A Confederate battle flag distinct from the flag of the Confederacy, the "Stars and Bars," was created following the first major battle of the Civil War, at Bull Run near Manassas, Virginia, in July 1861, because in the heat of battle soldiers and commanders confused the Stars and Bars with the Union army's "Stars and Stripes."

After General Pierre Gustav Toutant Beauregard, commander of the Confederate forces at Manassas, demanded a change, the Virginia army's high command, meeting in the Fairfax Court House in September, agreed to a design that earlier had been proposed for the flag of the Confederacy, but rejected in favor of the Stars and Bars. The new battle flag, a perfect square of red with a diagonal St. Andrew's cross of blue punctuated with white or gold stars, was produced by women in Richmond and first issued to soldiers by the end of October. The number of stars, representing the number of seceding states, increased to 13 after Missouri was admitted into the Confederacy on November 28, 1861 and a Kentucky secessionist provisional government that had formed on November 18 was voted into the Confederacy on December 10.

Despite the fact that a pro-Union government replaced the secessionists in Missouri and the Kentucky government voted to end their status of neutrality and stay in the Union, the 13 stars remained on most Confederate battle flags throughout the war, although flags with 12 stars also were produced. Beauregard attempted to standardize the battle flag throughout the Confederacy, but individual units resisted, insisting on retaining their own distinct designs.

Your friend may have been thinking of William Hoffman (1807–1884), who was Colonel of the 3rd U.S. Regular Infantry, and, as Commissary General of Prisoners, reported directly to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton during the Civil War.

On October 13, 1863, Brigadier General Gilman Marston (1811–1890), the Commander of the military district where the war prison at Point Lookout, Maryland, was located, wrote to Hoffman, asking for money to build barracks for the thousands of Confederate prisoners there, who had to sleep in a large stockade compound crowded into flimsy tents, summer and winter. Hoffman denied General Marston's request. Marston also asked to be supplied with better rations for the prisoners, but Hoffman also refused that request, saying that the prisoners were already "bountifully supplied with provisions" sent to them from their families and friends, which was clearly not true.

The Union officer then acting as the Provost-Marshall in charge of the camp, Captain Joab Nelson Patterson (1835–1923), was relatively well-regarded by the prisoners, despite the terrible conditions there. One of the prisoners wrote of Patterson that he was "as kind as he was allowed to be."

General Marston was reassigned, as was Captain Patterson. Replacing Marston was Brigadier General James Barnes (1801–1869), who had performed extremely poorly at the Battle of Gettysburg. He was a kindly man, thought the prisoners, but he had almost no contact at all with them. His Provost-General at Point Lookout became Major Allen G. Brady, 20th Regiment, Veteran Reserve Corps (1822–1905), a cruel, brutal, and arrogant man who assumed his post at the prison in June 1864 and proceeded immediately to increase enormously the sufferings of the prisoners and to appropriate for himself vast amounts of provisions meant for them. He remained in command of Point Lookout until the end of the war. His tenure there was the worst time for the prisoners.

Brigadier General Barnes received a brevet promotion to Major General just before the end of the war. Major Brady was never promoted anywhere near as rapidly as he believed he merited, but months after the war ended, he was promoted to Brevet Colonel before he was discharged.

Colonel Hoffman appears to have handled the management of Point Lookout no differently than he did the other Union prisons, which is to say badly, allowing terrible conditions of privation and abuse to grow unchecked. Secretary Stanton certainly did nothing to intervene and may even have encouraged this as one way to punish the South for its rebellion. Stanton did not wish to exchange prisoners with the South because he believed the North could better afford to prosecute the war without the return of its men than the South could, and because he believed that negotiating with the South on this issue might provide some precedent that could be construed as a Union recognition of the Confederacy as a sovereign power.

Many prison camps on both sides during the war were miserable places where many tens of thousands of prisoners from either side died. Prisoners returning from Point Lookout, however, pointed out that whereas some of the privations of Union prisoners in Confederate camps might be attributed to the general deterioration of conditions in the South as the war progressed, the privations of Southern prisoners in Union camps had no such contributing cause, and, in fact, were fostered by a commonly-practiced policy of retribution.

