The Flag over Fort McHenry

Sure it's hard to sing, but you have to give "The Star-Spangled Banner" (which you may have sung to fireworks this weekend) huge points for sincerity.

When Francis Scott Key (1779-1843) strained to see whether the U.S. flag was still flying over Fort McHenry on the morning of September 14, 1814, he wasn't just a curious bystander. He was a virtual prisoner of the British navy, which had been bombarding the fort for more than 20 hours.

Key Witness

Why did this Washington, DC, lawyer have a front-row seat to observe one of the War of 1812's most important battles? Because of a client, of course. Key had been persuaded to negotiate the release of an elderly Maryland physician, Dr. William Beanes, whom the British had imprisoned after they captured and burned the U.S. capital in August 1814.

Key enlisted the help of John Skinner, a U.S. government agent who served as a liaison to the British forces. On September 7, under a white flag of truce, they approached the British fleet and made their case for the freeing of Dr. Beanes. The British brass agreed. Yet they also decided that these Americans had seen too much of the preparations for the attack on Baltimore. The Americans were not permitted to head home until after the battle.

The British attack on Fort McHenry began early on September 13 in a pouring rain. All through the day and into the night, rockets and shells battered the fort that guarded Baltimore Harbor. The British ships carried mortars that could lob bombs over a target from two miles away. The high-trajectory shells exploded above the heads of Americans in the fort, raining shrapnel down on them. Fires raged wherever the shells landed. As many as 1,800 bombs were fired at the fort. The U.S. commander estimated that 400 fell within its walls.

Defiant Poem

Key watched the battle illuminated by what he later called "the rockets' red glare." When, on the morning of September 14, the shelling stopped, the Americans watching must have feared that the commander of the fort had surrendered. But then they saw the American flag flying triumphantly over the battlements. British commanders had judged Baltimore too costly a prize and had ordered their forces to withdraw.

Key, an amateur poet, pulled an old letter out of his pocket and scribbled a few lines on the back. He worked on the rest of the verses for a day or so. A few days after the battle, he showed his poem to some friends. One of them took it to the office of the Baltimore American, where it was printed as a broadside and distributed under the name "Defence of Fort M'Henry" to the fort's garrison.

More than a dozen newspapers, beginning with the Baltimore Patriot on September 20 and the Baltimore American on September 21, reprinted Key's poem in the next few weeks. Most noted that the words could be sung to a popular tune called "To Anacreon in Heaven" by John Stafford Smith, whose melody had become a sort of theme song for a gentlemen's club (called the Anacreontic Society) that met in London in the late 1700s.

"The Star-Spangled Banner" gained popularity over the years, particularly in the North during the Civil War. But the song did not become America's national anthem until 1931, when Congress made it so. In 1949, Congress decreed that a flag fly continuously at Key's birthplace in Maryland--a perpetual answer to Key's anxious question: "O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave?" Yes, Mr. Key, it does.

--Colleen Kelly