Through the Perilous Fight Read online

  Key became a confidant and legal adviser to Jackson; the general reportedly told Key that the “Star-Spangled Banner” helped inspire the troops at New Orleans. When Jackson’s friend, the rising legend Sam Houston, caned a congressman in 1832 and was put on trial before the House of Representatives, it was Key who got him off with a reprimand. After appointing Key U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia in 1833, Jackson sent the lawyer on a delicate mission to Alabama to mediate a dispute with the state government over federal promises to move settlers from Creek Indian reservations. Passions against the federal government were running high, with talk of secession, but Key was welcomed in Alabama, and serenaded by a band playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” upon his arrival in Tuscaloosa. (“That is a pretty air,” Key, who some claimed was tone-deaf, reportedly asked. “What is it?”) Key mediated a settlement to the crisis through a mixture of political savvy and personal charm that included penning poems for the governor’s wife and daughter.

  Key had a hand in the rise of Roger Taney, who would make decisions with far-reaching consequences for the country. When Jackson considered appointing Taney attorney general in 1831, he called Key to the White House, wanting assurances Taney would accept. Key persuaded his hesitant brother-in-law to take the job, telling Taney “you will find yourself … acting with men who know and value you & with whom you will have the influence you ought to have.” Key later worked behind the scenes for Taney’s confirmation as chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1836, to replace John Marshall. More than two decades later, Taney—by then cynical and suffering a “broken spirit” following the death of his wife, Anne, and their youngest daughter from yellow fever—authored the notorious Dred Scott decision, an assault on free black citizenship and one of the final steps leading to the Civil War.

  The post as federal prosecutor in Washington thrust Key into the midst of dramatic and unsettling events. On January 30, 1835, a demented house painter named David Lawrence tried to shoot Jackson at point-blank range on the steps of the Capitol, but his pistol misfired. An enraged Jackson was convinced the assassination attempt was part of a political plot, but after interrogating Lawrence at the city jail, Key believed the man was insane and had acted alone. Despite political pressure, Key saw that the law protected Lawrence when he was tried in April. Key “did not lose his calmness, allowing only a sense of justice and a desire for the truth to influence him in the matter,” a newspaper wrote. Lawrence was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to an asylum.

  The sorriest episode in Key’s career erupted later that year and centered around Anna Maria Thornton, the widow of Key’s longtime friend, patent supervisor William Thornton, who had died in 1828. In August 1835, Anna Thornton woke up one night to find her eighteen-year-old slave, Arthur Bowen, hovering in her bedroom door with an axe. She fled unharmed, and Bowen was arrested. For some Washingtonians, the incident evoked terrifying memories of Nat Turner’s bloody slave rebellion in Virginia four years earlier. Angry whites threatened to tear down the jail and lynch Bowen, and at Key’s request, marines were called out to restore order. The nights that followed saw some of the most violent riots in Washington’s history, as lower-class whites rampaged against free blacks. In this highly charged atmosphere, Key won the death penalty against Bowen for attempted murder. But a distraught Anna Thornton pleaded for clemency from the president, insisting that Bowen had simply been drunk. Jackson pardoned the slave.

  Key had meanwhile brought charges against abolitionist Reuben Crandall, claiming that Bowen’s actions had been instigated by antislavery pamphlets and accusing Crandall of a “base and demonical” effort to incite slaves. Key’s aggressive prosecution brought condemnation from many critics, including abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, who accused Key of a “deep malignity of purpose.” During the trial, Crandall’s attorney, Joseph Bradley, read an eloquent statement decrying the evils of slavery, and then revealed its author: Francis Scott Key. After deliberating for three hours, the jury found Crandall not guilty, a stinging rebuke for the prosecutor.

