The Star-Spangled Banner Read as a Document of Survival, All Four Stanzas

Nobody can sing it. Hand a stadium full of people the national anthem and watch the ceiling of their ambition: the first line is fine, the "rockets' red glare" is a gamble, and "the land of the free" is a high note that has ended more careers than any Senate hearing. A melody built for a London drinking club was bolted to a poem about a bombardment, and a country has been trying to hit the notes ever since.

But the difficulty is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that almost no American has read the whole thing. There are four stanzas, and the one that tells you what the poem is about, the prayer at the end, goes unsung at nearly every ball game in the country. Let us read it as what it is: a document written by an eyewitness on the night a republic might have ended.

The night of September 13, 1814

The setting first, because the poem is a piece of reporting. In August 1814 the British had burned Washington, as we trace in The War of 1812 Gave America a Burned Capital and a Second Independence. They sailed up the Chesapeake to Baltimore, a port of consequence and a base for privateers, and prepared to reduce Fort McHenry, which guarded the harbor.

Francis Scott Key was a lawyer, not a soldier. He had gone out to the British fleet with John Skinner, an American agent for prisoner exchanges, to negotiate the release of Dr. William Beanes, an elderly physician who had been taken prisoner after the burning of Washington. The British agreed to release the doctor but held the Americans aboard until the attack on Baltimore was over, so that they would not carry word of the preparations. So Key, Skinner and Beanes watched the bombardment from a truce vessel behind the British fleet.

The bombardment began on the morning of September 13 and went on for about twenty-five hours. The Royal Navy threw shells and Congreve rockets at the fort. The fort answered where it could. Key could see the flag at dusk. In the night he could see only the flash of the guns. In the dawn of September 14, he saw whether the flag was still there.

It was. Key wrote the lines on the back of a letter, finished them ashore, and they were printed within days as a handbill, then in a Baltimore newspaper, set to the tune of a popular English song, "To Anacreon in Heaven." Printings varied in small details of wording and punctuation, and the text quoted below is the common modern form. The poem was a hit within weeks.

Stanza one: the question

O say can you see, by the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming, Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming? And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there; O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

The thing that every singer misses is that the first stanza is a question. It is not a boast. Key does not announce that the flag is flying. He asks, and the question has a stakes-laden edge: the flag was last seen at "twilight's last gleaming," and the only light since has been explosions. The "rockets' red glare" and the "bombs bursting in air" are not decoration. They are the evidence that the fort, and therefore the flag, was still there, because the bombardment had not stopped. An unanswered fort would have gone quiet.

The final couplet pairs two nouns that rhyme with the history that produced them: "free" and "brave." A republic is free only if its people are willing to be brave, and Key says so in six words.

Stanza two: the answer

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep, Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes, What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep, As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam, In full glory reflected now shines in the stream: 'Tis the star-spangled banner! O long may it wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Here is the answer, and it is dramatic because it arrives slowly. The poet cannot be sure what he sees. Mist, smoke, the half-light. The breeze "half conceals, half discloses." Then the sun catches it, and he knows. The tone changes from a question to an exclamation, and the refrain now ends in an exclamation point. If you have ever waited all night for news and seen it at dawn, you know the emotion. It is relief with an edge of astonishment.

The "foe's haughty host" in "dread silence" is a detail worth noticing. The British, in the early light, have stopped firing. The bombardment is over. The fleet is withdrawing, having failed to reduce the fort or to take Baltimore. That silence is the sound of an attack that did not work.

The flag behind the poem

The flag Key saw was no ordinary one. Major George Armistead, who commanded Fort McHenry, had asked for a flag so large that the British would have no trouble seeing it from a distance. The commission went to Mary Pickersgill, a Baltimore flagmaker, who with her daughter, two nieces and a young indentured servant named Grace Wisher sewed a flag of fifteen stars and fifteen stripes, about thirty feet by forty-two. According to the National Park Service, it was finished in August 1813, and each star measured two feet from point to point. The garrison flag raised on the morning of September 14 was this one; a smaller storm flag, about seventeen by twenty-five feet, is believed to have flown during the rainy bombardment.

Fifteen stars, because Vermont and Kentucky had joined the original thirteen, and fifteen stripes, because Congress had in 1794 added a stripe for each of the new states. The practice of adding a stripe for every state proved unworkable, and in 1818 Congress fixed the flag at thirteen stripes and a star for each state, which is how the flag has been arranged since. The Fort McHenry flag survives, in the care of the Smithsonian. For the rules about how to treat the flag today, see Old Glory's Rules, What the Flag Code Says and Why Most of Us Break It.

Stanza three: the one that causes trouble

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion A home and a country should leave us no more? Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave: And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

This is the stanza the modern critics point to, and it deserves an honest hearing. Three observations before we get to the argument.

First, it is a wartime verse about a defeated enemy. The "band" that "vauntingly swore" is the British, who, in Key's understanding, had boasted that they would leave Americans without "a home and a country." The tone is vengeful, and the verse is not generous. Poems written in the white heat of a battle often are.

Second, the phrase "the hireling and slave" is the line in dispute. A hireling is a paid soldier, a mercenary. The word "slave" has led some readers to see a reference to the former slaves who escaped to the British. That is a real history. In April 1814 the British naval commander on the American station, Vice Admiral Alexander Cochrane, issued a proclamation inviting those who wished to leave the United States to come over to the British, and offering them freedom. Many enslaved people from Chesapeake plantations took the offer, and a number served in the Corps of Colonial Marines. The British were in effect running a free-soil policy against their enemy, for reasons of war and not of principle, but with real consequences for the people who fled.

