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Now, for the benefit of elementary school teachers, homeschoolers, foreigners and would-be U.S. citizens, here's what everyone should know by grade five, at least, about our national anthem:
In 1776, "We the People of these United States" asserted our independence from King George III of England. At the time the U.K. was much bigger and richer than the U.S. and nobody expected our little colonial rebellion to succeed. When the British (and several foreign troops they had hired) surrendered and went home, the song people sang was called "The World Turned Upside Down."
"Our" song, at the time, was "Yankee Doodle." It was originally a silly ditty intended to make fun of ignorant colonial young men, but Americans quickly adopted it and added lots of verses about how the young man might be comically ignorant but the army he'd joined was nothing to laugh at. Dozens if not hundreds of songs were written to the tune of "Yankee Doodle" during and after the Revolutionary War. Many were also written to other tunes.
Our first serious national anthem was "Hail Columbia." (Several people wanted "Columbia" to be our nation's name.) Written for the inauguration of George Washington in 1789, it was the official "President's March" until it was replaced by "Hail to the Chief" and demoted to being the theme tune for the Vice-President. It's not as easy as "America," but I learned it in grade five and expect The Nephews to have learned it too.
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| (Image donated to Wikipedia By Aetzkorn - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10077577 .) |
However, the turn of the nineteenth century was a period of serious interest in the "liberal arts," the arts studied by free citizens--which included singing--and social clubs, not school teachers, were the ones promoting popular songs that were even more of a challenge to sing. One popular, though silly, song was called "The Anacreontic Song" and was the anthem of an "Anacreontic Society" of amateur musicians. It was wonderfully challenging to the voice; even professional singers usually have to "warm up" to be sure of being able to hit all the right notes.
Francis Scott Key of Maryland liked the tune, and wrote a song to go with it in honor of Stephen Decatur, also of Maryland. Decatur's heroic service in our mini-wars against the Barbary States, 1801-1804, had earned him the commission of captain, making him the youngest captain in the U.S. Navy. Decatur went on to earn promotion all the way to admiral. Key's song was called "When the Warrior Returns." I've never seen the text, but the song Key composed in 1814, while watching the British bombardment of Fort McHenry, was based on "When the Warrior Returns."
Humorist Richard Armour, much later, wisecracked about the possible effects if the colonial army had actually tried to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner": "Francis Off Key wrote 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' and when...the British heard it sung, they fled in terror." It's funny because we all know that he wrote "The Defense of Fort McHenry" after the British had retreated.
Between 1789 and 1814, the rest of the world had been sneering at these United States. It was widely believed that no large-scale democratic republic could last through even one generation's time. The Barbary States were attacking our ships because they thought they could beat us. The Europeans were too busy with their own tribal wars to bother, which was a blessing to us. By 1812 the British thought they could reclaim us as a colony.
The British navy, at this time, was relying on conscription to staff its ships. The desperation of practices used to recruit Englishmen may have been exaggerated in folklore, but a lot of British sailors evidently fought in naval battles because the penalty for any experienced sailor not "fighting for his King" was hanging. Sailors could be forcibly "impressed" off merchant ships or river boats. Slavery, which was not abolished until 1833, was another source of ships' crews, but was not widespread enough to supply a whole navy. In the early nineteenth century the British Navy also started attacking U.S. ships and commandeering American sailors into His Majesty's service. This was the cause of the War of 1812 between the U.S. and U.K.
At this time, Europeans were sneering "Who reads an American book?" and the answer seems to have been "Mostly students of American history," and what those students find in early American books was a massive amount of rhetoric about how glorious it was to be "freemen," rather than being "slaves" to a monarch.
How free were the first generation of U.S. citizens, exactly? By modern standards, most of them did enjoy the "freedom" of living on widely scattered small farms. Apart from that...women had no vote, and their rights to own property were limited, throughout their lives, many of which were shortened by their having no legal right to birth control even by abstinence. The rights of non-English men varied from State to State but were often also restricted; members of suspected ethnic groups were often forbidden to use firearms, sometimes barred from buying or renting property in certain places at all, and, where any public services such as schools or hospitals existed--which wasn't in many towns, in 1812--barred from using them; job and housing discrimination was common, and even Irish- and German-Americans were sometimes distrusted as "alien races" whose allegedly different looks and customs endangered Anglo-American culture. There were towns where no outsider was welcome to spend a night. Most Native Americans were still respected as belonging to separate nations--enemy nations, or potential enemy nations--and feared and hated accordingly. Men who didn't own property couldn't vote. Teenagers had different limited civil rights in different States, but generally even a rich White boy couldn't be considered "his own master" before age twenty-one. Teenagers were, technically, supposed to consent to their parents' or guardians' decisions about marriage or apprenticeship, but had few opportunities to oppose those decisions. Apprentices were not technically slaves but, like slaves, were normally paid only their room and board, expected to work every day unless their "master" happened to be a strict sabbatarian, and forbidden to leave their workplace without the master's permission; like slaves, they often ran away, and were subject to harsh penalties if caught after running away; like slaves, they could legally be beaten or starved as punishment. Then there were "bound" Americans, whose "condition of servitude" to those who'd paid the costs of their immigration was basically slavery as permitted by the Bible--work without wages for a few years, after which they were free. So in fact most Americans were not full citizens of these United States for several generations after 1812.
