Listen - I'll tell you why I cried, tonight...
When was the last time you heard "The Star-Spangled Banner"? You might have been at a baseball game. Or a 4th of July celebration. You might have heard it through speakers or earbuds, waiting impatiently for the game to start or the aerial display to begin.
Did you think about it?
Tonight it came through my headphones as the kickoff to a festival concert, and suddenly I was overwhelmed with painful, conflicting feelings. First there was shame, as the knowledge of treaties abrogated, friends and allies horribly betrayed, citizens slaughtered in our streets, refugees and immigrants tormented, oligarchs enriched and autocrats empowered washed over me. The thought came to me that I did not want that noble music to signify such ignoble, greedy, immoral, stupid actions.
But, after all, it's just a drinking song... "The Anacreontic Song" was the club anthem of a British men's club that met monthly to eat, drink, and listen to music - the club was named for Anacreon, a Greek poet famed for his many drinking songs. Not exactly "noble music", right?
And those lyrics - how many times have we all sung them, mouthed them, hummed along, whatever. They're just lyrics. Just the kind of bombastic (pun intended) patriotic militaristic puffery that's appropriate for our current mindless sabre-rattling Goon Show on the Potomac, right?
Unless you know a little more, perhaps. I suddenly found myself thinking of the original poem, "The Defence of Fort M'Henry", and how it came about.
Who was Francis Scott Key, and why was he watching the bombs burst in air, that fateful night? What was his vantage point, that ne could see the "rocket's red glare"? Where were those bombs bursting and why? Baltimore, right? During the War of 1812?
Here's the tale, as simple as I can make it.
Key was a poet and author, but his day job was a law practice - an important one. He held more than one public office. He owned enslaved people, and in his public capacity defended 'the peculiar institution' but privately was conflicted, freeing some of his own slaves, supporting a charity that repatriated emancipated slaves to Africa, and giving free legal representation to some enslaved people seeking freedom. He was born into the Revolutionary War generation in 1779, and in September of 1814 he was evacuated from his Georgetown law practice as the British arrived to ravage the Potomac basin.
One of Key's friends was a Baltimore doctor who had been working among the British prisoners of war, and he was arrested by the British as they swept through Maryland after the burning of Washington. Key sought permission to negotiate for his freedom, working with Colonel John Skinner, a US military "agent" for prisoners of war. Together they hired a "truce boat" to approach the Royal Navy ships in the Cheseapeake Bay, where they were preparing to lay seige to Baltimore.
This was suddenly very vivid to me. Imagine approaching enemy gunships - fearsome and powerful military hardware of the era, fresh off the burning and looting of the nation's capital. Even under a flag of truce, it must have been a nervous undertaking.
They didn't know where Dr. Barnes was - the British finally dircted them to a ship further along the Bay, providing them with an escort to the British ship stationed at Tangier Island, where representatives of the Admiralty would negotiate with them. At first the Brits were disinclined to grant the request, but letters from a number of British prisoners of war, praising the kindness and assistance of the American doctors helping their wounded, did the trick.
But there was a problem. They'd been on a British Admiralty flagship, negotiating the prisoner release - but on that same flagship, the British were planning the attack on Baltimore. They were not about to let the truce ship wander off on its own. Instead, they transferred the three Americans to another British warship, tethered their "truce boat" to the warship, and set off, escorted by the Admiralty flagship, up the Bay for their attack.
And that is how Francis Scott Key saw the Battle of Baltimore - from a ship in the harbor, tethered to a British warship, detained by the attacking British, sailing up the Patapsco to assault Fort McHenry on September 13th.
The three Americans, back on their unarmed "truce boat" tethered between British warships, had front-row seats to a 25-hour bombardment. It was a rainy day and visibility wasn't good. The smoke of the rockets and mortars formed heavy drifts, and even in daylight, the Americans could only occasionally see the Fort's smaller "storm flag" as the day wore into evening and the bombardment continued all around them - the noise, the smoke, the creak of the ships against their anchors and the shifting tide.
The British had burned Washington. They were ravaging the mid-Atlantic... if they took Baltimore they would have control of America's third-largest city, with all its supplies and materials, providing a base to attack inland and roll up the region. Fort McHenry stood in their way.
Through the night of September 13th and into the morning of September 14th the bombardment continued, deafening, terrifying, relentless. And through that night, the three Americans in the truce boat had no idea whether the Fort would hold.
Finally, just after sunrise, the bombs stopped. The smoke slowly cleared. And over Fort McHenry, the 30-by-42 foot banner with its fifteen stars and fifteen stripes, sewn by Mary Young Pickersgill and her friends at their home on Pratt Street in Baltimore, floated proudly.
The British did not take Baltimore. They did release the three Americans. Francis Scott Key had already jotted a few lyrics on the back of a letter in his pocket, waiting for their release. He finished it that evening in a Baltimore hotel, and sent it, unsigned and attributed, as "The Defence of Fort M'Henry" to a printer of 'broadsides" - probably the closest thing the early 19th Century had to social media. Like an earlier poem of Key's, it was set to the music of "The Anacreontic Song" and it quickly went viral by the standards of the day.
I thought, tonight, about those three Americans, surrounded by the enemies bombarding the Fort defending their homes, with the noise and the gunpowder drifting through the air, uncertain of the outcome and the future of their new nation. Could we make it through that ordeal? Wouid Fort McHenry hold? Would America endure?
And the moment, that morning, when they saw that flag. And that did bring the tears to my eyes.
I hope America can endure through this current painful challenge to our existence as a nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal.
May it be so.
To this I pledge MY life and all I can bring, to ensure that my grandchild's children can sit impatiently through that anthem waiting for the start of a baseball game, long after I'm gone.
determinedly,
Bright
= new reply since forum marked as read
