Jackson took the snubbing of the Eatons personally. During the campaign of 1828, his wife, Rachel, had been savaged by Jackson’s foes as an adulteress because she had lived with Jackson before getting divorced from her abusive first husband. After his election she died suddenly in December 1828. In defending Margaret’s honor he was honoring the memory of his late wife, who had also been traduced. Now abandoned by his vice president and thwarted by the ladies of society, the old general defended the Eatons all the more adamantly. To one clergyman who questioned Margaret’s virtue, Jackson famously roared, “She is as chaste as a virgin,” a sentiment perhaps more sincere than accurate.
Key and his wife, Polly, did not have to see the Eatons socially, so they could stay aloof from the conflict around her at least for a while. But then the Reverend John Nicholson Campbell, minister of the Second Presbyterian Church on Fourteenth Street, told friends he had proof of Margaret’s immorality. The Eatons heard of his aspersions and confronted him in his parsonage. John Eaton wanted to challenge the offending divine to a duel with pistols, but his wife insisted on defending herself. Margaret took a swing at the reverend, and in the ensuing fracas suffered a bruise on her face. As John Eaton pulled her away, she promised to sue Campbell for libel. Rev. Campbell, previously known only for his turgid sermonizing, realized he was at risk of public scandal. He retained Key as his attorney. Under the sacred tenet of lawyer-client confidentiality, Campbell conceded he had no evidence of any moral transgressions by Mrs. Eaton, only the same rumors everyone else had heard: that she made love outdoors, that she boasted of cuckolding her first husband, that she did not recognize a past lover at a social occasion, and so on.
Key’s counsel was uncomplicated. Publicly, he played for time, issuing a statement that the reverend would present the evidence to the appropriate authorities. Privately, Key advised Campbell to meet with the president and withdraw the accusation. Campbell did so in such obsequious fashion that Jackson loathed him all the more.
As the impasse endured, Jackson dispatched his friend Senator Richard Mentor Johnson to talk to other cabinet members who were deferring to their wives in what had become known as “the Petticoat War.” Johnson was a war hero in the mold of Jackson, legendary for having killed the great chief Tecumseh in battle and popular with working-class voters for crusading against imprisonment for debt and opposing laws that curbed consumption of liquor on the Sabbath. Johnson had reason to share Jackson’s fervent belief that a man’s choice of women was nobody’s business. He had what some regarded as his own sex scandal in Julia Chinn, his mixed-race companion back in Kentucky, whom he regarded as a wife even though they were not married. Despite his popularity, Senator Johnson failed to persuade anyone in Washington to see the Eatons.
After two years of frustration Jackson decided to dissolve the Eaton impasse by simply purging the entire cabinet. The president let it be known he wanted the resignations of all the cabinet secretaries, including John Eaton. The unprecedented plan stunned Washington and so did the details of its origins. In April 1831, the well-connected Duff Green reported in the Telegraph that the idea of the cabinet purge originated with Secretary of State Martin Van Buren, the canny political boss from New York whose brilliant wardrobe adorned a body seemingly devoid of any principle, belief, or conviction save the accumulation of power. His willingness to resign as secretary of state ingratiated him with Jackson, and it was indeed a masterstroke, ensuring that the president would take on Van Buren as his vice presidential running mate in 1832 and replace Calhoun as Jackson’s heir apparent.
As Jackson collected resignation letters from his cabinet, the last obstacle was the incumbent attorney general, John Berrien, who declined to take the hint. Berrien was a Georgia politico who compensated for a second-rate legal mind with first-class oratory.
As a widower, he paid special attention to the feelings of his two daughters, both of whom wanted to snub Mrs. Eaton. He supported them and did not want it thought that he endorsed Jackson’s efforts to impose Mrs. Eaton on Washington society. While the other cabinet men shuffled off to new jobs, Berrien played for time by going to Georgia. The much-annoyed Jackson decided Berrien needed a push, and Frank Key was just the man to provide it.
In June 1831 Key traveled to Georgia on behalf of the president, ostensibly to mediate a dispute between white settlers and displaced Indians. On the return trip, Key arranged to travel in the same stagecoach as Berrien. As soon as the door closed Berrien sensed doom.
“I expect that I am supposed to resign,” he said to Key, “although I would remain if the President is so inclined. What are people saying and thinking?”
As a gentleman, Key dissembled. He told Berrien that he might not have to quit.
“I know Taney agrees,” Key added. This was kindly but wholly erroneous. Taney was back in Baltimore angling hard for the attorney general’s job. Berrien was not fooled.
“I’m afraid Van Buren requires me to be included in his arrangement,” he said, sighing. “Who do you think will be my successor?”
Taney’s name had been mentioned, Key allowed, which was accurate. “But I don’t think the job will be offered to him,” he added—which was not.
“Would Taney accept?” Berrien asked.
“Possibly,” Key replied. “That is, if he sees a prospect of things going well.”
Berrien got the point. He would have Key’s support for keeping his job right up until the moment Taney was offered the position. He changed the subject.
