Republic or Death! (12 page)

‘How did I do?' I shout, running up to the judging table suddenly filled with adrenalin.

‘Ten out of ten for the words,' one replies.

‘And … how about the actual singing?'

‘Yeah … er … um … We'll get back to you,' he says, with a wry smile.

*

Nashville might be a great city in which to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner', but if there is really a place to explore its history and meaning, it's Baltimore, just off the Chesapeake Bay, in the corridor between Washington DC and New York.

Baltimore used to be thriving and energetic, one of the world's most important ports, sucking in anything that could be grown or manufactured in the eastern US and shipping it out. Today, after decades of decline, it only seems to make it into newspapers for riots or in connection with the city's appalling reputation for drugs. Baltimore is now apparently all crack and meth, re-ups and corner boys, and is dominated by the projects – large estates filled with the city's poor, places you don't go to unless you want your car stolen.

When you step out of the city's train station and on to a bus downtown, that reputation seems deserved. Within two minutes of getting on one myself, I'd seen my first addict, shuffling up the aisle in a stained Michael Jackson sweater, hunched over and missing a few teeth. He didn't ask for money, perhaps assuming everyone else was in as hopeless a situation as his own.

But give Baltimore a little time and it opens up to you. It's a city with some extremely obvious problems, but it also has a youthfulness and vibrancy to it, like a cut-price New York. You can be skirting a project one minute, the next be walking along a tree-lined road with bustling Mexican cantinas and gentrified terraced homes. You can go to one end of the waterfront and be shocked by homelessness, then head to the other and join the people gazing enviously at the yachts moored in the bay. And it's also here, at a red-brick and white-timber fort on the city's southern edge, that 200 years ago ‘The Star-Spangled Banner' was born.

*

Before you can tell the story of ‘The Banner', as everyone in Baltimore seems to call it, you need a brief lesson about the War of 1812. It was fought between Britain and America. It lasted three years. It was also one of the strangest wars in history, with its biggest battle fought long after peace had been signed. Yet hardly anyone's heard of it.

The US had been independent for just thirty-six years when that war began. In nationhood terms, it was still a baby barely able to make out shapes, and it was trying to be sick all over its parents. To be fair, the British had given it enough reasons to want to do so. Britain was at war with France at the time and so was trying to strangle America's trade with the French: stopping American ships mid-ocean, taking their cargo or even throwing it into the sea. The British navy was also in desperate need of men and so had developed a habit of boarding American ships to look for deserters, then taking anyone it liked the look of – British or not. As real as these grievances were, some Americans wanted war for other reasons, such as to open up the west (Britain had been arming some American Indian tribes) or thinking it would present a good opportunity to make Canada part of the United States. With the British busy fighting the French, there'd never be a better chance. Soon the five-foot, four-inch president, James Madison, realised he couldn't keep away from conflict, and on 18 June, he signed a declaration of war. There's no record of when he started to regret that decision, but it was probably, at most, three days later.

The next two years passed in a series of embarrassments and mishaps for the US army, which, it turned out, wasn't really capable of invading anywhere. It had few proper soldiers. Those it had were poorly paid. And some of those refused to fight anywhere but their home states – they'd happily march up to the Canadian border as long as they didn't have to cross it.

The British, meanwhile, could only really sail up and down the coastline, raiding the odd town, bombing the odd city, what with most of its troops occupied elsewhere – hardly the behaviour of a global superpower. Things didn't become anywhere near dramatic until the summer of 1814, when Britain, having finally seen off Napoleon, sent thousands of troops across the Atlantic, all of them angry and embittered that they couldn't just go home to their wives. That August, there was a large battle at Bladensburg, a village that today sits in the middle of Washington's commuter belt. President Madison turned up to give orders, the last president to set foot on a battlefield. But half of his cabinet decided to come along too, shouting at the generals and contradicting each other. The Americans had the numerical advantage, and they occupied the high ground, but with such confused leadership, and relying on militias easily scared by British rockets, it was unsurprisingly soon a rout. Thousands of Americans fled, the British giving chase in their distinctive red coats. Madison was forced to jump on a horse and gallop for his life, while a messenger was sent to the White House calling for his wife ‘to quit the city immediately'. She carried off their silver in her handbag.

