“'Shoot,
if you must, this old gray head,
But
spare your country's flag,' she said.
A
shade of sadness, a blush of shame,
Over
the face of the leader came;
The
nobler nature within him stirred
To
life at that woman's deed and word;
'Who
touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies
like a dog! March on!’ he said.”—John Greenleaf Whittier, "Barbara Frietchie," The Atlantic Monthly, October 1863
I
don’t recall reading this poem by the New England abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)
when I was in elementary school more than 40 years ago. It’s probably even less
likely for today’s schoolchildren.
But
there was a time in this country when you couldn’t attend a school pageant,
celebrate the Fourth of July, or open a school reading primer without
encountering this tribute to patriotism.
It’s
easy to see why today's critics might view the poem condescendingly. It
speaks of a binary world where judgment is easy (Confederate flag=bad, American
flag=good). Its rhymed-couplet structure is simple, without elaborate symbolism or allusions. It doesn’t ask hard questions such
as why slavery hadn’t been destroyed by this time in the U.S., why the poor
(primarily then, Irish and German emigrants) couldn’t buy their way out of
being drafted in the Civil War while the rich could. It's a ballad about a public event, an exhortation to celebration, not free verse about a private sorrow.
But
the poem lives. You’ll find a hard time forgetting the event at the heart of
it, or the word picture.
But
was it true? You ask hard questions, Faithful Reader! Okay, pull up a chair and
let’s talk…
On
this date in 1862, Stonewall Jackson,
fresh from his key role in the Confederate victory at Second Manassas (which I
discussed in a post from last week),
passed through Frederick, Md., the leading edge of Robert E. Lee’s invasion of
the North. His troops, famous for following their leader on lightning-fast marches,
were indeed, as Whittier writes, a “famished rebel horde.”
Fredericksburg
did indeed have a resident named Barbara Frietchie, who, in fact, was even more than the “four score years and ten”
described by the poet. (Maybe it’s harder to rhyme “ninety-five”?) She was a friend
of “Star-Spangled Banner” composer Francis Scott Key, and, in a state rife with
Confederate sentiment, an outspoken Unionist.
But
at the time Jackson and his men passed through town, she was gravely ill (she died a
couple of months afterward). Associates of the Confederate general after the war claimed that he never met the elderly woman, and no contemporary newspaper accounts of the event survive. Moreover, there was a question of whether the Confederates
even marched past her home.
An
article in the Frederick News-Post in July recounted the research of
local-history enthusiast Chris Haugh into the matter. He recounts how Whittier
came to know of the alleged incident in the first place (he heard about it through
his friend, the popular fiction writer Eden Southworth, who lived in
Georgetown), as well as three similar incidents involving female supporters of
the flag when Jackson passed through (including teacher Mary Quantrill, a
Unionist in-law of the notorious William Quantrill, whose anti-Union gang in
Missouri included Jesse and Frank James).
(Interestingly, Haugh notes, despite her ardent Unionist sympathies, Frietchie owned a couple of slaves. Did the abolitionist Whittier know this fact, or simply leave it out of the poem?)
Whittier’s
poem appeared the year after the Confederate invasion of Maryland, by which
time not only Frietchie but also Jackson was dead. In acknowledging the humanity
of a fierce soldier who still respected the elderly and women, the poet
demonstrated the kind of attitude in the North that would pave the way for
reconciliation between the two sides after Appomattox.
Is
this poem, then, untrue? If the old Quaker poet were alive now, I imagine him,
drawing himself up, trying to control his wrath, as he answers: “Not more
untrue than what your two political parties are saying now in commercials—and a
good deal less hurtful, in the bargain!”
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