JEB Stuart's Battle Flag: "Liberty or Death" at Gettysburg

The Words and the Women

On March 23, 1775, in the Second Virginia Convention meeting at St. John’s Church in Richmond, a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer from Hanover County named Patrick Henry rose to support a resolution placing the colony in a state of defense. “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet,” he asked the convention, “as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!” The speech, reconstructed decades later by William Wirt from the memory of attendees, became within a generation the most frequently quoted oration in the American canon.

The Ladies of Virginia, an informal association of Richmond and Hanover women who organized to support the Confederate war effort in the spring of 1861, turned to Henry’s words as a source of regimental motto. Multiple Virginia units carried flags bearing “Liberty or Death” in the first year of the war, but the flag that survives and is associated with the 1st Virginia Cavalry is distinguished by the documentary chain of its commissioning. It was presented at a ceremony at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond in the late summer of 1861, before the regiment marched north. The presentation speech survives in the Richmond Daily Dispatch of September 4, 1861.

The 1st Virginia Cavalry and J.E.B. Stuart

The 1st Virginia Cavalry was organized at Harper’s Ferry in May 1861. Its first colonel was James Ewell Brown Stuart — known always as Jeb — a West Point graduate (class of 1854) and former lieutenant of the 1st U.S. Cavalry on the Kansas frontier. Stuart, twenty-eight at the outbreak of war, was promoted to brigadier general in September 1861 and given command of the cavalry brigade of the Army of Northern Virginia. But his old regiment remained the core of his command and carried, under successive colonels, the flag that had been presented at Hollywood.

Between 1861 and 1863, the 1st Virginia rode in every major cavalry action of the Eastern Theater: First Manassas, the Peninsula Campaign, the two great “rides around McClellan” in June 1862 and October 1862, Second Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. Stuart, by the spring of 1863, had become the most famous cavalry officer in the world. Lee called him “the eyes and ears of the army.” He wore a plumed hat, a crimson-lined cape, and a perpetual grin. He would be dead within a year, mortally wounded at Yellow Tavern on May 11, 1864.

Gettysburg and East Cavalry Field

The Gettysburg campaign began for Stuart on June 25, 1863, when he took three brigades east around the Army of the Potomac on a sweeping ride that would not rejoin Lee until the afternoon of July 2, with the battle already two days joined. The absence of his cavalry during the approach to Gettysburg has been argued and re-argued for a century and a half; Lee himself, on the evening of July 2, greeted Stuart with a cold “General Stuart, you are here at last.”

On July 3, 1863 — the day of Pickett’s Charge — Stuart was ordered to take his cavalry around the Union right and fall on the Federal rear in coordination with the great infantry assault on Cemetery Ridge. At approximately 1:00 p.m., he began to move eastward along the Hanover Road, accompanied by the brigades of Wade Hampton, Fitzhugh Lee, John R. Chambliss, and Albert G. Jenkins. Waiting for him, on the ridges three miles east of Gettysburg, was Brigadier General David McMurtrie Gregg’s 2nd Cavalry Division — and, attached to it, a young brigadier who had been a captain two weeks before: George Armstrong Custer.

Custer’s Charge

Custer had been promoted from captain of the 5th U.S. Cavalry to brigadier general of volunteers on June 29, 1863 — six days before the action at East Cavalry Field. He was twenty-three years old, the youngest general officer in the Union army. Assigned to the Michigan Brigade (1st, 5th, 6th, and 7th Michigan Cavalry), he reported to Gregg’s division on the morning of July 3 and was present when Stuart’s column debouched from Cress’s Ridge shortly after 1:00 p.m.

The action that followed was, by general consent, one of the largest mounted cavalry engagements fought on American soil. It opened with dismounted skirmishing and an artillery duel. Stuart then committed Wade Hampton’s and Fitz Lee’s brigades in a compact column-of-squadrons charge — stirrup to stirrup, sabers drawn, at a full gallop. Gregg ordered Custer to counter-charge with the 1st Michigan. Custer rode at the head of his regiment, raised his saber, and shouted the line that every trooper in the 1st Michigan would remember for the rest of his life: “Come on, you Wolverines!”