That battle has been called the ‘most humiliating episode in US history', but what came next seems, in some respects, worse. The British got to the White House and found a meal for forty laid out in the dining room: decanters of wine chilling in ice on the sideboard and food in tin-warmers (they thought it was a victory banquet, but it was actually that day's dinner). So they ate wolfishly – gluttonously, apparently. You can imagine them letting the fat from the meat drip down their chins and slopping wine on to the floor. Then they burned the White House, and most of Washington's other public buildings, to the ground.

Then they turned their attention to Baltimore.

*

You can tell that some people are going to be heroes. They're a certain type: men and women whose hair appears to be blowing in the wind even on still days, whose names are never far from words like ‘magnetic' or ‘debonair'. Francis Scott Key, the man who wrote ‘The Star-Spangled Banner', was never meant to be a hero.

In September 1814, Key was a thirty-five-year-old lawyer and father of five. He had a long Roman nose and hair that fell around his face in curls. He was in demand for his work, by all accounts, but he hardly stands out from anyone else from that time. If you dig around for exciting anecdotes about him, you come up desperately short. He liked to go to church – a lot. And he liked to write poems with titles like ‘To my Steed' and ‘To a Rose-bud'. The most interesting thing about him actually seems to be his confused views on slavery: he owned slaves, but he argued cases on behalf of freed ones; he thought the answer to slavery was to encourage freed blacks to go back to Africa (ignoring the question of whether they'd come from there in the first place), but he vehemently opposed abolition. That's pretty much it – apart from the fact that he wrote one particular poem, or rather song, which became very famous indeed.

In Baltimore, I met Burt Kummerow, the portly president of the Maryland Historical Society, which owns Key's original manuscript, but he, too, was unable to tell me one good story about Key. He tried desperately, searching his memory, flicking through books for something amusing or interesting to say, but he just kept slipping into stories about different people entirely. ‘Do you know Key's son, Philip?' he said at one point. ‘He was this well-known rake and at some time he was having an affair with a Latin ingénue, the wife of a congressman. She was evidently “raising the shade” whenever her husband went out. But the congressman somehow learned about it, confronted Philip in front of the White House, pulled a pistol and murdered him. Just shot him right in front of everybody! You should really look him up.'

‘But Key himself, there's nothing about him that stands out?' I asked.

‘Er, let me think a minute,' he said, looking off purposefully. Then he suddenly brightened. ‘You know, he
was
friends with a guy called John Randolph of Roanoke. Now
there
was a character …'

The only person who gave me a different picture was Lisa Sherwood, Key's great-great-great-great-granddaughter and the most sparkling seventy-three-year-old you could ever hope to come across. I met her in a sunny courtyard in the middle of the city and with her blonde bob and mischievous smile she could easily have passed for twenty years younger.

Lisa had no stories about Key himself – her parents hadn't passed any down – but she almost pleaded with me that he couldn't have been as staid as he seems. ‘The paintings I've seen of him, he looks – what's the word? – debonair,' she said, ‘like he's about to flash his cape about.

‘And his wife, Polly, was lovely, beautiful, a real prize. Her father was the richest man in the whole of Maryland so Key must have had a lot of charm – or
something
– to catch her. And he wrote her these wonderful, romantic letters. I guess I think of him as a bit like my own father, who was extremely exuberant and mischievous and energetic and passionate.'

Whether he had any heroic characteristics or not, Key was clearly respected, since about a week after the burning of Washington he was asked to sail out to the British fleet near Baltimore and help negotiate the release of a prisoner, Dr Beanes. Beanes had been ‘punishing a bowl of punch' with some friends one afternoon, celebrating the British leaving his town, when he discovered a desperate British soldier in his garden trying to steal food. They took him prisoner then went in search of more stragglers to lock up, a somewhat foolhardy idea given the British would clearly find out about it. The British came for the men the next day, and took Beanes off as well, not even letting him pick up his glasses.

