The summer of 1814 had been a devastating one for the fledgling nation of America. The end of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe meant the mighty British military could turn its full attention to The War of 1812 and recapturing its former colonies.
A series of attacks culminated with the siege of Washington, DC on August 24th
The American government was forced to flee, and the White House, the Capitol, the Treasury, and the Washington Navy Yard burned. Hope for the young nation, it seemed, burned with them.
Across the Potomac River, the British raided Alexandria, Virginia. By early September, they were poised to take the entire eastern seaboard and with it, any chance of America surviving as an independent nation.
In Baltimore, a 35 year-old lawyer named Francis Scott Key set sail in the Chesapeake Bay to negotiate for an exchange of prisoners being held on the HMS Tonnant, including a civilian, Dr. William Beanes.
Key and fellow attorney John Stuart Skinner talked for days with the Tonnant’s three commanding officers and secured Dr. Beanes’ release, but in doing so learned too much of the British Navy’s plans.
A fleet was already on its way to the Chesapeake Bay, and on the night of September 13th, it would lead the invasion of Baltimore by destroying Fort McHenry. That, the British figured, would surely cripple America’s resistance and force its surrender by the end of the year.
After the Battle of Baltimore, America the nation and America the idea would be ended forever.
Of course, once Key and the other two Americans learned of these plans, they couldn’t be allowed to sail back and warn the thousand troops stationed at Fort McHenry, so they were to be held captive until Baltimore fell.
When the 13th arrived, Key, Skinner, and Beanes were allowed to return to their sloop, but with a heavy contingent of British troops who kept the ship anchored eight miles away from Fort McHenry.
Key paced the deck anxiously as storm clouds gathered overhead. He glanced at Fort McHenry, and saw a giant American flag being raised in defiance of the advancing British forces.
A thick haze began to envelop the bay as the rain started to fall, but through it Key could see dozens of British ships moving into position.
Suddenly, the sky erupted in cannon fire.
“It seemed as though mother earth had opened and was vomiting shot and shell in a
sheet of fire and brimstone,” Key wrote later.
But each time that fire would rain down on Fort McHenry, o’er the rampart Key watched and could see the flag flying and he knew that, for the time being at least, the fort—and America along with it—had not fallen.
Proudly, he hailed, from the twilight’s last gleaming through the perilous fight that lit up the stormy night sky, the flag that meant America’s last hope for survival was still alive.
Key held onto that hope with each rocket’s red glare and each bomb bursting in air that allowed him to dream that maybe the thousand brave men at Fort McHenry could turn back the strongest Navy on earth and maybe, just maybe, the dream that was America would live for another night.
But the harbor air grew too thick with fog and smoke for Key to see anything except the flashes of light against the clouds that filled him with dread. Then, by the dawn’s early light, the smoke began to clear and the morning sun broke through the clouds and Key could see the American flag, dirty and tattered,
but still flying above Fort McHenry.
Miraculously, the strongest Navy in the world had been turned back. Only four of the thousand American troops inside the fort had been killed. The City of Baltimore, and the young nation, had survived.
As the officers on board the HMS Tonnant had predicted, the battle was a turning point, and the war ended just a few months later…only with the British surrendering to the Americans at Fort McHenry.
When the smoke cleared in the early morning hours of September 14th, though, all Francis Scott Key knew was the sheer joy he was feeling, so he tried his best to capture it by jotting down a poem he called “The Defense of Fort M’Henry,” which was published in two newspapers in Baltimore six days later.
The poem, which Key’s brother-in-law noticed fit the melody of a popular tune by composer John Stafford Smith, was reprinted in newspapers across the nation. The resulting song became known “The Star-Spangled Banner” and in 1931 was officially designated as America’s National Anthem—the perfect anthem for a nation that has stood, like the flag above Fort McHenry, as a shining light for freedom even when the forces of oppression lined up against it seem darkest.
Francis Scott Key saw all of that when the smoke cleared on that freedom’s new dawn 200 years ago, and it became the final stanza of his poem, a stanza that has been all but forgotten today, but whose theme is utterly timeless:
Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
