Autograph Letter Signed as editor, Western Continent magazine, ca. 1847-48 Exact date unknown because the upper corner of the letter has been torn off, with loss of the year portion of the date..1pg.+ stampless address leaf. To J.T. Taylor, Tallahassee, Florida, asking for $2 for a one year’s subscription to the magazine.
A rare autograph, especially from this early period; most of Thompson’s papers held by the University of Georgia Library date from the Civil War period and after. William Tappan Thompson had a long career as author (writing, under a pseudonym, the popular novel, “Major Jones’s Courtship) and itinerant journalist,, later co-founding a morning newspaper in Savannah, Georgia. But his real claim to historical fame – now vigorously contested - was as designer of the second flag of the Confederacy during the last years of the Civil War.
Seventeen years earlier, when he wrote this letter, Thompson’s “Southern literary journal” – which began in January 1846 with stories like “The Bride of a Ghost” and went on to serialize Dickens’ Dombey & Son” - is so obscure that no American library has a complete set. It was still published in 1849, but Thompson sold his interest as owner and editor the year before.
What makes the claim that he designed the Confederate flag so controversial today are Thompson’s words, published in his Savannah paper, that “as a people, we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race.” Whether or not Thompson was the original source of the design, that flag is now considered by many as symbolic of white supremacy and vehement racism.