The main cause in this story is when Barbara Frietchie stops the soldiers from shooting at her house. The effects of that event are significant and the soldiers change their mind and stop. From that point in the story the story’s action keeps going down and down to the denouement. In the beginning it was said that the soldiers came into town all patriotic marching into town like they knew that they were the boss.(This is text evidence but I didn’t pull it directly out of the text I read the text and got text evidence that way) This means that the people of that town, honestly, let the soldiers have that right by locking themselves in their house and locking their doors and taking down their flags. The soldiers used that action to make them