Alabama's flag is one of the shortest laws on the books anywhere. The 1895 act runs to a few dozen words: a crimson cross of St. Andrew on a field of white, bars not less than six inches broad, extending diagonally across the flag from side to side. That is the whole specification. No proportions, no shade of crimson, no symbolism. The brevity produced one of American vexillology's odder disputes, a ninety-year disagreement about whether the flag is supposed to be square, and it left the flag's origins open to an argument about Confederate memory that historians still have not resolved.
An act of forty-odd words
The bill became law on February 16, 1895, as Act 383 of the Alabama legislature. Its operative text reads: "The flag of the state of Alabama shall be a crimson cross of St. Andrew on a field of white. The bars forming the cross shall be not less than six inches broad, and must extend diagonally across the flag from side to side."
Read it twice and you notice what is missing. There is no ratio, no dimensions for the field, no Pantone-style color reference (the word is just "crimson"), and no statement of what any of it means. By the standards of flag legislation, which often runs to paragraphs of heraldic description, it is strikingly spare. The minimum bar width of six inches is the only measurement in the law, and it is an absolute figure rather than a proportion, so a small desk flag that followed the statute literally would be nearly all crimson.
The economy of the design has aged well. In the North American Vexillological Association's 2001 survey of 72 US and Canadian flags, Alabama placed 29th with a score of 6.06 out of 10, comfortably ahead of the seal-on-blue designs that fill the bottom half of the table. Two colors, one shape, no lettering.
The Sanford question
The bill was introduced by John W. A. Sanford Jr., a state representative from Montgomery. His father, John W. A. Sanford Sr., had commanded a battalion of Hilliard's Legion, an Alabama unit in the Confederate army, and later the 60th Alabama Infantry, a regiment formed from it. That family connection is the seed of the most persistent claim about the flag: that the crimson saltire is a deliberate echo of the Confederate battle flag, or more specifically of a battle flag carried by the men his father commanded.
The circumstantial case is real. The flag arrived in 1895, in the same decades that produced Confederate monuments on courthouse lawns across the South, and a red diagonal cross is the defining feature of the battle flag. Several twentieth-century writers treated the connection as settled fact.
The documentary case is thinner. The 1895 legislature recorded no statement of intent, Sanford left no known explanation, and the act itself describes the design in the language of Scottish heraldry (the cross of St. Andrew) rather than Confederate commemoration. Steve Murray, director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, has said the Confederate link rests on assumption rather than evidence. The honest summary is that nobody can prove what Sanford had in mind, and the flag's meaning has been argued about ever since precisely because the law declined to say.
Square or rectangular
The battle flag question had a practical consequence. The Confederate battle flag, in its army form, was square. If Alabama's flag descended from it, the reasoning went, Alabama's flag should be square too. A 1915 state history publication showed it square, square versions flew over state buildings at various points, and flag books disagreed with each other for most of the twentieth century.
In 1987 the Department of Archives and History asked the state attorney general to settle the matter. Attorney General Don Siegelman's opinion concluded that the proper shape is rectangular, noting that the flag had appeared that way in official publications and that nothing in the 1895 act suggested a square. Rectangular flags, usually in the 2:3 proportions common to US state flags, have been the standard since. Square versions still turn up, including in the logo of the Alabama Historical Association, a small fossil of the older reading.
The 1861 banner that came first
Alabama had flown a flag of its own exactly once before. When the secession convention voted Alabama out of the Union on January 11, 1861, a group of Montgomery women presented a flag they had made for the occasion. One side showed the Goddess of Liberty holding a sword and a single-starred flag beneath the arched words "Independent Now and Forever." The reverse carried a cotton plant and a coiled rattlesnake with the Latin motto "Noli Me Tangere," touch me not.
The flag flew over the capitol only briefly. Damaged by weather within about a month, it was moved to the governor's office and never replaced. Through the Confederacy, the war, Reconstruction, and two decades beyond, Alabama had no state flag at all. The 1895 act filled a vacancy that had lasted 34 years.
A near twin on the Gulf
Alabama's flag has a close relative next door. In 1900, Florida added a red saltire to its own white field, which until then had carried only the state seal, on the argument that a plain white flag hanging limp could be mistaken for a flag of truce. The result is that two neighboring Gulf states fly red diagonal crosses on white, distinguishable at a distance only by the seal at Florida's center. Both are also, along with Scotland's blue-and-white original, members of a small family of national and regional saltire flags that includes Jamaica and the Basque Country.
Alabama's version remains the plainer of the two, and the plainest flag in its region: two colors, no seal, no text, unchanged since a legislature in 1895 spent forty-odd words on it and moved on.
References
[1] Code of Alabama, Title 1, Chapter 2A, "The Alabama State Flag Act," incorporating Act 383 of 1895. https://law.justia.com/codes/alabama/2006/1000/1-2a-2.html
[2] Alabama Department of Archives and History, "Alabama Emblems: State Flag." http://collections.archives.alabama.gov/emblems/st_flag.html
[3] "Flag of Alabama," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Alabama
[4] "Alabama (U.S.)," Flags of the World. https://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/us-al.html
[5] Ted Kaye, "The American State/Provincial Flag Survey," Raven: A Journal of Vexillology, Vol. 8 (2001), NAVA.
[6] Opinion of the Attorney General of Alabama (Don Siegelman) on the shape of the state flag, 1987, as summarized by the Alabama Department of Archives and History.