Transcript
By the Dawn's Early Light
Sept 13–14, 1814
Night · September 13, 1814 The Patapsco River, below Baltimore
Francis Scott Key was a Georgetown lawyer who wrote poems for fun. Tonight the British navy wouldn't let him go home.
He'd come to free a friend the British had arrested. They agreed, then kept everyone until the attack was over.
All night, British ships threw bombs and rockets at Fort McHenry. Three weeks earlier, the same force had burned Washington.
In the rain, Key could see the fort only when something exploded over it.
Early in the morning, the guns stopped. Nobody on the sloop knew why.
Robert J. Barrett …the Americans hoisted a most superb and splendid ensign on their battery, and fired at the same time a gun of defiance.
That's a British officer, describing the same flag.
Francis Scott Key O! say does that star-spangled Banner yet wave, O'er the Land of the free and the home of the brave?
For twenty years, foreign navies had treated the American flag as a suggestion. How did a small, weak country get the world to take it seriously?
Tribute
1801–1805
The Mediterranean, 1801. Bring money.
In May 1801, the ruler of Tripoli wanted more money. He declared war by chopping down the flagpole at the American consulate.
Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli licensed raiders to seize ships from countries that hadn't paid.
Britain paid. France paid. So did the United States.
Jefferson thought navies cost too much and made presidents too strong. He sent one anyway.
In 1803 the frigate Philadelphia hit a reef off Tripoli. Three hundred and seven Americans were captured.
So the Navy burned its own ship. Stephen Decatur, 25, slipped into the harbor by night in a captured ketch and set her on fire.
In 1805, a few Marines and several hundred hired soldiers crossed five hundred miles of desert.
They took the town of Derna: the "shores of Tripoli" in the Marines' Hymn.
In June 1805, Tripoli made peace. The United States paid sixty thousand dollars to get its sailors back. Four years of war, and it paid anyway.
Navy officers paid for a marble monument to their dead, the first to the American military. Europe hardly noticed. It had a bigger war to fight.
Caught Between Giants
1803–1809
In 1803 Britain and France went back to war, and they fought for twelve more years. Each tried to strangle the other’s trade. Both seized American ships.
Worse, British officers took sailors off American ships to serve in the Royal Navy.
Britain had a case. It was fighting for survival, and thousands of its sailors had deserted to better-paid American ships. But its officers took Americans too, by the thousands.
In June 1807, HMS Leopard ordered the USS Chesapeake to stop and be searched for deserters. Her captain refused. The Leopard fired, killing three men. The Chesapeake fired one gun and lowered her flag.
The British took four sailors. They hanged one, Jenkin Ratford, a deserter. The other three said they were Americans. One of them, Daniel Martin, was a Black sailor.
Thomas Jefferson Never, since the battle of Lexington have I seen this country in such a state of exasperation as at present.
He chose an experiment instead of a war.
The Embargo Act of 1807 kept American ships out of foreign ports. Britain, the theory went, needed American trade more than America needed Britain’s.
Exports fell from about 108 million dollars in 1807 to 22 million in 1808. Britain bought elsewhere.
A cartoonist spelled Embargo backward: O grab me.
Jefferson, who had feared a strong federal government, sent soldiers to the Canadian border to catch smugglers.
Congress repealed the Embargo three days before Jefferson left office. Trade reopened with everyone but Britain and France. Some of the money that had stopped going to sea went into cotton mills.
Prophetstown
1805–1811
West of the mountains, the fight was over land. Treaty after treaty pushed settlement across Ohio and into Indiana.
In 1809, Governor William Henry Harrison bought about three million acres at Fort Wayne. The chiefs who signed did not speak for everyone living there.
Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee prophet, told Native people to give up whiskey and American goods, and to stop selling land. Followers came from many nations to his town, Prophetstown.
His brother Tecumseh turned the faith into a plan: one confederacy, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. No one nation, he said, could sell what belonged to all of them.