  Days later came tragedy. Key’s nineteen-year-old son, Daniel, serving a tour of duty with the navy, had quarreled at sea with a fellow midshipman. Encountering each other back in Washington, they agreed to a duel, in which Daniel was fatally shot. When his lifeless body was brought back to the Key house on C Street, the family was utterly devastated. Less than a year later, Key’s son John, a tall and promising twenty-seven-year-old lawyer and himself the father of two young boys, died after a brief illness, bringing “fresh and heavy affliction” to the household. Key would be spared the death of a fourth son, Philip Barton Key II, his youngest and most brilliant child, who had followed in his father’s footsteps to become U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. He was shot and killed in 1859 by Representative Daniel Sickles for having an affair with Sickles’s wife, one of the most sensational crimes in Washington’s history.

  The tragedies and tumult sapped Key of some of his vitality. He retired after two terms as U.S. attorney in 1841 but continued his private practice, living most of the year at Terra Rubra and returning to Washington only when his presence was required in court.

  Key had emancipated seven of his slaves by 1838, although, he fretted, “when age and infirmity come upon them, they will probably suffer.” The rest of his slaves he left to Polly with the request that she free them before she died. Key remained deeply opposed to abolition, telling a minister in 1838 that the Bible gave “neither an express sanction nor an express prohibition” to slavery and calling blacks “a distinct and inferior race.” But in the same letter, Key said that for his entire life, “I have had the greatest desire to see Maryland become a free state, and the strongest conviction that she could become so … I feel sure that it will be so.”

  By then the lyrics of “The Star-Spangled Banner” were being used in parodies by abolitionists condemning the hypocrisy of slaveholders. Whether he was aware of this or not, Key was clearly troubled by the juxtaposition of slavery in the land of the free. “Where else, except in slavery, was ever such a bed of torture prepared by man for man?” he asked in 1842, in one of his last speeches.

  In early January 1843, Key traveled to Washington to appear before Taney’s Supreme Court and then continued to Baltimore on legal business. Along the way, he wrote a long poem he called “The Nobleman’s Son,” about the prayers of a mother saving her dying child. By the time Key arrived in the city and walked to the home on Mount Vernon Place where his daughter Elizabeth lived with her husband, he was feverish with a cold.

  “So long as patriotism dwells upon us, so long will this song be the theme of our nation.”

  Sculpture of Francis Scott Key atop his grave at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Frederick, Maryland.

  The next morning, a Sunday, Key stayed in bed at the insistence of his daughter rather than go to church. “Lizzie, I have a feeling I never had before,” he told her. Key seemed better Tuesday after his wife arrived. But by Wednesday morning, Polly was alarmed at his deteriorating condition. Key was soon in a state of delirium. Occasionally he recited passages from the Bible or favorite hymns. “I cannot agree to that proposition,” he said at one point. “Tell them not to bother me.”

  Key asked someone to read the Ninety-First Psalm, and he listened through the end of the second verse—I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust—and then his mind drifted off. Around 8 p.m. on Wednesday, January 11, 1843, at age sixty-three, Key died of pleurisy complicated by pneumonia, just a few miles from Fort McHenry.

  “Francis S. Key, the author of the Star-Spangled Banner, is no more,” reported the Baltimore American. “So long as patriotism dwells upon us, so long will this song be the theme of our nation.” Flags in Washington and Baltimore were lowered to half-mast, and the Supreme Court promptly adjourned in his memory.

  Key was buried in the family vault of his son-in-law, Charles Howard, at St. Paul’s Church in Baltimore, and when Poll
y died in 1859, she was placed next to him. But in 1866, their remains were moved to Frederick and buried beneath a small headstone at Mount Olivet Cemetery, in keeping with the wish Key once expressed to rest “ ’neath the shadows of the everlasting hills” of Frederick County. The Keys were reinterred at Mount Olivet in 1898 underneath a graceful monument with a sculpture of Key atop a granite pedestal, doffing his hat in joy upon spotting the flag. By resolution of Congress, the American flag flies over Key’s grave twenty-four hours a day.

  On October 8, 1824, the Marquis de Lafayette visited Baltimore, part of a triumphant tour of America by the French aristocrat who had served at George Washington’s side during the Revolutionary War. As Lafayette sailed into Baltimore Harbor, the garrison at Fort McHenry fired its guns in salute and hoisted a great banner on the flagpole.

