The War of 1812 is the only time in our history that the
United States was invaded by a foreign power. The war saw American troops
decisively defeated by the British at the Battle of Bladensburg, near
Washington, D.C., the flight of President James Madison and his wife Dolley,
and the burning of Washington itself. But this defeat was followed by a
great and unexpected victory at the Battle of Baltimore. This, as most
schoolchildren still know, was the inspiration for "The Star-Spangled
Banner." The author, Francis Scott Key, a lawyer and amateur poet, watched
the battle from a British boat where he was being held prisoner. After a
long night, he was elated to see that the fort guarding Baltimore Harbor had
not fallen, and he wrote, on the back of a letter, what were to become the
words of our national anthem.
Tastes change, even in something like a national anthem, and it is not
unusual (or was not before Sept. 11, 2001) to hear people objecting to the
unabashed patriotism of "The Star-Spangled Banner." But Key’s poem is not
mere patriotic rhetoric. It is rooted in an important moment in our history
and in the joy that a simple citizen--not a hero or even a participant in
the battle--felt when the dawn revealed the American flag still flying over
Fort McHenry, and he knew that the real possibility of defeat had given way
to victory.
Perhaps we can come closer to recreating this feeling when we read an
account of the ignominious destruction of our capital city that preceded the
Battle of Baltimore and the triumph that gave us our national anthem. We
find them both in the following excerpts from Irvin Molotsky’s The Flag,
the Poet, and the Song: The Story of the Star-Spangled Banner.
--Editor
WASHINGTON BURNS
The Battle of Bladensburg and the subsequent burning of Washington came two
years into the War of 1812. The Americans had already lost Detroit in 1812
and burned York (now Toronto, Ontario) in 1813. In 1814, the British, who
had finally defeated Napoleon, could give full attention to their American
war.
The British began this phase of the war with a series of raids on towns in
Maryland and Virginia. Amazed that they were meeting so little resistance,
they advanced toward Washington, which was lightly guarded because the
government did not regard it as much of a military target. Strictly
speaking, the government was correct. Washington was a small, swampy town
without much in the way of military facilities, and it had just 8,208 people
in the 1810 census although nearby Alexandria, Va., had 7,227 people and
Georgetown 4,948. What the Americans had failed to take into account was the
attractiveness of Washington as a symbolic target, the locus of revenge for
the sacking and burning of York in Canada. At an emergency cabinet meeting
called by President Madison on July 1, 1814, Secretary of War John Armstrong
insisted that Washington was not at risk because the main target of the
British was Baltimore.
On their way to the capital, the greatest difficulty encountered by the
British came from the oppressive August heat of the Washington area. Colonel
Arthur Brooke, a British officer, who kept a diary throughout the American
campaign, wrote,
Our poor fellows [were] so tired from the long march of the
morning and the excessive heat of the day, that many of them in striving to
keep up fell down from actual fatigue and breathed their last.
On Aug. 24, the British force reached Bladensburg, Md., just
five miles from the White House. Bladensburg is on the eastern branch of the
Potomac, now known as the Anacostia River, and it was there that the
Americans attempted to make a stand. The British invasion force numbered
5,000, but only 1,500 soldiers, sailors, marines, and freed slaves were on
the lines as they attacked a force of 8,000 Americans. However, the
Americans were poorly equipped, poorly led, and poorly organized, many of
them citizens formed into militia units. The battle began at 1 p.m. and
ended in three hours, with the Americans thoroughly defeated and put to
flight. Most of the British force paused for a while at Bladensburg to
recover from the heat and the battle, while Major General Robert Ross, the
British army commander, took a reserve force on the road to Washington.
President Madison had witnessed the Battle of Bladensburg and, before
fleeing himself, sent his messenger, James Smith, a free black man, to ride
to the White House with an order for Madison’s wife, Dolley, to flee. She
was fearful but outwardly calm. Years later, Dolley Madison wrote, in a
re-creation of that day,
I am accordingly ready. I have pressed as many Cabinet
papers into trunks as to fill one carriage.... I am determined not to go
myself until I see Mr. Madison safe.... I hear of much hostility towards
him. Disaffection stalks around us. My friends and acquaintances are all
gone.
