The War Between the States was the heyday of American
battleflags and their bearers. With unusual historical
accuracy, many stirring battle paintings show the colors
and their intrepid bearers in the forefront of the fray or
as a rallying point in a retreat. The colors of a Civil War
regiment embodied its honor, and the men chosen to bear
them made up an elite. Tall, muscular men were preferred,
because holding aloft a large, heavy banner, to keep it
visible through battle smoke and at a distance, demanded
physical strength. Courage was likewise required to carry a
flag into combat, as the colors "drew lead like a magnet."
South Carolina's Palmetto Sharpshooters, for example, lost
10 out of 11 of its bearers and color guard at the Battle
of Seven Pines, the flag passing through four hands without
touching the ground.
 
Born in Charleston in 1824, Charles Edmiston and his twin
sister, Ellen Ann, were the third son and second daughter,
respectively, of newspaper editor Joseph Whilden and his
wife, Elizabeth Gilbert Whilden. The births of two more
sons, Richard Furman in 1826 and William Gilbert in 1828,
would complete the family, making seven children in all.
Young Charles' roots ran deep into the soil of the
lowcountry. His Whilden ancestors had settled in the
Charleston area in the 1690's, and an ancestor on his
mother's side, the Rev. William Screven, had arrived in
South Carolina even earlier, establishing the First Baptist
Church of Charleston in 1683, today the oldest church in
the Southern Baptist Convention.Like many Southerners who
came of age in the late antebellum period, Charles Whilden
took pride in his ancestors' role in the American
Revolution, especially his grandfather, Joseph Whilden,
who, at 18, had run away from his family's plantation in
Christ Church Parish to join the forces under Brigadier
General Francis "Swamp Fox" Marion fighting the British. 

At the time of Charles' birth, the family of Joseph and
Elizabeth Whilden lived comfortably in their home on
Magazine Street, attended by their devoted slave, Juno
Waller Seymour, a diminutive, energetic black woman known
as "Maumer Juno" to four generations of the Whilden family.
Raised by Maumer Juno from the cradle, Charles soon
developed a strong attachment to the woman - an attachment
that would endure to the end of his life. The prosperity of
Joseph Whilden and his family would prove less enduring,
however, and business reversals, beginning in the late
1820's, combined with Joseph's stroke a few years later and
his eventual death in 1838, would reduce his family to
genteel poverty. To help make ends meet, Maumer Juno took
in ironing. Despite a lack of money for college, young
Charles managed to obtain a good education.Details about
Charles' schooling are sketchy, but the polished prose of
his surviving letters reflects a practiced hand and a
cultivated intellect. Charles' admission to the South
Carolina bar at Columbia in 1845 is further evidence of a
triumph of intellect and effort over financial adversity. 

In the closing decades of the antebellum period, when
Charles Whilden was growing up in Charleston, the city was
the commercial and cultural center of the lowcountry as
well as South Carolina's manufacturing center and most
cosmopolitan city. By the time Charles Whilden reached
adulthood, however, the Charleston economy was in decline,
and the city's population would actually diminish during
the decade of the 1850's. Not surprisingly, after a brief
attempt to establish a law practice in Charleston, Attorney
Whilden chose to seek his fortune outside his home town.
But the practice of law in the upcountry town of Pendleton
also failed to pan out for Whilden. Confronted with a major
career decision, Whilden elected not only to leave the law
but also to leave the Palmetto State for the north. 

The 1850 federal censustakers found Charles Whilden living
in a boarding house in Detroit, Michigan, where he worked
as a clerk, probably in a newspaper office. Speculation in
copper stocks and land on Lake Superior soon left Charles
deeply in debt to his youngest brother, William, who had
built up a successful merchandising business back home in
Charleston. Desperate to get out of debt, and perhaps
longing for adventure, in the spring of 1855 Charles
Whilden signed on as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army.
After an arduous two-month trek from Fort Leavenworth,
Kansas, Whilden arrived in the old Spanish city of Santa
Fe, New Mexico Territory, on August 27, 1855, where he took
up his duties as civilian private secretary to the local
garrison commander, Colonel John Breckinridge Grayson of
Kentucky, who would later serve the Confederacy as a
brigadier general in Florida. 

