Official and Traditional Colors of Maryland

Maryland General Provisions Code § 7-202 describes the state flag in formal heraldic language, specifying the first and fourth quarters as a paly of six pieces or (gold) and sable (black) with a bend dexter counterchanged, and the second and third quarters as quartered argent (white) and gules (red) with a cross bottony counterchanged. The statute does not specify Pantone or HEX values, as is common with historically derived flag descriptions rooted in heraldic tincture convention. Maryland law also requires that any ornament affixed to the top of a flagstaff carrying the state flag must be a gold cross bottony, the same trefoil-ended cross symbol appearing in the Crossland quarters of the flag, reinforcing the heraldic coherence of the four-color system across all official applications also reflected on the Maryland state motto page.

The four colors of Maryland's flag trace to Cecil Calvert, the second Baron Baltimore, who received the Maryland charter from King Charles I of England in 1632 and directed the first settlement of the colony in 1634. Cecil's coat of arms combined the gold-and-black paly arms of the Calvert paternal line — which George Calvert, the first Baron Baltimore, had received for military valor, the pattern of vertical bars evoking the palisade fortifications of a besieged stronghold — with the red-and-white quarterly arms bearing a cross bottony from his grandmother's Crossland family, which the Calverts were entitled to display because the Crossland heiress had married into the family. This quartered heraldic composition, unchanged in substance from the 17th century, became the state flag of Maryland in 1904 and remains the most direct link between any U.S. state's visual identity and its colonial founding family.

The gold-and-black Calvert arms represent the paternal lineage of the Lords Baltimore and were the original Maryland colors used during the colonial period. After American independence severed Maryland's official connection to the Calvert family, the gold-and-black arms fell out of use but were reintroduced in 1854 when the Calvert coat of arms was restored to the Maryland state seal. By the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Marylanders who supported remaining in the Union had adopted gold and black as their identifying colors, wearing gold-and-black cockades and flying gold-and-black banners at public demonstrations. Maryland's Union regiments carried gold-and-black regimental flags, cementing the association between the Calvert colors and loyalty to the United States that persists in the flag's symbolism today.

The red-and-white Crossland arms gained their specific Maryland significance during the Civil War in the most divisive possible context. Following Abraham Lincoln's election in November 1860, Marylanders who sympathized with the Southern cause adopted red and white as their 'secession colors,' wearing red-and-white stockings, cravats, and accessories as a public signal of Confederate sympathy. Maryland-born Confederate soldiers wore metal cross bottony pins on their uniforms and carried red-and-white flags into battle. By the war's end, red and white were indelibly associated with the Confederate side of Maryland's divided loyalties. The genius of the combined flag design that emerged in the 1880s was that it placed the Crossland red-and-white directly alongside the Calvert gold-and-black, transforming both sets of Civil War colors into components of a unified Maryland identity. The combined flag's first public appearance at the 1880 Baltimore parade and its 1888 display at Gettysburg — the site of Maryland's most celebrated Civil War engagement — explicitly framed the four colors as symbols of reunion rather than division.