When the stagecoach reached Washington City many hours later, Jackson immediately summoned the exhausted Key again. It was after nine o’clock at night when Key arrived in the candlelit offices. Jackson told him he was going to replace Berrien with Taney. Key fumbled for words, then assured the president that his brother-in-law would accept. Key went home to notify Taney of the good news. Berrien resigned in the morning.
On June 23, 1831, Roger Brooke Taney was named the new attorney general of the United States of America. Before long he was a trusted confidant of the president, his influence exceeded only by Van Buren’s. In the process, Francis Scott Key achieved a new measure of influence with President Jackson.
8
FRANCIS SCOTT KEY had ridden the immortal “rockets’ red glare” to fame and power. Yet as he rose in Washington he was modest about how he came to write “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and for good reason. His memorable composition was the culmination of a disastrous series of events embarrassing to Key and the country. Only the enduring popularity of Key’s song redeemed the ignominy that preceded it.
The story of the “Banner” begins in 1812. At the behest of the U.S. Congress, President James Madison had reluctantly declared war on Great Britain. The so-called war hawks of Capitol Hill cited a variety of British provocations, ranging from punitive tariffs to the impressment of American seamen into the British navy. Led by the thirty-four-year-old Henry Clay, then the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the hawks disdained diplomacy as inadequate to the threat against American interests. Once the fighting began, the hawks discovered neither their government nor their constituents were as ready for war as they had assumed. When U.S. forces attempted to seize Canada in 1813, the British had repulsed them. The Americans had more success annihilating the Indian tribes who had allied themselves with the English. In early 1814, the British navy took the offensive with a series of raids on the eastern seaboard. In August, British commanders moved a flotilla of warships carrying some five thousand soldiers up the Chesapeake Bay to the Patuxent River.
By the middle of the month, the people of Washington City, less than fifty miles away, woke up to the possibility of an attack by an experienced expeditionary force of the most powerful country in the world. Almost as frightening, the British commanders were offering freedom to enslaved Africans who helped them. Already more than a thousand slaves had run away from their white owners to join the British forces, with some black men serving as scouts to help the invaders navigate the
countryside. President Madison, a reticent man with no military experience, appointed General William H. Winder to organize the capital’s defense. Winder, who had never commanded a force of more than a thousand soldiers, rallied a motley army of some ten thousand men. Militias came from the towns around the Chesapeake and descended from the hills of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Francis Scott Key, a young gentleman lawyer, mobilized with the Georgetown militia in which he served as a lieutenant.
As the British forces advanced, Winder decided to take his stand on a hill above the town of Bladensburg in Maryland, just outside the District of Columbia. If the British wanted to attack the capital, they would have to pass through the town, cross a narrow bridge, and then advance uphill against a larger American force. The Americans had the superior terrain, the British the superior soldiers. Major General Robert Ross, leader of the British ground forces, had battled Napoleon’s legions in Europe, while Winder was an overwhelmed gentleman leading a band of ill-educated farmers, undisciplined mechanics, and inexperienced scions exemplified by one Francis Scott Key. As the American forces mobilized for the big battle, General Winder did not appreciate the lieutenant’s unsought battlefield advice. “Mr. Francis Key informed me that the troops coming from the city could be most advantageously posted on the left and right,” General Winder noted in his journal, impressed by the uselessness of Key’s recommendation.
As the British forces approached the American lines at Bladensburg, Winder’s artillery started to rain shells down on them. The British flanks did not break as the soldiers absorbed the explosions and mounted the slope, firing steadily at the Americans as they advanced. When the novices in the American front lines saw the implacable advance of British bayonets, some started to panic. Their officers, such as Key, did not command much respect and could not calm them. One line of soldiers broke and ran, then another. As the troops started to flee the battle zone, their hapless officers joined them, causing still more soldiers to bolt. As the gunfire intensified, the Americans took flight by the hundreds and then thousands. Most simply ran back toward Washington, including Lieutenant Key, who chugged down the dirt road looking sweaty and ridiculous in his blue uniform. Wags and cartoonists would soon dub this mass retreat the “Bladensburg Races,” a derisive term that did service as a punch line for decades. In the Bladensburg Races, Francis Scott Key was a sprinter.
In the wake of this headlong stampede, the British forces glided into the defenseless Washington City with merriment on their minds. Major General Ross was joined by Rear Admiral George Cockburn, and they ordered their men to seize the Capitol building in the name of the king. In the great hall of the House of Representatives, Cockburn took the Speaker’s chair. “All in favor of setting fire to this harbor of Yankee democracy, say Aye,” he cried. The vote was unanimous. A torch was applied to the drapes. Cockburn and Ross rode back down the Avenue to the President’s House, where they broke into the abandoned mansion and helped themselves to James and Dolley Madison’s food and drink. Another torch was applied.
