The next month, a Baltimore theater advertised the performance of “a much admired New Song, written by a gentleman of Maryland, in commemoration of the GALLANT DEFENCE OF FORT M’HENRY, called, THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER.” The retitled song gained in popularity as the whole nation felt a sense of pride and relief as the war with Great Britain came to a close. On the battlefields of Europe, the British had largely defeated France, their principal enemy, and no longer needed to worry about the United States. In December 1814, Great Britain and the United States negotiated a peace treaty. If the United States had not won the War of 1812, it had not lost it either.
“The Star-Spangled Banner” would not officially become the national anthem for another century. But it was already a national success. Key’s humiliation at Bladensburg enabled him to compose the lyrics that exulted so proudly in the joy of survival and the prospect of righteous victories in the future. Key did not have to promote his song. Its vivid scenes, stirring melody, and triumphant climax did that for him. In December 1814, a group of political men threw a banquet at McKeowin’s Hotel, located at the corner of Sixth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Washington really was just a village then and McKeowin’s a lonely outpost of camaraderie. During the toasts after the dinner, the Intelligencer reported, F. S. Key’s “beautiful and touching” lines were sung “with great effect by several of the guests.” It was the first time “The Star-Spangled Banner” had been performed publicly in Washington City.
Seventeen years later, Francis Scott Key’s patriotism was undimmed. His song was famous, matched in popularity only by “Hail Columbia,” an older patriotic hymn. Key’s anthem, all four stanzas, was still sung with gusto, but the city that listened had changed. The corner of Sixth and Pennsylvania now anchored a growing metropolis where democracy was ascendant but morality embattled, a national capital for General Jackson and the common man but also a place plagued with gamblers, whores, and free Negroes who presumed to act the equal of white men.
Then came word of Southampton.
9
THE TERRIBLE NEWS from Southampton reached Frank Key at Terra Rubra, the family estate to which he retreated each summer. Terra Rubra was Key’s solace. He and Polly and the children came every year to the rolling hills along the Monocacy River in northern Maryland. The Pennsylvania border was just fifteen miles away. Key’s estate, with its slaves and slow pace, was an outpost of the South with a view of the North.
These verdant hills had been the seat of the Key family since 1753, when Philip Key, a bachelor from England, had patented some two thousand acres of wilderness between the Monocacy River and its tributary Big Pipe Creek. Philip Key built a large home on his new property and dubbed it Terra Rubra, or Red Lands, in honor of the fertile reddish soil. Three generations of Keys, including Francis Scott, had grown up on the property.
By all accounts it was a splendid place. “The mansion was of brick, with centre and wings and long porches,” said one historian. “It was situated amidst a large lawn, shaded by trees, and an extensive terraced garden adorned with shrubbery and flowers. Near by flowed Pipe Creek, through a dense wood. A copious spring of purest water where young people loved to retire and sit under the sheltering oaks in summer was at the foot of the hill. A meadow of waving grass spread out toward Catoctin Mountain, which could be seen at sunset curtained in clouds of crimson and gold.”
Key delighted in his time at Terra Rubra with the children, sometimes leading them in prayer twice a day. At least six of them were there that summer, along with Roger Taney, his wife, and their brood.
Key probably first read news of the slave uprising in Southampton, Virginia, in the pages of the Frederick Town Herald on August 27, 1831, under the headline “Insurrection of the Blacks.”
“I have a horrible, heart-rending tale to relate,” the author began, “and lest even its worst features might be distorted by rumor and exaggeration I have thought it proper to give you all and the worst information that has yet reached us, through the best sources of intelligence which the nature of the case will admit.”
A band of slaves had taken up arms in Southampton County in southern Virginia the previous Sunday, the dispatch reported. The rebels had murdered several whole families of white people. Most of the white men in the area had been off attending a camp meeting some miles away, the correspondent noted, “a circumstance which gave temporary security to the brigands in the perpetration of their butcheries.”
