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Fort McHenry's Ordeal

There is no record of when Armistead's men first raised their new colors over Fort McHenry, but they likely did so as soon as Pickersgill delivered them: a sizable British flotilla had just appeared on Baltimore's doorstep, sailing into the mouth of the Patapsco River on August 8. The city braced itself, but after the enemies eyed each other for several days, the British weighed anchor and melted into the haze. They had surveyed the region's sketchy defenses and concluded that Washington, Baltimore and environs would be ripe for attack when springtime opened a new season of war in 1814.

That season looked like a disaster in the making for the Americans. When summer arrived in Canada, so did 14,000 British combatants ready to invade the United States across Lake Champlain. On the Chesapeake, 50 British warships under Vice Adm. Sir Alexander Cochrane headed for Washington, where, in August 1814, the invaders burned the presidential mansion, the Capitol and other public buildings. The British then headed for Baltimore, in part to punish the city's privateers, who had captured or burned 500 British ships since hostilities erupted two years before.

After maneuvering their ships into position and testing the range of their guns, the British opened the main assault on Baltimore on September 13. Five bomb ships led the way, lobbing 190-pound shells into Fort McHenry and unleashing rockets with exploding warheads. The fort answered—but with little effect. "We immediately opened Our Batteries and Kept up a brisk fire from Our Guns and Mortars," Major Armistead reported, "but unfortunately our Shot and Shells all fell considerably Short." The British kept up a thunderous barrage throughout the 13th and into the predawn hours of the 14th.

During the 25-hour battle, says historian Sheads, the British unleashed about 133 tons of shells, raining bombs and rockets on the fort at the rate of one projectile per minute. The thunder they produced shook Baltimore to its foundations and was heard as far away as Philadelphia. Hugging walls and taking the hits wore on the defenders. "We were like pigeons tied by the legs to be shot at," recalled Judge Joseph H. Nicholson, an artillery commander within the fort. Capt. Frederick Evans looked up to see a shell the size of a flour barrel screaming toward him. It failed to explode. Evans noticed handwritten on its side: "A present from the King of England."

Despite the din and the occasional hits, the Americans sustained few casualties—four out of a thousand were killed, 24 wounded—as the fort's aggressive gunnery kept the British at arm's length. After a furious thunderstorm broke over Baltimore about 2 p.m. on September 13, the storm flag was likely hoisted in place of its larger sibling, although official descriptions of the battle mention neither. After all, says Sheads, it was "just an ordinary garrison flag."

High winds and rain lashed the city throughout the night, as did the man-made storm of iron and sulfur. Fort McHenry's fate remained undecided until the skies cleared on September 14 and a low-slanting sun revealed that the battered garrison still stood, guns at the ready. Admiral Cochrane called a halt to the barrage about 7 a.m., and silence fell over the Patapsco River. By 9 a.m. the British were filling their sails, swinging into the current and heading downriver. "As the last vessel spread her canvas," wrote Midshipman Richard J. Barrett of HMS Hebrus, "the Americans hoisted a most superb and splendid ensign on their battery, and fired at the same time a gun of defiance."

Major Armistead was absent from celebrations inside the fort that day. Brought low by what he later described as "great fatigue and exposure," he remained in bed for almost two weeks, unable to command the fort or to write his official account of the battle. When he finally filed a 1,000-word report on September 24, he made no mention of the flag—now the one thing most people associate with Fort McHenry's ordeal.

The reason they do, of course, is Francis Scott Key. The young lawyer and poet had watched the bombardment from the President, an American truce ship the British had held throughout the battle after he negotiated the release of an American hostage. On the morning of September 14, Key had also seen what Midshipman Barrett described—the American colors unfurling over the fort, the British ships stealing away—and Key knew what it meant: threatened by the most powerful empire on earth, the city had survived the onslaught. The young nation might even survive the war.

Rather than return to his home outside Washington, D.C., Key checked into a Baltimore hotel that evening and finished a long poem about the battle, with its "rockets' red glare" and "bombs bursting in air." He conveyed the elation he felt at seeing what was probably Mrs. Pickersgill's big flag flying that morning. Fortunately for posterity, he did not call it Mrs. Pickersgill's flag, but referred to a "star-spangled banner." Key wrote quickly that night—in part because he already had a tune in his head, a popular English drinking song called "To Anacreon in Heaven," which fit the meter of his lines perfectly; in part because he lifted a few phrases from a poem he had composed in 1805.

