Excerpts from Article By Sally Jenkins
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE ~ October 2013

"During the Civil War, no flag became a more popular symbol of Union loyalty than the worn and imperiled standard belonging to 19th-century sea captain William Driver, who was originally from Salem, Massachusetts. His defiant flying of it—from his Nashville, Tennessee, household during the midst of the conflict— made national news."

"The flag was originally designed to unfurl grandly from a ship’s mast. Driver received the homemade flag with 24 stars in 1824, sewn for him by his mother and a group of young Salem female admirers to celebrate his appointment, at the age of just 21, as a master mariner and commander of his own ship, the Charles Doggett. According to legend, when Driver raised the flag up the main mast, he lifted his hat and declaimed, “My ship, my country, and my flag, Old Glory.”

“It has ever been my staunch companion and protection,” he wrote. “Savages and heathens, lowly and oppressed, hailed and welcomed it at the far end of the wide world. Then, why should it not be called Old Glory?”

“The flag embodied America as he knew it at that point, going across the world,” says NMAH curator Jennifer Locke Jones. “He carried it with him and it was the pride of this independent free spirit. He was taking a bit of America to uncharted territories and he felt very proud that this was the symbol he flew under. He took a piece of his home with him wherever he went.”

"Driver flew his flag on holidays “rain or shine,” according to one of his Nashville-born daughters, Mary Jane Roland. It was so large that he attached it to a rope from his attic window and stretched it on a pulley across the street to secure it to a locust tree." 

“This is my old ship flag Old Glory,” he said … “I love it as a mother loves her child … cherish it as I have always cherished it; for it has been my steadfast friend and protector in all parts of the world—savage, heathen and civilized.”

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE ...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-flag-came-to-be-called-old-glory-18396/