The Star-Spangled Banner: A Song History

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In September 1814 a British attack on Baltimore stalled at Fort McHenry: after some 25 hours of bombardment, the attackers could not get past the city's defenses and pulled back[1]. Francis Scott Key, detained aboard a British ship, saw the attempt fail at dawn on September 14[2]; the flag over the fort was a garrison flag the National Park Service gives as 30 by 42 feet[1]. According to the Smithsonian, Key began the poem on the back of a letter and completed its four stanzas after returning to Baltimore[3].

Nineteenth-century American flag of linen and wool with stars in rows and thirteen stripes

Flag, American, linen and wool, 19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A later American flag, not the one that flew over Fort McHenry; it has no connection to the song.

The poem was printed almost at once as a broadside titled "Defence of Fort M'Henry," with a note that it was to be sung to "Anacreon in Heaven"[4]. That sheet was probably run off around September 17 at the office of the Baltimore American and Commercial Daily Advertiser, and only two copies are known to survive; Baltimore newspapers carried the words on September 20 and 21, and the Baltimore publisher Thomas Carr, who is generally credited with the title "The Star-Spangled Banner," issued words and music together, probably by October 19[5]. By mid-October at least seventeen more newspapers along the East Coast had reprinted it[3]. The tune came from "To Anacreon in Heaven," the society song of a London gentlemen's club, the Anacreontic Society, with words by Ralph Tomlinson, who had been its president; the Park Service describes the music as a group effort of which the court musician John Stafford Smith was most likely the main author[6]. The melody was already familiar in America, carrying various new lyrics in newspapers by 1798, and Key himself had fitted it to an earlier poem, "When the Warrior Returns," by 1806[6].

The song gained official standing gradually. The Library of Congress notes that the Navy adopted it for flag-raising in 1889 and that the Wilson White House used it wherever an anthem was called for, before President Herbert Hoover signed the act making it the national anthem on March 3, 1931, an act that fixed no official text or arrangement[2]. Smithsonian curator Christopher Wilson and historian Bennett Parten have also drawn attention to Key's record on slavery: he was a slaveholder, and as district attorney for Washington he prosecuted Reuben Crandall in 1836 over abolitionist pamphlets, a case that ended in acquittal[7][8].

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Sources

  1. National Park Service, Fort McHenry: "The Star-Spangled Banner".
  2. Library of Congress, Music Division: "Star Spangled Banner".
  3. Smithsonian National Museum of American History: "The Lyrics".
  4. Library of Congress: "Defence of Fort M'Henry".
  5. Library of Congress, In the Muse blog (Ray White): "Printing 'The Star-Spangled Banner'".
  6. National Park Service, Fort McHenry: "To Anacreon In Heaven".
  7. Smithsonian Magazine (Christopher Wilson): "Where's the Debate on Francis Scott Key's Slave-Holding Legacy?".
  8. The Conversation (Bennett Parten): "Francis Scott Key: One of the anti-slavery movement's great villains".