About the only man in Washington who tried to stop the sacking of the city was Dr. William Thornton, architect of the Capitol and advocate of African colonization, who served as the superintendent of the Patent Office. As scores of British troops gathered ominously around his office at Seventh and G streets, Thornton feared they wanted to trash the rooms where he stored each new invention submitted for patent approval. Thornton had hundreds of models of every conceivable type of American machine: plows, buggies, ovens, and clocks, not to mention kaleidoscopes, concave mirrors, artificial limbs, unplayable musical instruments, and the odd medical device. As a man with several patents of his own, Thornton could not bear the thought of seeing his own work trashed, much less that entrusted to him by his countrymen. With the British troops closing in on his building, Thornton strode into their ranks, shouting into their faces.
“Are you then not Englishmen, but Goths and Vandals?” he yelled. “Would you rival the barbarian Turks who burned the Library at Alexandria?”
The soldiers stood back, puzzled by this strange American.
“Yonder the genius of America is housed,” Thornton railed at them. “To destroy these discoveries would condemn you before all the civilized nations of the world.”
A British major waved off his men, and they went in search of less-defended targets. Thornton’s outburst had saved the workshop of American ingenuity.
That evening, a low black thundercloud settled over the city. A torrential rain began, then a tornado ripped through the streets, rattling windows and bringing down branches. As the British officers retired to a bawdy house for the evening, Lieutenant Key was cowering in his Georgetown home. He was a God-fearing man, and always would be. He took defeat and death as the instruments of a demanding God displeased by earthly sinners.
“Key heard the voice of God in the howling of the tempest,” said one biographer. “He did not bear up as bravely under the humiliation as a godly man such as he might have done. He looked on the spectacle as a prodigious disgrace. So unnerved was he that for several days afterwards he had neither time or mind to do anything.”
Francis Scott Key’s immortal anthem was born in this sense of disgrace. The tale of how Key came to write the song is taught so blandly to most American schoolchildren that they invariably forget it by adulthood. Yet Key’s forgotten failure was the father of his success. Seeking to redeem his battlefield failure, Key proved himself to be resilient, intrepid, and creative.
First, Key came to the rescue of a family friend, a doctor named William Beanes who lived in Upper Marlborough, Maryland, southeast of Washington City. The British forces, satisfied with their pedagogical defacement of the American capital, had withdrawn and passed through Upper Marlborough, where Beanes shouted insults and attempted to detain them. The annoyed soldiers arrested him and took him away on their march toward Baltimore. When Key got word of Dr. Beanes’s arrest, he became concerned about his safety and asked President Madison for permission to contact the British forces to negotiate his release. Madison approved; Key left the next day.
Traveling by carriage, Key caught up to the British forces in Baltimore, where they were massing for an attack on Fort McHenry, the U.S. military post guarding the city’s harbor. Dr. Beanes was being held on one of the British ships. When Key asked for his release, he was rudely informed that he would have to wait until after the attack but that he was welcome to visit Dr. Beanes on board.
As the British forces bombarded Fort McHenry on the morning of September 14, 1814, they proved their prowess in the spectacular and useless display of military power. The British ships, anchored outside the range of the American guns, faced no return fire. The U.S. forces inside the fort hung out a massive red, white, and blue flag and hunkered down to withstand the onslaught. They absorbed the artillery fire all night, with epic explosions from the massive British cannons lighting up the night sky. When dawn came, Key saw the British had not breached the fort’s walls, and the flag was still there. The British officers, not caring to expend more ammunition, decided they had made their point and prepared to move on.
Amidst the tumult, Key had the idea of writing a patriotic song. He scrawled notes for lyrics on the back of a letter during the bombardment. Upon returning to his hotel the next day, he fitted the words to the melody of a popular English drinking club song called “To Anacreon in Heaven.” Key had heard the tune (or “air”) used for a popular song in the 1790s called “Adams and Liberty.” Key infused the air of “Anacreon” with bold images of war to pose a patriotic question:
O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming?
The end of the first stanza answered the question: the fort had held, the flag survived:
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Then Key asked another question:
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free & the home of the brave?
In the modern mind, that is where the song ends and the ballgame begins. For Key, that question was just the prelude to his next three stanzas, in which the American flag not only survives but goes on to greater glory. These stanzas, taught in American public schools for much of the twentieth century, have fallen out of favor and been forgotten, probably because by then they no longer fit with prevailing notions of patriotism. In the third verse, for example, Key’s lyrics condemned the African Americans who dared to join the British cause to escape bondage, declaring, “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” By the end of Key’s fourth stanza, the defensive hopes of the first have swelled into a celebration of just war that promised America would go from near defeat to a godly conquest:
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 & the home of the brave!
In 311 words, Key had captured and defined something essential and enduring in America’s love of nation. His song summoned the “heav’n-rescued land” into righteous action—conquer we must, when our cause, it is just—the divine destiny of the land of the free.
With the end of the British siege and the release of Dr. Beanes, Key took his lyrics to the offices of the Baltimore American newspaper, where a printer ran off dozens of copies under the uninspired title “Defence of Fort McHenry.” Jubilant to see the British invaders depart, people started to sing Key’s song in the taverns and the theaters. When Key returned to his family estate in central Maryland a few days later, he barely mentioned the song to his wife and children, but he told Roger Taney about it in some detail.
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