When Whilden arrived in Santa Fe, the city had been under
U.S. jurisdiction for only a few years, and the population
was overwhelmingly Hispanic and Roman Catholic, causing the
Baptist Whilden to complain, in an early letter to his
brother William in Charleston, that "[t]here are so many
Saints days among these Hottentots, that it is hard to
recollect them." So isolated was Santa Fe from the U.S.
that mail reached the city only once a month from Missouri.
Looking on the bright side of his cultural and geographic
isolation in New Mexico Territory, in a letter written in
May 1856 Charles expressed his intention to William to
remain in New Mexico until "I have paid up all my debts,
for I can do it better out here, than in the States, as
there are no concerts, Theatres, White Kid Gloves,
Subscriptions to Charities or churches, or gallivanting the
ladies on Sleigh rides and &c to make a man's money fly." 

Whilden's duties as Colonel Grayson's secretary were
relatively light, leaving him ample time for other pursuits
- perhaps too much time for his own financial good. His
April 30, 1857 letter home to Charleston states: "In
addition to the offices I hold in this Territory of Warden
of a Masonic Lodge, President of a Literary Society, member
of a Territorial Democratic Central Committee &c ..., I
have lately added that of Farmer." Dreaming of making
enough money to satisfy his debts to William and to
establish a law practice in Texas, Charles had purchased a
16 acre truck farm near Sante Fe, establishing his claim as
a "farmer." Alas, the farm would prove to be unprofitable.
In his spare time, Whilden also occasionally edited the
Santa Fe newspaper when the regular editor was busy.During
the Presidential election campaign of 1856, Whilden penned
an editorial supporting the renomination of President
Franklin Pierce, a pro-Southern Democrat, and he expressed
the hope in a letter to William that Pierce would be
re-elected and "give me a fat office." Whilden's hope for a
political sinecure also proved to be a dream. 

Marriage was another unrealized dream. After his own
marriage in 1850, William Whilden badgered his elder
brother to end his bachelorhood and to settle down. In
December 1854, when he was still in Detroit and aged 30, a
friend had tried to interest Charles in marrying his
fiftyish, red-headed aunt. Seizing the opportunity to turn
the tables on William, Charles wrote to William not to be
surprised if he married the woman and took up William on
his standing offer to permit Charles to honeymoon at
William's stylish new home in Charleston. Whatever romantic
aspirations Charles may have entertained when he arrived in
New Mexico, the dearth of eligible women in the territory
soon squashed them. In a letter to William written seven
months after his arrival in Santa Fe, Charles could count
only six unmarried American ladies in all of New Mexico,
none of whom, however, lived in Santa Fe. However boring it
may have been, life in Santa Fe also afforded Whilden time
for puffing his meerschaum pipe, reading his subscriptions
to the peppery Charleston Mercury newspaper, the highbrow
Russell's Magazine, and reflecting on the mounting
sectional tensions of the prewar years. In a letter to
William dated March 26, 1856, Charles complained that the
"Government is becoming more abolition every day" and he
predicted that the "Union may last a few years longer, but
unless a decided change takes place in Northern politics,
it must at last go under." 

Events would prove Whilden correct. On December 20, 1860,
delegates to the so-called Secession Convention, meeting in
Institute Hall in downtown Charleston, only a short
distance from Charles Whilden's boyhood home on Magazine
Street, unanimously adopted the "Ordinance of Secession",
taking South Carolina out of the Union. The bombardment of
Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor four months later heralded
the beginning of the shooting war. A lesser man than
Charles Whilden might have been content to sit out the war
in New Mexico Territory. After all, Whilden had been gone
from the South for more than a decade. He was fast
approaching 40. 

Whilden's frequent denunciations of abolitionism in his
letters were based on principle, not political expediency
or financial self-interest. Apart from a nominal, undivided
interest in his beloved Maumer Juno that he shared with his
siblings, Charles held no slave property. Furthermore, he
was more than 1,000 miles from South Carolina, with little
money for travel. But Charles Whilden was no ordinary man.
Undeterred by the obstacles confronting him, Whilden
resolved to answer South Carolina's call to arms. According
to a reminiscence written in 1969 by his grand niece, Miss
Elizabeth Whilden Hard of Greenville, South Carolina, the
"only way he could get back to Charleston was by the
Bahamas, and on his way back to Charleston the ship was
wrecked, he spent some time in an open boat, suffered
sunstroke, and as a result had epileptic attacks." The date
of Whilden's harrowing return to Charleston is conjectural,
as none of his correspondence from the early war years has
survived, but the likely date is late 1861 or early 1862. 