The next morning, Key shared his new work with his wife's brother-in-law Joseph Nicholson, the artillery commander who had been inside Fort McHenry throughout the battle. Although it is almost certain that the flag Key glimpsed at the twilight's last gleaming was not the one he saw by the dawn's early light, Nicholson did not quibble—Key was, after all, a poet, not a reporter. Nicholson was enthusiastic. Less than a week later, on September 20, 1814, the Baltimore Patriot & Evening Advertiser published Key's poem, then titled "Defence of Fort M'Henry." It would be reprinted in at least 17 papers around the country that fall. That November, Thomas Carr of Baltimore united lyrics and song in sheet music, under the title "The Star-Spangled Banner: A Patriotic Song."

Key's timing could not have been better. Washington was in ruins, but the war's tide was turning. On September 11, as Baltimore prepared to meet Admiral Cochrane's assault, Americans trounced a British squadron on Lake Champlain, blocking its invasion from Canada. With Britain's defeat in New Orleans the following January, the War of 1812 was effectively over.

Having won independence a second time, the nation breathed a collective sigh of relief. As gratitude mixed with an outpouring of patriotism, Key's song and the flag it celebrated became symbols of the victory. "For the first time, someone put into words what the flag meant to the country," says Sheads. "That is the birth of what we recognize today as a national icon."

Major Armistead, showered with honors for his performance at Fort McHenry, had little time to enjoy his new fame. Although he continued to suffer bouts of fatigue, he remained on active duty. At some point the big flag left the fort and was taken to his home in Baltimore. There is no record that it—officially government property—was ever transferred to him. "That is the big question," says Sheads. "How did he end up with the flag? There is no receipt." Perhaps the banner was so tattered from use that it was no longer considered fit for service—a fate it shared with Armistead. Just four years after his triumph, he died of unknown causes. He was 38.

The big banner passed to his widow, Louisa Hughes Armistead, and became known as her "precious relic" in the local press. She apparently kept it within the Baltimore city limits but lent it out for at least five patriotic celebrations, thereby helping to lift a locally revered artifact into the national consciousness. On the most memorable of those occasions, the flag was displayed at Fort McHenry with George Washington's campaign tent and other patriotic memorabilia when Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette visited in October 1824. When Louisa Armistead died in 1861, she left the flag to her daughter, Georgiana Armistead Appleton, just as a new war broke out. That conflict, the bloodiest in America's history, brought new attention to the flag, which became a symbol of the momentous struggle between North and South.

The New York Times, reacting to the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, railed against traitors who fired upon the Stars and Stripes, which "shall yet wave over Richmond and Charleston, and Mobile and New Orleans." Harper's Weekly called the American flag "the symbol of the Government....The rebels know that, as surely as the sun rises, the honor of the country's flag will presently be vindicated."

In Baltimore, a Union city seething with Confederate sympathizers, Major Armistead's grandson and namesake, George Armistead Appleton, was arrested attempting to join the rebellion. He was imprisoned in Fort McHenry. His mother, Georgiana Armistead Appleton, found herself in the ironic position of decrying her son's arrest and pulling for the South, while clinging to the Star-Spangled Banner, by then the North's most potent icon. She had been entrusted to protect it, she said, "and a jealous and perhaps selfish love made me guard my treasure with watchful care." She kept the famous flag locked away, probably at her home in Baltimore, until the Civil War ran its course.

Like other Armisteads, Georgiana Appleton found the flag both a source of pride and a burden. As often happens in families, her inheritance generated hard feelings within the clan. Her brother, Christopher Hughes Armistead, a tobacco merchant, thought the flag should have come to him and exchanged angry words with his sister over it. With evident satisfaction, she recalled that he was "forced to give it up to me and with me it has remained ever since, loved and venerated." As the siblings squabbled, Christopher's wife expressed relief that the flag was not theirs: "More battles have been fought over that flag than were ever fought under it, and I, for one, am glad to be rid of it!" she reportedly said.

When war threatened Washington in 1942, Smithsonian officials quietly whisked the flag and other treasures to a warehouse in Luray, Virginia, to protect them. Returned to the capital in 1944, the flag provided a backdrop for inaugural balls, presidential speeches and countless public events. But constant exposure to light and ambient pollution took their toll, and the flag was removed from exhibit in the National Museum of American History in 1998 for a thorough conservation treatment, aimed at extending the flag's life for another century.

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