The account had plenty of disturbing detail, not all of it accurate. The black insurgents, reportedly led by one or two white men, numbered some three hundred, half of them riding horses. In fact, the rebels were led by a black preacher named Nat and no white men were involved. The exploits of General Nat, as he was dubbed, fascinated even as they sickened. Nat and his men had butchered a master and mistress in their bed. They bashed a baby’s head on a brick fireplace. A father, who hid himself in the bushes of a garden, watched his whole family be murdered just a few yards away. Some forty to fifty people were reported to have fallen victim to their vengeance.
Whatever comfort Key felt at his family retreat was now gone. Frederick County was swept with helpless and numbing fear and irresistible speculation. The Keys lived in a sea of black people whom they thought content, just as the masters of Southampton—now dead—must have thought. Key had to protect himself and his family. Within two weeks the news became more reassuring. Sixteen of the black rebels had been captured and hanged. But General Nat had escaped, and the governor of Virginia was offering a five-hundred-dollar reward for his capture. White people slept no easier. A nervous Polly Key decided to return to Georgetown rather than think about black phantoms in the countryside. She took the baby of the family, four-year-old Charles, with her. Key stayed behind to manage his property in people.
Thomas Jefferson and other guilty slave-owning savants had long predicted that American slavery would end in “servile war” in which the slaves would annihilate their masters or vice versa. Nonetheless, the Southampton uprising was a shock for the patriotic statesmen and respectable citizenry of the slaveholding republic.
White people started arguing among themselves. The leaders of the American Colonization Society cited the massacre to stress the urgency of expatriating Africans and organized several more expeditions to Liberia. While colonization remained the most popular solution to the problem of slavery, a growing minority of whites wanted to do more. The editors of the Adams Sentinel in nearby Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, used the occasion to call “for the gradual abolition of slavery throughout the land.” Antislavery activists found more people willing to listen to their arguments that slavery made such crimes inevitable. In the two months after Southampton, Ben Lundy gained more than 250 new subscribers to the Genius. In Virginia, the two leading newspapers, the Richmond Enquirer and the Richmond Whig, both came out in favor of the gradual emancipation of the Africans.
Southampton affected Key personally. He soon agreed to manumit two of his seven adult bondsmen. Key’s decision was unusual in its timing. Before August 1831, white slave owners in the Frederick County area often freed their chattel, sometimes in exchange for payment, more often in their wills. After Southampton, slave owners in the area became fearful and not a single slave was manumitted—except for the two freed by Key. On September 7, 1831, barely a week after news of the massacre, Key agreed to sell the evidently unhappy William Ridout his freedom for three hundred dollars. Ridout left, and Key said good riddance. After Southampton it might have made more sense to manumit an unruly African than let him stick around and share his admiration of General Nat with others.
The second man was Clem Johnson, a trusted forty-five-year-old slave who had worked at Terra Rubra for years. Since the death of Key’s father in 1821 and the aging of Key’s mother, Johnson had gradually taken over the management of the household. He was the custodian of the family recipes, superintendent of the kitchen garden, and boss of the field hands, who no doubt discussed Southampton among themselves.
In early October 1831, Key and Johnson traveled north from Terra Rubra to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where Key gave the magistrate a handwritten deed of manumission. Clem Johnson gained his freedom for a fee of just five dollars.
Key’s decision to go to Pennsylvania was also peculiar. He could have—and, from a legal point of view, should have—executed the deed in Frederick County. The problem for Key was likely that he knew the clerks, lawyers, and judges at the courthouse. And they knew him as a tireless, sometimes tiresome advocate of colonization, who had long urged his slave-owning neighbors to free their property and send them to Africa—exactly what he was not going to do in the case of Clem. By taking care of Johnson in Gettysburg, Key spared himself from accusations of hypocrisy in Frederick Town.
