History of the Confederate flags created before the Southern Cross

Capturing a Confederate battle flag during the Civil War was considered an act of valor with Union soldiers being granted furloughs and awarded Medals of Honor. To qualify, Union soldiers sent the captured flags to the War Department and later on to officials in Washington, D.C. where they were kept in storage until Congress passed an act in 1905 - decades after the war ended - to have them returned to the states of the units that carried them.

So many different variations of Confederate battle flags were created before the Southern Cross became widely accepted as the symbol in 1862, that 279 of them went unidentified and were sent to what was then the Confederate Museum in Richmond, Virginia. Today, it's known as The American Civil War Museum and has more than 820 variations of Confederate and Union national, state, presentation, company and regimental battle flags, making it the largest collection in the United States.

'There's a huge variety of flags that were used in the South during the war and most people don't know that,' Robert Hancock, the Senior Curator & Director of Collections at The American Civil War Museum, told DailyMail.com. 'There was everything from Confederate state flags, the battle flags we're familiar with, and hundreds of flags that most people are not familiar with and have never seen those patterns.'

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