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Cowpens Flag History

A Distinctive Thirteen-Star Design

The design commonly called the Cowpens flag combines thirteen alternating red and white stripes with twelve white stars surrounding a central thirteenth star on a blue canton. Its unusual arrangement distinguishes it from designs that place every star in an outer ring. The thirteen-star format belongs to the early American flag tradition, but a star count alone cannot establish when a particular flag was made. Congress's June 14, 1777 resolution specified the colors and number of stars and stripes without prescribing the familiar modern arrangement. The Library of Congress explains the early freedom in star arrangements.

The Battle Behind the Name

Cowpens was fought in South Carolina on January 17, 1781, during the Revolutionary War's Southern Campaign. Brigadier General Daniel Morgan's combination of Continental soldiers, militia, and mounted troops defeated Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton's force. Morgan arranged his men in successive lines and used the different strengths of his troops rather than expecting every formation to fight in the same way. The victory weakened British operations in the South and became an important part of the campaign leading toward Yorktown. These are documented events; they do not, by themselves, establish that the flag now called Cowpens was present. Read the National Park Service's battle history.

The Batchelor Family Tradition

The flag's battlefield association comes from Joshua F. Batchelor, a Maryland veteran of the War of 1812. He said his father, William, carried it at Cowpens and that he later carried the same flag at North Point in 1814. He also identified the central star with Maryland. The Maryland State Archives treats these claims critically: it documents Joshua's service at North Point but finds problems in his account of his father's life and the textile's age. The Maryland interpretation of the center star is therefore part of the family story, not an established original design instruction. See the Archives' Batchelor biography.

What the Surviving Artifact Establishes

The custody story includes a flag deposited with Baltimore's Old Defenders' association in 1843 and a flag presented to Maryland in 1907. In her Smithsonian study, textile specialist Grace Rogers Cooper distinguished that history from the surviving object's physical evidence: its cotton stars and sewing materials indicated nineteenth-century construction rather than a Revolutionary War textile. She concluded that the 1907 object was not the earlier flag described in the tradition. See Cooper's examination in Thirteen-Star Flags, pages 28–29.

Maryland's current catalog dates its Cowpens flag to 1840–1849. A modern reproduction is best understood as the traditional Cowpens design, with a meaningful place in American commemorative history, rather than a verified copy of a flag carried into the 1781 battle. View the Maryland State Archives artifact record.