Through the Perilous Fight Read online

  Given the size of the flags and the speed with which the army wanted them, everyone in the household would have to work on it. Rebecca Young, who was seventy-three years old and ill at the time, may not have done much sewing, but she doubtless chimed in with advice. Two other women lived at the home: a female slave and a young African American indentured servant named Grace Wisher. They, too, would almost certainly have had a hand in creating what would become the nation’s most enduring icon.

  The garrison flag’s size was not unusual for the time. Forts and ships often flew big flags to project power, and to make perfectly clear to both friend and foe who was in control. Armistead had a particular penchant for them, having ordered one measuring 36 feet by 48 feet a decade earlier while posted at Fort Niagara.

  The flag was to have fifteen stars and fifteen stripes, as dictated by the regulations governing the second official version of the American flag. Two stars and two stripes for Kentucky and Vermont had been added to the thirteen representing the original states, and though three more states had since joined the union, they were not included, as Congress had not authorized further additions.

  Pickersgill used some four hundred yards of top-quality bunting—worsted wool manufactured, ironically, in England. Each stripe had to be twenty-three inches wide, and as the bunting was woven in strips no wider than eighteen inches, two had to be painstakingly sewn together for each stripe. The blue for the union came from dye made of indigo; while red for the stripes came from madder with tin mordant. The fifteen white cotton stars, each measuring two feet from point to point, were cut from cotton cloth. Rather than sew stars on both sides, Pickersgill employed a reverse appliqué method, cutting holes through the blue bunting so they showed through, saving on fabric and weight.

  The women worked in the upstairs bedroom, but when it was time to sew the stripes and the field together, the flag was too big for the house. Pickersgill received permission to use a nearby brewery, spreading the flag on the malt house floor, where the women sewed by sunlight during the day and candlelight by night. “I remember seeing my mother down on the floor, placing the stars,” Caroline wrote many years later. “My mother worked many nights until 12 o’clock to complete it in the given time.” Some six weeks and 350,000 hand-sewn stitches later, the flag was finished.

  Pickersgill delivered the flags to Fort McHenry on August 19, 1813. For her labors, Pickersgill was paid $405.90 for the garrison flag and another $168.54 for the storm flag. Two seven-foot-long, hand-hewn oak timbers had been sunk in the fort’s parade ground as supporting cross braces for the flagstaff that would carry the flag, which weighed at least fifty pounds. Pickersgill supervised the flag’s placement, Caroline recalled, “having it fastened in the most secure manner to prevent it being torn away by [cannon] balls.”

  All along the shore around Fort McHenry, the final dispositions had been made, and the troops manning the garrison and batteries awaited the bombardment. Seasoned sailors were positioned at every critical point along the water. At Lazaretto, across from Fort McHenry, the three-gun battery of eighteen-pounders was manned by 45 flotillamen commanded by the veteran Lieutenant Solomon Frazier, who had led the escape of Barney’s men from Pig Point after scuttling the flotilla. Along the Ferry Branch, six French eighteen-pounders were manned by 50 flotillamen led by Sailing Master John Webster, Barney’s right-hand man at Bladensburg. Farther west, at Fort Covington, 50 of the best sailors from Rodgers’s ship Guerriere waited with ten eighteen-pounders under the command of Lieutenant Henry Newcomb, one of Rodgers’s most trusted officers.

  A thousand troops were ready to defend Fort McHenry, including 300 men to service the thirty-six guns. The garrison included a company of army regulars from the U.S. Artillery Corps, and two companies of U.S. Sea Fencibles, federal units that manned coastal fortifications. Nicholson’s Baltimore Fencibles and two companies of volunteer artillery from Baltimore augmented the garrison. Sixty flotillamen helped man the big guns on the river battery. Not least were four musicians from the U.S. Corps of Artillery, stationed behind the parapets of the water batteries, holding the critical role of sounding orders and keeping up morale. All four were young; the youngest, George Schellenberg, was just fifteen years old.