She forbade spiking the cannon at the north lawn of the
White House with an explosion because she feared that would panic the
residents of Washington. The dinner table would be set as if nothing
untoward were happening--in fact the table was set for 40 people--and ale,
cider, and wine were brought up from the White House cellar.
By midafternoon, Smith galloped up the White House drive and shouted that
everyone should flee. Dolley Madison insisted that the portrait of George
Washington by Gilbert Stuart be taken down, lest it fall into British hands,
and so it was saved and hangs today in the White House. Amid all this
confusion, servants continued dinner preparations, including decanting wine
into cut-glass bottles on the sideboard. Finally Mrs. Madison left, heading
for the safety of Virginia, though an hour later the thoroughly discouraged
President Madison returned to the White House and poured himself a glass of
wine.
Madison himself finally fled across the Potomac in the evening, joining
Dolley in Langley, Va., where they stayed with friends. Servants locked the
doors and followed him, as if a bolted door would hold back the invading
British. One servant took Mrs. Madison’s macaw for safekeeping to the
Octagon, one of Washington’s magnificent houses of that day, then being used
as a residence by the French minister to the United States, Louis Serurier.
When General Ross and his British navy counterpart, Rear Admiral George
Cockburn, arrived in Washington on the evening of Aug. 24, 1814, they
quickly put the city’s public buildings to the torch. First to be set afire
was the Capitol, but not before the British had a bit of fun. Admiral
Cockburn sat in the Speaker’s chair in the House of Representatives and
asked, "Shall this harbor of Yankee democracy be burned? All for it say
aye!" The resolution carried and the deed was done, and then a force of 150
men set out down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. They broke in and
found the set dinner table, and the officers enjoyed the food and wine while
the lower ranks prepared to burn the building. Rags soaked in oil were lit
and the White House went up in flames.
Besides the White House, then called the President’s House as it had not yet
gotten its coat of white paint, and the Capitol, the British burned the
Treasury, the War Department building, an arsenal, and American war
supplies. The Library of Congress was then housed in the Capitol and lost
its collection of 3,000 books in the fire. The library was re-established in
1815 when Thomas Jefferson sold it his personal library of 6,487 books for
$23,950, the equivalent of more than $217,000 today.
Although the Americans had burned and looted public and private buildings in
York during the invasion of Canada, a fact that is much better known to
Canadians than it is to Americans, the British refrained from taking full
revenge and, for the most part, destroyed public buildings only.
Margaret Bayard Smith, who established the Washington newspaper, The
National Intelligencer, with her husband Samuel Harrison Smith, and was
a prolific writer for it, left a vivid account of the British attack on
Washington in letters to her family. The invading British soldiers, she
wrote, "never halted one moment, but marched in a solid mass--disregarding
the dead bodies before them." She lamented that "our city was taken, the
bridges and public buildings burnt, our troops flying in every direction."
She reported seeing many dead horses and "nothing but blackened walls
remained" at the once majestic government buildings and offices. "We looked
at the public buildings," Mrs. Smith wrote, "but none were so thoroughly
destroyed as the President’s House. Those beautiful pillars in the
Representatives Hall were crack’d and broken. The roof, that noble dome,
painted and carved with such beauty and skill, lay in ashes in the cellars
beneath, smoldering ruins yet smoking." The Smiths visited the Madisons, and
Mrs. Smith reported, "Mrs. M. seem’d much depressed, she could hardly speak
without tears."
Colonel Arthur Brooke, the British officer who kept a diary of the campaign,
wrote that the invaders burned "the Senate house (supposed to be one of the
finest buildings in the world)." He went on,
The President’s house, in which was found every thing ready
for Dinner, table laid, Wine in, etc., etc., etc. I think this was one of
the finest, and at the same time, the most awful sights I ever
witnessed--the Columns of fire issuing from the houses, and the Dock yard,
the explosions of Magazines at intervals, the sky illuminated from the
blazes.
Brooke was amazed by the lack of opposition: "Next morning
[we] retired a little from the Town," he wrote,
as we could scarce think the Americans (from their immense
population, and a well trained Artillery) would tamely allow a handful of
British Soldiers to advance thro’ the heart of their Country, and burn &
destroy, the Capitol of the United States.
Secretary of War John Armstrong, who had insisted that the
British would not attack Washington, resigned, but the episode had little
strategic importance. The humiliation suffered by the United States did,
however, set into motion a unity, a sense of nationhood, that was to be
raised further in the next attack by the British, the attempt to capture
Baltimore.
