Ken and I did indeed go through the Madaus Papers at Carlisle thanks to Howard's wife and some connections that I have and had at Carlisle. As they have no flag historians on staff one of the tasks they asked Ken and I do was to take notes on the files so they would better know how to catalog them, reorganize them etc. Howard's filing system was completely different than what Ken and I use; Ken and I have files for unit flags by unit while Howard did not. That was part of what we had to do for them.

I did not see any scale drawings for the 43rd Mississippi during my time there in his collections of his scale drawings. Besides doing the research that I needed at the time I was also copying things for my files that I did not have from the drawings. Ken stayed three more days longer than I could and he went though more than I did of them and it seems that he did not see it either. From what Tom describe it matches the other two flags issued by Dabney Maury probably later in 1863 for the units of his Vicksburg division after their exhange. Two of those flags are depicted in Howard's AOT flags book. They are 71 inches square.

This is not to state that Tom does not have a scale drawing of the flag from Howard. I do know that Howard did change IDs of flags after he drew them as I have some of his drawings first with one designation then an altered designation based on further research. It may be - and this is simply a guess on my part - that Howard thought that one of the flags now depicted in his AOT flags book was once that of the 43rd Mississippi and then changed the ID later. Again, this is just a guess based on the fact that Ken and I did not find the actual drawing of this flag (all of Howard' s drawings are in a large batch of three ring binders and organized by style of flag so this would have been easy to find as it would have been grouped with like flag styles).

Greg Biggs