What this flag must have seen!
It started out as a piece of silk cloth in Philadelphia, painted by David Bustill Bowser with an emblem of a black Union soldier waving goodbye to a white woman dressed as Columbia, who represented the United States.
It went into battle with the 127th Regiment of the United States Colored Troops (USCT), which fought against the Confederate South during the Civil War. It was even on hand in 1865 at Petersburg, VA, where Robert E. Lee and his Confederate troops were whipped by the Union army and at Appomattox Courthouse where Lee surrendered.
The flag had been in the collection of the Grand Army of the Republic Civil War Museum and Library in Philadelphia, which was forced to sell it because it needed the funds. It was auctioned a month ago and purchased by a history museum in Atlanta – an ironic place for it to land given its purpose and its history.
I didn’t learn about the auction until it was over and was saddened that I had missed the opportunity to see this historic artifact for myself. The flag was placed at an auction house 64 miles northwest of Philadelphia, far from where Bowser lived and worked and the soldiers trained in the mid-1800s.
The flag, 6 feet wide and 4 feet tall, sold for $192,000 (including the buyer’s premium), according to the auction house, and drew 12 bids.
It was one of 11 USCT flags created by Bowser and is said to be the only one left. The 127th was organized and trained at Camp William Penn near Philadelphia in 1864. The camp had been set up a year earlier on land owned by the son-in-law of Lucretia Mott, a Quaker abolitionist, to recruit and train free blacks after Congress passed a law allowing them to serve.
Camp William Penn was said to be the largest Civil War recruitment camp for blacks in the country. The Union League of Philadelphia, a club for wealthy white men who supported the Union, donated money to set up the camp, soliciting volunteers from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware with the assistance of Frederick Douglass, and local activists Jacob C. White Jr. and Octavius V. Catto. Bowser also helped to recruit blacks.
The 11,000 men at Camp William Penn were among about 180,000 black soldiers who fought for the Union. The most famous were the men of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment whose story was told in the film “Glory” in 1989.
After the war, Bowser’s flags were kept in storage at the military museum at West Point. There are different versions of how they disappeared: burned in a fire, removed and destroyed, or thrown out. Fortunately, photographs of seven of them still exist. And somehow, the one at auction ended up at the Grand Army of the Republic museum.
The messages on the flags were pretty direct:
“The 127th and 3rd regiments marched carrying banners reading ‘We will prove ourselves men’ and ‘Rather Die Freemen, Than Live To Be Slaves.’ Beneath these, black soldiers protect white women representing Columbia, the symbol of the republic. The 45th’s banner, proclaiming ‘One Cause, One Country,’ shows a black soldier proudly holding an American flag in front of a bust of George Washington as black troops fight in the background. The 24th’s banner shows a black soldier ascending a hill, his arms outstretched in prayer, beneath the words ‘Let Soldiers in War, Be Citizens in Peace.'”
The 22nd Regiment of the United States Colored Troops flag showed a black Union soldier pointing a bayonet at a white Confederate soldier.
Bowser has as interesting a history as the flags he designed. He came from a very prominent family in Philadelphia– one of his descendants was the activist, singer and actor Paul Robeson. His grandfather Cyrus Bustill baked bread for George Washington’s army and was a founder of the Free African Society, a mutual aid society for African Americans.
Bowser studied art with his cousin Robert Douglass Jr., an activist who attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
His first commission was a portrait of Jacob C. White Jr., a prominent black real-estate developer and abolitionist. He later did portraits of Abraham Lincoln and John Brown, who stayed at the family’s home – which was an Underground Railroad stop – as he planned his insurrection at Harpers Ferry. He also painted “Fire in the Night.”
Bowser was commissioned in 1863 to create banners and flags for the 11 black regiments at Camp William Penn. The first one was designed for the 1st United States Colored Infantry and paid for by the Contraband Relief Association, founded in Washington, DC, by Elizabeth Keckley, a black woman who was Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker. The organization assisted former enslaved Africans with funds and clothing.
These battle flags were created by supporters of the black regiments, not by the federal government. It was not clear if the organization commissioned the other flags.
The association submitted the flag to the Union League’s Supervisory Committee for the camp, where it was met with opposition. Bowser enlisted a powerful politician and newspaper owner who was a member of the Union League to make an appeal on his behalf to the committee.
Bowser was unable to get any more commissions, so he and his seamstress wife Elizabeth made banners, hats, signs and other items for organizations, including the Know Nothing Party (an anti-immigrant and Catholic group), and fire and fire-insurance companies. The couple also sold fraternal products, including collars sewn by her. She was also a member of a women’s organization that raised money for black soldiers, and she sold some of his paintings to assist freed people.
Both were also very active politically. Their home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. He worked to repeal a clause in the Pennsylvania Constitution that forbade blacks from voting. And he joined with Catto and others to persuade lawmakers to pass a bill allowing blacks to ride street cars in Philadelphia. Catto was shot and killed by a white man on his way to vote on Election Day, October 1871.
