William Porcher Miles - Confederate Congress

Confederate Congress

Miles was selected for both the provisional and regular Confederate Congress. He was chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee while also serving as an aide-de-camp for General P. G. T. Beauregard at both Charleston, in the buildup to the attack on Fort Sumter, and the First Battle of Bull Run. Recognizing, however, his own lack of military training, Miles focused most of his attention on his congressional duties.

Historian Eric H. Walther describes Miles tenure in the Confederate Congress:

Like other fire-eaters, Miles found only frustration in the Confederate Congress. Before secession he had wanted to eliminate all trade duities in a southern confederacy. Now, De Bow warned him that a sudden shift to free trade would alienate and antagonize the powerful sugar planters of the Gulf South, who had prospered under the tariff policies of the Union. Miles complained that his colleagues on congressional committees made work impossible because their habitual absences prevented a quorum, and as events began to sour in the new nation he held no higher opinion of President Davis than other fire-eaters. late in the war, when some military officials began to discus the efficacy of using black troops in the Confederate army, Miles was perplexed. ... e understood the urgent demands of the army, but eventually ... that "it is not merely a military, but a great social and political question, and the more I consider it the less is my judgment satisfied that it could really help our cause to put arms into the hands of our slaves.

While serving in the Confederate Provisional Congress, Miles chaired the "Committee on the Flag and Seal," which adopted the "Stars and Bars" flag as the national flag of the Confederacy. Miles opposed this selection because, he felt, it too much resembled, as supporters of it admitted, the old Stars and Stripes. Miles argued:

There is no propriety in retaining the ensign of a government which, in the opinion of the States composing this Confederacy, had become so oppressive and injurious to their interests as to require their separation from it. It is idle to talk of "keeping" the flag of the United States when we have voluntarily seceded from them.

Miles favored his own design, which, although rejected by the committee, eventually became the Confederate Battle Flag today known simply as "the Confederate flag."