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Where the First Confederate Flag Was Unfurled Major Orren Randolph Smith had fought in the Mexican War and served in the U.S. Army under General Zachary Taylor before the looming conflict between the states over slavery caused him to resign his commission and return home to Franklin County to lead the fight for secession. Realizing that the cause of the southern states needed a flag to rally around, he designed one in February 1861, and asked his friend Becky Murphy, a young widow, to make it for him from silk dress goods that he bought from Barrow's Store in Louisburg. The tiny flag was similar to the stars and stripes of the Union. It featured a circle of seven white stars on a field of blue with three broad stripes, one white between two red. The stars represented the seven states that had already seceded. The stripes represented church, state, and press; the white color stood for purity, the blue for constancy, the red for defiance. Major Smith sent his flag to the Confederate capital in Montgomery, Alabama, where it was adopted by the Congress on March 4. Learning of its adoption, Major Smith had Becky Murphy make a large copy of it, 9 feet by 12. She later recalled that she sewed it while her sister Sarah, an ardent Unionist, entertained her yankee officer boyfriend (whom she later married) in the next room by playing "Yankee Doodle Dandy" on the piano. On March 18, 1861, Major Smith, waving his flag, led a march around the Franklin County Courthouse in Louisburg, where most people had been opposed to secession. With great ceremony, amid much whooping, he raised his flag on a tall pole made from two freshly cut poplar trees erected on a corner of the courthouse square. The event turned into a rallying of volunteers to fight for the Confederacy. In a speech that proved to be less than prophetic, Furney Green, a local planter who later led the Franklin County Rifles, urged the men to join the fight. "We'll whip them out before breakfast," he cried, "and I'll wipe up all the blood spilt with my pocket handkerchief." Four years later, when General Sherman's victorious troops marched into Louisburg, they cut down the pole upon which the first Confederate flag was flown, moved it to another corner of the courthouse square, and raised the stars and stripes of the Union on it. Actually, Major Smith's flag flew over the Confederacy for only two years, until it was replaced by a new design, which was replaced by yet another design before the Confederacy crumbled. The flag now commonly called the Confederate flag--a blue St. Andrews cross whit white stars on a field of red--never was the official flag of the Confederate states but only a battle flag used by the army to distinguish its forces from those of the Union. In 1935, the Alabama legislature claimed that the first Confederate flag was designed by a Montgomery artist, Nicola Marschall. Some historians think it possible that two similar designs were submitted simultaneously, but in 1915 the Confederate Veterans, meeting in Richmond, decreed that Major Smith was the designer of the first flag. The United Daughters of the Confederacy also recognized Smith as the designer and erected a monument to him and Becky Murphy in front of the Franklin County Courthouse in downtown Louisburg.
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