The poem was first published on June 24, 1865, in the
New York Freeman, a pro-Confederate, Roman Catholic newspaper. Ryan published it under the pen-name "Moina". It made Father Ryan famous and this became one of the best-known poems of the post-war South, memorized and recited by generations of Southern schoolchildren. Ryan told an interviewer that he wrote the
Conquered Banner in
Knoxville, Tennessee shortly after General
Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox, "When my mind was engrossed with the thought of our dead soldiers and our dead Cause". This is interpreted as Ryan's statement that, however noble he and others thought the Confederate cause had been, the defeat was final, and the Confederate idea should be put away forever, along with the
Confederate flag. The poem was published again in the first issue of the
Confederate Veteran in 1893. John McGreevy calls it the most popular Confederate poem in the post-Civil War years. Attorney and Southerner Hannis Taylor wrote of the effect of Father Ryan's poem on readers sympathetic to the Confederacy: "Only those who lived in the South in that day, and passed under the spell of that mighty song, can properly estimate its power as it fell upon the victims of a fallen cause." The poem reached the height of its popularity between 1890 and 1920. ==References==