Whilden's Confederate service records in the National
Archives in Washington, D.C. commence with his enlistment
in 1864, but Miss Hard's reminiscence may be correct that
her Great Uncle Charles "enlisted a number of times, but
when he had an [epileptic] attack would be discharged. Then
he would go somewhere else and enlist again." Confederate
service records are notoriously incomplete, and it stands
to reason that Charles Whilden would not have risked life
and limb returning to Charleston only to avoid military
service once home.
 
Irrespective of whether or not he had seen prior service,
Whilden demonstrably enlisted "for the war" at Charleston
on February 6, 1864, as a private in Company I (known as
the Richardson Guards) of the 1st Regiment, South Carolina
Volunteers. Lieutenant Wallace Delph enlisted Whilden, and
the lieutenant can be forgiven if he looked askance at his
new recruit. By most standards, Whilden was a marginal
recruit. Though intelligent and patriotic, Whilden was also
in his 40th year, the red hair of his youth turned grey.
His urban background and string of sedentary occupations
better suited him for a Richmond clerkship than active
service in the field. On top of everything else, Whilden
was epileptic.
 
Whilden's new regiment was a proud outfit. The 1st
Regiment, South Carolina Volunteers, was known popularly as
"Gregg's lst South Carolina" after its first colonel, Maxcy
Gregg, in order to distinguish the regiment from several
other South Carolina infantry regiments also identified
numerically as the "lst Regiment." The successor to a
regiment organized by Col. Gregg in December 1860 for
six-months service, the 1st Regiment, SCV, was arguably the
very first Rebel infantry regiment. At the time of
Whilden's enlistment, the regiment was part of Brigadier
General Samuel McGowan's brigade in the Army of Northern
Virginia. 

At one time part of A.P. Hill's vaunted Light Division,
McGowan's South Carolinians had won a reputation for hard
fighting on many a bloody field. That reputation was
shortly to be put to its sternest test at a strategic
Virginia crossroads village known as Spotsylvania Court
House. 

Following his repulse at the Wilderness on May 5 and 6,
1864, Union General Ulysses S. Grant ordered the Army of
the Potomac to move southeast about 12 miles to the
vicinity of Spotsylvania Court House (NPS Web Site), hoping
to get between the Army of Northern Virginia and Richmond.
General Robert E. Lee, however, was quicker, and elements
of the Confederate First Corps arrived at Spotsylvania
Court House just ahead of the Federals. Over the next few
days a series of collisions in the area occurred as both
sides took up positions and brought up additional units.
The Army of Northern Virginia settled into a defensive line
at Spotsylvania that bulged northward in the center to form
a salient or "mule-shoe," with elements of Lieutenant
General Richard Ewell's Second Corps defending the
mule-shoe. At first light on May 12, nearly 19,000 men of
the Union II Corps, taking advantage of ground fog,
attacked the tip or apex of the mule-shoe, quickly
overwhelming Major General Edward Johnson's 4,000-man
division defending the apex. Once inside the mule-shoe, the
Federals threatened to advance southward like a tidal wave.
Only their own disorganization and a series of desperate
Confederate counterattacks halted the Union's advance
before it resulted in a general rout. 

With most of Johnson's Division dead or prisoners, a
considerable segment of the works inside the apex of the
mule-shoe was unoccupied by any Confederate troops. To
correct this, General Lee forwarded two brigades from the
Third Corps, Harris's Mississippians and McGowan's South
Carolinians, during the mid-morning hours of the 12th. With
a cheer and at the double quick, McGowan's Brigade advanced
towards the tip of the mule-shoe in support of Harris's
Brigade, sloshing through rain and mud and under heavy
fire. At the head of each of the brigade's five regiments,
two soldiers carried the regimental state flag and the
national battleflag. The blue silk state flag featured a
palmetto tree encircled with a wreath of oak and laurel
leaves; the national battleflag displayed the familiar
blue, starred St.Andrew's cross dividing a red field. 

When the regular color bearer was shot, Whilden insisted
upon bearing his regiment's national colors into the fight,
although he was not a member of Company K, the regiment's
color company. Lieutenant James Armstrong, the commander of
CompanyK and Whilden's messmate, relented, though,
according to Armstrong's postwar account, Whilden was
"feeble in health and totally unfitted for active
service.... In fact, he was stumbling at every step."
Watching Whilden struggle to keep up with his command,
Armstrong offered to relieve Whilden of the flag and to
carry it himself. Whilden relinquished the flag to the
lieutenant, but only after Armstrong had promised to
restore it to him when the regiment halted. As the command
arrived at the next line, "Whilden came rushing up, took
the flag and bravely bore it throughout the fight,"
Armstrong recalled. The lieutenant was being literal when
he wrote that Whilden "bore" the flag, because, when the
top of his flag staff was shot away during the advance,
Whilden tied the battleflag around his waist and continued
forward. 

