Through the Perilous Fight Page 36

  The Intelligencer rushed the letter into print under an exultant headline: HUZZA FOR BALTIMORE!

  NORTH POINT, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15

  There were no cheers when the British army arrived at the North Point beach. The brigades moved down one by one to the water’s edge, boarding boats to carry them out to the ships.

  The ships crews were shocked by the condition of the injured troops. “Sad, sad wounds, some of them,” wrote Captain Robert Rowley, commander of the troopship Melpomene. “I have 18 poor creatures on board—doing as well as can be expected.”

  Cots were slung for the wounded aboard Hebrus, and the whole half deck of the man-of-war was transformed into a hospital. Midshipman Barrett, serving as mate of the main deck, was haunted by the “piteous groans” of the blanched-faced soldiers. Two or three died and their bodies were slipped into the water.

  Still anchored off North Point, every ship crackled with heated debate about the decision to retreat from Baltimore. The story of Admiral Cochrane’s message, which effectively forced retreat, had spread through the fleet.

  “The failure of our attempt upon Baltimore has caused much talk amongst us,” Major Gubbins, the commander of the 85th Light Infantry, wrote to a friend from aboard HMS Diadem. “[M]any think that the Navy should, even with the heavy loss they might have sustained, have stormed the Fort—others think the troops should have gone on notwithstanding the Admiral’s advice and want of assistance.” Gubbins believed the army could have broken through anywhere it attacked, “but whether we could have maintained ourselves with an inferior force, or attempted the destruction of the town without the assistance of our men-of-war I cannot pretend to say.”

  Aboard Severn, Cockburn wrote his official report to Cochrane. It had been the vice admiral’s message, Cockburn pointedly noted, that “induced” Brooke to break off the army’s attack. As for Cochrane’s failed attack on Fort McHenry, Cockburn wrote coolly, “As you Sir were in person with the advanced frigates, sloops, and bomb ships, and as from the road the Army took I did not see them after quitting the beach, it would be superfluous for me to make any report to you respecting them.”

  As the fleet prepared to withdraw from the Patapsco on Friday, a wet, tempestuous day, a message from Cochrane was read congratulating the men for “the decisive victory” over a larger enemy force. The admiral’s words seemed directed at the intense discontent that prevailed aboard the ships: “[T]he best proofs of steady and cool bravery are a scrupulous obedience of orders & a strict attention to discipline.” Few were mollified, and spirits were low as they sailed toward the bay.

  “I regret we ever returned up the Chesapeake again,” Rowley wrote in a letter Thursday, “but it was so fated.”

  PATAPSCO RIVER, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16

  The American truce ship remained in British custody, anchored with the fleet off North Point. The American delegation and crew would be set free when all “the troopers were on board, and the fleet ready to sail,” Key was informed.

  Skinner sought fruitlessly to get a list of American prisoners who had been taken to the ships. “After the attack here, as Mr. Key can explain, there was such a state of hurry and bustle that we could scarcely obtain decent attention to any application,” Skinner reported to General Mason in Washington. After repeated requests, Skinner was given an incomplete list of eighty-nine prisoners along with a promise to send the rest of the names later.

  Dispensing with the usual salutations when he saw Skinner, Cockburn readily acknowledged the attack had failed: “Ah, Mr. Skinner, if it had not been for the sinking of those ships across the channel, with the wind and tide we had in our favor, we should have taken the town; as it was, we flurried you, any how.”

  By late Friday afternoon, the British had finished loading their ships, and Key, Skinner, Beanes, and the American crew were told they were free. As the truce ship sailed toward Baltimore that evening, Key worked on his composition. He was writing a song, not a poem. Later, the myth would take hold that Key’s words were adapted to song by an alert singer who noticed that the words coincidentally matched “To Anacreon in Heaven,” a well-known tune of the day. Yet the evidence is clear that Key had that tune in mind from the start.

  Written in London around the time of the American Revolution, “Anacreon” was an old American standard by 1814. It is often referred to dismissively as “a drinking song,” a misleading label. The Anacreontic Society was a popular and convivial gentleman’s club in London named after the sixth-century B.C. Greek poet Anacreon, whose verse celebrated the joys of wine and women.

  The society’s meetings, usually at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand, often featured a concert with some of the best performers in London. After the music, an elegant supper was served, and then all members would join in singing lighthearted songs. The first song was always the club’s constitutional song, “To Anacreon in Heaven,” whose words had been written by the club president, Ralph Tomlinson, a London attorney.

  To Anacreon in Heav’n, where he sat if full glee

  A few sons of harmony sent a petition,

  That he their inspirer and patron would be;

  When this answer arrived from the Jolly Old Grecian

  “Voice, Fiddle and Flute, no longer be mute,

  I’ll lend you my Name and inspire you to boot,

  And, besides, I’ll instruct you like me to entwine

  The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s Vine.”

