UPDATE: Rare flag carried by Pennsylvania African-American regiment sold for $196K to Atlanta History Center

(Courtesy of Morphy Auctions)

A flag painted by hand for one of 11 African-American regiments from Pennsylvania was auctioned for $196,800, including fees, to the Atlanta History Center.

Acclaimed African-American artist David B. Bowser created the banner for the 127^th U.S. Colored Troops. It depicts a soldier waving farewell to Columbia, a symbol of the United States, with the words “We Will Prove Ourselves Men.”

Of the 11 such flags Bowser painted, the 127^th flag is the only known to survive.

“Seven others are known only from photographs. Those seven flags were sent to the military museum at West Point in 1906, but incredibly, were thrown out in the 1940s,” said Dan Morphy, president of Morphy Auctions, in a press release, before the sale. The auction house had said the banner might go for as high as $250,000 on Thursday.

D.B. Bowser (Wikipedia)

The 1864 flag in recent years has belonged to the Grand Army of the Republic Civil War Museum and Library in Philadelphia. But the museum, which had the 6-by-6-½-foot silk flag restored a couple years ago, decided to part with it to help bolster the venue’s finances, the Associated Press reported. The Picket reached out to the museum for comment.

The Atlanta History Center, which recently restored and reopened The Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama, said the purchase was the most it has ever spent on a single artifact. "It's one of those things that doesn't need words to tell you what it is and what it represents," said center president and CEO Sheffield Hale.

Bowser, the son of a fugitive slave whose home was a stop on the Underground Railroad, designed banners and flags for a variety of clients. He helped recruit black soldiers and was commissioned to paint 11 flags for African-American regiments, which trained at Camp William Penn outside Philadelphia. The segregated units were led by white officers.

"Bowser's works were the first widely viewed, positive images of African Americans painted by an African American," according to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

Joseph Becton of the African American Museum in Philadelphia told the Associated Press that Bowser’s flags were meant to be provocative.

According to the AP: “The banner for the 22nd regiment showed a black Union soldier pointing his bayonet at the chest of a fallen Confederate soldier who is tossing aside his sword, beneath a banner reading ‘Sic semper tyrannis,’ which translates into ‘thus always to tyrants.’ That was also the motto of Virginia at the time, so it was likely meant to enrage the enemy, Becton said.”

127th USCT flag detail (Courtesy of Morphy Auctions)

The 127^th was organized in late summer 1864 and took part in siege operations against Richmond and Petersburg until the end of the Civil War. Part of the Army of the James, it participated in one battle and several other actions. The regiment was at Appomattox for the surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.

"With meticulous attention to detail in restoration, the vibrant banner represents the epic struggle, valor and patriotism of the African-American troops during the Civil War," Morphy Auctions said.

Gordon Jones, senior military historian and curator at the Atlanta History Center, said in a statement:  “It’s an iconic knock-your-socks-off artifact. Even an enlisted man’s USCT uniform wouldn’t be as historically significant as this flag.”

The history center’s collection includes a brass drum belonging to a drummer boy of the all-black 55th Massachusetts Regiment, a knapsack used at the Battle of Olustee, Fla., by a soldier in the 8th USCT and a recently acquired canteen bearing the stencile mark of the 15th USCT, which guarded railroad lines in Tennessee during the 1864 Atlanta Campaign.