A Surgeon's Idea

 

The Union Signal Corps began not with a soldier but with an Army doctor. Albert James Myer, a surgeon whose early interest in sign language for the deaf led him toward the problem of long-distance communication, devised a system in which a single flag's motions stood for numbers, and numbers combined into letters. Stationed in Texas in the late 1850s, Myer pressed his idea on a skeptical War Department. A board chaired by then-Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee judged the method "suitable only as a secondary means of communication over short distances" — but recommended further testing. Those trials, some conducted with a young lieutenant named Edward Porter Alexander, proved messages could be read across distances of up to fifteen miles.

 

Congress was persuaded. On June 21, 1860, President James Buchanan signed the bill creating the position of signal officer, and Myer was appointed the Army's first — the date the Signal Corps still marks as its birthday. Yet Myer began the war almost alone: no enlisted men were authorized to help him. Not until March 3, 1863, did Congress formally establish the Signal Corps "during the present rebellion," finally giving Myer the officers and men he had spent two years begging for.

 

Wig-Wag: Talking With a Single Flag

 

The heart of our impression is the method Myer called aerial telegraphy, better known as "wig-wag." Unlike European semaphore systems that needed two flags, wig-wag used just one — a flag on a staff built in four-foot sections so it could be carried and assembled in the field. The most common was a four-foot white flag with a red center square, though sizes ran from two to six feet, and a smaller flag was often chosen deliberately to avoid drawing enemy attention. At sea and against snow, a red or black flag stood out better.

 

The code itself is elegant, and it is what we most enjoy demonstrating for visitors. From an upright starting position, the flagman swings the staff left for a "one" and right for a "two," returning to vertical between each motion. Strung together, these numbers spelled out letters, and a "five" — a dip straight forward to the ground — closed a word. Two fives ended a sentence; three finished the message. A message always opened by waving the flag steadily to call the distant station to attention, and the far operator answered "I understand" before the sender began in earnest. When darkness fell, the flag gave way to a torch — a copper cylinder with a cotton wick — with a second, stationary "foot torch" set on the ground as a reference point so the moving light could be read against it.

 

A well-drilled signal party was small and self-contained: an officer to read and compose, and a handful of men — typically a sergeant and several privates — to work the flag and man the telescope. Recruits were examined in reading, writing, arithmetic, surveying, and topography, because a signalman was as much an observer as a communicator. Their entire kit — flags, torches, telescopes, and staff — could travel by horseback to whatever hilltop, cupola, or steeple gave the best view.

 

Eyes on the Battlefield

 

That view often mattered as much as the messages. At First Bull Run in July 1861, it was in fact the Confederate side — Myer's old testing partner, E. P. Alexander — who sent what is remembered as the war's first flag message under fire, warning a Southern commander that his flank was threatened. The lesson was not lost on either army.

 

At Antietam in September 1862, Union stations fed a steady stream of reports across the field, one of them warning of A. P. Hill's arriving troops; relayed down the line to the telegraph, battlefield news could reach Washington in well under an hour. But the corps' most famous moment came at Gettysburg. On July 2, 1863, a signal station on Little Round Top spotted General Longstreet's corps maneuvering toward the Union left. Realizing they had been seen and that their movement would be reported, the Confederates were forced into a long countermarch that delayed their attack — time the Union badly needed. Signalmen held that post under artillery and sniper fire, and a bronze plaque on Little Round Top honors their service there today.

 

Wires, Ciphers, and Rivalries

 

Myer's ambitions ran beyond flags. He built horse-drawn "field telegraph trains" — wagons carrying miles of insulated wire, lances to string temporary "flying" lines, and telegraph sets simple enough that an operator turned a dial to a letter rather than tapping Morse. At Fredericksburg in December 1862, such a line was run across the Rappahannock under fire, keeping Burnside in contact through fog and smoke. But the magneto-powered Beardslee machines proved fragile beyond a few miles, and Myer's push to hire trained Morse operators collided with the rival civilian Military Telegraph Corps and its powerful patron, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. The feud cost Myer his post in November 1863 and sent him west — until the war's end vindicated him, and an 1866 reorganization restored him as chief signal officer with authority over the telegraph at last.

 

Because flag signals were visible to the enemy, security became its own art. The corps adopted the cipher disc — two lettered discs set to a prearranged alignment — allowing coded messages that, by the record, the Confederates never broke. The Union, meanwhile, routinely read Confederate signals, a fact one Union staff officer exploited at Chancellorsville by deliberately flagging false messages he knew the enemy would intercept.

 

Why We Carry the Flag

 

By the time the wartime corps disbanded in 1865, some 2,500 enlisted men and roughly 300 officers had served under the flag, and the Signal Corps had earned a permanent place in the Army it holds to this day. What began as one surgeon's idea had proven that information, moved quickly and read clearly, was a weapon in its own right.

 

That is the tradition our detachment keeps alive within the NCWV. When you see us on a hilltop working the flag through its arcs, you are watching a living demonstration of how a Civil War army saw, thought, and spoke across the miles. Stop by our station at an event — we are always glad to spell out a visitor's name in wig-wag and hand down a piece of history one motion at a time.

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