What Is The Background To The Defence Of Fort Mchenry

In September 1814, Francis Scott Key, an attorney and DC insider, watched the American flag rising over Baltimore, Maryland's Fort McHenry from a British send in the harbor. Key had been negotiating the release of an American convict during the War of 1812 when the British attacked the fort. After twenty-5 hours of heavy battery, Primal was sure that, come up dawn, the British flag would exist flying over Baltimore. Upon seeing the American flag still aloft, he wrote, on the back of a letter, the first poesy of what would eventually become the national anthem of the United States. One time he returned to the city, he drafted 3 more verses, completing what was then titled "Defence of Fort K'Henry." The words were put to the tune of a popular British song, "To Anacreon in Heaven."

Francis Scott Key, "Defence of Fort M'Henry" grew to exist one of the most recognized songs in the United states. A local printer outset published the lyrics in a broadside and shortly after, two Baltimore newspapers picked it up as well. Past October, seventeen newspapers had spread the song upward and down the Eastward Coast. Inside a few months, the song's title, "Defense force of Fort M'Henry," was replaced with its more recognizable name, "The Star-Spangled Banner." (Information technology is believed that Thomas Carr, a Baltimore publisher, coined the new championship.) In the 1890s, the US Navy and Army made "The Star-Spangled Banner" an official song of the armed services. President Woodrow Wilson signed an executive order to make it the national anthem for the armed forces in 1916, and in 1931, Congress passed legislation making information technology the national canticle.

This document, "Defence of Fort M'Henry," is from the Analectic Mag, published past Moses Thomas in Philadelphia. This publication includes all four verses of the vocal, including the controversial lines in the 3rd verse, "No refuge could save the hireling and slave, From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave." Key was nigh likely referring to the more than four,000 enslaved people who joined the Corps of Colonial Marines during the War of 1812 to fight for the British to gain their liberty. Some printed editions of the song omit that poetry birthday. The Analectic Mag's introduction hints at the song's rapid ascension in popularity, saying, "These lines have already been published in several of our newspapers. . . . We think that their merit entitles them to preservation in some more than permanent form than the columns of a daily paper."

Excerpts

[Verse 1]

O! say tin you encounter, by the dawn'southward early on calorie-free,
What and so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose wide stripes and brilliant stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we lookout'd, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' cherry glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was all the same there—
O! say, does that star-spangled banner however moving ridge
O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?

[Verse three]

And where is that band who then vauntingly swore
That the havock of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more than?
Their blood has launder'd out their foul foot-steps' pollution.
No refuge could relieve the 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 country of the free, and the habitation of the brave.

A full transcript is available.

What Is The Background To The Defence Of Fort Mchenry,

Source: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/%E2%80%9Cdefence-fort-mchenry%E2%80%9D-or-%E2%80%9C-star-spangled-banner%E2%80%9D-1814

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