In the American Civil War, the U.S. flag was flown by the Union against the Confederacy. Union Army general Benjamin Franklin Butler ordered the 1862 execution for treason of William B. Mumford, who had removed a Union flag in occupied New Orleans. An apocryphal tale of Barbara Fritchie preventing Confederate soldiers dishonouring her Union flag was propagated by John Greenleaf Whittier's 1863 poem ", which contains the famous lines: