So as the rain poured down, a smaller storm flag that measured 17-by-25 feet flew in its place. The fort’s 30-by-42-foot garrison flag was so massive that it required 11 men to hoist when dry, and if waterlogged, the woolen banner could have weighed upwards of 500 pounds and snapped the flagpole. In addition to a thunderstorm of bombs, a torrent of rain fell on Fort McHenry throughout the night of the Battle of Baltimore.
The flag Key “hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming” did not fly “through the perilous fight.” Accompanied by British guards on September 10, Key returned to the American sloop from which he witnessed the bombardment behind the 50-ship British fleet.ģ. William Beanes, a prominent surgeon captured at the Battle of Bladensburg.Īccompanied by John Stuart Skinner, a fellow lawyer working for the State Department, Key set sail on an American sloop in Baltimore Harbor, and on September 7 the pair boarded the British ship Tonnant, where they dined and secured the prisoner’s release under one condition-they could not go ashore until after the British attacked Baltimore. In his capacity as a Washington, D.C., lawyer, Key had been dispatched by President James Madison on a mission to Baltimore to negotiate for the release of Dr. Key was not imprisoned on a British warship when he penned his verses. The first broadside of the verses, printed just days after the battle, noted that the words should be sung to the melody of “To Anacreon in Heaven.” Key was quite familiar with the tune, having used it to accompany an 1805 poem, which included a reference to a “star-spangled flag,” he had written to honor Barbary War naval heroes Stephen Decatur and Charles Stewart.Īlthough Key composed the patriotic lyrics amid a burst of anti-British euphoria, “To Anacreon in Heaven” was ironically an English song composed in 1775 that served as the theme song of the upper-crust Anacreontic Society of London and a popular pub staple.Ģ. “We know he had the tune in mind because the rhyme and meter exactly fit it,” says Marc Leepson, author of the Key biography What So Proudly We Hailed. Although Key was an amateur poet and not a songwriter, when he composed his verses, he intended them to accompany a popular song of the day. “ The Star Spangled-Banner” was not a poem set to a melody years later. Francis Scott Key intended his verses to be song lyrics, not poetry.
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