MARCH 29, 2024 – When I heard about the “Key Bridge,” I thought of the “main” or “key” bridge serving greater Baltimore. I was not thinking about the author of the lyrics to our national anthem. The more information I absorb about the recent catastrophe and the enormous projects—recovery, clean-up and rebuilding—the more amazed I am by the interlocking work of governmental agencies—international, federal, state, and local—and spectrum of commercial enterprises that are and will be involved. Where would the whole operation be without government, insurance companies, engineering firms and dare I say . . . lawyers? Who’s in charge? Who’s responsible for what? I can’t imagine.
Thanks to Wikipedia, it’s much easier to wrap my head around Francis Scott Key. The first thing I learned, unfortunately, is that he was a slaveowner. Bad. Why before every sporting event in America are we still mumbling the words to of a national anthem written by a slaveowner!
But as we know, he had plenty of good (“bad”?) company, starting right up—er, down—there with the Father of Our Country, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and who knows how many signatories of that seminal document proclaiming freedom and liberty—at least for white men.
I jest—in part. We’re not quite the country we’ve portrayed ourselves for multiple generations. But that’s for another day, another essay. For now, I’ve got to cut Francis Scott Key some slack. He treated his eight slaves humanely. How’s that for a try? Not enough? How about, he freed seven of his slaves. “Out of how many?” it’s fair to ask. Well, he managed subsequently, apparently, to acquire another eight slaves, which is the number he had when he died. But hold on. One of his freed slaves he retained as his (hobby) farm foreman, paid him a wage, and put him in charge of . . . the non-freed slaves.
Okay, okay. Not convinced? How about this: as a lawyer he represented several slaves seeking freedom, though again, it’s fair to point out that they weren’t his own slaves. And in the spirit of full disclosure, it’s important to know that as a hired gun, Key represented slave-owners who were trying to recover their runaway slaves. Yet, in the end, Francis should get some credit—perhaps—for serving as executor of a slave-owner’s estate, and in accordance with the will, freeing 400 (!) slaves. Apparently Key slaved—oops, wrong verb choice; he worked hard—for a decade to enforce the will and ensure that the freedmen and freedwomen were given sufficient land to support themselves.
Key’s heavy involvement in the American Colonization Society, whose mission was to expatriate Blacks back to West Africa, further clouds his legacy. But in a newspaper editorial, the editor wrote, “[Francis Scott Key] convinced me that slavery was wrong—radically wrong.”
The bottom line is that like many white people of his day, Key was conflicted when it came to America’s Original Sin. If abolitionists of his day saw things with much greater moral clarity than the “conflicted” did, before we ship Key (Washington, Jefferson, and the whole lot of them) off to the equivalent of history’s #MeToo hell, I remind myself of all the animals that have lived horrific lives and died terrible deaths because of my eating habits. Worse, I think of the crimes against the earth I’ve committed as an active participant in a culture of mass consumerism, starting with my own carbon footprints and ending with the tons of plastic that are out of mind as soon as I put them out of my sight. Don’t I know better—just as a slaveowner like Francis Scott Key knew better? Slavery in all its overt and covert forms is bad, but what is worse than trashing the earth?
Now that we’ve got all that out of the way . . .
. . . The circumstances that led to the famous lyrics of The Star-Spangled Banner were rather improbable. It seems that on September 7, 1814—amidst the War of 1812 (Washington D.C. had been torched the month before)—a good friend of Francis Scott Key, an American geezer named Dr. Bill Beanes, was held captive by the British. Beanes’ offense was that he’d squealed on some British soldiers who’d been pillaging homes. The soldiers soon found themselves arrested. In the early evening of September 7, Key and an American colonel sailed aboard a truce vessel out among the British fleet in Baltimore Harbor. Their intent was to meet with high British naval brass to try to negotiate the release of Beanes. The American pair were treated favorably—even wined and dined.
All went well. Keys and the colonel, along with Dr. Beanes, were escorted back to the truce ship, but because they were now privy to sensitive military information—the size and position of British units and their plan to attack Baltimore—they weren’t allowed yet to go ashore.
Helpless, from their ship the trio had to watch the ensuing attack on Fort McHenry during the 25-hour Battle of Baltimore. When it was all over, Key—an amateur poet, as well as a sharp lawyer (he’d argued several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court)—saw that “our flag was still there” flying over the fort and was sufficiently inspired to jot down the start of a poem about it.
When Key, the colonel, and old Beanes were finally released the next day, Key finished the poem and called it “In Defence of Fort M’Henry.” For a tune he added the notation, “Tune – Anacreon in Heaven,” which was the popular theme song of the Anacreon Club—ironically, a famous “gentlemen’s club” in . . . London. It’s the difficult-to-sing melody that crowds at American sporting events still struggle with to this day. The poem was published in newspapers across the young country. It was our unofficial national anthem by the time we were at war with Mexico. It would take an act of Congress—in 1931—however, to make The Star-Spangled Banner official.
If the Dali hadn’t smashed into the pylon of a major bridge named after Francis Scott Key, I wouldn’t have learned any of this. We come by much of our knowledge in strange and random ways.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
