Blue and the Gray (I), The

DESCRIPTION: "A mother's gift to her country's cause is a story yet untold, She had three sons...." All three boys died at war. Two died for the Confederacy in the Civil War; a third died for the Union in Santiago. The singer hopes mother and sons will meet in heaven.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1922
KEYWORDS: war death Civilwar mother
FOUND IN: US
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Pound-AmericanBalladsAndSongs, 56, p. 129, "The Blue and the Gray" (1 text)
Spaeth-ReadEmAndWeep, p. 202, "The Blue and the Gray" (1 tune, partial text)
ST LPnd129 (Full)
Roud #4984
NOTES [182 words]: There were soldiers who fought in both the Civil War and Spanish-American War; a leading example is Joseph Wheeler, a Confederate cavalry general who was also a Major General at San Juan Hill and the siege of Santiago. M. Calbraith Butler was another Confederate cavalry general who also served in the later war. And then there was Johnny Clem, who joined the Confederate forces at age nine, and retired from the U. S. army as a general in 1916.
Still, the odds of one mother having a child die at Chickamauga (1863), Appomattox (i.e. probably Saylor's Creek in 1865, though very few men actually died there), and Santiago (1898) must be considered slight; the final son would surely have been a fairly senior officer, unlikely to be hurt -- and what are the odds that the mother would still be alive in 1898 anyway? She would have had to be in her seventies at least.
The feeling, though, is probably appropriate for this era of horrid sentimentality.
There were, of course, many poems of this name in the period shortly after the Civil War. Few had any more literary merit than this piece. - RBW
Last updated in version 5.0
File: LPnd129

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