  Some 600 infantrymen from four U.S. Army regiments were positioned in a dry moat that circled the fort, ready to meet the enemy should they land. Among them was Frederick Hall, a twenty-one-year-old slave who had escaped five months earlier from a tobacco plantation in Prince George’s County. Hall signed up with the 38th U.S. Infantry in April under the alias of William Williams, receiving an enlistment bounty of fifty dollars and a private’s wage of eight dollars a month. Though slaves were prohibited from enlisting, the officer who signed him up asked no questions, possibly because Hall’s skin was “so fair as to show freckles,” according to a notice published in May offering forty dollars for his return. In the anonymity of the army, Hall hoped to save his freedom by fighting for the preservation of the country that had allowed him to be enslaved.

  A final boost to morale came in the form of Captain Oliver Hazard Perry, who pulled himself out of a sickbed to report for duty. Perry had been near collapse after the disappointing British escape past his guns at Indian Head. His physical constitution had been weakened from his service on Lake Erie a year earlier. “Perry, I am sorry to say, was so indisposed and worn out with the fatigue he had experienced on the Potomac” that he had been unable to take an active role in the defense of Baltimore, Rodgers reported to Jones.

  But at the last minute Perry arrived “ready to render every assistance in his power,” Rodgers added. Perry was determined to prevent the British from capturing USS Java, his nearly completed frigate, which presented a tempting target at Fells Point, its masts readily visible to the enemy. “I shall stay by my ship and take no part in the militia fight,” Perry wrote a friend. “I expect to have to burn her.”

  PATAPSCO RIVER, 6:30 A.M., TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13

  Volcano began the bombardment of Fort McHenry at 6:30 in the morning, lofting several shells to test the range. Each time the enormous four-ton mortars fired, the hull of the bomb ship was pushed two feet into the water. When the first shots fell short, the squadron moved to within a mile and a half of the fort. Cochrane, aboard Surprize, ordered all the ships to open fire.

  A broadside from the small frigate Cockchafer shook the city and brought residents to their rooftops. “The firing at the fort has just commenced,” John Moore wrote to his wife. “Don’t wonder if my writing looks as if my hand trembles, for the house begins to shake.”

  Fort McHenry came under what Armistead called “an incessant and well directed bombardment.” Private Severn Teakle, a volunteer with the Baltimore Independent Artillerists, was astonished at the firepower. “[F]rom such a rattling and whistle Good Lord forever deliver me,” he wrote to his brother-in law.

  Major Armistead mounted the parapet at the water battery and ordered the guns to return fire. “Then the whole fort let drive at them,” reported Private Isaac Munroe, the newspaper editor serving with Nicholson’s Fencibles. “We could see the shot strike the frigates in several instances, when every heart was gladden[ed], and we gave three cheers, the music playing Yankee Doodle.”

  “Four or five bombs were frequently in the air at a time, and, making a double explosion, with the noise of the foolish rockets and the firings of the fort, Lazaretto and our barges, created a horrible clatter,” Niles’ reported.

  Bomb fired at Fort McHenry.

  Cochrane ordered the bombardment squadron moved back to a more circumspect distance of two miles, out of American range. But the bomb ships were still able to loft one shot after another into the fort. Private Schellenberg and the other musicians soon broke off the celebratory music.

  The American guns kept firing, but now their shots did nothing but kick up spouts of water, falling well short of the British ships. The range of the biggest guns at Fort McHenry was a mile and a half, no match for the British mort
ars. This was no surprise to Armistead. Months earlier, he had asked for larger mortars that could match the British range, but Secretary of War Armstrong had turned him down on the grounds that the French guns were sufficient.

  To gain further distance, the fort’s gun crews raised their barrels to the maximum elevation and increased the powder to dangerous levels, risking bursting a barrel, but it was to no avail. “[T]his was to me a most distressing circumstance as it left us exposed to a constant and tremendous shower of shells without the most remote possibility of our doing him the slightest injury,” Armistead reported.

  Once the futility of fire became obvious, Armistead ordered his crews to cease fire. Skeleton crews manned the guns, firing occasionally to show the fort was not giving up, but at Armistead’s order, most of the men took cover in the dry moat. There were no bomb shelters in the fort, and soldiers resorted to digging slit trenches with their bayonets for extra cover.

