I have never thought that the blue VA state flag, which existed unofficially for VA militia well before its use as the official state flag, has nothing to do with the Bonnie Blue Flag. Additionally, not all lone star flags were blue!

I have doubts as well about the blue color having to do with the uniform facings and that relationship with the color of flags. This was indeed the pattern begun well before the Civil War by Swedish general Gustavus Adolphus, who created his regiments by color and matched the flags to fit those uniform colors (red regiment, green regiment, etc.). This was latter borrowed to some extent by the British Army with their regimental colors as they altered their flags during the 18th century from 12 flags per regiment to three and then to two right as the Rev War began. The 12 flags were the colonel's color (as the colonels paid for their regiments and commissions), lt. colonel's colors, major's colors and then the company colors. This dropped to three flags, colonel's color, regimental color and King's color and finally to the regimental color and King's color. The regimental flags were color coded to the facings of the red uniforms which is how the army commanders knew what regiment was what regiment.

Our Baron Von Steuben, in his "Blue Book," took this style for the Continental Army but based on surviving flags, not many, if any, flags were made like this. When the 1st and 2nd American Regiments were raised in the early 1790s, their national colors were blue with the national coat of arms on the field. Later regiments added regimental colors of buff (yellow) with a scroll bearing only their regimental designation on the field. So the US Army, until the Mexican war, fought under the blue national flag with national COA and their yellow (buff) regimental flags. These were not color coded to uniform facings whatsoever. Just before the Mexican War, the US Army finally adopted the stars and stripes as their national colors (artillery and infantry only) and moved the blue flags to their regimental colors. The yellow/buff flags were dropped completely.

Some US Army units bore regimental flags of different colors than blue before the Civil War; the Regiment of Mounted Rifles had a green flag (green being the traditional color of rifle units), and artillery regiments adopted yellow flags, the traditional color of artillery. Following this, I suppose, the two US Dragoons regiments should have had orange flags but I have never heard of such a thing. Some of the heavy artillery regiments in the Civil War were converted to infantry and fought under their yellow colors.

Hope this was of some interest.

Greg Biggs