  It was the last time that the Star-Spangled Banner would fly at Fort McHenry. The flag by then was in the possession of George Armistead’s widow, Louisa, who had loaned it for the occasion. The family later said the flag was presented to George Armistead after the battle, but more likely, he felt a proprietary interest and simply kept it. Had he not, the banner would probably have been discarded or destroyed. Such was the apparent fate of the storm flag, which likely flew during the bombardment and has long since disappeared. But the great banner, raised on the morning of September 14, 1814, at the end of the bombardment, was the one Armistead saved. After her husband’s death, the flag took on enormous sentimental value to Louisa Armistead, and it was likely she who sewed a red chevron on one of the stripes, the beginning of the letter A.

  The family loaned the flag to be displayed at appropriate events. For a time, the flag occasionally appeared at Baltimore’s annual celebration of Defenders’ Day, the state holiday on September 12, marking the successful defense of Baltimore. “On the staff we saw the old flag of Fort McHenry … amidst the joyous shouts of those who recognized its tattered folds,” a correspondent wrote following a celebration at Hampstead Hill in 1828. “A holy relic never disgraced, and receiving now the homage of friends, as in 1814, it commanded the respect of foes.” The Armistead family offered the flag for Key’s funeral procession, but it was not used.

  When Louisa Armistead died in 1861, a few months after the outbreak of the Civil War, her youngest daughter, Georgiana Armistead Appleton, who was born at Fort McHenry and named after her father, inherited the flag. In the terrible conflict that followed, some of George Armistead’s descendants would fight against the flag he had defended. His nephew, Confederate Brigadier General Lewis Addison Armistead, died of his wounds from leading an assault on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg. His grandson, George Armistead Appleton, was arrested for possessing a Confederate flag on Defenders’ Day in 1861 and was held as a prisoner at Fort McHenry, which was used by Union forces during the war as a prison for Confederate soldiers and southern sympathizers. On that same anniversary of the British attack, Frank Key Howard, editor of the pro-South Baltimore Exchange, was also arrested and imprisoned at Fort McHenry. The irony was inescapable for Howard, the grandson of Francis Scott Key. “As I stood upon the very scene of that conflict, I could not but contrast my position with his, forty-seven years before,” Howard later wrote. “The flag which he had then so proudly hailed, I saw waving at the same place, over the victims of as vulgar and brutal a despotism as modern times have witnessed.”

  Though a southern sympathizer herself, Georgiana Appleton and her family safeguarded the Star-Spangled Banner through the war. “[W]ith me it has remained ever since, loved and venerated,” she wrote in 1873. But the flag by then was deteriorating badly, “just fading away, being among our earthly treasures where moth and rust must corrupt,” she said. It did not help that the Armistead family occasionally allowed those deemed worthy of the honor to cut out pieces of the flag, a common custom at the time.

  The flag had remained through this time a family keepsake, largely unknown to the American public outside of Baltimore. But in 1873, Georgiana Appleton lent the flag to Commodore George Henry Preble, a naval officer and historian. Preble had a canvas sail stitched to the flag to give it support, put it on display in New England, and had it photographed for the first time. His lectures and articles brought great attention to the flag at a time when the public, in the years after the Civil War, was hungry for symbols of national unity.

  By the time Eben Appleton, a New York stockbroker, inherited the flag upon his mother’s death in 1878, it was an America icon. Appleton, the grandson of George Armistead, was a private and proper man greatly concerned with keeping the flag’s dignity. He refused to lend the flag for events that lacked proper decorum, keeping it locked much of the time in a Manhattan safe-deposit vault. The flag made a last visit to Baltimore in 1880, when it was carried in a great procession celebrating the city’s sesquicentennial. But Appleton was dissatisfied with the arrangements for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the bombardment in 1889, and refused to lend the flag, sparking outrage in Baltimore. Appleton was vilified amid suggestions that the flag was public property.

