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Treasury Guards (U.S.)

submitted by
Steve Stringfellow, 6 July 2001
image by
Blas Delgado Ortiz, 8 July 2001

Overview
Description
Detailed Cantons
The Treasury Guards
Connecticut Historical Society website with more info

See also:

Overview

Excerpted from a July 3, 2001 New York Times article by Paul Zielbauer:

Five flags surrounded Lincoln's box in Ford's Theater — three American flags and two Treasury Guard flags, the only two such flags issued by the department. The discovery means that three of those five are now accounted for, Civil War historians said. A bloodstained American flag, which was used to cushion the head of the mortally wounded president, was discovered and verified in Pennsylvania in 1998. It is now in the collection of the Pike County Historical Society. The other Treasury Guard flag, a blue banner that hung from a pole several feet to Lincoln's right on the opposite side of the theater box as the flag discovered in Hartford, is in the Ford's Theater National Historic Site in Washington.

Hours before Lincoln was to arrive at the theater for a production of "Our American Cousin," James R. Ford, the theater manager, sent workers scrambling around Washington to find flags to adorn his presidential box. They found one American flag, now lost to history, at a local bookshop, and the two Treasury Guard flags at the United States Treasury.

The flag's importance, said Thomas Reed Turner, a professor at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts and the author of two books on Lincoln, is in its proximity to the nation's first presidential assassination, five days after Gen. Robert E. Lee's formal surrender at Appomattox, Va. As with most historical relics, though, there are gaps in what is known of the flag's exact place in history. Whether the dying president indeed grabbed this newly discovered flag after his assassin, John Wilkes Booth, shot him, for instance, may never be known for sure. One of the best illustrations of that moment shows Lincoln clutching a flag with red and white bars, but it may be impossible to verify whether that image is accurate.

submitted by Lewis Nowitz, 5 July 2001

The flag at Ford's Theater, one of the two original flags of the Treasury Guards, has a tear along one edge. Treasury officials believed that the flag was what had snagged John Wilkes Booth's spur when he leaped from Lincoln's box to the stage. They hung the flag outside the Treasury Building, with the tear prominently displayed, as Lincoln's funeral procession passed.

A nylon replica of the Treasury Guards flag (complete with the tear) is on display in the Office of the Und