Twenty-four hours after he arrived in Washington, General Ross marched his
troops back to the ships still at Benedict, Md., on the Patuxent River, and
the invaders set sail on Sept. 10 to attack Baltimore, a much richer target
than the provincial Washington.
Here is where Francis Scott Key, a lawyer and soon-to-be writer of "The
Star-Spangled Banner," enters the story.
Key was enlisted to help rescue an American physician, William Beanes, a
resident of Upper Marlboro, Md., not far from the site of the Battle of
Bladensburg. Dr. Beanes had been arrested by the British, who mistakenly
thought him to be a recent immigrant from Scotland. This was a more serious
accusation than it seems.
At the time, Britain believed that anyone who was born British remained
British forever. The United States, on the other hand, maintained that any
foreigner could become a citizen after five years of residence and after
meeting some requirements. (The conflict between these two views of
citizenship was one of the causes of the War of 1812: Seamen on American
ships regularly were being seized by British naval officers on the grounds
that they were British and were probably deserters from the King’s navy.)
Although Dr. Beanes was, in fact, a third-generation American, the
accusation that he was born a British citizen meant the British could try
him for treason.
Beanes was in immediate danger, too. When he was arrested, his captors made
him sit on a mule facing the hind end. "With bare feet tied under the
animal’s belly," an early account said,
he was herded throughout the night and the next day to where
the invading army was encamped. From there he was shipped as brig prisoner
on the flagship HMS Tonnant down the Chesapeake Bay.
It got worse when Beanes boarded the ship, where some of his
captors threatened to hang him from the nearest yardarm.
Key went to President Madison and got permission to deal directly with the
commander of the British army, General Ross, on Dr. Beanes’s behalf. He set
off from Washington on Sept. 3, accompanied by Colonel John S. Skinner, an
American prisoner-of-war exchange officer, showing a flag of truce and
carrying a letter arguing that Beanes had been an unarmed citizen who should
not have been arrested. On Sept. 7, they arrived at the Tonnant.
However, the British could not release Beanes, or even Key and Skinner,
while they were in the middle of planning an attack on Baltimore, lest the
Americans tell their army what they knew of the plans.
It is hard today to imagine the importance of Baltimore in 1814. Today, it
is an attractive, busy city, but not as important as it was then. In the
1810 census, Baltimore, with 46,555 residents, was the third-largest city in
the United States, trailing only New York City (96,373) and Philadelphia
(53,722). Baltimore had an excellent harbor that made it a center of
shipping, shipbuilding, commerce, and industry, and it had a strategic
position at the head of the Patapsco River, which connected it to the
Chesapeake Bay. Since the British had naval superiority in the Chesapeake,
they would approach Baltimore by ship. And so the British, with Key, Colonel
Skinner, and Dr. Beanes aboard their flagship, headed toward Baltimore,
where they would lose the battle and America would get its "Star-Spangled
Banner."
THE STAR FORT SURVIVES
On the evening of Sept. 11, 1814, a balmy Sunday evening lit by a bright
moon shining from a cloudless sky, the British fleet arrived at the mouth of
the Patapsco River. This put the British approximately 12 miles from
Baltimore by water and 15 by land. At about two o’clock on the morning of
Sept. 12, the British force started going ashore. One American account puts
the invaders’ strength twice as high as the British report of 4,000. On the
other hand, Colonel Arthur Brooke, in his campaign diary, put the British
force at 3,000 men facing 12,000 Americans. It seems that winners are prone
to exaggerate the size of their enemy--it enhances their accomplishment--and
losers are just as likely to understate the size of their own force--it
suggests a cause for the defeat.
The British carried rations for three days, enough time, they calculated, to
capture Baltimore. Major General Robert Ross, the British army commander,
had said he would eat his next Sunday dinner there. While accounts of the
opposing armies’ sizes varied greatly, there is no doubt that the British,
who had just defeated Napoleon, were better trained than the Americans, who
were largely part-time militiamen.
The residents of Baltimore knew what to expect if the British could reach
their city, since they had received word of the burning of Washington and,
in fact, could see the flames of the burning capital 35 miles away. A
suggestion of desperation appears in this notice published by a committee
formed to defend the city:
Elderly men who are able to carry a firelock, and willing to
render a last service to their country & posterity; are requested to meet at
the Court House at 11 o’clock tomorrow, to form a company and be prepared to
march in conjunction with the troops expected to move against the enemy.