  “A holy relic never disgraced, and receiving now the homage of friends, as in 1814, it commanded the respect of foes.”

  The first known photograph of the Star Spangled Banner, taken at the Boston Naval yard in 1873.

  Gravely insulted, Appleton refused to discuss the flag for the next eighteen years. By then he was looking for a public institution to take on the burden of caring for what had become a national symbol. A cousin directed Appleton’s attention to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, which, since its founding in 1846, had taken an increased role as the national museum.

  In 1907, Appleton loaned the flag to the Smithsonian, and, pleased with its handling, he made it a permanent gift five years later. Even so, a Baltimore committee preparing for the centennial of the Star-Spangled Banner in 1914 pressed Appleton to have the flag brought to Baltimore, even printing programs announcing it would be carried on parade. An irritated Appleton sent a condition to the Smithsonian: The flag was to “remain there forever” and never moved.

  The disintegrating flag was in any event in no condition for further public tours. By the time the flag was turned over to the Smithsonian, it was eight feet shorter than the one sewn by Mary Pickersgill, and more than two hundred square feet of fabric were missing, including one star. In 1914, a team led by noted flag restorer Amelia Fowler stitched a linen backing to the flag, allowing it to be displayed in the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building on the National Mall.

  The flag remained there for the next quarter century, folded over inside a glass case. But the outbreak of World War II and the destruction of public buildings in the London blitz raised concerns about the Star-Spangled Banner’s safety in the event of an enemy air raid. Soon after Pearl Harbor, despite Eben Appleton’s admonition, the flag was placed in a fifteen-foot-long crate and taken in secrecy to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. It was stored in a park warehouse, along with other priceless artifacts—including George Washington’s uniform and the desk on which Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence—until late 1944, when Washington was deemed safe.

  In 1964, the flag was freed from the growing clutter of glass cases in its old home and made the dramatic centerpiece of a new building now known as the National Museum of American History. For thirty-four years, the stirring sight of the Star-Spangled Banner suspended from fifty feet high greeted visitors to the flag hall.

  But the flag suffered from exposure to light and pollution, even after a screen was added to protect it. In 1998, the Star-Spangled Banner was lowered and a new restoration begun. Examining the material, conservators concluded that the linen sewn to the back in 1914 had to go, as it forced the flag into a uniform rectangle that distorted its true, irregular shape. Working with scissors and tweezers and often lying prone on a movable bridge suspended above the flag, conservators painstakingly removed the 1.7 million stitches that held the backing.

  The results were spectacular
, revealing a side of the flag unseen by the public since 1873, with vivid colors that had been protected from light and dirt. The preservation team cleaned the flag with more than ten thousand common cosmetic sponges, and then brushed a solvent mixture of water and acetone on the surface to remove dirt, further revealing the flag’s original colors. Cotton fibers on the stars bore traces of exposure to battle conditions, but there was no evidence anywhere on the flag of damage caused by shot or shrapnel—supporting the notion that the storm flag flew during the bombardment. The holes were not from battle, as was often assumed, but rather from time, including insect damage and snippets cut out as relics. The largest hole, which entirely removed the fifteenth star, was apparently cut out by Louisa Armistead to give as a memento to an unknown distinguished recipient.

  The flag was far too fragile to ever be again hung vertically, it was clear. A strong, lightweight, and almost sheer backing was attached to give the flag support. The conservation, expected to last three years, ended up taking eight years and costing $8.5 million, but the flag was not yet ready for display. As part of a major renovation of the museum begun in 2006, a special $19 million chamber was constructed on the second floor to protect the banner from light, air, and water. The flag was placed on a display platform, raised to an angle of 10 degrees for viewing. In November 2008, the flag was restored to public view in the new gallery, and the effect was mesmerizing.

  The banner hovers in the dimly lit chamber like a ghostly apparition, thin as a wisp, but its vibrant colors startlingly alive. The holes and tears previously disguised by a painted background are now plainly visible. Two hundred years after the battle, tattered and frail, the Star-Spangled Banner seemed more powerful than ever.