square, and I shuddered inwardly as Wilhite manhandled this antiquity, knocking flecks of gold leaf from the stars to the hotel carpet. The stars were unusual, aligned like the night sky, haphazardly in loosely defined circles, set at different angles. At first glance, they seemed to be dancing.
In the middle of one of the seven red stripes, in capital shadow-box letters, were the words 12th REG. INFANTRY CO’ A.
It was precisely as my tipster at the U.S. Army Center of Military History had described. This was the battle flag of the Twelfth Regiment Infantry, Corps d’Afrique, a near-sacred artifact in African American history, one of only five such flags to survive the Civil War. The Army museum’s historical property tag—“HP 108.62”—was still affixed to the lower left edge of the banner.
Wilhite caught my eye and smiled. “Beautiful, ain’t she?”
“Looks good to me, Charlie.”
A BATTLE FLAG is unlike any other antiquity.
Flags hoisted by the soldiers at Fort McHenry, the marines at Iwo Jima, and the firefighters at the World Trade Center are symbols of American resolve. The legend of the Fort McHenry battle flag inspired our National Anthem. Today, the tattered Star-Spangled Banner is the most visited artifact displayed at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, viewed by some six million tourists annually. That flag, hand- stitched with forty-two-foot reams of wool, is the most valuable artifact in the entire Smithsonian collection—worth more than the Hope Diamond, Charles Lindbergh’s
As an amateur Civil War artifacts collector, I knew that regimental flags played a key role in battle—that they were not merely ceremonial. The soldiers who carried the flags served as beacons for troops to follow in the chaos and cacophony of battle. The regimental flags literally marked the battle lines, where soldiers from the North and South died by the tens of thousands. Each side tried to knock off the other’s flag-bearers, eager to cut off a unit’s chief means of communication. To carry a regiment’s colors into battle was considered a great honor, but also a great personal burden and incredible risk.
The battle flag Wilhite brought to the hotel room was freighted with additional meaning. Missing from the Army archives for more than a decade, the Twelfth Regiment flag proudly stood for bravery, sacrifice, and racial history. After hanging for years in a place of honor at West Point, the flag was transferred to an Army museum in Washington. In the mid-1970s, the old records showed, it was loaned out as part of an exhibition in South Carolina, but never arrived at its destination.
I first learned of its theft a month before I met Wilhite. Leslie Jensen, an Army historian in Washington, called to say that Army investigators were tracking a tip that someone was shopping the Twelfth Regiment flag on the black market.
Could the FBI help? Jensen asked.
Tell me more about the flag, I said.
“At least five men died carrying it,” Jensen said. “That’s why they call it a blood cloth.”
This Louisiana-based regiment, the expert explained, held a particularly significant place in the history of the War Between the States—and the U.S. military, generally. The Twelfth was among the first African American regiments to see major battle. Free blacks served in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 in limited numbers, and they also served in the Navy in the decades leading to the Civil War, but the notion of arming full regiment-sized units of black soldiers remained controversial. At the outset of war, the South used slaves in support roles for the Confederate Army, but President Lincoln initially declined to enlist black soldiers. After the Union lost several early battles, Lincoln ordered that tens of thousands of black men be used in support positions, but barred them from carrying weapons. His Union commanders fretted that these untested soldiers might cut and run in the heat of battle. Yet faced with the realities and horrors of war, Union generals gradually changed their minds. By the fall of 1862, when Lincoln declared that all slaves would be emancipated on January 1, 1863, self-formed black units were beginning to fight alongside Union whites in Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Louisiana. One of them was the Twelfth near New Orleans.
In May of 1863, when Union troops attacked Port Hudson, the final Southern stronghold on the Mississippi River, black regiments like the Twelfth won the chance to prove their mettle in battle. In his 1887 book
When a Confederate mortar felled the sergeant carrying the Twelfth Regiment’s flag, Wilson wrote, another scooped it up.“The flag, the flag!” shouted the black soldiers as the standard-bearer’s body was scattered by a shell. They fell faster and faster; shrieks, prayers and curses came up from the fallen and ascended to Heaven. “Steady men, steady,” cried bold Captain Cailloux, his sword uplifted, his face the color of sulphurous smoke that enveloped him and his followers, as they felt the deadly hail which came apparently from all sides.Captain Cailloux was killed with the colors in his hands; the column seemed to melt away like snow in sunshine, before the enemy’s murderous fire; the pride, the flower of the Phalanx had fallen. Then, with a daring that veterans only can exhibit, the blacks rushed forward and up to the brink with a shout. The defenders emptied their rifles, cannons and mortars.
The battle won, white and black Union soldiers, having fought side by side for the first time, found themselves openly bonding, a remarkable sight during that time:Nature seems to have selected the place and appointed time for the negro to prove his manhood and to disarm prejudice…. It was all forgotten and they mingled together on terms of perfect equality. The whites were only too glad to take a drink from a negro soldier’s canteen.
A white Union officer wrote to his family: “You have no idea how my prejudices with regard to Negro troops have been dispelled by the battle.” Even some Southerners were impressed. The Confederate general Henry McCulloch, describing one of his troops’ failed forays, wrote, “This charge was resisted by the Negro portion with considerable obstinance (while) the white or pure Yankee portion ran like whipped [dogs] almost as soon as the charge was made.”
In strictly strategic military terms, the forty-eight-day battle at Port Hudson was critical. It cleared the final Confederate garrison along the Mississippi, a milestone in the Civil War. But perhaps more important, Port Hudson marked a watershed for the U.S. military and race relations. Black enlistment mushroomed following this early engagement. By the war’s end, more than 150,000 African Americans had served in the Union army and at least 27,000 died in battle. They mustered in 160 regiments and participated in thirty-nine major campaigns. Yet only five battle flags from black regiments survive.
ALL OF THIS history reeled through my head as Wilhite and I held the blood cloth by its four corners in the hotel room.
I could have arrested the bastard right then and there, signaled the SWAT team and hoped Wilhite resisted. But I wanted more. I wanted to crawl inside his mind. I wanted to know more about a man who could sell such a blood cloth, especially someone like Wilhite, who professed to be a Civil War buff. How could he be so callous, so eager to seek to profit from a piece of stolen history?
Of course, I also wanted him to incriminate himself with the video surveillance tape running. To do that, I needed to prove intent—get him to admit on tape that he knew he was selling a stolen historical artifact. After the takedown, I didn’t want his lawyer to claim that this was all some sort of misunderstanding, that Wilhite had obtained the flag in good faith, not knowing it was stolen.
Moving in for the kill, I eased back in my chair and sipped my Coke. “Did you ever find out where it came from?”
From a museum in Colorado, he said, making it clear it was stolen. “I’m telling you this upfront. I don’t want to mislead you. Because if I could take this to a show, I know what it could bring. I didn’t want to take that chance.”
This was going to be easy. Wilhite liked to hear himself talk and seemed eager for me to like him. I said, “You’re afraid someone will see it?” In other words, you know this is stolen property?
