Lawyer who wrote "The Star-Spangled Banner" in 1814
Appears in 1 documentary
On the morning of September 14, 1814, a 34-year-old Washington lawyer stood on the deck of a British naval vessel in the Chesapeake Bay and watched the dawn reveal something extraordinary: an American flag still flying over Fort McHenry. What he scribbled on the back of a letter in the hours that followed would become one of the most recognizable pieces of writing in American history.
Francis Scott Key was born on August 1, 1779, in Frederick County, Maryland, into a prosperous planter family with deep roots in the colony. He studied law, built a successful practice in Georgetown, and became known as one of the more capable attorneys in the District of Columbia — a man comfortable arguing before the Supreme Court and equally comfortable in the company of presidents. He was devoutly religious, an active Episcopalian who reportedly considered entering the ministry, and his faith would color everything he wrote, including the poem that made him famous.
Key was no stranger to the tensions fracturing American society in the early republic. He owned enslaved people, a fact that complicates any straightforward telling of his story but also places him squarely within the contradictions of his era. He was simultaneously a man who could write of “the land of the free” and one who participated in the institution that made those words ring hollow for hundreds of thousands of Americans. He later served as a District Attorney for Washington, D.C., and used that office in ways that reflected those same contradictions — at times prosecuting cases involving enslaved people with a severity that troubled even some of his contemporaries.
The circumstances of September 1814 were chaotic and desperate. The British had already burned Washington, torching the White House and the Capitol just weeks earlier. Key had sailed out to the British fleet under a flag of truce to negotiate the release of a friend, Dr. William Beanes, who had been taken prisoner. He succeeded in securing Beanes’s freedom, but British officers, concerned the Americans had overheard details of the planned bombardment of Baltimore, held them aboard ship until the attack was finished.
For 25 hours, Key watched as the British fleet unleashed an estimated 1,500 bombs, rockets, and shells on Fort McHenry. The garrison held. When the smoke cleared and the 30-by-42-foot garrison flag was still aloft, Key began writing. The poem, originally titled “Defence of Fort M’Henry,” was published in a Baltimore newspaper within days and set to the tune of a popular British drinking song. By 1916, it was being used as the national anthem at official events. Congress made it official on March 3, 1931.
Key died on January 11, 1843, in Baltimore, largely forgotten as a public figure even as his words were becoming ubiquitous. The anthem outlasted the man by more than a century of widening significance, sung before sporting events, at moments of national grief, and at ceremonies honoring the military — each performance a kind of echo of that particular dawn over Baltimore Harbor.
His connection to Maryland runs deeper than biography. The state was itself a place of impossible contradictions during the Civil War era — a border state that never seceded but was home to fierce Confederate sympathizers, a place where the very battle lines of American identity were drawn and redrawn. It is fitting that the anthem born from a Maryland shoreline would become the soundtrack to a nation perpetually arguing over what it means to be free.
Key matters historically not simply because he wrote a memorable poem but because his life embodies the unresolved tensions at the heart of the American founding. A slaveholder who celebrated liberty, a religious man who invoked God’s protection over a republic built on compromise, he is a figure who forces a more honest reckoning with what the anthem actually meant then — and what Americans choose to make it mean now.
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