Goodheart focuses his story on the months from Anderson’s flag-raising until the battle of First Bull Run, July 21, 1861. Goodheart quotes a letter from a young woman in New York written that first spring of the war: “It seems as if we were never alive till now never had a country till now.” For the first time, American flags were mass-produced rather than individually stitched, and even so, manufacturers could not keep up with demand.” “Suddenly,” Goodheart narrates, “the Stars and Stripes flew - as it does today, and especially as it did after September 11 - from houses, from storefronts, from churches above village greens and college quads. Anderson’s raising of the flag above Fort Sumter inspired thousands of ordinary Americans to do the same wherever their hands could reach. At a time when most federal installations in the South were being surrendered either by weak-willed local commanders or by treasonable officials in the War Department in Washington, and months before Abraham Lincoln took office, the Kentucky-born Anderson gave the first hope that secession would be resisted.

The event that precipitated the new flag craze was Major Robert Anderson’s transfer of his Charleston garrison from the (indefensible) Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. When did Americans start flying flags on town greens?Īccording to Adam Goodheart in his widely (and justly) praised new history, 1861: The Civil War Awakening, the custom erupted in December 1860.

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