“The flag of the United States preserves the truth as to the “one people” doctrine. On June 14, 1777, the Congress which submitted the Articles [of Confederation] to the States, passed this resolution: “That the flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white, with thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.”
Afterwards the stars in the “new constellation” were increased as new States were added to the Union, the first act of the Congress providing for such increase being passed April 4, 1818.
It was a union of separate and sovereign States, bound together by the ties of mutual interest and for mutual defense, the same ties which bound them under the Articles, and under the Constitution. Such was the significance of the flag and in the beginning, and nothing has happened since to impart any other significance to it.
If this is not true, the stars should have been long ago removed from it and the population of the “Nation” substituted for them, the thirteen strips remaining to remind us of the time when the United States “were.”
(The Case of the South Against the North, Benjamin Franklin Grady, Edwards & Broughton, Publishers, 1899, pg. 68)