The Star-Spangled Banner

Congress declares war on Britain over impressment of American sailors, interference with American trade, and British support for Native American resistance on the frontier. The war goes badly for the United States in its opening years, American invasions of Canada fail, and the U.S. Army proves unprepared for sustained conflict against British regulars.

It was the closest formal declaration of war in American history: 79 to 49 in the House and 19 to 13 in the Senate, with the Federalist Party and much of New England opposed. President James Madison signed it the same day.

Impressment was the central grievance. The Royal Navy had seized thousands of sailors from American ships since 1803, claiming they were British subjects, and the 1807 Chesapeake-Leopard affair, in which a British warship fired on a U.S. Navy frigate and removed four men, had already brought the two nations near war.

Britain had actually voted on June 16 to suspend the Orders in Council that restricted American trade, but news took weeks to cross the Atlantic, and the war went forward regardless.

A British force under General Robert Ross and Rear Admiral George Cockburn marches on Washington, routs the American defenders at the Battle of Bladensburg, and burns the U.S. Capitol, the White House, and other federal buildings. President Madison flees the city. It is the only time since the Revolution that a foreign power has occupied and destroyed the American capital. The British then turn toward Baltimore.

The raid was framed as retaliation for the American burning of York, now Toronto, the capital of Upper Canada, in 1813. British troops torched the Capitol, destroying the roughly 3,000 volumes of the Library of Congress, later replaced by Thomas Jefferson's personal library, and gutted the President's House.

First Lady Dolley Madison delayed her own escape to save a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, ordering the frame broken and the canvas removed. That painting still hangs in the White House East Room.

A hurricane and an accompanying tornado struck the city the next day, extinguishing many of the fires and killing several British soldiers. The occupation lasted only about 26 hours before the British pulled back to their ships.

Baltimore, a major port and the third-largest American city, is defended by Fort McHenry at the entrance to the harbor. On September 13, a British fleet of 19 vessels, including bomb ships capable of lobbing 200-pound explosive shells from beyond the range of Fort McHenry's cannons, begins a 25-hour bombardment of the fort. The garrison, commanded by Major George Armistead, fires back when ships come within range. The British fire an estimated 1,500 rounds; the fort is hit repeatedly but not silenced. At dawn on September 14, the British fleet withdraws, having failed to suppress the fort or silence its guns. The land assault on Baltimore is also repulsed after British General Ross is killed. Baltimore is saved.

Baltimore had roughly 50,000 residents and was a home base for American privateers who had captured hundreds of British merchant ships; the British press had branded it a 'nest of pirates,' making it a deliberate target.

The land attack stalled at Hampstead Hill, where about 15,000 Maryland militia under General Samuel Smith had dug in behind earthworks. General Robert Ross was killed by an American sharpshooter on September 12, early in the advance, depriving the British of their ground commander.

The bomb vessels and the rocket ship HMS Erebus stayed about two miles offshore, beyond the reach of the fort's roughly three dozen guns. Despite the day-long shelling, only four defenders inside Fort McHenry were killed and about two dozen wounded.

Francis Scott Key, a 35-year-old Washington lawyer and amateur poet, had sailed out under a flag of truce and met the British fleet aboard HMS Tonnant to negotiate the release of a captured American physician. The British agreed to release the prisoner but kept Key and his party under guard aboard their own American truce sloop, behind the British fleet, during the bombardment, fearing they would report on British positions. Key watched the battle from that sloop, unable to know whether the fort had fallen until dawn revealed the American flag, a massive garrison flag measuring 30 by 42 feet, still flying over Fort McHenry. Overwhelmed, he wrote the poem 'The Defence of Fort McHenry' on the back of a letter he had in his pocket, completing it at a Baltimore hotel after the British released him on September 16.

The prisoner was Dr. William Beanes of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, arrested by the British for jailing stragglers after the Washington raid. Key carried letters from wounded British prisoners attesting to their good care, which helped win Beanes's release.

The flag Key saw had been sewn in Baltimore in 1813 by flagmaker Mary Pickersgill, her daughter, two nieces, and an indentured servant, for $405.90. It carried 15 stars and 15 stripes for the states then in the Union. A smaller storm flag flew during the rain of the bombardment; the large flag was hoisted at dawn.

Key's brother-in-law Joseph Nicholson, a judge who had helped command a Fort McHenry artillery unit, carried the poem to a Baltimore printer within days. The surviving Pickersgill flag, now missing several feet of fabric cut away over the years as souvenirs, is preserved at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Key's poem is printed as a broadside (a single large sheet) by the Baltimore Patriot under the title 'Defence of Fort McHenry,' with a note that it should be sung to the tune of 'To Anacreon in Heaven', a popular British drinking song with a notoriously difficult melody that had already been used for several American patriotic songs. The song spreads rapidly through newspapers across the country and is immediately popular.

'To Anacreon in Heaven' was the club song of the Anacreontic Society, a London gentlemen's musical club, written around 1775 with music usually credited to John Stafford Smith. Its vocal range of about an octave and a half is the reason the anthem is famously hard to sing.

