Q Post 3806, The State of the Union and the Star Spangled Banner. Interesting History Q has been talking about Early American history lately and there must be a good reason. There must be lessons to learn from the PAST. Looking up these stories has helped me look at current events differently. I try to see the similarities between THEN AND NOW, It seems SO MUCH of our Government was destroyed in 1814, but Americans were able to go on and have victory. "One by one, the buildings at the heart of the American government went up in flames. On the evening of August 24, 1814, British troops torched the Capitol, the Treasury, the President’s House (not yet called the White House). All burned ferociously, as did the structures housing the War and the State departments. Battle-hardened redcoats had overwhelmed and scattered the largely untrained and poorly led American militiamen and regulars deployed to stop them from reaching the capital. President James Madison, along with his attorney general and secretary of state, had fled to safety across the Potomac River. Reporting news of the rout, the LondonCourier crowed: “War America would have, and war she has got.” The burning of Washington did not herald disaster for the floundering American cause. Instead, it turned out to be the PRELUDE to one of the most celebrated expressions of patriotic fervor in the young country’s history: Francis Scott Key’s composition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” written following the British attack on BaltimoreHarbor three weeks after the assault on the capital. However opposed to America’s entry into the war he had been, Key had been outraged by British incursions up the Chesapeake, the attack on the nation’s capital and the capture of Beanes. On September 7, 1814, Key, accompanied by American prisoner-of-exchange officer John Skinner, boarded the Tonnant, flagship of the British fleet, where Beanes was being held. They carried with them letters from British officers who had been treated by Beanes after being wounded during a skirmish in Bladensburg, Maryland. Within hours, the Americans had persuaded a British commander, Maj. Gen. Robert Ross, to release the doctor. By then, however, the assault on Baltimore was imminent; the three Americans, guarded by British marines, were obliged to wait out the battle aboard the British sloop some eight miles upriver from Fort McHenry From the vessel, they anxiously watched the bombardment of the fort through the daylight hours of September 13. According to Key, “It seemed as though mother earth had opened and was vomiting shot and shell in a sheet of fire and brimstone.” But as darkness descended, Key could see little more of the battle than the “red glare” of the enemy’s newly designed gunpowder-propelled Congreve rockets tracing fiery arcs across the sky. “The heavens aglow were a seething sea of flame,” he later wrote to his friend John Randolph. In the “angry sea,” as Key described conditions on that stormy night, the flag-of-truce sloop was “tossed as though in a tempest.” Key was alarmed by the sound of “bombs bursting in air”—British shells detonating short of their target. It seemed unlikely, Key would later recall, that American resistance at the fort could withstand such a pounding. Not until the mists dissipated at dawn September 14 did he learn the outcome of the battle. “At last,” he later wrote, “a bright streak of gold mingled with crimson shot athwart the eastern sky, followed by another, and still another, as the morning sun rose.” Gradually he was able to discern not the British Union Jack that he had feared, but still, defiantly, an American flag, enormous in its dimensions, fluttering in the breeze from the flagpole of an undefeated Fort McHenry. The fort had not fallen: Baltimore remained safe. It was, he later wrote, a “most merciful deliverance.” Major Armistead, the fort commander, could take credit for the flag’s spectacular size, 30 by 42 feet. Leaving no detail to chance in his preparations for the fort’s defense, he envisioned a DRAMATIC EMBLEM, commissioning Baltimore flag maker Mary Young Pickersgill to stitch a banner SO LARGE that the enemy would “have no difficulty in seeing it from a distance.” Mrs. Pickersgill had duly supplied the massive flag, sewn of wool bunting. Each of its 15 stars was about two feet across; its 15 stripes were about two feet wide. At the time, Francis Scott Key, a 35-year-old Washington lawyer and writer of occasional verse, found himself detained on a British ship within sight of the fort. The son of a distinguished judge, he had been born into a family of wealthy plantation owners based in Keymar, Maryland. Key was in British custody due to an incident that had occurred two weeks earlier, when a 65-year-old physician, William Beanes, confronted some British soldiers who had tried to plunder his Upper Marlboro, Maryland, home. One of the soldiers complained to his officers, who had the doctor placed under arrest. He was escorted to one of their vessels in the Chesapeake Bay. Learning of the incarceration through Richard West, his wife’s brother-in-law, Key agreed to act on Beanes’ behalf and received permission from President Madison to try to negotiate his release. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/francis-scott-key-the-reluctant-patriot-180937178/