The two columns met at what one Confederate officer later called “the crash of falling timber.” Horses went down. Men were unhorsed and killed with sabers, pistols, carbines, and, where nothing else was at hand, with bare fists. Captain William E. Miller of the 3rd Pennsylvania Cavalry, on his own authority, took two squadrons into the Confederate flank and broke the momentum of the charge. In the swirl that followed, Confederate colors were seized. Among them, according to the after-action report filed by Colonel Charles H. Town of the 1st Michigan Cavalry on July 10, 1863, was the 1st National flag of the 1st Virginia Cavalry bearing the “Liberty or Death” device.

“Come on, you Wolverines!” — Brig. Gen. George A. Custer, at the head of the 1st Michigan Cavalry, East Cavalry Field, Gettysburg, July 3, 1863.

The Federal Trophy Chain

Captured Confederate flags in Federal hands followed a well-documented path. Under War Department General Order No. 226 of July 31, 1863, captured colors were to be forwarded to the Adjutant General’s Office in Washington. Many were, but a significant number were retained by the individual captor or by the regimental command, often with the unwritten understanding that they would be surrendered later when requested. The 1st Virginia flag was retained by the 1st Michigan and carried back to Michigan with the brigade when it mustered out. It descended through a captain of the regiment who had been in the charge, to his son, and by the 1890s was in the hands of a collector of Michigan Civil War material in Detroit.

Between 1905 and 1912, in response to the campaign led by Congressman Charles Dick and President Theodore Roosevelt to return captured Confederate flags to the Southern states, a substantial number of Federal-held colors were returned by act of Congress on February 24, 1905. The 1st Virginia flag, in private hands rather than state or federal hands, was not among them. It passed through two Michigan families, was documented in a 1938 exhibition at the Detroit Historical Society, and surfaced in the 1970s in the collection of a prominent Midwestern collector of Confederate flags.

Condition and Physical Evidence

The flag survives as a silk 1st National pattern, approximately 48 by 72 inches, with a canton of seven five-pointed stars arranged in a circle with a central star — the pattern adopted after the accession of Tennessee in May 1861 and used through the summer of 1862. The “Liberty or Death” motto is hand-painted in black on the central white bar. The fly end shows the characteristic shredding of a flag carried in the field, with several small repairs made in a hand consistent with mid-war Confederate quartermaster thread. The hoist edge bears an iron-gall ink inscription: “Captured by 1st Mich. Cav., Gettysburg, July 3, 1863.”

Every captured Confederate flag offered on the private market must be weighed against the surviving pattern literature, the regimental records of both armies, and the physical evidence of the silk itself. Gary Hendershott’s framework for flag authentication draws on five decades of handling Confederate battle flags of every major pattern — 1st National, 2nd National, 3rd National, Army of Northern Virginia, Army of Tennessee, and the various regional variants — and on close comparative study with institutional holdings at the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, the Museum of the Confederacy, and the National Park Service.

“A battle flag is not cloth. It is the written history of the men who died to raise it and the men who died to take it down.”

Why This Flag Matters

Most surviving Confederate flags were surrendered at Appomattox or handed over in the spring of 1865 when the Confederacy dissolved. They tell the story of endings. The 1st Virginia flag tells a different story — the story of the high-water mark of the Confederacy, captured on the afternoon of Pickett’s Charge, in a cavalry action without which the Confederate plan for July 3 could not succeed. It is a direct witness to the single most consequential afternoon of the Civil War.

It is also, through Patrick Henry’s words, a direct witness to the earlier American rebellion that made the later one possible. The two claims on liberty embodied on that strip of silk — Henry’s in 1775 and Virginia’s in 1861 — are not the same claim, and no serious collector or historian can treat them as such. But both are real. And both rode into battle under this flag.

Gary Hendershott and Confederate Flags

Over five decades, Gary has handled Confederate battle flags from virtually every major army and a substantial number of the individual regimental flags that survive. Flags with documented Gettysburg association are among the rarest of all Confederate colors — the number with continuous period documentation to a specific July 3, 1863 action can be counted on the fingers of two hands. The 1st Virginia Cavalry flag, with its East Cavalry Field capture and its Custer-brigade provenance, sits among the most consequential of them.