Key had used the same tune before. In 1805 he wrote 'When the Warrior Returns,' honoring naval heroes of the First Barbary War, a poem that already paired 'star-spangled' with 'the brave.' The new work was soon retitled 'The Star-Spangled Banner' and reprinted in newspapers from Georgia to New Hampshire within weeks.

The Baltimore music publisher Thomas Carr issued the words and melody together in November 1814, fixing the pairing of Key's lyrics to Smith's tune that has held ever since.

For most of the 19th century, 'The Star-Spangled Banner' is popular but not official. The U.S. Army and Navy both use it ceremonially from the mid-19th century onward, and it is played at major patriotic events, but the country has no official national anthem. 'My Country, 'Tis of Thee,' 'Hail, Columbia,' 'Yankee Doodle,' and 'America the Beautiful' all compete for the role of de facto national anthem depending on the occasion and the region.

The song gained emotional weight during the Civil War, when it was sung at Union rallies and some singers added a defiant new verse by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. attacking 'the traitor that dares to defile' the flag.

In 1889 the Secretary of the Navy ordered the song played at the raising of the colors, and the Army adopted a similar order in the 1890s, making it the standard military ceremonial anthem decades before Congress acted.

Objections persisted on two grounds: the melody was a foreign tune, and a drinking song at that, and the lyrics celebrated one battle rather than the nation. Backers of 'America the Beautiful' and other songs pressed those points for years.

President Woodrow Wilson, by executive order, designates 'The Star-Spangled Banner' as the official anthem for military and naval occasions. This is the first formal presidential recognition of the song, though it still has no statutory standing.

The order came as the United States moved toward entry into World War I, a period of intense official promotion of patriotic display; the country declared war in April 1917.

Performances had drifted into many keys and tempos, so in 1917 the Army and Navy asked a committee of musicians, including Walter Damrosch and John Philip Sousa, to prepare a standard 'service version,' published in 1918.

Baseball helped cement the song's public role. It was played during the seventh-inning stretch of Game 1 of the 1918 World Series between the Cubs and Red Sox, drawing a strong crowd response, and teams increasingly featured it at big games.

After decades of lobbying by veterans' groups, patriotic organizations, and musicians (and despite persistent opposition from those who found the melody too difficult to sing and the lyrics too war-focused), Congress passes and President Herbert Hoover signs a law designating 'The Star-Spangled Banner' as the national anthem of the United States, 117 years after Key wrote it within sight of the British fleet.

The bill was carried in Congress largely by Representative J. Charles Linthicum of Baltimore, who introduced versions of it repeatedly starting in 1918, backed by a Veterans of Foreign Wars petition drive that gathered roughly five million signatures.

At the 1930 House hearing, opponents included a Daughters of the American Revolution music committee and temperance advocates who objected to the drinking-song origin. Two sopranos sang the anthem at the hearing to show that an ordinary voice could manage it.

The designation is now codified at 36 U.S.C. Section 301, which also sets out conduct during the anthem: civilians should face the flag with the right hand over the heart, and those in uniform should render the military salute.

Jimi Hendrix's August 18, 1969 performance of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at Woodstock, a distorted, feedback-laden electric guitar interpretation that evoked air raid sirens, bombs, and chaos amid the melody, becomes one of the most discussed musical performances in American history. It is variously interpreted as protest, as patriotism, as art, or as all three simultaneously. The performance is now considered one of the defining cultural artifacts of the Vietnam era.

He played it near the end of a roughly two-hour set on the festival's final morning, a Monday, to a crowd that had thinned to perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 of the estimated 400,000 who attended across the weekend.

Asked weeks later on The Dick Cavett Show whether the rendition was 'unorthodox,' Hendrix objected to the word and said, 'I thought it was beautiful.' He had performed the anthem live many times before Woodstock and kept doing so afterward.

Hendrix, a former paratrooper with the Army's 101st Airborne Division, died about 13 months later, in September 1970. The performance survives in the 1970 Woodstock documentary and is a standard reference in scholarship on protest and American symbolism.

San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick begins protesting during the national anthem before NFL games in August 2016, first by sitting and, from September 1, by kneeling, to protest police violence against Black Americans. The gesture, chosen in consultation with former Army Green Beret Nate Boyer, who suggested kneeling as more respectful than sitting, triggers a national debate about patriotism, protest, free speech, and the meaning of the anthem itself. Kaepernick is not re-signed by any NFL team after the 2016 season; the debate over anthem protests continues to divide the country.

Kaepernick first sat through the anthem during preseason games; the switch to kneeling followed his September 1, 2016 conversation with Boyer, who had written him an open letter. Kaepernick also pledged $1 million to community organizations, paid out over the following year.

The protests spread across the league and drew sustained criticism from President Donald Trump beginning in September 2017, when he said owners should fire players who knelt. In 2018 the NFL announced, then shelved, a policy requiring players on the field to stand.

Kaepernick and safety Eric Reid filed grievances alleging the owners had colluded to keep them out of the league; the NFL settled with them confidentially in 2019. In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, Commissioner Roger Goodell said the league had been 'wrong' not to listen to players sooner.