20 pages • 40 minutes read
John Greenleaf WhittierBarbara Frietchie
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1863A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: The Fireside Poets
Whittier is often referred to as one of the fireside poets, who are also sometimes called the schoolroom or household poets. In addition to Whittier, the fireside poets were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809-1894), and James Russell Lowell (1819-1891). They came mainly from the northeastern part of the country, and they were all popular, successful, influential poets in their day, providing moral edification as well as the delight of poetry to thousands of readers. Families would read their poetry aloud as they gathered around the fire in the winter—hence the term fireside poets. These were the first American poets to establish a reputation and a readership that rivaled the great British poets such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson and William Wordsworth. They wrote many long narrative poems in conventional poetic forms with rhyme and meter, often in a way that people found easy to learn by heart and recite for themselves. Longfellow, for example, the most renowned of the five, was famous for his epic poem The Song of Hiawatha as well as the shorter “Paul Revere’s Ride,” which celebrates an episode in the life of one of the heroes of the Revolutionary War. Bryant made a name for himself early in his career with the elegy, “Thanatopsis” (1817), a poem that is still read today. The popularity of the fireside poets declined during the early 1900s, not long after the last of them, Holmes, died. Holmes’s shorter poems, “Old Ironsides,” “The Last Leaf,” and “The Chambered Nautilus” are still read today.
Historical Context: Barbara Fritchie
Barbara Fritchie was a historical character who lived in Frederick, Maryland. (In the poem, her last name is spelled “Frietchie.”) She was born in 1766 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and died in Frederick in December 1862, a little over three months after the incident described in Whittier’s ballad. She was 96 years old. Barbara was a well-known citizen of the town, and when the Civil War broke out she had firm Unionist beliefs, like the majority of Frederick residents. By that time she was a widow, her husband, who owned a glove-making business, having died in 1860.
There is no record of the incident in the poem taking place as Whittier presents it, and many people, even soon after the poem was published, have questioned its veracity. The incident was not mentioned in newspapers or in any surviving letters. Some researchers claim that the Confederate troops never even directly passed by Barbara Fritchie’s house, and some accounts say that in any case, Barbara was sick at the time and would not have been able to wave a flag.
Over the years, there has been some suggestion that the woman who defied the Confederates was in fact Mary Quantrill, who lived close to Barbara on Patrick Street. Quantrill operated a private school, and on the day the Confederate soldiers arrived, “She and her students were apparently waving small flags as Rebel soldiers passed by,” wrote Karen Gardner for the Frederick News-Post in 2016. Drawing on the work of local researcher Chris Haugh, Gardner continues, “Although soldiers attempted to take her flags, an officer had words with Quantrill, and then told the soldiers to stop. ‘I salute you, but not your flag,’ he said. To his men, he said, ‘Nobody harm her. She had some moxie.’”
Whittier was aware of the questions that had arisen about the story’s authenticity. He wrote a note to the poem that appeared nearly 30 years later, in 1892, in The Poetical Works in Four Volumes:
This poem was written in strict conformity to the account of the incident as I had it from respectable and trustworthy sources. It has since been the subject of a good deal of conflicting testimony, and the story was probably incorrect in some of its details. It is admitted by all that Barbara Frietchie was no myth, but a worthy and highly esteemed gentlewoman, intensely loyal and a hater of the Slavery Rebellion, holding her Union flag sacred and keeping it with her Bible; that when the Confederates halted before her house, and entered her dooryard, she denounced them in vigorous language, shook her cane in their faces, and drove them out; and when General Burnside’s troops followed close upon Jackson’s, she waved her flag and cheered them. It is stated that May Quantrell, a brave and loyal lady in another part of the city, did wave her flag in sight of the Confederates. It is possible that there has been a blending of the two incidents (Whittier, John Greenleaf. The Poetical Works in Four Volumes, 1892).
The truth of what happened that day can never be known for certain. The story may have been embellished and, as Whittier notes, perhaps separate incidents had been merged into one by the time the story reached him.
The Invasion of Maryland
General Robert E. Lee, who is mentioned once in the poem, was the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, which invaded Maryland on September 4 and reached Frederick two days later without opposition. General “Stonewall” Jackson led an advance force of 5,000 men down Market Street, and the rest of Lee’s army of 40,000 men followed without delay.
Jackson, who is one of the central figures in “Barbara Frietchie,” was one of the Confederacy’s most prominent generals, and his leadership was a vital element in many battles. He was nicknamed “Stonewall” after the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, in which another Confederate general commented that Jackson was “standing like a stone wall” in his refusal to allow the enemy to advance. Jackson would die less than one year after the Maryland campaign, succumbing to wounds received at the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863.
In the Maryland campaign, Lee hoped to recruit many young men from Frederick to reinforce his tired and hungry troops. On September 8, he issued a “Proclamation to the People of Maryland,” in which he tried to convince them that they had been deprived of their rights by the U.S. government and that the people of the South wanted to help them regain their freedom. The citizens of Frederick, however, showed little enthusiasm for the rebel cause.
The rebel army left Frederick on September 9, and the Maryland campaign would last only for another nine days or so. The Battle of Antietam, which took place on September 17 near Sharpsburg, just 28 miles from Frederick, was the bloodiest single-day battle in U.S. history. There were nearly 23,000 casualties, counting dead, wounded, and missing. Although militarily the battle was indecisive, Lee retreated south of the Potomac the following day, returning to Virginia.
