Third National Flag of the Confederacy
(1865)

Concern over the Second National Flag led to the introduction of a bill in December 1864 to change the national flag yet again. Although the Civil War was in its final stages, President Jefferson Davis signed legislation on March 4, 1865, creating the Third National Flag of the Confederacy.

The new banner had a width two-thirds of its length. The flag's canton (i.e., the Confederate Battle Flag) changed from a square to a rectangle of a width three-fifths the width of the flag, and of a length so that the field beyond it measured twice the width of the field below the canton. The flag continued to use a white field, except that the outer half of the field to the right of the Battle Flag canton consisted of a vertical red band. Authorized in the final months of the war, relatively few copies of the Third National Flag were made, and even fewer survived.

Computer generated flag image and text from Edwin L. Jackson, Flags That Have Flown Over Georgia (Atlanta: Secretary of State, 1995). © Carl Vinson Institute of Government, The University of Georgia

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