We know that Francis Scott Key wrote the poem, “The Star Spangled Banner,” which eventually became the national anthem, and many of us know the first verse; however, the song has four verses. Few of us know about these other verses, especially the third verse, which supports slavery and is specifically hostile to slaves. This post is for those who were unaware of that fact–like most of us–and did not see the revelations over the past couple of years.
As the story goes, in September of 1814, during the ongoing War of 1812, Francis Scott Key, an American lawyer and a lieutenant in the army, had gone to the flagship of the British fleet to plead for the release of a physician friend who had been captured. The British agreed to free him, but made both men stay on the ship until the impending attack on Fort McHenry in the Baltimore harbor was completed. The bombardment went on all night, but in “the dawn’s early light” Key saw the American flag–not the British Union Jack–flying over the Fort, signaling an American victory. Elated, Key, while still on the ship, drafted the poem–about the “bombs bursting in air” and “star-spangled banner yet wav(ing).” And the rest, as they say, is history.
So why the third verse? Why be concerned here with slaves? Well, as Paul Harvey used to say, let’s look at the rest of the story. In the month before the bombardment of Fort McHenry, Lieutenant Key encountered the Colonial Marines, a battalion of several hundred runaway slaves who joined with the British Royal Army in exchange for their freedom. The British aided by the Colonial Marines defeated the Americans in the Battle of Bladensburg and marched into Washington, D.C., burning the Library of Congress, the Capitol Building, and the White House. This was obviously an unsettling sight for Key, a slave holder. So when he learned that some of the British dead and wounded in the battle at Fort McHenry included escaped slaves, he was so pleased he penned the third verse, the first three lines of which refer to the slaves who took advantage of the war to escape, but “their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.” Key’s words gloated that there was “no refuge” for the “hireling and slave.”
These escaped slaves, the Colonial Marines, were true heroes as they fought not only for their freedom but for the freedom of all American slaves. We should be praising them. Instead, our national anthem mocks them.
Verses one and three are included below:
Verse one:
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?
Verse three:
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.