An article in Saturday's editions incorrectly referred to the battle flag reproduced on Maryland license plates for members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans as the Stars and Bars. The Stars and Bars, with horizontal stripes, was the Confederate national flag.
The Sun regrets the errors.
You don't have to be a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans to own a Maryland license tag with a Confederate symbol. In fact, you probably have one on your car right now.
FOR THE RECORD - CORRECTION
The stylized red and white cross that appears in the state seal and flag -- and on most Maryland license tags -- was a powerful symbol of Confederate sympathy in Maryland during and after the Civil War.
Maryland men fighting in Confederate regiments often wore the cross on their lapels and incorporated it into their unit flags. Confederate Gen. Bradley T. Johnson, a Marylander, designated his headquarters tent on battlefields with a banner made of the the distinctive cross.
The cross was the centerpiece of an ornate iron gateway that stood for many years in front of the Maryland Line Confederate Soldier's home in Pikesville, which opened in 1888 and was closed, and its gate removed, long ago.
The crosses can still be seen on the tombstones of Confederate soldiers in the state and are prominently displayed on monuments to Marylanders at the Gettysburg battlefield.
"It was a very significant symbol of the Confederacy for Marylanders," said Edward C. Papenfuse, the state archivist.
The red and white colors became so closely associated with the rebellion that federal authorities garrisoned at Baltimore outlawed displaying them in the city, a hotbed of Southern sympathizers. Offenders were jailed.
The derivation of the cross is disputed although, unlike the Stars and Bars Confederate battle flag, it predates the Confederacy by several centuries.
George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore and the founder of the Maryland colony, adopted a quartered seal in the 1600s that incorporated his paternal ancestor's cross-hatched family crest and the Greek cross, properly called a cross bottony.
The families of his mother, Alicia Crossland, and his wife, Ann Mynne, used ornate crosses in their coats of arms. Most texts attribute Calvert's cross bottony to the Crossland arms, but Papenfuse believes the version that appears in the state seal and flag more closely resembles the Mynnes' arms.
Design resurrected