Or perhaps Gettysburg was Johnson’s idea. Possessing free papers in Pennsylvania gave him a new degree of personal security. As a free resident in a state that had abolished slavery, Clem had gained rights in the eyes of the law and made himself less vulnerable to the threat of kidnapping. Whatever the calculus, Johnson obtained his freedom and shed few tears. He had successfully used the white man’s panic over Southampton to secure his freedom on advantageous terms. He had no interest in going to Africa. Indeed, Johnson did not even resettle in Pennsylvania, where he was now legally a free man. The red lands of Terra Rubra were his native soil too. He had gained his freedom and the right to be paid. On those terms, he resumed running the kitchen and leading prayers at Terra Rubra and made sure none of the young black men got any stupid ideas in their heads. He was free, and the Key family could sleep easier.
But something had changed in the autumn air. When Frank Key and Clem Johnson stood outside the slaves’ quarters of Terra Rubra on a clear day and looked north toward Gettysburg, they could see the blue ridge of two mountains in the distance. One was called Big Round Top, the other Little Round Top. The long struggle against slavery that would culminate in the battle of Gettysburg in those hills in 1863 had just begun.
10
IN THE BALMY dusk of a Friday evening in April 1832, three gentlemen strolled west on Pennsylvania Avenue, heading for the theater. With the curtain for the show not scheduled to go up until eight o’clock, the men took their time. The sidewalks were filled with strolling ladies, stevedores heading for grog shops, and men exiting the faro banks where gambling flourished. Horse-drawn carriages clattered by as they passed Pishey Thompson’s bookstore and Mrs. Queen’s boardinghouse. At the corner of Eleventh Street, three men paused to look at a pedestrian crossing from the south side of the Avenue. The flame of a streetlamp illuminated the man’s face as much as the full moon rising behind them.
“Are you Mr. Stanbery?” asked the tallest of the three men.
“Yes, sir,” said the pedestrian, bowing.
“Then you are a damned rascal!” the tall man shouted, raising his wooden cane and slamming it down on Stanbery’s head. The man’s hat went flying into the gutter as he staggered backward. The attacker clubbed Stanberry again, then grabbed his victim. “Please, sir,” Stanbery squealed as his attacker tumbled him to the curb. The attacker raised his cane yet again.
“Don’t strike me!” Stanbery cried, now lying on his back, feet up to ward off the blows. The big man struck him again. Stanbery rolled onto his left side and with his right hand extracted a pistol from his pocket. As the big man recoiled, Stanbery pulled the trigger. Sparks glittered amidst a little snapping sound, but no bullet discharged. Enraged all the more, the big man grabbed the gun and used it to beat Stanbery some more about his much-abused head.
William Stanbery was a forty-three-year-old congressman from central Ohio who had been elected as a supporter of General Jackson in 1828 and reelected as an opponent in 1830. His assailant was Sam Houston, the thirty-nine-year-old former governor of Tennessee who had made his name as an Indian fighter, succumbed to drinking, then threw away the bottle and returned to politics by getting himself elected to Congress as a Jackson ally. After the beating, Stanbery tottered back to his room at Mrs. Queen’s boardinghouse, while Houston continued on to the theater with his two companions, both of whom happened to be members of the U.S. Senate.
Stanbery knew why Houston had assaulted him. Ten days before, Stanbery had delivered a bitter attack on the Jackson administration on the floor of the House of Representatives, alleging corruption in western road construction contracts. Stanbery said that the superintendent of construction on the Cumberland Road, a mammoth public works project, had defrauded the government, yet remained in his position—perhaps because one of the contracts involved Sam Houston.
The beating of Stanbery shocked the city and the Congress. Lawmakers in the capital had come to expect the insults, lies, deceptions, and calumnies that flourished in the struggle for power. On questions of honor, some congressmen resorted to the elaborate and often deadly ritual of dueling. But an unannounced cane to the head broke even the lax rules of the democratic game. The House went into session that afternoon. By a vote of 145 to 25, the members approved a resolution calling for Houston’s arrest. The sergeant at arms took Houston into custody that night.
