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Fly the South Carolina flag and celebrate the Palmetto State
South Carolina certainly has the simplest design for a state flag of any of the original thirteen colonies. If you know anything about John C. Calhoun, the doctrine of nullification, and prominence of South Carolina in starting the Civil War, it will not surprise you to know that this is the same flag that was its "National banner" when the state seceded from the union on December 20, 1860. However, the design goes back to before the American Revolution, and was first seen on a banner carried by South Carolinians protesting the Stamp Act. That banner had three white crescents on a blue background and a decade later when the South Carolina Revolutionary Council of Safety asked Colonel William Moultrie to design a banner for the colony's troops, he picked a silver crescent moon (i.e., a new moon), on a blue field. The blue was the same color as the uniforms of the soldiers with the silver crescent being the symbol the soldiers wore on the front of their caps.
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The South Dakota flag for citizens of the Mt. Rushmore State
Actually, South Dakota has two official flags. The first, adopted in 1909, had two sides, with the state seal on one side and the sun on the other. Of course, it is expensive to manufacture a double-sided flag, so in 1963 a second design was adopted (and updated in 1992). The state's blue flag now show the state seal surrounded by a sunburst with the words "South Dakota" above and "The Mount Rushmore State" below (the latter being the state's official nickname).
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The state flag of Wisconsin for citizens of the Badger State
For a second it struck me as a bit strange that the state flag of Wisconsin is blue because when I think Wisconsin I think red because of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My son graduates from there next week and you can never have too many t-shirts and the ones from Wisconsin tend to be red. But then I remembered that the football stadium on campus is called Camp Randall because it is built on the site of a military camp of the same name. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Governor Alexander W. Randall ordered Major Horace A. Tenney to turn the fairground near the University into a training post for the troops Wisconsin would be sending to preserve the Union. The camp was named for the governor and it was there that the 2nd, 6th and 7th Wisconsin regiments, which would make up the Iron Brigade (along with the 19th Indiana and then later the 24th Michigan and Battery B of the 4th U.S. Artillery), known as the Black Hat Brigade. During the course of the Civil War the 2nd Wisconsin would have a higher percentage of its enrollment killed in action than any other regiment in the United States Army. The key thing here is that once I get to thinking about the Civil War and the Union troops from Wisconsin I am back to thinking about blue instead of red.
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