Early in the morning on September 23, 1810, armed rebels stormed Fort San Carlos at Baton Rouge and killed two Spanish soldiers "in a sharp and bloody firefight that wrested control of the region from the Spanish". The rebels unfurled the flag of the new republic, a single white star on a blue field made by Melissa Johnson, wife of Major Isaac Johnson, commander of the Feliciana cavalry engaged in the attack. (The "Bonnie Blue Flag" that was flown fifty years later at the start of the American Civil War resembles it.)