  Hundreds of shells and rockets had been fired by noon, landing at the rate of more than one a minute. “Four or five bombs were frequently in the air at a time, and, making a double explosion, with the noise of the foolish rockets and the firings of the fort, Lazaretto and our barges, created a horrible clatter,” Niles’ reported.

  Erebus fired incendiary rockets, which trailed smoke as they flew wildly in the sky, but did little damage to the fort. “Harmless indeed,” said Munroe. But the iron mortar shells, packed with up to twenty pounds of powder, flew in high arcs that easily carried over the fort’s walls. Their wooden fuses, timed to explode immediately before or upon landing, worked erratically, but many set off tremendous explosions. One shell crashed on the arched roof of the fort’s magazine, a brick vault packed with as many as three hundred powder barrels stacked three tiers high. If it had exploded, the fort would likely have been destroyed and the garrison decimated, but somehow, the shell did not go off.

  To lessen the chances of a catastrophic hit, Armistead ordered men to remove the barrels from the magazine and place them behind the fort’s rear wall. Private Teakle survived a minor explosion as he rolled out a barrel, receiving “no other damage than getting my pantaloons torn nearly off me,” he wrote.

  Most of the garrison kept relatively safe, but some were unlucky. Private Williams—the escaped slave, Frederick Hall—had his leg blown off by shrapnel. Another soldier, shaking uncontrollably after three mortars crashed into the fort in quick succession, took shelter under a gun carriage but was killed by a direct hit. The wife of a soldier, talking to her husband near the tents pitched outside the fort, “was cut in two pieces,” a witness wrote.

  Captain Joseph Nicholson’s men stayed in place manning the guns at the bastions. Nicholson bluntly described the garrison’s helplessness in a letter to James Monroe: “We were like pigeons tied by the legs to be shot at.”

  The lack of fire from Fort McHenry alarmed Francis Scott Key. But the stirring sight of the American flag streaming above the ramparts offered reassurance. As Key later told Roger Taney, the Americans aboard the truce ship “thought themselves fortunate in being anchored in a position which enabled them to see distinctly the flag of Fort McHenry from the deck of the vessel.” The exact location of the truce ship has never been determined, and it is possible the vessel was moved over the course of the bombardment. One likely spot is near the mouth of Bear Creek, about two miles behind the bombardment squadron and four miles from the fort. From that distance, the flag would have been visible, particularly with a spyglass, which the sloop almost certainly would have carried.

  For at least part of the attack, the truce ship may have been up front with the bombardment squadron, near Cochrane aboard Surprize. The vice admiral apparently wanted the American emissaries close at hand, believing they could help negotiate the fort’s surrender. “[P]revious to the attack he asked Mr. Key, a lawyer from Georgetown who was on board the flag whether there was any person in the fort authorized to surrender,” Private Teakle, who spoke to Skinner after the attack, wrote to his brother-in-law. A contemporary sketch of the bombardment by a Maryland militia officer watching from Hampstead Hill shows what appears to be the American truce ship positioned on the left edge of the bombardment squadron.

  A sketch of the bombardment by a Maryland militia officer watching from Hampstead Hill shows what appears to be the American truce ship positioned on the left edge of the bombardment squadron.

  Battle of Baltimore by Lt. Henry Fisher of the 27th Maryland Regiment.

  Key’s mood swung from despair to hope as the bombardment continued. His revulsion at Baltimore’s pro-war riots in 1812 had left him with the sinking fear that the city had earned a horrible fate. Yet many people Key admired and loved were in the city—not least Nicholson, married to Polly’s eldest sister. “[Y]ou may imagine what a state of anxiety I endured,” Key wrote to John Randolph. “Sometimes when I remembered it was there the declaration of this abominable war was received with public rejoicings, I could not feel a hope that they would escape, and again when I thought of the many faithful, whose piety lessens that lump of wickedness, I could hardly feel a fear.”

  The thousands of troops nervously waiting in their rain-sopped trenches along Hampstead Hill had a clear view of the punishment being inflicted upon Fort McHenry, about a mile and a half to their southeast. General Smith and Captain Rodgers, who each had established headquarters on the hill to better coordinate the naval and land forces, watched anxiously through field glasses, in contact with the fort and shore batteries via messengers dashing back and forth through the shower of bombs and rockets.

