For a school assignment a little while back, I did an emotional analysis on the origin of “The Defense of Fort McHenry,” later put to music as “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This is one of those topics in American history I remember sort of hearing about, but up until I did this short essay, I didn’t have many of the details, and so since I presume that’s the standard experience, I thought it would be neat to share my analysis.
It’s unsurprising that Francis Scott Key had such a passionate emotional response to the sight of the American flag still flying after the Battle of Baltimore, for many reasons. First is the simple fact that Mr. Key was a patriot. He may have been opposed to the war, but more than that, he was outraged by the British’s actions, including the injustice that had brought him to Baltimore in the first place: the arrest of a physician, William Beanes, for having the courage to stand up to British soldiers who had been plundering his home. Mr. Key, a lawyer, was there to negotiate for Mr. Beanes’s release. By the time he had succeeded in his venture, however, he had learned of the imminent attack on Fort McHenry and was therefore withheld from returning to shore until after the battle’s conclusion. This means that not only was Key witness to the bombardment, he knew that it was coming and was helpless to stop it.
This helplessness would have been bad enough as it persisted through the daylight hours of the attack, Key watching from afar as “it seemed as though mother earth had opened and was vomiting shot and shell in a sheet of fire and brimstone,” but even worse as the battle carried into the night, and he had only red in the sky and the sound of “bombs bursting in air” as evidence that the fighting carried on, with no way to see the damage or which side the tides of war were favoring. It seemed inevitable to him that given the scale of the attack, the British would overtake the fort, and yet Key had not even the comfort of knowing whether that was so. I can only imagine the overwhelming relief he must have felt when dawn broke, and rather than the British Union Jack that Key feared he would see, the American flag still flew over Fort McHenry. It was, in his words, “a most merciful deliverance,” and from that raw emotion of relief and pride, “The Defense of Fort McHenry” was written.
