In 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, two Confederate battle flags from Tennessee made their way to Cincinnati, brought here by the Cincinnati soldiers and sailors who captured them as trophies of war and displayed them so that the whole town could revel in the local boys' victory.

And today, Tennessee would like to have them back.

But what happened to the battle flags is a mystery.

"Maybe they no longer exist; or maybe they are sitting in somebody's attic somewhere in Cincinnati,'' said Greg Briggs, a historian from Clarksville, Tenn., who is writing a book on the battle flags carried by Tennessee troops in the Civil War.

"If they do exist,'' Briggs said, "it's time they came home."

The regimental battle flag was a sacred object to the troops who fought in the Civil War, both North and South.

It was carried into battle by a color bearer - a soldier of extraordinary bravery who was willing to face enemy fire while carrying the colors. He was often the first to fall.

The flag had a practical use, too - soldiers separated from their units by the smoke and chaos of a battlefield could see the flag flying and use it as a rallying point.

When a unit was overwhelmed by its opponents, it was common for the victors to take the unit's battle flag as a trophy. Often, it was returned to the victorious regiment's home town for public display.
'They may hold a clue'

The Tennessee State Museum in Nashville, for which Briggs works, has a number of Tennessee battle flags on display, as do state museums in many other states.

Many of the Confederate battle flags were returned to the former Confederate states in the years right after the Civil War as a gesture of good will by the Northern states whose troops captured them.

Briggs' dream now is that someone will find the Tennessee flags that came to Cincinnati 147 years ago and send them home.

The first of the two Tennessee flags that historical records show ended up in Cincinnati was the flag of the Gillespie Guards, a company of the 19th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry.

It was captured in January 1862 at the battle of Mill Springs, Ky., by men of the 9th Ohio Infantry.

The 9th Ohio was a famous unit - it was made up entirely of German-Americans from Cincinnati, all of them members of the Turner Society, a German organization dedicated to physical fitness and education.

In the 19th century, the Turner Society - which still exists today - was a large and powerful organization, meeting in an ornate building at the corner of Walnut Street and 14th Street in Over-the-Rhine called Central Turner Hall.

Briggs, in his research on Tennessee battle flags, found a Louisville Journal story in Feb. 1862 that said the 9th Ohio sent the captured flag of the Gillespie Guards to the Turner Society in Cincinnati.

Briggs said he believes the flag, along with other artifacts sent home by the 9th Ohio, were kept at the Walnut Street hall. But the Cincinnati Central Turners moved out of the building in the mid-1950s and the building was demolished.

The Cincinnati Historical Society has a large number of records from the Turner Society, according to Anne Shepherd, a research librarian.

"The records are here for anyone to look at,'' Shepherd said. "They may hold a clue as to what happened with the battle flag, but, then again, they may not. It will a difficult one to track down."
'Those flags belong in Tennessee'

The second flag belonged to a Tennessee unit called Crew's Battalion.

The battalion's flag was captured by Union sailors in Feb. 1862, when their gunboat flotilla - made up of The Cincinnati, The Conestoga, and The Essex - was heading up the Tennessee River. They stopped to ransack the riverside camp north of Pittsburg Landing where Crew's Battalion was training.

The Cincinnati Commercial, a newspaper that covered the war thoroughly, printed a letter on Feb. 18, 1862 from John A. Duble, a steamboat captain, who, according to census records, lived on Sycamore Street in Cincinnati.

Duble, who was serving as the second-ranking officer on one of the gunboats, said he was sending the Commercial the Crew's Battalion flag "that I took from their colonel's headquarters."

"After taking all that was valuable in their camp, we burnt it and destroyed everything appertaining to it,'' Duble wrote.

The newspaper attached a note to Duble's letter, saying "the Rebel flag alluded to above may be seen at the counting room of this office."

The Commercial's offices were at the northeast corner of Fourth and Race streets downtown, but, by the early 20th century, the building was long gone.

Dan Reigle, a member of the Cincinnati Civil War Round Table who has been assisting Briggs in his search for the flags, said no one has yet found any records that show if the flag stayed in the possession of the Commercial or was returned to Duble.

"If we could find that there are some descendants of John Duble still around, maybe we could get a lead on what happened to the flag,'' Reigle said. "But it is a real long shot. And, the fact is, that a lot of Civil war artifacts seem to grow legs and walk away. In other words, people take them."

Briggs said he will continue searching what records remain.

"Maybe somebody will come forward and say, 'yes, I have that flag in a box in my basement,'' Briggs said. "I know it's a pretty remote possibility. But it's worth a shot. Those flags belong in Tennessee."