Walking about the snowy, mostly empty streets of Washington, D.C. today I was thinking about The Star-Spangled Banner, which was declared the National Anthem today in 1931, and about its author Francis Scott Key, a devout Episcopalian.
Interesting that it became the National Anthem during the depths of the Great Depression, and in time for World War II. The great film Tora, Tora, Tora shows a U.S. Navy band performing an early morning rendition of The Star Spangled Banner aboard a battleship in Pearl Harbor just as diving Japanese bombers begin to attack, prompting the band conductor to wave his wand more frantically.
Besides The Star Spangled Banner, Key also wrote a hymn, Lord, with Glowing Heart I’d Praise Thee. Reputedly he considered entering the ministry as a young man but instead became a lawyer. He helped found St. John’s Episcopal Church in Georgetown, an old Washington, DC neighborhood, where he practiced and lived, and served as a lay reader at the church. He also was a deputy to six Episcopal Church General Conventions.
In their campaign that captured and burned part of Washington, D.C., the British had taken captive a prominent physician and friend of Key’s, prompting Key to seek his release, by which point the British were then poised to attack Baltimore, which was 200 years ago this Summer. Key was himself temporarily held captive until after the failed attack. From a ship 8 miles away he watched the British bombard Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor all night. In the morning dusk he beheld the giant American flag aloft, which inspired him to write the poem that became The Star Spangled Banner.
God is not mentioned until the final stanza, which is rarely sung:
O, thus be it ever when freemen shall stand,
Between their lov’d homes and the war’s desolation;
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land
Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause is just,
And 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!
Star Spangled is rarely if ever in church hymnals, but I have found it in a Salvation Army hymnal. Some years ago I attended a Sons of the American Revolution dinner where high school students competed in a contest of patriotic recitation. One young woman was reciting The Star Spangled Banner but became stumped in the middle. Embarrassed, she struggled to recall and finally burst forth with the final stanza, amid tears, more from embarrassment than from the lyrics’ emotional impact, I suspect. So when I recall the words, “And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust,’” which had been unfamiliar to me, I think of her.
Key had lots of interesting family connections. His sister married Roger Taney, later one of the longest serving chief justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, writing the notorious “Dred Scott” decision that enshrined slavery and declared even free blacks non-citizens. The ruling supposedly settled the slavery issue but instead helped ensure civil war, a lesson to all who think court rulings can conclusively arbitrate contentious national issues. Ironically, Taney would swear in Abraham Lincoln as president.
There was also Key’s son, a Washington playboy who romanced the wife of Congressman Daniel Sickles, who would later lose a leg as a general at Gettysburg, and who notoriously shot his wife’s lover dead in Lafayette Park, in broad daylight, across from the White House. Sickles’ defense lawyer was Edwin Stanton, later Lincoln’s War Secretary, who successfully acquitted Sickles by making the first use of innocent by reason of temporary insanity.
The elder Key, like many Americans, had opposed the War of 1812, which he denounced as “abominable” and a “lump of wickedness,” and which was possibly the most divisive war in American history, outside of the Civil War itself. Another war opponent was General Light Horse Harry Lee, confidante to George Washington and father to future General Robert E. Lee. When his son was only age 5, the older Lee helped defend an anti-war Baltimore newspaper from an enraged mob. He was severely beaten and spent much of his remaining 6 years of life seeking relief in the Caribbean, away from his family. Young Robert grew up almost fatherless, aspiring towards an imagined perfection, perhaps based partly on someone else who loomed large but whom the younger Lee never knew, George Washington. The Lees attended Washington’s Christ Episcopal Church in Alexandria, their pew just across from where Washington’s had been.
Not long after the Baltimore riot that nearly killed Lee’s father, the commander of Fort McHenry commissioned seamstress Mary Young Pickersgill to construct a flag so giant that attacking foes would “have no difficulty in seeing it from a distance.” She was successful, so that both the British and Key saw it well.
Pickersgill’s house is still preserved as a museum in Baltimore. So too is Key’s brother-in-law, Justice Taney’s, in Frederick, Maryland. Sadly, Key’s house in Georgetown was tragically lost, literally. It was privately preserved as a private museum early in the 20th Century, thanks to the patronage of Admiral George Dewey, victor of Manila Bay. But the museum effort failed, and the house was not procured by the federal government until the 1940s in preparation for a highway. Legislation supported by Republican Senate leader Robert Taft to relocate and rebuild the house close by as a permanent Key museum was vetoed by President Harry Truman, ironically a champion of historic preservation. The house had already been dismantled, and the materials gradually disappeared, their whereabouts still a mystery. But Key’s famous patriotic hymn lives on.
Occasionally there have been efforts to replace The Star Spangled Banner as the National Anthem with a less martial hymn like America the Beautiful. But I agree with columnist Jay Nordlinger, who some years ago noted that America the Beautiful celebrates the nation’s natural splendor while Star Spangled celebrates the nation’s unique audacity.
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