  Music to accompany the four verses was written around 1775 by another member of the society, John Stafford Smith, an accomplished organist, tenor singer, and composer from Gloucester, England, who composed a great deal of secular and sacred music. The society members, many of them proud of their musical abilities, wanted a song that would both challenge and show off their vocal range, and “Anacreon” fit the bill.

  The song’s popularity soon spread across the Atlantic, where various Anacreontic societies were established—including one in Baltimore. Songwriters continually adapted new words to the melody, and by 1814, no fewer than eighty-five versions had been published in the United States. The most famous was Robert Treat Paine, Jr.’s “Adams and Liberty,” a rousing patriotic number written in 1798 that became the most popular political song of the era, sung around the country.

  There is no doubt Key was quite familiar with the melody. He had used the tune for a song he had written nine years earlier saluting Navy Lieutenant Stephen Decatur for his heroism during the first Barbary War. At Tripoli harbor in February 1804, Decatur boarded the captured USS Philadelphia with U.S. Marines, set fire to the ship, and escaped under a hail of fire. Lord Nelson called the raid “the most bold and daring act of the age,” and Decatur was celebrated across America.

  Key viewed it as not only a triumph against pirates, but also a victory of Christianity over Islam. When a dinner party was thrown in Georgetown on November 30, 1805, in honor of Decatur, Key wrote a song for the occasion. Titled “When the Warrior Returns from the Battle Afar,” it was sung to the tune of “Anacreon.”

  When the warrior returns, from the battle afar

  To the home and the country he has nobly defended

  Oh, warm be the welcome to gladden his ear

  And loud be the joys that his peril has ended!

  In the full tide of song, let his fame roll along

  To the feast flowing board let us gratefully throng

  Where mixed with the olive the laurel shall wave

  And form a bright wreath for the brow of the brave

  The third verse included this couplet:

  And pale beamed the Crescent, its splendor obscured,

  By the light of the star-spangled flag of our nation.

  The song was printed in several newspapers, including the Boston Independent Chronicle. Though inferior to the song that would follow nine years later, Warrior contains the unmistakable genesis of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” showing metric agreement and similar phrasing. It guided Key as he composed h
is new song.

  FELLS POINT, 9 P.M., FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16

  Darkness was approaching as the American truce ship sailed past Fort McHenry and carefully maneuvered through the obstacles blocking the mouth of the channel. Sometime between 8 and 9 p.m., the ship glided into Hughes Wharf at Fells Point. Word of the ship’s arrival quickly spread in Baltimore, eager for any news from the British fleet.

  At 9 p.m., a correspondent for the True American and Commercial Advertiser sent a hasty dispatch via stagecoach to the newspaper’s office in Philadelphia: “A flag of truce has just arrived from the enemy’s fleet, which had gone down before the late bombardment, bringing a list of the prisoners taken at the battle of the meeting-house,” he wrote. “The flag officer states that they intend to send them to Halifax—many of them are the most respectable citizens of this place. All is now quiet in this city, though no one doubts but that we shall have another bout with the enemy.”

  Reporters gathered around Skinner, Key, and Beanes. Skinner told one correspondent that the British had lost at least five hundred men, as well as a barge sunk in the Ferry Branch attack. Beanes reported that the British were “much disappointed in not being able to carry Baltimore.” Key told a correspondent with the Philadelphia Political and Commercial Register that British officers spoke of repairing their ships at their island base in the Chesapeake and then sailing to Halifax. “But he believed this to be far from their intention,” the paper added ominously.

  Once the excitement died, Key took lodging a few blocks away at the Indian Queen Tavern, at the corner of Market and Hanover streets. That night in his room, he picked up a pen and paper to write his song longhand. The notes written on the back of the letter served as the basis for much of his composition. But for some of the lines, as he told Taney, “he was obliged to rely altogether on his memory.”

  “O say can you see through”—Key paused here, scratched out “through” and substituted “by,” and then continued: “the dawn’s early light.” The verse, when completed, asked one long question:

  O say can you see by the dawn’s early light

  What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming

  Whose broad stripes & bright stars through the perilous fight

  O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming

  And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air

  Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there

  O say does that star spangled banner yet wave

  O’er the land of the free & the home of the brave?

  The question mark at the end of the verse, Mencken later noted, is essential to understanding Key’s meaning, revealing “the poet is not at all sure that the Republic will survive.” The second verse carries the answer, describing the tension at dawn as Key and his companions tried to make out what flag was flying:

  On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep,

  Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,

  What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep

  As it fitfully blows, half conceal, half discloses?

  Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam

  In full glory reflected now shines in the stream,

  Tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave

  O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave

  In the third verse, Key’s disgust with the British spilled out, and his language took on uncharacteristically angry and vengeful tones, reflecting the emotion of the moment.