When Whilden and his comrades finally halted in the late
forenoon, they fell into trenches west of the mule-shoe
tip. Perhaps two hundred yards of the salient's defenses
then remained in Federal hands. In his recent book on
Grant's Overland Campaign, Noah Trudeau writes: "Along
those two hundred yards of mutually held trenches, men now
killed each other with zealous abandon. In a war that had
birthed its share of bloody angles, this day and the
morning of the next at Spotsylvania would give birth to the
bloodiest of them all." For the next 17 hours or so,
McGowan's Brigade would hold its position along the apex of
the salient front and would maintain a more or less
continuous fire. At times the two sides were only a few
yards apart. Now and then a hundred or so Yankees would
surge forward over the Confederate trenches, only to be
immediately hurled back in desperate hand-to-hand fighting.
Rain fell intermittently during the afternoon of the 12th,
adding to the misery of the combatants. About 10 o'clock
that evening, a large oak, some 22 inches in diameter and
cut almost in half by Federal rifle fire, fell down on
works manned by Whilden's regiment, wounding several men
and startling a great many more. 

While this desperate fighting took place, other
Confederates were constructing a new defensive line across
the base of the mule-shoe about a mile to the rear of the
Mississippians and South Carolinians. Finally, at 4 o'clock
in the morning of May13, the brigades of Harris and McGowan
withdrew to the new line. Thus ended the longest sustained
hand-to-hand combat of the war. The toll on McGowan's
Brigade had been heavy. General McGowan was wounded early
in the advance, and the commander of Gregg's 1st South
Carolina, Col.C.W. McCreary, fell wounded almost in
Whilden's arms. Total casualties within the brigade
exceeded 40 percent. One of these casualties was the
impromptu flag bearer, Private Charles Whilden. At some
point before McGowan's Brigade retired to the relative
safety of the new defensive line, a bullet tore open
Whilden's shirt, inflicting a wound to his shoulder. With
the flag still tied around his waist, Whilden was carried
to a field hospital. For all intents and purposes, the war
was over for him. The next day, May l4, Charles hurriedly
wrote a letter to his brother, William, who was then
serving as an artillery officer near Charleston. After
describing the fighting of the preceding two days and the
heavy losses of his brigade, Charles turned to a more
personal subject. "[I]f it should be the decree of the
Almighty that I should lose my life in this War," he wrote,
then William should have his meerschaum pipe and his
sisters-in-law should draw for his watch and chain. What
little remained of his property, Charles wrote, should be
"equally divided between Sisters Charlotte & Ellen Ann -- I
promised dear Mother that they should never want if I could
prevent it."Sent to the General Hospital at Camp Winder in
Richmond to recover his health, Whilden was furloughed to
Charleston in late August. Listed as "absent sick at
Charleston" on the muster rolls of his regiment for
September through December 1864, Whilden never recovered
sufficiently to return to active service 

In common with other Confederate veterans, Charles Whilden
struggled to put his life back together after the war. He
might have succeeded, but on September 25, 1866 he died
suddenly in Charleston at age 42. According to Elizabeth
Hard, her Great Uncle Charles "died without fame or glory,
as on an early morning walk he suffered an [epileptic]
attack and fell in a pool of water from rain collected on
the pavement." The man who had survived the Bloody Angle at
Spotsylvania drowned back home in a few inches of ground
water. The story of the flag that Charles Whilden carried
so courageously at Spotsylvania does not end with his
death. After Whilden was wounded at Spotsylvania and
hospitalized, the flag was stored with his other effects.
Given to Whilden when he was furloughed to Charleston in
August 1864, the flag was in his possession when he died
about two years thereafter. About 15 years after the war,
Edward McCrady, Jr., a prominent Charleston lawyer who had
captained the color company of Gregg's 1st South Carolina
early in the war and had later risen to the rank of
lieutenant colonel of the regiment, petitioned William
Whilden to turn over the battleflag that he had inherited
from his brother Charles. McCrady had possession of the
regiment's blue state colors, and he professed a desire to
reunite the two flags. In a letter written on New Year's
Day, 1880, McCrady pled his best case, pointing out that
his regiment had carried the battleflag "in every battle
until May 1864" and that, for years during the war, he had
"lived with the flag in [his] tent, and slept with it by
[his] side in the bivouac." After consulting his three
surviving brothers, two of whom were Baptist ministers,
William Whilden declined McCrady's request, essentially on
the grounds that McCrady had no higher claim to the flag
than any other veteran of the regiment. In declining,
however, Whilden indicated a willingness to entrust the
flag to a collection of Confederate relics. 

