Dawn reveals the flag still flying over Fort McHenry; Key starts writing on the back of a letter
All through the night of September 13, British bomb ships had thrown shells at Fort McHenry, the last thing standing between the Royal Navy and Baltimore's harbor. Francis Scott Key, a Georgetown lawyer aboard a truce ship on a mission to free a captured doctor, had no way of knowing who held the fort until first light. At dawn on September 14, 1814, he saw Mary Pickersgill's 30-by-42-foot flag still raised over the ramparts, and began writing lines on the back of a letter in his pocket. He finished the poem that evening at Baltimore's Indian Queen Hotel.
Key's four stanzas, printed as a broadside three days later, gave the young republic something it lacked after the White House had been burned weeks earlier: a story of its own flag surviving the worst a great power could throw at it. Congress made it the national anthem in 1931, but Americans had already been singing it at ballgames and ceremonies for decades. The song stuck in part because of that image: a flag still there at dawn.
QWas the giant flag over Fort McHenry raised specifically to defy the British?
No. Historians long claimed the oversized flag was hoisted to taunt the retreating Royal Navy, but that story does not hold up. Fort McHenry flew the smaller storm flag during the actual bombardment, and Mary Pickersgill's 30-by-42-foot garrison flag went up the next morning simply because it was the fort's regular reveille flag, run up every day at dawn regardless of what had happened the night before. Major George Armistead's men were following routine, not staging a gesture for Key's benefit. The timing was dramatic, but the flag went up on routine, not as a calculated insult to Cochrane's fleet.
QWhat happened to the British commander who marched on Baltimore before the bombardment even began?
Major-General Robert Ross, who had led the force that burned Washington three weeks earlier, never lived to see Fort McHenry shelled. He was killed on September 12 at the Battle of North Point, two days before Key wrote his poem, shot by American skirmishers as British troops advanced on Baltimore by land. His death removed the officer coordinating the ground assault that was meant to work in tandem with Cochrane's naval bombardment. Command shifted to Colonel Arthur Brooke, whose infantry stalled short of the city's defenses. Ross's death is one reason the land assault never pressed home while the fleet pounded the fort through the night.
QWhat exact words became attached to Key's poem to turn it into a singable song?
Within days of the September 17 broadside, someone paired Key's verses with the melody of "To Anacreon in Heaven," a British gentlemen's club drinking song written decades earlier for London's Anacreontic Society. The tune already had a wide range and a rowdy, celebratory feel suited to toasting. That a British drinking song now carried American war verses went almost unremarked at the time. Newspapers up and down the coast ran the combined words and tune that same autumn, and the pairing stuck for over a century before Congress ever made it official in 1931.