Tecumseh Brother. This land that was sold and the goods that was given for it was only done by a few.
William Henry Harrison …one of those uncommon geniuses, which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things.
Harrison meant it as a warning.
Tecumseh was already traveling south, to the Chickasaw, Choctaw and Creek.
While Tecumseh was away, Harrison camped an army outside Prophetstown. Before dawn on November 7, the Prophet's warriors attacked his camp and were driven off.
Harrison's men burned the town and its winter food. Frontier settlers blamed Britain for arming the Prophet's warriors.
Tecumseh came home to ashes. He took what was left of his confederacy to the one power that might help: Britain.
Mr. Madison's War
1810–1813
In Washington, everyone was talking about Canada.
In 1811, young war hawks made Henry Clay Speaker on his first day in the House.
Henry Clay The militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet.
Not everyone was charmed.
John Randolph of Roanoke We have heard but one word—like the whip-poor-will, but one eternal monotonous tone—Canada! Canada! Canada!
Congress tried Macon's Bill Number Two. Napoleon played along, and Madison cut off only Britain.
James Madison Thousands of American citizens, under the safeguard of public law, and of their national flag, have been torn from their country…
That was impressment. He added seized ships and British help for Native warriors.
Congress declared war: 79 to 49 in the House, 19 to 13 in the Senate. New England's Federalists called it Mr. Madison's War.
Five days later, Britain dropped the trade orders behind the quarrel. The news was still at sea.
Thomas Jefferson The acquisition of Canada this year… will be a mere matter of marching.
Instead, General William Hull surrendered Detroit and his army after a short shelling.
Three days later, the general's nephew Isaac beat HMS Guerriere in the frigate Constitution. British cannonballs bounced off her oak sides, sailors said. They called her Old Ironsides.
On Lake Erie, Perry's flagship was shot to pieces. So he rowed half a mile to another ship, and won.
He scribbled his report to General Harrison on the back of an old letter.
Oliver Hazard Perry We have met the enemy and they are ours: two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop.
Without the lake, Britain could not hold Detroit. General Procter chose to retreat.
Tecumseh answered him, remembering 1783.
Tecumseh Our father took them by the hand without our knowledge, and we are afraid our father will do so again at this time.
At the Thames, Procter's line broke almost at once. Tecumseh stayed and fought, and was killed. No one knows where he is buried.
Dinner at Three
April–August 1814
In April 1814, Napoleon gave up. Britain sent its spare ships and veterans to America.
In Chesapeake Bay, hundreds of men who had escaped slavery joined the British as Colonial Marines. They knew the roads and the rivers.
At Bladensburg, the militia defending Washington broke and ran. People called it the Bladensburg Races. President Madison was on the field.
Dolley Madison Since sunrise I have been turning my spy glass in every direction and watching with unwearied anxiety, hoping to discern the approach of my dear husband…
Downstairs, dinner was ordered for three o'clock, as usual. Paul Jennings, fifteen, enslaved by the Madisons, had set the table.
Late that night, British officers walked in.
Paul Jennings …they ate up the very dinner, and drank the wines, etc., that I had prepared for the President's party.
They piled up the furniture and set the house on fire. The Capitol was already burning. The British called it payback for York.
The next day, a storm tore through the city. That night, the British marched back to their ships. Three weeks later, the same army came for Baltimore.
The Rockets' Red Glare
September 12–14, 1814
Three weeks later, the same army came for Baltimore.
Near North Point, American riflemen killed its general, Robert Ross.
At the fort, four defenders died in about 25 hours of bombardment. Baltimore held.
Francis Scott Key O! say can you see by the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Within days it was printed, and sung to a London club song, "To Anacreon in Heaven."
Key had used that tune in 1805, for a dinner honoring the heroes of Tripoli. That song had a "star-spangled flag" in it too.
Almost nobody sings the third verse.
Francis Scott Key No refuge could save the hireling and slave, From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave,
Some of the men Baltimore faced had escaped slavery that year. Historians still argue whether Key meant them. Key himself enslaved people.