“Most Daring Outrage and Assault” blared the headline in the Telegraph on Monday morning. “What gives more importance to this transaction is the known relation which Houston bears to the President of the United States,” wrote editor Duff Green. “. . . The proof that he [Houston] contemplated a fraud upon the government is conclusive yet he is still received at the executive mansion and is treated with the kindness and hospitality of an old favorite.”
Francis Blair, an ally from Kentucky and editor of the newly established Globe newspaper, served as Jackson’s chief bodyguard in the press. A homely man who wielded a wicked pen, Blair rejected Green’s “vile attempt” to connect the president with the affair of Governor Houston and Mr. Stanbery. Blair’s indignation was hardly necessary. Jackson believed Houston was fully justified in beating Stanbery, and Green was right that Houston could expect hospitality at the President’s House. Indeed, when Houston visited Jackson a few days later, he brought a souvenir of the encounter, Stanbery’s malfunctioning gun. The president just chuckled at the sight. Jackson thought his friend needed a good attorney to fend off his petty foes, and he knew just the man for the job.
The trial of Sam Houston got under way in the hall of the House of Representatives on April 19. Houston arrived wearing a long buckskin coat with a fur collar, leaning on his habitual hickory walking stick. His counsel, Francis Scott Key, slim, handsome, and conventionally dressed in cravat and jacket, walked by his side. Appearing together they caused a stir: the alliance between the rugged frontiersman and the patriot poet was as exciting as it was unlikely. Before long, the crowd of awestruck spectators exceeded any seen in the Capitol since the Senate galleries overflowed in January 1830 for the debates between Daniel Webster and Robert Hayne over states’ rights and nullification. The semicircular gallery of the House chamber grew crowded with tourists, ladies, lobbyists, editors, auditors, scriveners, messengers, clerks, and correspondents. Members flocked to their desks on the floor. “On no occasion, we believe, has the House of Representatives been so entirely filled,” reported the Intelligencer.
In his earlier days, Francis Scott Key might have been a pious dreamer, a sensitive poet, a tranquil philanthropist. Under the influence of President Jackson, said one admirer, he had hardened into a militant warrior of galvanized conviction: “ardent, zealous, fearless.” From the outset of Houston’s trial, Key sought to exclude Jackson’s critics. He made a motion that no member who had formed or expressed an opinion on the assault should sit in judgment. That would disqualify the majority, who had voted to arrest Houston and neatly end the proceedings before they began. Indignant representatives shouted that Mr. Key had questioned their integrity. Somewhat abashed, he withdrew the motion.
Stanbery, still bruised, gamely took the stand, testifying in detail about his investigation of irregularities in a government contract for Indian rations that was given to
Houston when he was governor of Tennessee. Key scorned the charge as rhetoric based on the testimony of a drunk. Houston, injured while fighting Indians, was incapable of attacking Stanbery with any force, he said. Talk of an “assault” was just a partisan game of the president’s enemies.
So it went for a week. Key served as field marshal for Houston’s allies as they waged a parliamentary war of attrition against those who sought to sanction the frontiersman in any way. For all the bombast, the stakes were real. The trial of Sam Houston was a struggle to define the norms of debate in Washington. Could a man assault a political opponent for words exchanged in legislative proceedings? Or, as Key put it, could Congress usurp its powers to rebuke a blameless man for responding to an unseemly challenge to his honor?
In his summation, Key raised the stakes.
“Sir,” he said to the House Speaker as the galleries hushed, “this cause cannot fail to have consequences, for good and for evil, extending to distant days, when the accused, and all around him may be forgotten. It is thought to affect the high privileges of this great House; and it is certain that it affects the still higher privileges of a still greater House—the people of this great republic.”
Francis Scott Key orated sincerely, his admirers noted. When he threw himself into a speech, said one, “his face reflected how deeply he was moved, sparkling beams upon his words as they fell from his lips. In his more impassioned moments his emotion was like lightning, charging his sentences with electrical power.”
In such an electric moment, Key lauded his rough-hewn client.
“I am proud, as an American lawyer, to stand by such a man, in such a cause… ,” he declared. “I consider this the proudest and most gratifying hour of my life.”
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