For the Dear Old Flag I Die!

DESCRIPTION: "For the dear old flag I die, said the wounded drummer boy, Mother, press your lips to mine, O, they bring me peace and joy, 'Tis the last time on earth." After that maudlin opening, the boy tells his mother not to grieve because he died in a good cause.
AUTHOR: Words; George Cooper / Music: Stephen C. Foster
EARLIEST DATE: 1863 (sheet music)
KEYWORDS: Civilwar mother death
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Jul 1-3, 1863 - Battle of Gettysburg
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Saunders/Root-MusicOfStephenCFoster-Vol2, pp. 321-324+449, "For the Dear Old Flag I Die!" (1 text, 1 tune)
Silber-SongsOfTheCivilWar, pp. 27-29, "For the Dear Old Flag I Die" (1 text, 1 tune)
NOTES [375 words]: The subtitle on this piece is "The last words of a brave little drummer boy who was fatally wounded at the battle of Gettysburg." This (like a lot of the Cooper/Foster collaborations, which consisted of Cooper scribbling out some words and Foster writing out a tune without even playing it on piano or guitar) was very fast work; the Battle of Gettysburg took place in early July 1863, and although we don't know just when the sheet music was published, Saunders/Root report that the song was advertised on October 5, 1863.
There is no sign that this ever went into tradition, and thankfully so. If you want a decent drummer boy song, try Will S. Hays's "The Drummer Boy of Shiloh." Frankly, I suspect that that song, not a report from Gettysburg, inspired Cooper to write this lyric.
Although it's interesting to note that Cooper himself just missed the Battle of Gettysburg; according to Milligan, p. 105, he was a member of the 22nd New York regiment, a unit raised in 1861 (although Cooper, according to Milligan, did not join until 1862) and mustered out upon expiration of its two year term of service on June 19, 1863 (NYReport, volume 2, p. 317) -- just two weeks before Gettysburg. Cooper was very lucky to get out when he did; the 22nd New York had been part of the union First Corps, which was slaughtered on the first day at Gettysburg, being hit so hard that the corps was organized out of existence the next year.
Cooper certainly saw men killed in battle, though; in the course of its career, the 22nd had 102 men die -- 73 in combat and 29 of illness (Fox, p. 477). According to Fox, p. 31, at Second Bull Run, the 22nd lost 46 men killed out of 379 engaged; that included nine of 24 officers present plus ten others wounded (Fox, p. 39), which was the highest rate of officer losses for a single regiment in the entire war. (It perhaps didn't help that the regiment's surgeon was dismissed from the army on November 24, 1862, the only officer of the regiment to suffer that fate; NYReport, volume 2, pp. 317-319). The regiment had a good reputation, and was known as part of Hatch's "Iron Brigade" until John Gibbon's command, through its extraordinary conduct, earned the name "Iron Brigade" for the rest of the war (Fox, p. 117). - RBW
Bibliography

Fox: William F. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War 1861-1865, 1881; fourth edition 1888 (I use a photoreproduction of the 1898 Albany Press edition which does not list a publisher!)
Milligan: Harold Vincent Milligan, Stephen Collins Foster: A Biography of America's Folk-Song Composer, 1920 (I use the 2004 University of Hawaii reprint)
NYReport: (no author listed), State of New York Annual Report of the Adjutant General 1868, 3 volumes, Charles van Benthuysen & Sons, 1868

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File: SCWF027

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