Waitman Willey salutes flag
In 1861, as talk of secession escalated before Fort Sumter, Bull Run and Gettysburg, southerners had to make a decision about the U.S. flag. Would they continue to honor it as a symbol of their unity, or would they toss it to the ground in order to raise a Confederate banner?
In Virginia, one of the men facing that decision was Waitman T. Willey, a 49-year-old who was about to be appointed to the U.S. Senate to fill the seat of James Mason, who had been expelled for his secessionist views.
Prominent Virginia men from every county in the commonwealth gathered to decide what to do. On March 4, 1861, Willey rose to deliver an impassioned speech in favor of preserving the Union. In doing so, he used the American flag as his symbol.
“Wherever our country’s flag with its 34 stars floats on the breeze,” he began, “any Virginian may stand up and proudly point to that banner as a flag that represents his country and his country’s greatness and power. Sir, it is a noble flag. It is a flag upon which victory has perched without interruption for 75 years….Secession will trail that glorious banner in the dust [and] destroy its prestige and its power.”
The Virginians voted to remain the Union, but not for long. Within weeks, they had seceded, and Fort Sumter had been fired on, igniting the War Between the States. Before the vote to separate, but sensing where it was headed, Willey rose again “to record my protest.”
Turning once more to the subject of the national flag, he said with regret that “I have lived to see the hour of the commencement of our disintegration and downfall. I have lived to see the hour when the proud flag, under which we have lived in safety and honor for nearly a century,…is to be trailed in the dust, and I have lived to see the hour when Virginia…is about to put her foot on that flag, on the very soil that gave it glorious birth.”
Loyal to the Union, Willey would become a senator again, this time from West Virginia, the state born during the Civil War. He would also live to see the states reunited, and the flag once again saluted in the South.
