship himself in gales, and facing down a hostile tribal chief in New Zealand with a pistol in hand and a dirk in his mouth. He made profits in the tortoise-shell trade, and could converse a bit in Fijian. Then, why should it not be called Old Glory?”Ī portrait of Driver as a young captain shows a dashing man with black sideburns, a confident smile and a frothy white shirt. “Savages and heathens, lowly and oppressed, hailed and welcomed it at the far end of the wide world. “It has ever been my staunch companion and protection,” he wrote. He more likely named the flag when reflecting on his adventurous 20-year career as an American merchant seaman who sailed to China, India, Gibraltar and throughout the South Pacific, at one point ferrying survivors of the HMS Bounty from Tahiti to Pitcairn Island under the flag. According to legend, when Driver raised the flag up the main mast, he lifted his hat and declaimed, “My ship, my country, and my flag, Old Glory.” However, Salem historian Bonnie Hurd Smith has found “no evidence whatsoever” that Driver made such a stiffly grandiose pronouncement. Driver received the homemade flag with 24 stars in 1824, sewn for him by his mother and a group of young Salem female admirers to celebrate his appointment, at the age of just 21, as a master mariner and commander of his own ship, the Charles Doggett. The flag was originally designed to unfurl grandly from a ship’s mast. “It cost three men’s lives, just to get one little flag, four by three.” “I have a little flag.It was taken by the Secesh in a cavalry fight, and rescued by our men in a bloody little skirmish,” Whitman wrote. The poet and hospital attendant Walt Whitman lamented the amount of blood spent to retain a simple, four-cornered regimental rag. His defiant flying of it-from his Nashville, Tennessee, household during the midst of the conflict- made national news.Ĭivil War-era citizens felt so passionately about flags that after the surrender of Fort Sumter, the garrison ensign toured the country for the duration of the war. “It represents success, righteousness, sovereignty,” says museum director John Gray, but also a conflict that is still “deeply contested in our souls.”ĭuring the Civil War, no flag became a more popular symbol of Union loyalty than the worn and imperiled standard belonging to 19th-century sea captain William Driver, who was originally from Salem, Massachusetts. Old Glory, the weather-beaten 17- by 10-foot banner that has long been a primary NMAH artifact, is second only to Francis Scott Key’s Star-Spangled Banner as a patriotic symbol, and is the source of the term now applied generically to all American flags. A tale of fidelity, family feud and argument over ownership is the subject of a new inquiry by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.