At the end of the war, Colonel Hoffman, having stifled some camp commanders and aid groups who had wished to help Confederate prisoners during the war, was actually able to return to the U.S. Treasury almost $2 million that had been originally allocated to feed Confederate prisoners. He was brevetted Brigadier General on October 7, 1864, for "faithful services," and then brevetted Major General on March 13, 1865, for "faithful, meritorious and distinguished services as Commissary General of Prisoners during war."

On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth became the first person to assassinate an American president when he shot and killed Abraham Lincoln in his box at Ford’s Theater in Washington. Using a .44 caliber derringer pistol—a small, easily concealed handgun—Booth fired a single shot (timed so that that the audience’s laughter would mask the report) into Lincoln’s brain at point-blank range before jumping to the stage and escaping into the night. After a two-week manhunt, Federal troops cornered Booth in a barn in Maryland, where a Union soldier shot him in the neck. Booth died two hours later.

A member of a famous acting family (many considered Booth’s father, Junius Brutus Booth, the finest Shakespearean actor of his generation, and Booth’s older brother, Edwin is commonly named among the greatest American actors of all time), John Wilkes Booth enjoyed a phenomenally successful stage career during the Civil War: by 1864, he earned $20,000 a year, at a time when the average Northern family earned around $300 annually. A Marylander by birth, Booth was an open Confederate sympathizer during the war. A supporter of slavery, Booth believed that Lincoln was determined to overthrow the Constitution and to destroy his beloved South.

After Lincoln’s reelection in November 1864, Booth devised a plan to kidnap the president and spirit him to Richmond, where he could be ransomed for some of the Confederate prisoners languishing in northern jails. Booth enlisted a group of friends from Washington to aid him in his attempt. That winter, Booth and his conspirators plotted a pair of elaborate plans to kidnap the president; the first involved capturing Lincoln in his box at Ford’s Theater and lowering the president to the stage with ropes. Booth ultimately gave up acting to focus on these schemes, and spent more than $10,000 to buy supplies to outfit his band of kidnappers. Neither of the kidnapping plans bore fruit—the second, a ploy on March 17 to capture Lincoln as he traveled in his carriage collapsed when the president changed his itinerary—and several of Booth’s conspirators ultimately left the group.

On the evening of April 11, the president stood on the White House balcony and delivered a speech to a small group gathered on the lawn. Two days earlier, Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House, and after four long years of struggle it had become clear that the Union cause would emerge from the war victorious. Lincoln’s speech that evening outlined some of his ideas about reconstructing the nation and bringing the defeated Confederate states back into the Union. Lincoln also indicated a wish to extend the franchise to some African-Americans—at the very least, those who had fought in the Union ranks during the war—and expressed a desire that the southern states would extend the vote to literate blacks, as well. Booth stood in the audience for the speech, and this notion seems to have amplified his rage at Lincoln. “That means nigger citizenship,” he told Lewis Powell, one of his band of conspirators. “Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”

Three days later Booth made good on his promise. Upon learning that Lincoln and his wife intended to see the play Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater with commanding general Ulysses S. Grant, Booth used his actor’s connections there to gain access to the president’s box. Finally rejecting the notion of kidnapping, Booth now planned to assassinate the president along with top officials his administration: besides Lincoln and General Grant, Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson were to be killed the same night by other members of Booth’s gang. Booth appears to have plotted the murders in the belief that the simultaneous assassination of four top officials would throw the North and the Republican Party into chaos long enough for the Confederacy to reassemble itself.

The other parts of Booth’s plan did not come to fruition. General Grant declined the invitation to see the play; Union officer Henry Rathbone took his place. While Booth waited for his opportunity to assassinate the president at Ford’s Theater, two of his co-conspirators journeyed to their assigned targets. Lewis Powell gained entry to Secretary of State’s home, where a bedridden Seward lay recuperating from a carriage accident; Powell stabbed him several times, but none of the blows was mortal. At the same time, another conspirator, George Azterodt, made his way to the hotel where Vice President Johnson was lodging. Armed with a gun and a knife, Azterodt detoured to the hotel saloon, where he got drunk and lost his nerve. He left the bar without confronting Johnson and discarded his knife in the streets of Washington.

Only one of the four intended victims of Booth’s plot was killed, but Lincoln was by far the biggest prize. With Lincoln’s death, Andrew Johnson ascended to the presidency, and the nation lost the one man that most contemporaries, and most American historians, believed best qualified to “bind up the nation’s wounds” after four brutal years of war.