Christmas Eve
1814
A British army marched south from Canada. Its governor-general had already written home about dinner:
Sir George Prevost Two thirds of the army in Canada are at the moment eating beef provided by American contractors.
At Plattsburgh, Thomas Macdonough's fleet beat the British squadron on Lake Champlain. Without the lake, the army went back to Canada.
London offered Wellington the American command. His advice:
Duke of Wellington I think you have no right from the state of the war to demand any concession of territory from America.
At Ghent, Britain opened by demanding a Native buffer state. By October, it dropped the demand.
On Christmas Eve, both sides signed. Every border went back. Impressment wasn't mentioned.
Article Nine promised to restore Native nations' lands and rights to what they were in 1811. Tecumseh had warned about exactly this.
Tecumseh Our father took them by the hand without our knowledge, and we are afraid our father will do so again at this time.
In the South, the Red Sticks, Creeks inspired by Tecumseh, had gone to war. At Horseshoe Bend that March, Jackson's army and its Cherokee and Creek allies killed about 800 of them.
In August, Jackson made the Creek Nation give up more than 21 million acres, nearly the size of Indiana. Millions of those acres belonged to Creeks who fought on his side.
The United States said Ghent's promise didn't cover that land.
The treaty sailed for America. The news would take seven weeks.
The Battle After the War
January–February 1815
Two weeks after the treaty was signed, a British army sat in the cane fields below New Orleans. Nobody there had heard of it.
Jackson's line was a mud wall behind a canal. Behind it stood regulars, frontier riflemen, Louisiana militia, free men of color, Choctaw warriors and Jean Lafitte's smugglers.
Andrew Jackson But you surpass my hopes. I have found in you, united to these qualities, that noble enthusiasm which impels to great deeds.
In less than an hour, the British lost about 2,000 men, among them their commander, Edward Pakenham. The Americans lost about seventy.
In Hartford, New England Federalists spent three weeks drafting amendments against Southern power. One would end the three-fifths rule. Another would require two-thirds of Congress for any offensive war.
Three delegates took the demands to Washington. They arrived in a capital that was celebrating victory and peace. The Federalist Party never recovered.
Americans heard about the victory first and the peace second. It felt as if New Orleans had won the war.
Hands Off
1815–1823
In 1815 the navy went back to the Mediterranean. Within weeks, Decatur made Algiers stop demanding tribute.
In 1817, Britain and the United States nearly disarmed the Great Lakes.
Then they drew the border west along the 49th parallel and shared Oregon.
Spanish Florida sheltered Seminoles and people escaping slavery. In 1818, Jackson invaded, burned Seminole towns, executed two British subjects and took Pensacola.
John Quincy Adams defended Jackson and pressed Spain to sell. In 1819 Spain gave up Florida, and the border ran to the Pacific.
By 1823, most of Spain's American colonies had broken free. Europe's kings talked of helping Spain take them back.
George Canning proposed a joint warning. Jefferson urged Monroe to accept.
Thomas Jefferson With her on our side we need not fear the whole world.
Adams disagreed.
John Quincy Adams It would be more candid, as well as more dignified, to avow our principles explicitly to Russia and France, than to come in as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war.
Monroe sided with Adams and spoke alone.
James Monroe The American continents are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.
And the United States would stay out of Europe's wars.
Europe's kings mostly shrugged. Britain's navy kept them out anyway, and Canning took the credit.
George Canning I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.
CODA: Still There
1815–1823
This 1815 print shows how Americans wanted to see themselves. Wisdom guides America. Washington's statue looks on. An armed ship carries trade. A woman spins at her door.
Albert Gallatin The war has renewed and reinstated the national feelings and character which the Revolution had given, and which were daily lessened.
The war won nothing on paper. It made Americans proud and Europe careful. For Native nations east of the Mississippi, it ended the last serious hope of a European ally.
Key's first verse ends with a question mark. The answer depended on who was asking.