Frederick: Where Barbara Frietchie Defied Stonewall

Frederick, Maryland sits at one of the great crossroads of American history. Laid out in seventeen forty-five by Daniel Dulany and settled by Germans pushing into the western Maryland backcountry, the town grew quickly on the strength of fertile farmland and its position along the main road connecting the eastern seaboard to the Ohio frontier.

But it is the Civil War that burned Frederick into the national memory. In September of eighteen sixty-two, Confederate General Robert E. Lee launched his first invasion of the North, and his Army of Northern Virginia marched straight through town. Streets that had known nothing but wagon traffic and market days suddenly filled with gray-clad soldiers. Local Unionists stayed inside. A ninety-five-year-old widow named Barbara Fritchie did not.

Fritchie had lived through the Revolution and seven decades of the young republic. When Confederate troops came down Patrick Street, she leaned from her dormer window and waved a Union flag. The specific incident is debated by historians, and the Confederate general who may or may not have responded was likely not Stonewall Jackson himself but another officer. None of that dimmed what the moment became.

Poet John Greenleaf Whittier heard the story second-hand and published his poem Barbara Frietchie in The Atlantic Monthly in eighteen sixty-three. Its most famous lines, attributed to Jackson ordering his men to spare the old woman and her flag, made Fritchie a household name across the Union. The poem was read in parlors and schoolrooms for generations. Abraham Lincoln reportedly could recite it from memory.

Days after Lee's troops passed through Frederick, they met the Union Army at Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg. The bloodiest single day in American history was born of movements that ran through these streets. Frederick served as a massive Union hospital in the aftermath, its churches and public buildings filling with thousands of wounded men.

Today the Barbara Fritchie House on West Patrick Street is a nineteen twenty-seven reconstruction of the original. The town's entire historic district reflects the layered complexity of a border-state city that housed both armies and buried their dead.