Florida's flag began as a fix for a practical embarrassment: on a still day, the state's plain white banner hung like a flag of surrender. The remedy, approved by voters in 1900, was a red diagonal cross from corner to corner, with the state seal at the intersection. That red X has since become one of the more argued-over marks in American vexillology, claimed both as a Confederate echo and as a Spanish inheritance, while the seal at its center carries a Seminole woman, a palmetto, and a steamboat chugging toward the hoist.
A seal on a bedsheet, 1868
Florida's flag history before 1900 is short and turbulent. During secession in 1861 the state briefly flew improvised banners, and its Civil War flag placed the state seal on a blue field within a design that did not outlast the Confederacy. Reconstruction brought a clean start: the constitution of 1868 established a new great seal, and the state flag became simply that seal on a white field.
The 1868 seal was a small catalog of errors that took more than a century to fix. It showed mountains in a state whose highest point is 345 feet, a cocoa palm rather than anything characteristically Floridian, and a Native American woman dressed as a Plains Indian rather than a Seminole. None of that stopped the flag from flying for three decades.
The 1900 referendum
The push to change it is usually credited to Francis P. Fleming, governor from 1889 to 1893 and before that a soldier in the Confederate army. The explanation passed down is that Fleming disliked how the white flag read as a banner of truce when it hung limp against the pole. In 1899 State Senator Thomas Palmer introduced a joint resolution to amend the constitution, adding "red bars in width one fifth the hoist" running from each corner toward the center. It passed the Senate on May 18 and the House on May 31, both unanimously, and went to the voters.
On November 6, 1900, Floridians ratified the amendment by 5,088 votes to 3,819. It was a small electorate and not a landslide, but it was enough. Because the change was constitutional rather than statutory, the design stayed put for decades; the 1968 constitutional revision dropped the flag language, and the legislature reenacted it without substantive change in 1970 as section 15.012 of the Florida Statutes, which now governs the flag.
The disputed X
What the red saltire was supposed to mean is the flag's unresolved question. The case for a Confederate reading is circumstantial but substantial. The saltire resembles the blue cross of the Confederate battle flag rendered in red. Fleming was a Confederate veteran, and the amendment passed at the high tide of the Lost Cause movement, the same decades that filled Southern courthouse squares with Confederate monuments. Alabama had adopted its own crimson saltire in 1895, and some contemporaries connected that design to the battle flag.
The counterargument is older than the Confederacy. A red saltire on white is the Cross of Burgundy, the flag of the Spanish empire, which flew over Florida for the better part of three centuries. Historians who favor this reading, among them the University of Central Florida's James C. Clark, note that Fleming's family traced its Florida roots to a Spanish land grant, and that no surviving letter or speech from Fleming mentions the Confederacy in connection with the flag. The honest summary is that the intent was never written down, and both readings remain in circulation. Unlike Georgia's or Mississippi's flags, Florida's has never faced a serious removal campaign, in part because the ambiguity cuts both ways.
Correcting the seal, 1985
The seal's accumulated mistakes were finally addressed under Governor Bob Graham. In 1985 the governor and cabinet adopted a redrawn seal by artist John Locastro: the cocoa palm became a sabal palmetto (the state tree since 1953), the mountains became low distant land, the steamboat gained plausible naval architecture, and the woman became recognizably Seminole, scattering flowers by the water. Because the flag's constitutional description incorporates the seal, the flag changed with it. The version flying today is technically the 1985 revision of the 1900 design.
Specifications and standing
The statutory description, carried over from the old constitutional text, fixes the geometry. The flag's proportions are 2:3. The red bars are one fifth of the hoist in width and run from each corner to the outer rim of the seal, whose diameter is half the hoist. The result is a flag that survives the usual test of American state flag criticism better than most: even when the seal is illegible at distance, the red X is identifiable from across a parking lot.
In the North American Vexillological Association's 2001 survey of 72 state, territorial, and provincial flags, Florida ranked 34th, mid-table, scored down for the seal and up for the saltire. The flag flies over the capitol in Tallahassee, on county courthouses, and at every Florida welcome center on the interstates, where the red X does exactly what Fleming wanted: it reads as something, even on a windless August afternoon.
References
[1] Florida Constitution, Article II, Section 4, and Florida Statutes § 15.012 (state flag). http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/
[2] Florida Department of State, "State Flag." https://dos.fl.gov/florida-facts/florida-state-symbols/state-flag/
[3] "Flag of Florida," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Florida
[4] James C. Clark on the Spanish origins argument, as discussed in coverage of the flag's history by Florida press and the University of Central Florida.
[5] North American Vexillological Association, "2001 State and Provincial Flag Survey." https://nava.org/digital-library/design/surveys/
[6] Florida Department of State, "The Great Seal of the State of Florida" (history of the 1985 revision). https://dos.fl.gov/florida-facts/florida-state-symbols/state-seal/