Charles B. Stewart was born February 18, 1809 in Charleston, South Carolina to Charles and Adriana Bull Stewart and was the second of their two children. His full name was Charles Bellinger Tate Stewart. Charles was about eleven years old when his father died in Georgia in 1817 and was not quite twenty years old when his mother died in 1825.
While still a young man, he was educated in medicine and worked as a druggist in Columbus, Georgia and Columbia, South Carolina throughout the mid to late 1820s, receiving his license in pharmacy in 1929. Around that time, he also was said to have engaged in various businesses, trading and working as a coffee merchant. An article profiling him in in the April 20, 1930 issue of the Houston Chronicle noted that he came to Texas with the party of Baron de Bastrop in the early 1830s and set up an apothecary shop. Stewart was a member of the convention at San Felipe de Austin in 1832. (The 1832 convention was composed of delegates from sixteen districts following the Anahuac Disturbances and other events including the Battle of Velasco prior to the Texas Revolution. Out of this convention came various petitions and requests of the current Mexican government concerning its tariffs and other governmental provisions at the time. One desire was for the Mexican government to separate the Tejas and Coahuila regions into two Mexican states. The 1832 convention produced no favorable changes for the settlers.) The article added that Stewart was fluent in Spanish and served in 1834 as secretary to the Mexican Supreme Court. In addition, he was a member of the Brazoria and San Felipe discussions after Santa Anna had been elected president of Mexico. Once again, few concessions were made by the Mexican government, leading up to the Texas Revolution and events in late 1835 and early 1836.
The article continued to state that Stewart was the first to sign the Texas Declaration of Independence and that he served in the Texas Army at San Jacinto. Stewart was one of the interpreters between Sam Houston and Santa Anna after the latter was captured following the battle. Following his involvement beyond San Jacinto, the article notes that he was appointed to a committee of the Texas senate to devise and adopt a flag and seal for the Republic of Texas and adds that he made “lovely drawings” of the first flag and made suggestions for the first seal, both of which were officially adopted by the senate on January 25, 1839.
The article concluded by stating that in 1845 Stewart was elected as a delegate to meetings in Washington, D. C. to discuss annexation of Texas as a state in the Union. After Texas’ admission as the 28th state Stewart was elected to the first state legislature and served additional terms, the last being in 1882.
According to the article “The Flags and Seals of Texas” by Charles A. Spain, Jr., there have been three primary flags associated with the Republic of Texas. The first was the “Zavala” flag of 1836, which many will recall had a solid white five pointed star with the letters “TEXAS” in capital letters (also in white) in the five notches around the star. All this was on a solid blue background. Though easily recognized and widely known, Spain’s position is that this flag was not officially adopted.
Spain refers to the second flag as “David G. Burnet’s Flag.” Burnet served as interim president of the Republic of Texas. This flag had two colors, gold and azure (a dark shade of blue) and featured a golden star in the center of a background of azure. It was a simple design with no lettering and was approved by the First Texas Congress on December 10, 1836. It served as the national flag of Texas for approximately three years.
The third flag was adopted by the Texas Congress in 1839 and is the design in use today. It is described as follows: “a blue perpendicular stripe of the width of one third of the whole length of the flag, with a white star of five points in the centre thereof, and two horizontal stripes of equal breadth, the upper strip white, the lower red, of two thirds of the whole length of the flag;” This flag design continued after annexation of the Republic of Texas as a state of the United States.
1835 was an interesting year for Charles Stewart. In the spring, he was operating a drugstore in San Felipe de Austin. In May of that year, he received his license to practice medicine. In July he attended a meeting to discuss the capture and detaining of Mexican troops under the leadership of Antonio Tenorio by William B. Travis. In November he was appointed to serve as enrollment clerk and secretary to the executive, provisional Governor Smith, essentially serving as secretary of state.
Stewart is said to be the first signer of the Declaration of Independence on March 2, 1836. The following year, he settled in Montgomery County in which he would make his home for the rest of his adult years. There he operated a medical practice and opened a drug store. As the months and years after the Battle of San Jacinto unfolded, Stewart served on a committee appointed by the Third Texas Congress in 1839 to design a new state flag. It is usually understood that all members of the committee (Charles Stewart, Oliver Jonks and William Wharton) contributed suggestions for its design, but Stewart is credited with drawing the original draft of the third state flag. This committee is also noted as having designed the official seal of the Republic.
In the April 21, 1946 issue of the Houston Chronicle, a story was told that may seldom have been mentioned elsewhere. The San Jacinto chapter of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas had reported that an early Texas document had used an unusual seal, appearing in December 1835. At the time, Cherokee Indians had refused to sign an offered treaty with Texas without a wax seal. There being no official seal available to mark the document in wax, a makeshift one was employed. According to the article, Herbert H. Fletcher was called an authority on Texas documents and said, “Charles B. Stewart, the governor’s secretary, and a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence three months later, solved the problem by using an old mother-of-pearl button which his father had brought from England to impress a ‘seal’ into wax.” The article added that to the knowledge of the writer, the button was not used again as a seal.
Stewart married Julia T. Sheppard on March 8, 1836. Julia had previously been married and had two children. The couple had three more children until Julia’s untimely death at about the age of 35 in the summer of 1949. Two years later, he married Elizabeth Antoinette Nichols Boyd with whom he had two children. Elizabeth died at around 34 years old in 1857. Dr. Stewart died in late July, 1885 and is interred at Montgomery New Cemetery.
Special thanks to Christy Spackey Slice for introducing us to Dr. Stewart and providing background information. Sources also include newspaper articles, handbook of Texas Online and the article by Charles A. Spain, Jr. (Spain, C. A., Jr. (1992). The flags and seals of Texas. South Texas Law Review, 33, 215-385.)
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