The Confederate flag, during the Civil War, never entered the United States Capitol – but a rioter carried one inside on Wednesday

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One of the rioters – a goat with a widow’s tip – was dressed more for a trip to the bar than a revolution, but what stood out was the pole he was carrying, taller than him, carrying a standard. flew in the Confederate rebellion. against the nation 160 years ago.

The man has not been identified. Where he went after photographers took his photo is unknown. Although there were dozens of arrests on Wednesday, it is not known if the man was one of them.

The defenses of the capital were “ sparsely inhabited ”

While versions of the Confederate flag appeared in legitimate exhibits at the country’s legislative headquarters, the closest to any rebel carrying a Confederate flag ever to come to Capitol Hill was around 6 miles, during the Battle of Fort Stevens on the 11th and 20th. July 12, 1864.
To be clear, the Beauregard battle flag – the red banner with the starry blue cross commonly known as the “Confederate Flag” today – was not the official ensign of the uprising of 1861. The 13-star design was used by the Second Confederate Navy and other military factions before being included in various iterations of the so-called national flag.

The version of the flag that paraded through the Capitol on Wednesday was not so directly associated with Confederation as a whole until the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Dixiecrats recoiled from the notion of rights civilians 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 rebellion flag in America’s “citadel of liberty” to borrow the currency of the new American president.

The Battle of Fort Stevens is the closest thing to Confederating Washington DC, according to Smithsonian Magazine. The south was defeated, but on July 11, 1864, Confederate Lieutenant General Jubal Early sat on his horse outside Fort Stevens, the dome of the Capitol in his eyes, and determined that the city’s defenses were ” sparsely inhabited, ”the magazine reported. He wasn’t wrong.

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

Grant’s troops return as Early’s men falter

Early ordered the commander of his main division to begin the attack on the capital of the United States. Thousands of cavaliers, artillerymen and infantrymen – armed with 40 cannons – began their assault.

Grant, who had redeployed many reinforcements from Washington, taking them into combat in Petersburg and Richmond, Va., Heard of Early’s charge and ordered 17,000 troops to return to the capital, according to the magazine. The commanders assembled the wounded on foot and clerks to take guns and join the poorly trained reserves that remained to defend the city.

At one point, one of Early’s commanders found a gap in the defenses that could have provided an avenue for the Federal Shipyard and its ships, the US Treasury, and the food, medicine and ammunition warehouses, But Early had a problem: After defeating Union forces in Lynchburg, Va., and Frederick, Md., during the hot, dry summer, his troops were exhausted, too tired to march, according to the Smithsonian.

The rioter passes portraits of slave owner John Calhoun, left, and abolitionist Charles Sumner.

“General Early rolled along the loosening formations, telling the tottering, sweaty, dusty men that he would take them to Washington that day. They tried to lift old Rebel Yell up to show him they were ready, but he came out cracked and thin. The magazine reported.

Before the men could muster their forces, some of Grant’s men returned to town and launched a counterattack. Early and his men regrouped on the night of the 11th and before dawn, Early took his binoculars to survey the Federal fortifications.

Rather than the sharp new uniforms worn by the clerks and the ambulant wounded, he now saw men in faded, war-worn sky blue, and “everywhere he saw battle flags flying,” said the Smithsonian.

“So I had to reluctantly give up any hope of capturing Washington, after coming in sight of the Capitol Dome,” Early wrote in his autobiography.

President Lincoln makes history

As Trump posted a video to social media on Wednesday that required careful fact-checking, President Abraham Lincoln took to the front lines, though Early was resigned to defeat. Still, the snipers’ rifles cracked and the cannons exploded. Lincoln “leaps to the parapet.” Generals and other military leaders pleaded with him to take cover as the bullets “hit the embankment,” Smithsonian Magazine reported.

Legend has it that one of these leaders was Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the future United States Supreme Court justice, who, not recognizing skinny Lincoln as his commander-in-chief, barked at the president: “Get off, fucking idiot!”

This is the only time that a sitting president of the United States has been the target of gunfire in combat, according to the National Park Service.

Early ordered his men to stay put, looking dangerous, and after darkness fell on the 12th, sometime after 10 p.m., he and his army fled to Virginia. And so, no Confederate flag was within 10 km of the Capitol.

“Although he failed to capture the nation’s capital, he apparently liked the campaign, as Major Henry Kyd Douglas recounted,” said the park service, which maintains Fort Stevens. partially restored in the Brightwood neighborhood of northwest Washington.

“On the evening of July 12, 1864, after deciding to withdraw from Washington, General Early called his staff together and said: ‘Major, we didn’t take Washington, but we scared Abe Lincoln like hell. ! ‘”

Early was relieved of his duties in March 1865, and after the war, he fled to Mexico, then to Cuba, then to Canada, before returning – with the promise of amnesty in hand – to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he resumed his mission. pre-war occupation as a lawyer and helped “craft the lost cause narrative,” the park service said.

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