Key reached the British fleet on a Wednesday, 7 September. He was deeply pessimistic about the trip, believing that even if he argued for days he would still have next to no chance of convincing the British that Beanes had done nothing wrong. But it turned out to be surprisingly easy. He was harried and messed about, but then he produced letters of gratitude from British soldiers Beanes had cared for throughout the war, and that was it: Key was given his man.

But the pair weren't allowed to leave. The British were planning to bombard Baltimore's Fort McHenry, the only thing stopping them sailing straight into the city's harbour, and Beanes and Key had seen the preparations being made. They also knew that a simultaneous land assault was planned. They couldn't be allowed to just sail off and warn everyone. So the British made them wait – and then they made them watch.

*

Fort McHenry today sits in a beautiful park filled with Lycra-clad joggers and chihuahua walkers from the up-and-coming neighbourhood nearby. It couldn't feel more peaceful or genteel, so it's probably not a place where you should do impressions of bombs going off. Vince Vaise, a thirty-something park ranger who has agreed to show me around, doesn't seem the slightest bit concerned about shattering the calm, though.

‘The British were firing mortar shells from two MILES away,' he says, throwing his arms out towards a bridge in the distance. ‘And these shells were filled with THIRTEEN pounds of high explosive black powder, so when they exploded – BOOOOOOOOOM! – they would shower down fragments. You'd have heard them for miles. BOOOOOOOOOM!'

Vince is the sort of tour guide you dream of stumbling across when you visit a historical monument like this. He lives and breathes Fort McHenry. He also, without any self-awareness, acts out everything he says, his arms swinging, his legs apparently forcing him to jump on to things or crouch behind them whether he wants to or not. And he RANDOMLY shouts WORDS in every sentence, like a comedian who can't remember where the punchline is.

The reason I wanted to meet Vince was to get an impression of what Francis Scott Key would have gone through with the British, and what he would have seen from his ship. It would have been far from pretty, Vince insists. On 13 September, at 6.30 a.m., the British stopped just out of range of the fort's cannons and, like the most ungodly dawn chorus, then pounded it with about 1,500 mortars and 800 rockets (the rockets were barely controllable, there as much to scare as to hit anything). ‘The bombardment lasted twenty-five hours, and don't forget it was in a thunderstorm too, so you had WIND and RAIN and LIGHTNING. I don't think anyone got ANY sleep that night,' Vince says.

Key was stuck pacing his ship's deck, watching those bombs, trying to make out the condition of the fort by the light of the explosions, to see whether the flag was still flying or a British one had been raised in its place. That flag would have been easy to see during the day as it had been made deliberately huge – 42 feet wide and 30 feet high – so the British couldn't fail to see it, a cocky gesture by the fort's commander to give his soldiers the confidence to take on the world's biggest navy. The flag was so large that when it was made it had to be laid out on the floor of a brewery, and was so heavy it took eleven men to lift it. It was actually taken down during the battle to stop it getting damaged by the storm but even the smaller flag that replaced it was vast: 17 feet high, 25 feet wide.

*

‘Key is a FASCINATING person,' shouts Vince, as if trying to get the passing joggers interested in him too. ‘He was quite an Anglophile before he went out there. But the British gave him a pretty hard time and really turned him off. I mean, it's not surprising – a lot of the British high command came from the ARISTOCRACY, so they were used to looking down on their OWN people, let alone Americans.'

Vince starts talking about some of the British logbooks he's seen. In one an officer wrote, ‘The work of destruction is about to begin and this must distress the Americans as much as it delights me.' In another, Alexander Cochrane, the admiral in charge, says the Americans were a ‘whining, canting race, much like spaniels', and had to be smacked on the nose and made to heel. He'd hated the Americans for years, ever since they'd started burning villages in Canada (the burning of Washington was partly retribution for that). ‘We know the negotiations were in the admiral's cabin over wine,' Vince adds, ‘so after a few drinks I'm sure the talk got a little LOOSE. I'm sure they told Key exactly what they thought about him and his country.'