Through the rain and smoke of the long day and night of September 13, he has no way of knowing what had happened until the following morning when he is able, finally, to see an enormous flag, raised to the tune of “Yankee Doodle,” sewn by Mary Pickersgill and her family: 30 by 42 feet, 3 stories high, weighing 80 pounds, containing 350,000 hand-sewn stitches, and, as was the case then bearing 15 stars and 15 stripes. He and his party get stuck there, however, as the attack on Baltimore is planned, so he has a front-row seat for the bombardment of Fort McHenry, which defends the harbor.įrom the deck of the Surprise, he witnesses the British use of the Congreve rockets, with roots back to 13th century China, and the bombshells designed to detonate as they neared their targets. Indeed, it’s in no small part because he’s momentarily off the stage that the British are able to turn their fuller attention to a pesky conflict in North America.Īt this point, coincidence smiles on Francis Scott Key, a lawyer, slaveholder, and occasional poet, who boards a British ship on a mission to free an American physician wrongly arrested for treason.
The Emperor himself has been in exile on Elba for four months, though he will linger there for only five months more. It’s also a time of some geopolitical import a continent away, the Congress of Vienna is gathering to reassemble Europe following the first wave of the Napoleonic Era. I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School, and it is September of 1814, Beethoven has premiered his Eighth Symphony, and Jane Austen has published Mansfield Park, anonymously. In the midst of an otherwise overlooked war, best known for actually ending before the decisive battle and for Dolley Madison saving George Washington’s portrait as the British burn the city bearing his name-in partial retaliation for the less-known abortive American invasion of Toronto-a day and a night of battle and uncertainty gave rise to one of the most recognizable songs in the world, which also tells us a story of quickly, and slowly, becoming. The backstory is well known too, though as is so often the case, not in detail and not always correctly. Almost every phrase has been repurposed you can easily imagine book titles like “The Rockets Red Glare,” and “The Dawn’s Early Light,” and you’d be right I found over 500 with that last one alone. I’d like to think I’m not alone it’s precisely because we’ve all heard it so many times that it’s become, for many, aural wallpaper, entirely familiar though rarely closely attended to.
Am I the only one who didn’t really recognize that the Star-Spangled Banner asks a question? It finally, ahem, dawned on me when doing the research for this episode.
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