Francis Scott Key Was an Enslaver

The song has four stanzas. Most Americans know the first. The fourth ends with the phrase "this be our motto: in God is our trust, and the Star-Spangled Banner in triumph shall wave, o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave." The man who wrote those words was, at the time he wrote them, the legal owner of enslaved human beings.

Francis Scott Key held enslaved people throughout his adult life. He was a Georgetown lawyer from a Maryland slaveholding family, and nothing in his career suggests he found the arrangement troubling. After he wrote the anthem in eighteen fourteen, he continued in his profession. In eighteen thirty-three, President Andrew Jackson appointed him United States Attorney for the District of Columbia. In that role, Key prosecuted abolitionists who attempted to distribute antislavery literature in the capital. He participated in legal actions against free Black Washingtonians who resisted re-enslavement. He opposed the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society and worked against its activities in Washington. He continued to hold enslaved people until his death in eighteen forty-three. He died owning them.

The monument to Key is over there, across the harbor. He is also buried in Frederick, Maryland, in the same state where he was born and where, at the time of his death, the enslaved population numbered in the tens of thousands.

Both of these things are true at the same time: the anthem was written by a man watching a flag he genuinely loved survive a bombardment, and the man who wrote those words spent the last thirty years of his life working to ensure that the freedom the anthem celebrated would not extend to the people he owned. The history does not resolve this into something more comfortable. It contains both, and so does the monument.