The Americans quickly fell back, and the British land force
advanced toward Baltimore. The next day, Tuesday, Sept. 13, the British
fleet reached a point 2 miles below Fort McHenry, a star-shaped installation
with cannons installed on each of the points.
As the British prepared to attack Baltimore, Francis Scott Key, Colonel John
Skinner, and Dr. William Beanes were transferred from the British flagship
to a sloop tethered to a British ship about 8 miles below Fort McHenry. A
number of British marines remained on Key’s boat to make sure no escape
would be attempted.
On Sept. 13, 1814, at seven o’clock in the morning, the British bombardment
of Baltimore began. This was no Washington. This was a major American city,
defended by Fort McHenry in the harbor and a considerable force of soldiers
on land under the command of Major General Samuel Smith, who deployed them
to meet the anticipated land attack to the east of Baltimore. The British
bombardment included 1,500 bombshells fired from the ships at Fort McHenry,
but the large naval guns of the fort’s battery kept the enemy from moving in
close.
It was here that the British overreached. Sir Alexander Cochrane, who was in
command of the British expedition, ordered three gunships to move closer to
increase the chances of their damaging the fort, but this brought them
within range of Fort McHenry’s guns, and Major George Armistead, the fort’s
commander, ordered that a cannonade be directed at them. The American
response forced the three gunships to withdraw after half an hour, and one
of them, the Erebus, was so damaged that it had to be towed to
safety. The two sides exchanged cannon fire into the night, during which a
British force left the fleet by barge and attempted to capture nearby Fort
Covington. This led the Fort McHenry gunners to turn their fire on them as
well, helping to drive them off. It was this terrific exchange of
cannon--the noise, the flashes of explosions--that Francis Scott Key
witnessed from his position on the sloop.
As the river stalemate continued, the British land force moved toward
Baltimore and General Smith then concentrated his defenders in its path. The
British, disheartened by the loss of their army commander, Major General
Ross, who had been killed by an American sniper, and their strength depleted
by battle, now calculated that they were far outnumbered by the Americans.
Because of the guns of Fort McHenry and because of the obstruction from
20-odd boats that the Americans had sunk in the river, the British army was
deprived of covering fire from the ships on the river. When a small flanking
naval attack was repulsed, the British hopes for capturing Baltimore
vanished.
The British fleet continued the bombardment of Fort McHenry to cover the
withdrawal of the army, ending its attack on Sept. 14, twenty-five hours
after it began, and sailing down the Patapsco River two hours later. On
Sept. 15, the withdrawing British army, its movements shielded by a heavy
rain, reached the mouth of the Patapsco and went back aboard the ships. Two
days later, the British fleet sailed off. The Americans had won at
Baltimore.
THE POET’S VIEW
During the 25-hour bombardment, Francis Scott Key, still held hostage on a
British boat in Baltimore Harbor, got a terrifying picture of Fort McHenry
under attack. The bombshells that were part of the British attack were
designed to detonate as they neared their targets, the "bombs bursting in
air," as Key was to write soon after the battle. Key’s "rockets’ red glare"
came from the British use of the Congreve rocket, which was invented in 1804
by Sir William Congreve, a British artillery officer, but had its roots in
13th-century China. Congreve was inspired by fireworks, and today’s Fourth
of July rockets are similar to Congreve’s. A Congreve rocket had a long
stick attached to it. The stick was placed in a pipe held upright by a
frame; the rocket was ignited and it burst out of the pipe. It was basically
a big and deadly bottle rocket. The rockets were not very accurate but could
be fired in a devastating barrage. Thirteen-inch mortar shells fired from
cannons added more devastation to the "bombs bursting in air."
With the rain and the smoke from the bombardment, Key and his American
friends had no way of knowing how the battle was going. He waited for the
dawn. "At last," he later wrote,
it came. A bright streak of gold mingled with crimson shot
athwart the eastern sky, followed by another and still another, as the
morning sun rose in the fullness of his glory, lifting the "mists of the
deep," crowning a "Heaven-blest land" with a new victory and grandeur.