  Rodgers Bastion, at the top of the hill, had a mix of sixteen field and naval guns manned by 200 seamen. The Corps of Seamen, a hearty band of privateers under command of Captain George Stiles, anchored the Philadelphia Road with five eighteen-pounder field guns. Four smaller batteries running south to the harbor were under the command of navy officers from Guerriere and Erie. The 1st Regiment of Maryland Artillery was positioned to the north. At Gambles Redoubt, a convergence of roads where the brunt of the attack was expected, 170 marines were positioned.

  The American firepower was heartening to the troops of the City Brigade, recuperating from their fight at Godley Wood. Private Levi Hollingsworth of the 5th Maryland had been painfully wounded in the left arm by a musket ball that passed between his elbow and hand, yet the battle left him encouraged. “I believe we handled them in a manner they little expected and I think they will be cautious in advancing on this place,” Hollingsworth wrote Tuesday morning to his wife, Ann. “Today we look for them here, and I now for the first time entertain a hope that we shall be able to avert so awful a calamity as that of this city falling into their possession—an hour or two may determine.”

  KELL HOUSE, TUESDAY MORNING, SEPTEMBER 13

  The British army moved at the first glimmer of dawn, with the light infantry leading the way as they advanced toward Baltimore along the North Point Road. Flanking parties, alert for ambush, were soaked moving through long grass and bushes wet with the night’s rain, their progress was slowed by trees cut across the road by the retreating Americans. But by 9 a.m., the light troops spotted the American lines and halted.

  An hour later, Brooke and Cockburn rode ahead to scout the position. From the upstairs windows of Judge Thomas Kell’s house on a hill off the Philadelphia Road, the British commanders had a fine view of the entrenchments on Hampstead Hill, two miles away. The sight was both breathtaking and sobering. Hampstead Hill, which commanded the town, was covered with earthworks, artillery, and men—some 15,000 to 20,000 troops and 110 guns, the British estimated. The chain of redoubts, interspersed with bastions for crossfire, stretched for more than a mile. The British would have to charge up the hill across muddy ground that had been cleared of any building or trees that might provide cover.

  Cockburn could not help regretting that the attack had not been made sooner. It was obvious that the Americans had put to good use the two weeks that had passed since the British returned to thei
r ships on the Patuxent. Brooke was of the same mind. “[I]n short saw it was impossible to attack them,” the colonel wrote in his diary.

  But the commanders were hardly ready to give up. While the Light Brigade pushed out to form a line, Brooke and Cockburn reconnoitered the American line more closely, looking for a weak spot. Cochrane had suggested in his note that the defenses to the northwest were less formidable, and upon examination Brooke concluded they indeed “were in a very unfinished state.” Around noon, he led his troops on a probe to the northwest, looking for a way around the earthworks.

  But Samuel Smith, watching from the command post atop Hampstead Hill, countered by sending his reserve, including Stricker’s City Brigade, to shadow the British. The American force took position between the Perry Hall and York roads defending the left flank. Seeing that Smith had forcefully countered the British move, Brooke broke off his probe.

  The chess match continued. Early in the afternoon, Brooke massed his force before the center of the American line, forming a battlefront more than a mile long and two ranks deep. He advanced to within a mile of the entrenchments, driving back the American scouts. Though Brooke had no intention of assaulting the American lines in the daylight, he showed every sign of an immediate attack, hoping to throw Smith off balance. The American commander promptly prepared a counterattack, maneuvering his reserve into position to fall on the British right and rear should they advance.

  Brooke had no choice but to hold his position and await dark. By now the British commanders had concluded that their best—and perhaps only—opportunity lay with a night attack. The American artillery would be of little use in the dark, and the militia would likely panic in the face of a bayonet by Wellington’s Invincibles. The British column would penetrate the defenses and sweep down the American line, clearing the redoubts. But to do it, the army needed supporting fire from the Royal Navy on the southern end of the American line, to keep the big guns from turning their fire on the British infantry and to divert attention from the point of attack. Cockburn sent his aide, Lieutenant Scott, to request Admiral Cochrane’s help for a 2 a.m. attack.