The Star-Spangled Banner

The story

In the War of 1812, after the burning of Washington, British forces arrested William Beanes, a physician of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, and a friend of the lawyer Francis Scott Key. With the sanction of President Madison, Key went to Baltimore in early September 1814 and, with John Stuart Skinner, an American agent for prisoners of war, sailed down the Chesapeake Bay to the British fleet. Aboard HMS Tonnant on 7 September they secured Beanes's release from Major-General Robert Ross and Vice-Admiral Alexander Cochrane, but because they had overheard the plans for the attack on Baltimore they were held with the fleet until the battle was over. From their own vessel, under guard, Key watched the 25-hour bombardment of Fort McHenry that began at sunrise on 13 September. Between 1,500 and 1,800 shells and over 700 rockets were fired; four men died in the fort and 24 were wounded. On the morning of 14 September the large garrison flag, 15 stars and 15 stripes, made by Mary Young Pickersgill and other workers in her Baltimore home, was raised over the fort.

Key began his poem that morning on the back of a letter and finished it at the Indian Queen Hotel in Baltimore after his release on 16 September. Much of its idea and some of its wording came from his earlier song "When the Warrior Returns", written for Stephen Decatur and Charles Stewart after the First Barbary War and set to the same tune. His brother-in-law Joseph H. Nicholson saw that the words fitted "The Anacreontic Song" by the English composer John Stafford Smith, the song of a London gentlemen's club. A Baltimore printer issued it as a broadside, "Defence of Fort M'Henry", on 17 September; it was in 17 newspapers from Georgia to New Hampshire within weeks, and Thomas Carr of Baltimore published words and music together as "The Star Spangled Banner". Its range of a twelfth makes it hard for most people to sing.

The song was played at public events through the 19th century. The Navy adopted it officially in 1889, Woodrow Wilson ordered it played at military and other occasions in 1916, and a standard arrangement agreed by five musicians, among them Walter Damrosch and John Philip Sousa, was first performed at Carnegie Hall on 5 December 1917. From 1918 the Maryland Society of the United States Daughters of 1812 campaigned for it as the national anthem, and Congressman John Charles Linthicum introduced six unsuccessful bills between 1918 and 1929. A petition of the Veterans of Foreign Wars with five million signatures reached the House Judiciary Committee on 31 January 1930. The Senate passed the bill on 3 March 1931 and President Herbert Hoover signed it, making the song the national anthem. All four stanzas are the anthem, but only the first is usually sung.

The anthem has carried political meanings since the 1960s. José Feliciano's slow blues version at the 1968 World Series caused a nationwide uproar, and a week later Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black-gloved fists on the medal podium at the Mexico City Olympics while it played. Jimi Hendrix's instrumental at Woodstock in 1969 became one of the best-known performances. Since the 1990s the anthem has been criticised over the third stanza, which mentions slaves, and over Key's own record: he held slaves for much of his life. Most recent historians of slavery in the War of 1812, among them Gene A. Smith, Marc Leepson and David Roediger, read that line as aimed at enslaved people who escaped to the British, who offered them freedom and a place in the Corps of Colonial Marines; Key's biographer Mark Clague reads it as aimed at British forces and their collaborators, and notes that Key freed four of the seven slaves he inherited.

From 2016 the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and other athletes knelt during the anthem in protest against police brutality and racism; in 2017 President Donald Trump called for kneeling players to be fired. In November 2017 the California chapter of the NAACP asked Congress to remove the song as the national anthem. On 19 June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, protesters toppled the statue of Key in San Francisco. In 2025, after Trump's tariff announcements and talk of annexing Canada, Canadian crowds booed the anthem at sporting events. Federal law (36 U.S.C. § 301) advises those present to stand facing the flag, hand over heart, or to salute if in the armed forces; the advice is not enforceable.

What it says

A poem in the voice of a watcher through a night of bombardment who asks at dawn whether the flag still flies, then sees it and rejoices. The later stanzas turn on the defeated invaders and end with trust in God as the nation's motto. The mood moves from anxious suspense to triumph.

The words