Third, the poem does not specify. It is possible to read "slave" as a reference to those enslaved people who joined the British, or as a general contemptuous term for the British military's rank-and-file, or as both. Scholars who have studied the poem disagree about what Key intended, and a writer who tells you the matter is closed is selling you a conclusion.

The objection, and the answer

State the argument at its strongest. The critic says: Key was a slaveholder. He wrote, in a poem that celebrates "the land of the free," a line that appears to mock people who sought freedom by fleeing slavery. The nation cannot ask citizens to sing a song whose author treated their ancestors' freedom as a taunt. The anthem, the critic concludes, should be retired or replaced.

That is a serious argument, and it deserves a serious answer. Here it is, in numbered points.

One. Key's own life is not the poem. Francis Scott Key did own slaves, and he was a complicated and in some ways contradictory figure on the subject. That is a fact about Key. The anthem is a text, and we judge a text by what it says. The text's refrain is about freedom and courage, and its closing stanza says what the whole is for.

Two. The disputed line is in a verse nobody sings. Whatever Key meant by it, it belongs to the third stanza, which has never been part of the national performance. In practice the first stanza is the one sung at public events.

Three. The words have carried a larger meaning than their author's intent. The idea of "the land of the free" has been the standard against which Americans have measured their country's failures, beginning with slavery. Frederick Douglass spent a career holding America to its own words, a point we develop in What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July and Why Douglass Kept the Constitution. A symbol that can be used against its worst failures is more valuable than a symbol that has no failures.

Four. Retiring symbols because of their authors' flaws proves too much. Most founding-era documents were written by people who had compromised with slavery. If the standard is the author's moral record, no founding text survives. The conservative answer is to read the text, state the history honestly and keep the symbol, which is how a mature country treats its inheritance.

Five. The honest course is to tell the story. If you are teaching children the anthem, teach all four stanzas and the history of the third. That is more informative than silence and more loyal than repudiation.

That, I think, is the right verdict, and I recognize that fair people disagree. What I would not accept is the claim that the anthem is a trophy of oppression. The poem was written about a fort, a flag and a night, and its closing stanza is a prayer.

Stanza four: the prayer

O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand Between their loved home and the war's desolation! Blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n-rescued land Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation. Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto: "In God is our trust." And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Here is the stanza that tells you what the poem was for. It begins with a wish: "O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand / Between their loved home and the war's desolation." That is a description of citizen defense, the idea that a free people defends its home. The phrase "freemen" is precise. The defenders of the fort were free men, and the thing they were defending was the condition that made them so.

Then comes the turn from arms to thanks: "may the heav'n-rescued land / Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation." Note the verb: "preserved." Key does not say that the army saved the country, though he honors it. He says the country was preserved. This is the language of a man who believes in Providence and thinks a nation owes thanks.

The final lines carry two ideas that Americans have argued about since. "Conquer we must, when our cause it is just" is a just-war formulation: victory is warranted when the cause is right. And "In God is our trust" is the line from which the national motto "In God We Trust" descends. Congress adopted that motto in 1956, more than a century after Key's pen. The connection to the faith of the Founding is something we trace in loving your country is not idolatry, a believer's case for patriotism.

From poem to anthem

How did a Baltimore handbill become the national anthem? Slowly. The Navy adopted the song for ceremonial use in the late nineteenth century, and President Woodrow Wilson ordered it played at military occasions in 1916. The custom of playing it before baseball games took hold during the 1918 World Series, a story told in Why We Play the Anthem Before Games, From the 1918 World Series On. On March 3, 1931, Congress passed and President Hoover signed the law making "The Star-Spangled Banner" the national anthem.

Think about the timing. The anthem was not chosen in a triumphal hour. It was adopted at the beginning of the Great Depression's worst years, in a country that had every reason to feel unsure of itself. A nation in doubt picked as its song a poem about surviving a night when the flag might not have been there at dawn. That is not an accident. It is a country telling itself something.

What the document teaches

Read as a whole, the four stanzas make an argument. The first asks whether the republic survived. The second says that it did. The third, with its war-heated bitterness, records the defeat of the enemy, in a way that requires honest historical commentary. The fourth gives thanks and states the policy: defend the home, trust the Power that preserved us, and keep the flag up.

The anthem has been criticized as militaristic, as hard to sing, as outdated. It is the second of those that is least in dispute. But the song's difficulty is in its way a lesson. It was made for a moment that was hard, and it carries the register of a people that had just seen how close it came to losing everything.

The case in brief

1. Key wrote the poem as an eyewitness to the bombardment of Fort McHenry on September 13 and 14, 1814, and the first stanza is a question the second answers.
2. The flag he saw, with fifteen stars and fifteen stripes, was sewn by Mary Pickersgill and her helpers at Major Armistead's request.
3. The third stanza's line about "the hireling and slave" is disputed; Key's slaveholding is a fact about the man, while the text speaks of a defeated enemy and the freedom the flag represents.
4. The best answer to the critic is to keep the anthem, teach all four stanzas and tell the history of the third honestly.
5. The fourth stanza supplies the poem's purpose: defend the home, give thanks to the Power that preserved the nation, and keep the motto the poem gives, "In God is our trust."

What you can do: print all four stanzas, read them aloud with your family, and then read the third stanza's history so that your children hear the whole poem and not just the first verse.