The ceremony had taken place on a day in December, and it had snowed the night before; so the next question that arose was that of the army overcoat. I had seen many of them in my boyhood; all of the farmers wore them in the fields. I took it for granted that it would be easy to get one. I appealed to the G. A. R. of Boston, the G. A. R. of New York, and the G. A. R. of Washington, D. C. There were none to be had. Finally, I wrote to Sanger, a classmate of mine, who was the Assistant Secretary of War, and found that there were some in the army archives and that all I had to do was to go to Washington and look at them. They would even have them taken out for me to examine thoroughly. This, of course, would do me no good whatever. I must have one in my studio so that a model could pose in it. My home and studio were at East Hampton, Georgica Pond, at the time, and I was walking around my garden one day, feeling very low in my mind, when my man of all work asked me what the matter was. I was blue enough to tell anyone my troubles, and explained to him, with no idea that he could help me.
“Why, old Jackson wears a coat like that,” he said.
I had no faith, but we harnessed up, drove several miles out, when, sure enough (I spied it at a distance), there was old Jackson weeding out his flower garden and wearing an original Civil War army overcoat. It was a beauty, stained by time and faded by the sun; a real work of art, but he thought me a great fool to give him an entirely new coat for it.
The last trouble was the flag. I found out that the maker of the flags carried in the war was still alive and had one in his possession. It was all battle worn and just what I wanted. After the panel was up the Boston _Transcript_ published a letter from an indignant woman stating that I had no right to monkey with Old Glory; that as an artist I might have thought the flag would be better with gold stars, but that I had no right to paint them so. The original flags were upon the wall of the State House, about ten feet under my panel, and I replied to her, asking that she take the trouble to go and look at them and see that the stars were gold. Also, as they had been given to the regiments by the ladies of Boston, the question was “up to them.”