  And where is that band who so vauntingly swore

  That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,

  A home and a country, shall leave us no more?

  Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps pollution

  No refuge could save their hireling and slave,

  From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave

  And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave

  O’er the land of the free & the home of the brave

  “Hireling” apparently refers to professional British soldiers fighting for money, unlike the American volunteers. Key’s use of “slave” may be a reference to the Colonial Marines; an ironic choice of words if so, as the escaped slaves were fighting for their freedom.

  Key took a more pious tone with his fourth verse. His song was ultimately a hymn, a prayer of thanks to God for saving the city, and this is most evident in the final verse.

  O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand

  Between their lov’d home & the war’s desolation;

  Blest with vict’ry and peace, may they 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 & the home of the brave.

  The four verses filled a single piece of paper, though Key had to write compactly to make the last one fit. He may have thrown out his notes from the truce ship, as they have never been located.

  Key had no way of knowing that in a single night, he had written what would become the United States’ national anthem, as well as coined a motto for the nation: “In God We Trust.” Yet before he fell asleep, he must have felt satisfied.

  BALTIMORE, MORNING, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17

  When Skinner called on Key the following morning at the Indian Queen, the attorney showed him the composition. Skinner was impressed—it captured the long night and the coming of dawn perfectly. The song, he later said, “was but a versified and almost literal transcript of our expressed hopes and apprehensions, through that ever memorable period of anxiety to all, but never of despair.”

  Key was anxious to see how Nicholson had weathered the bombardment. The judge had only returned home from the fort the night before. It had been a chaotic several days at the fort, still on the alert for another British attack. Major Armistead was exhausted after days of stress. His wife had given birth to a daughter on Thursday, September 15, one day after the bombardment ended. That evening, Armistead collapsed with fever brought on by fatigue and exposure. Nicholson sent word Friday warning that Armistead was “in a high state of delirium,” and Samuel Smith placed Captain Rodgers in charge of Fort McHenry.

  After arriving at the Nicholson home on Saturday, Key presented his composition to the judge. Two of the volunteers Nicholson had enlisted to fight with his company—Lieutenant Claggett and Sergeant Clemm—were dead, and several more were severely wounded. The emotional Nicholson was anguished at the loss, and reading Key’s words, profoundly moved. “[Y]ou may easily imagine the feelings with which, at such a moment, he read it,” Taney later wrote. Nicholson wanted the song shared with the public.

  Key apparently gave permission, but did not stay long. “I … was obliged to leave Baltimore immediately,” he would soon write to John Randolph, apologizing that he did not have time to visit Randolph’s brother, who lived in the city. Anxious to reunite with his family, Key made arrangements to travel to Frederick.

  Either Nicholson or Skinner—or possibly the two working together—took the composition to the office of Baltimore American and Commercial Daily Advertiser that day to be set as a handbill. The American, like other newspapers in Baltimore, had shut down during the attack. Thomas Murphy, the American’s master printer, served with Aisquith’s sharpshooters, but he had been granted leave to reopen the American’s office, and the shorthanded paper had resumed sporadic publication.

  When Key’s composition was brought in, apprentice Samuel Sands was minding the office. “I was the only one … who was on hand,” Sands recalled many years later. The fourteen-year-old Sands, too young to serve with the militia, had divided his time during the invasion between watching the shop and visiting friends in the trenches on Hampstead Hill.

  Sands, p
ossibly with the help of Murphy, set up the print for the handbill, painstakingly fishing out the letters, a task that likely would have taken several hours. Once it was finished, one or more galley proofs were struck, and then at least one thousand handbills printed.

  The song carried the title “Defence of Fort M’Henry”—a bit unimaginative, perhaps, but entirely appropriate from the perspective of Nicholson, who apparently gave it the name. The judge likely also wrote the introduction that appeared above the song, which described the circumstances that placed an unnamed “gentleman” on a mission to gain the release of a friend held captive by the British. “He watched the flag at the Fort through the whole day with an anxiety that can be better felt than described, until the night prevented him from seeing it,” the introduction read. “In the night he watched the bomb shells, and at early dawn his eye was again greeted by the proudly waving flag of his country.”

  Key’s name did not appear on the handbill. Given Nicholson’s affection for Key, the omission would likely have been at Key’s request, perhaps out of modesty or embarrassment.

  Hundreds of copies of “Defence of Fort M’Henry” were delivered to the fort, probably at the behest of Nicholson, and it was quite popular with the garrison. Private Teakle, with the Baltimore Independent Artillerists, wrote to his brother-in-law, “We have a song composed by Mr. Key of G. Town which was presented to every individual in the fort in a separate sheet.…”

  The song, by Taney’s account, was soon “all over town, and hailed with enthusiasm.”