Fort McHenry: The Night That Made the National Anthem

The five-pointed star-shaped earthwork guarding the entrance to Baltimore Harbor has been here since seventeen ninety-nine, built on the plans of French military engineers and armed to stop any enemy fleet from reaching the city beyond. It faced its great test on the night of September thirteenth, eighteen fourteen.

Britain and America had been at war for two years when Vice Admiral Alexander Cochrane positioned five bomb ketches, HMS Terror, Volcano, Meteor, Devastation, and Aetna, just beyond the range of the fort's guns and opened fire. For twenty-five hours, more than fifteen hundred mortar shells, cannonballs, and Congreve rockets rained down on Fort McHenry. The American garrison of roughly one thousand men, commanded by Major George Armistead, could not return fire effectively. Their guns simply could not reach the enemy ships. All they could do was endure.

Among those watching from a truce ship anchored nearby was a Maryland lawyer named Francis Scott Key. He had come to negotiate the release of an American prisoner and was being held by the British, who did not want him reporting their plans for the attack. As the bombardment thundered through the night, Key was certain that by morning the British flag would be flying over the fort.

It was not. At dawn on September fourteenth, as the British fleet began withdrawing, Key looked through the morning haze and saw the great garrison flag, thirty feet by forty-two feet, fifteen stars and fifteen stripes, that Armistead had ordered sewn specifically to be visible from a distance. Major Armistead had commissioned it from Baltimore flagmaker Mary Pickersgill in the summer of eighteen thirteen, paying about four hundred and five dollars for it. He had wanted a flag large enough that the British could have no doubt whose harbor they had failed to take.

Key began writing on the back of a letter. He finished the poem, which he called Defence of Fort McHenry, within days. It was set to the tune of a popular English drinking song, printed in Baltimore newspapers, and eventually titled The Star-Spangled Banner. Congress declared it the official national anthem in nineteen thirty-one.