It is March 22nd. Welcome to Episode 81 of History in a Year. Today, the United States finds its anthem in the rockets’ red glare. After burning Washington D.C., the British fleet sets its sights on the wealthy, heavily fortified city of Baltimore. We stand on the deck of a British truce ship with a young American lawyer named Francis Scott Key, who is forced to watch the terrifying 25-hour bombardment of Fort McHenry. We explore the massive, 30-foot-tall flag sewn by Mary Pickersgill, the relentless rain of British bombs, and the breathtaking moment at dawn that inspired four verses of poetry and changed the soul of the nation forever.
STEPHEN:
Welcome to History in a Year: America’s First 250 Years.
LEAH:
Join us every single day as we journey from the Revolution of 1776 to the 250th anniversary of the United States.
STEPHEN:
You can find every episode and join the discussion at PointedWords.com. I’m Stephen.
LEAH:
And I’m Leah.
STEPHEN:
It is March 22nd. Welcome to Episode 81. Yesterday, a freak tornado blew the British Army out of the burning ruins of Washington D.C.
LEAH:
But the British weren’t retreating. They were just relocating. Vice Admiral Alexander Cochrane loaded his veteran troops back onto their massive warships and sailed up the Chesapeake Bay toward their real target.
STEPHEN:
Baltimore, Maryland.
LEAH:
The British hated Baltimore. It was the third-largest city in the United States, and it was a massive hub for American “privateers”—essentially government-sanctioned pirates who had been terrorizing British merchant ships for two years.
STEPHEN:
The British press literally called Baltimore a “nest of pirates,” and Admiral Cochrane wanted to burn it to the ground.
LEAH:
But unlike Washington D.C., Baltimore was ready for them. The citizens had spent months sinking ships in the harbor to block the British fleet, and they had built massive earthwork trenches around the city, manned by 15,000 angry militiamen.
STEPHEN:
And sitting right at the mouth of the harbor, guarding the water approach to the city, was a massive, star-shaped brick fortress: Fort McHenry.
LEAH:
The fort was commanded by Major George Armistead. Armistead knew the British were coming, and he wanted to send them a very specific, very defiant message.
STEPHEN:
Months before the battle, Armistead commissioned a local flag maker named Mary Pickersgill to sew an American flag for the fort. But he didn’t want a normal flag. He told her, “I want a flag so large that the British will have no difficulty seeing it from a distance.”
LEAH:
Pickersgill, her daughter, and a young indentured servant spent weeks sewing together massive strips of English wool. The final flag was breathtaking. It was 30 feet tall and 42 feet wide. The stars alone were two feet across. It was so big they had to lay it out on the floor of a local brewery just to stitch it together.
STEPHEN:
While Major Armistead was hoisting that massive flag over Fort McHenry, a 35-year-old American lawyer named Francis Scott Key was rowing out to the British fleet.
LEAH:
Key wasn’t a soldier; he was on a diplomatic mission. The British had arrested a beloved elderly doctor from Maryland, and Key had secured letters from British prisoners of war testifying that the doctor had saved their lives. He was hoping to negotiate a prisoner exchange.
STEPHEN:
Key boarded the British flagship, and he actually successfully argued his case! The British agreed to release the doctor.
LEAH:
But there was a catch. The British officers told Key, “You can have your doctor, but you can’t go home yet.”
STEPHEN:
Because while Key was on the ship, he had accidentally overheard the entire British battle plan for the attack on Baltimore. The British forced Key and the doctor back onto their small American truce ship, but they tethered it to the British fleet and placed it under heavy guard.
LEAH:
Francis Scott Key was essentially given a front-row seat to the destruction of his own country.
STEPHEN:
On the morning of September 13, 1814, the British fleet moved into position just out of range of Fort McHenry’s cannons. And the bombardment began.
LEAH:
For 25 agonizing hours, the British pounded the brick fort. They fired over 1,500 explosive mortar shells and hundreds of screeching Congreve rockets.
STEPHEN:
The weather was absolutely miserable. It was pouring rain, the harbor was choked with thick, sulfurous gunsmoke, and the noise was deafening.
LEAH:
Inside the fort, it was terrifying. One British bomb actually crashed through the roof of the fort’s gunpowder magazine, where 300 barrels of gunpowder were stored. If it had exploded, the entire fort would have vanished. Miraculously, the fuse fizzled out, and it didn’t detonate.
STEPHEN:
Out on the truce ship, Francis Scott Key paced the deck all night in the pouring rain. Because of the dark and the smoke, he couldn’t see the fort. The only way he knew the Americans hadn’t surrendered was because the British kept firing.
LEAH:
He wrote that it was lit up by “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air.”
STEPHEN:
But around 4:00 AM, the firing suddenly stopped. The British had realized they couldn’t break the fort, and the land invasion had been stopped by the Baltimore militia. The British decided to cut their losses and retreat.
LEAH:
But Francis Scott Key didn’t know that. When the silence hit the harbor, he was terrified. He assumed Fort McHenry had surrendered.
STEPHEN:
He waited in agonizing suspense for the sun to come up. As the dawn finally broke on September 14th, the rain stopped, and a breeze cleared the smoke away from the fort.
LEAH:
Key pulled a spyglass up to his eye. He looked at the flagpole.
STEPHEN:
During the rainstorm, Major Armistead had actually flown a smaller storm flag so the massive wool flag wouldn’t get waterlogged and snap the pole. But at dawn, he ordered his men to raise Mary Pickersgill’s massive, 42-foot masterpiece.
LEAH:
Francis Scott Key looked through his glass, and he saw the broad stripes and bright stars waving defiantly over the walls of Fort McHenry.
STEPHEN:
He was so overcome with emotion that he pulled a letter out of his pocket and started scribbling a poem on the back of it.
LEAH:
He called it “The Defence of Fort M’Henry.” He set the words to the tune of a popular British gentlemen’s club song.
STEPHEN:
Within a week, the poem was printed in the Baltimore newspapers under a new title: The Star-Spangled Banner. It spread like wildfire across the country, uniting a fractured, war-weary nation with a massive surge of patriotism.
LEAH:
In 1931, Congress officially made it the national anthem of the United States.
STEPHEN:
The British had failed to break Baltimore. The war had essentially fought itself to a bloody, exhausting stalemate. Both sides were completely out of money, and they were finally ready to talk peace.
LEAH:
Join us tomorrow for Episode 82. The Treaty of Ghent. American and British diplomats meet in a freezing city in Belgium to try and end the war. We explore the brilliant, maddening negotiations led by John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, and how the United States managed to secure a peace treaty without actually fixing a single reason why they went to war in the first place!
STEPHEN:
I’m Stephen.
LEAH:
And I’m Leah.
STEPHEN:
You can find every episode at PointedWords.com. And this… is our story.