There was not yet a national anthem, so when it became clear
that Fort McHenry had withstood the British attack, a huge star-spangled
banner was run up the flagpole to the tune of "Yankee Doodle."
Contrary to popular belief, that flag is not the one that flew over Fort
McHenry during the British bombardment. It was raining then, and forts did
not fly their prized flags in the rain. Instead, the flag flying at Fort
McHenry that night was a smaller and less valuable banner called a "storm
flag." By dawn’s early light, if we may borrow a bit of poetry here, the
rain had stopped and Armistead had a magnificent new flag that had
just been made for Fort McHenry run up, and that is what Key then saw. That
version is supported by an eyewitness account from a young British naval
officer, Robert J. Barrett, who wrote that, as the British sailed away, the
Americans "hoisted a most superb and splendid ensign on their battery."
Key described the events of that day in a speech in Frederick, Md., years
later:
I saw the flag of my country waving over a city, the
strength and pride of my native state, a city devoted to plunder and
desolation by its assailants. I witnessed the preparation for its assaults.
I saw the array of its enemies as they advanced to the attack. I heard the
sound of battle. The noise of the conflict fell upon my listening ear and
told me that the brave and free had met the invaders.
There is an old legend in American history that Abe Lincoln
scribbled the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope. This is not
true. But is this the source of the legend? Key began to write "The
Star-Spangled Banner" on the back of a letter he had in his pocket. After
the British left, Key wrote more during the trip from the harbor to
Baltimore City and wrote the rest of it in the Indian Queen Hotel.
Key’s brother-in-law, Judge Joseph H. Nicholson, the second in command at
Fort McHenry, was very much taken with Key’s poem and took it to a local
printing shop, where it was set in type and printed in handbill form. The
copies were circulated around Baltimore under the title "The Defence of Fort
McHenry," a name evidently given to it by Nicholson.
A descendant of Key’s, Francis Key-Smith, took up the story in a biography
of Key that he wrote:
Copies of the song were struck off in handbill form and
promiscuously distributed on the street. Catching with popular favor like
prairie fire, it spread in every direction, was read and discussed, until,
in less than an hour, the news was all over the city.
Picked up by a crowd of soldiers assembled, some accounts put it, about
Captain McCauley’s tavern, next to Holiday Street Theater, others have it
around their tents on the outskirts of the city. Ferdinand Durang, a
musician, adapted the words to the old tune of "To Anacreon in Heaven," and,
mounting a chair, rendered it in fine style.
On the evening of the same day it was again rendered upon the stage of the
Holiday Street Theater by an actress, and the theater is said to have gained
thereby a national reputation. In about a fortnight it had reached New
Orleans and was publicly played by a military band, and shortly thereafter
was heard in nearly, if not all, the principal cities and towns throughout
the country.
On Sept. 20, 1814, "The Star-Spangled Banner," by then given
its new name by Key, was published as a poem in The Baltimore Patriot
and then reprinted by other newspapers around the country. At some
point, the notation "Tune: To Anacreon in Heaven" was added.
"To Anacreon in Heaven" was an English drinking song that was enormously
popular in both Britain and the United States. It was first performed in
Baltimore earlier in 1814 and had become so popular that people wrote many
parodies of it. Key himself had used it in composing a poem in honor of
Stephen Decatur, the American naval hero, and he probably had the tune in
his head as he composed "The Star-Spangled Banner" because his words fit the
rhythm of "Anacreon" exactly.
The use of "Anacreon" came with a price. Americans have struggled to sing
"The Star-Spangled Banner" ever since because its range is outside most
people’s abilities. Nevertheless, "The Star-Spangled Banner" increased in
popularity steadily over the years and finally was adopted as America’s
national anthem on March 3, 1931.
It could be said that the 25-hour ordeal Fort McHenry withstood under
British guns on Sept. 13--14, 1814, was the day the United States became a
nation. Certainly Americans singing Key’s song found a greater devotion to
the union, setting into motion a love of the flag as well, although that
reverence did not reach its present level until the Civil War. America does
not have the kings and queens of royalty, and there is not an officially
sanctioned religion. It has the greatest democratic document ever written,
the Constitution, and when the nation salutes the flag or sings Key’s song,
there is a strength greater than any throne or church. This was Key’s
shining moment, his one great good deed, something that was never to be
repeated.