Following William Whilden's death in 1896, custody of the
battleflag passed to William's daughter, Mrs. Charles Hard
of Greenville. In 1906, Mrs. Hard delivered the flag to her
Uncle Charles' old friend and messmate, James Armstrong, a
postwar harbor master of Charleston who had commanded the
color company of Gregg's 1st South Carolina at
Spotsylvania. In his letter to Mrs. Hard expressing his
appreciation for the flag, Armstrong promised to
"communicate with the other officers of the Regiment in
regard to sending the flag to the State House to be placed
alongside of the blue State flag." Armstrong assured Mrs.
Hard that, "[u]ntil sent there it will be kept in a fire
proof vault." Time passed, and the battleflag remained with
the aging Armstrong. Finally, in 1920, Mrs. Hard wrote to
Armstrong about the flag. Rose McKevlin, Armstrong's nurse,
responded, informing Mrs. Hard that Armstrong's leg had
been amputated the prior month as a result of a wound he
had suffered at Spotsylvania more than half a century
previously. The letter explained that Armstrong had tried
to convene a meeting of the surviving officers to discuss
the flag but that he had failed to do so, and it concluded
with the promise that Armstrong, being the senior of the
two surviving officers of the regiment, would send the flag
to the Secretary of State in Columbia to be placed
alongside the blue state colors of the regiment already
there. Although the evidence is not conclusive, the old
soldier evidently made good on his nurse's promise on his
behalf by turning over the battleflag to the state before
he died. 

. 
 
Works cited:
 
Armstrong, james and Varina D. Brown, "McGowan's Brigade at
Spotsylvania,"
 Confederate Veteran, vol. 33 (1925), pp. 376-379. 

Caldwell, J.F.J. The History of a Brigade of South
Carolinians, Known First as "Gregg's," and Subsequently as
"McGowan's Brigade" (Dayton, Ohio: Morningside Press, 1984
reprint of 1866 ed.). 

Compiled Service Record of Charles E. Whilden, 1st
Regiment, South Carolina Volunteers, Compiled Service
Records of Confederate Soldiers Who Served in Organizations
from the State of South Carolina, War Department Collection
of Confederate Records, Record Group 109, National
Archives, Washington, D.C. 

Downey, Fairfax. The Color-Bearers. Mattituck, NY: J. M.
Carroll & Company, 1984
 
Matter, William D. If it Takes All Summer, the Battle of
Spotsylvania. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1988
 
Moore, John Hammond. Editor, "Letters From a Santa Fe Army
Clerk, 1855-1856, CharlesE. Whilden," New Mexico Historical
Review, vol.40, no.2 (April 1965), pp. 141-164 (relating to
letters from CharlesE. Whilden to his brother, William G.
Whilden, or Mrs.WilliamG. Whilden, the originals of which
are in the South Caroliniana Library). 

O'Neall, Belton, John. Biographical Sketches of the Bench
and Bar of South Carolina. Spartanburg, SC: The Reprint
Company, Publishers, 1975, Vol.II,
 p. 614. 

Trudeau, Noah Andre. Bloody Roads South, the Wilderness to
Cold Harbor, May-June 1864. Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1989). 

U.S. Bureau of the Census, Seventh Census of the United
States, 1850, City of Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan,
Schedule1-Free Inhabitants, National Archives Microfilm
Pub. No.T-6, Reel No.146, p.8 (reverse). 

Whilden, Charles E. Letters, 1855-1856. MSS in the South
Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina,
Columbia, SC. 

Whilden, Charles E. Letters, 1854-1920. MSS in the South
Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, SC (which
collection also includes letters of Edward McCrady, Jr.,
WilliamG. Whilden, Mrs. Charles Hard and Rose McKelvin
respecting the battleflag of Gregg's 1st South Carolina and
a typescript of Ella Hard's October23, 1969 letter to the
Director of Archives, Columbia, SC, respecting her great
uncle). 

Whilden, Ellen. Life of Maumer Juno of Charleston, S.C, A
Sketch of Juno (Waller) Seymour. Atlanta, GA: Foote &
Davies, 1892