So, did all that rhetoric about the "freedom" of paying taxes to the government the rich White men elected, instead of an hereditary monarch, grate on the ears of women, ethnic minority types, and young low-paid working men? Sometimes it did; a lot of those people moved to Canada. However, we have to remember that those women, minority types, and working men were not full citizens under British or other European monarchies' laws, either. Slaves had been an item of international trade, recognized and regulated by law, all around the world in the eighteenth century. In the Southern States slavery reached the status of a "peculiar institution" indeed, being practiced on an unprecedented scale that allowed for unprecedented abuses, but many of the slaves in the early days of the American Colonies were English. Europeans became slaves to other Europeans, as did Native Americans and also people in other parts of the world, by sinking deep into debt, as punishment for crimes including political dissent, by being taken prisoner in wars or raids, or simply by being kidnapped.
Some of the young people collectively anonymized as The Nephews are close physical relatives of mine, and some are adoptive relatives. Some are legally White, and some are not. I think the White ones have been kept familiar with the historical fact that one of our Whitest-looking ancestors, who came from the French/German border country, came to North Carolina as a slave. Because he was White and Christian and talented and hardworking, he worked his way up from half-grown runaway slave to apprentice to business owner to son-in-law in a rich Anglo-American family, which many other slaves who arrived in the early nineteenth century were legally barred from being able to do. The fact remains that, as a teenager who chose to sneak out of school and see a bit of real life around the shipyard, he was kidnapped and enslaved. That happened, and at the time it was legal; fear of being enslaved was one thing that kept teenagers obedient to parents, teachers, and masters-of-the-trades into which their parents apprenticed them.
Taking one consideration with another, the historical fact seems to have been that a lot of people didn't have full civil rights anywhere, knew it, and did indeed cherish whatever "choice of masters" they had. B.A. Botkin collected in books some samples of documents that slaves really did compose and sing songs like "Carry Me Back to Old Virginie." Slaves were not only sold but rented out, and had incentives to compete for more desirable (or less undesirable) positions by showing off their skills and talents. Since they were going to be slaves in any case some did indeed show preferences for doing different kinds of work, for being in towns or on farms, among old friends or out in new country. If several slaves wanted the same job, the advantage might be to the one who could make up a song about it...and sometimes slaves did that.
In most if not all the wars fought in recorded history up to the nineteenth century, certainly in the War of 1812, a few enslaved people fought on both sides. Sometimes good prospective soldiers and sailors were recruited with promises of freedom; sometimes the soldiers and sailors counted slaves, along with horses, as assets they brought to the service.
There were literal slaves in Maryland in 1812--Black, White, and also Red, although Native Americans were considered not to be valuable slaves because they thought they had a moral right to escape. While it's hard to say exactly what was in Francis Scott Key's mind during a long night watching guns and bombs explode, if it was at all accurate, his comparison between "free men" on the U.S. side and "slaves" on the U.K. side was political rather than racial. British troops killed many Black Americans (like Crispus Attucks) and, from Maryland's point of view, whether Black Marylanders were "free men" (like Benjamin Banneker) or slaves, if they were killed in the war that was Maryland's loss--part of the enemy's "foul footsteps' pollution."
Key did not explain his song. He wrote it for educated adults. He expected people to understand several terms that are confusing to children and foreigners. He wrote four verses, of which, on most occasions, singers are expected to attempt only the first.
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| By Francis Scott Key - Scan of a surviving copy from the Smithsonian, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=541428 |
When I wrote the first draft of this post I typed out definitions of the words that are unfamiliar to children and foreigners. I don't know that that's a good idea. I think students of English learn more by looking up and writing out the definitions for themselves. It may be worth mentioning, though, that according to Wikipedia Key was aware of the redundancy of "the perilous fight" and tried revising the line, in a handwritten copy, to "the clouds of the fight" instead.
Anyway: "That band" means the British Navy. "The hireling" means that much despised character, the mercenary soldier or sailor who'd taken the King's shilling to fight in the King's war even though he was not British and his own country might have been at war with Britain during his lifetime. "The slave" whose "terror of flight or the gloom of the grave" was a source of triumph was obviously not the property of a Marylander--so if Key was thinking about Black slaves, he was thinking about those owned (or stolen) by British troops.
In 1776, during a long, large-scale war, both British and American military officers promised freedom to slaves who enlisted in either army. Most, apparently, never took those promises seriously. The War of 1812 was a shorter, smaller-scale war, in which that kind of chicanery is not recorded because it was not necessary. We don't know how many, if any, participants in the siege of Fort McHenry were anything but English or Anglo-American.
"Freemen," when printed as one word, sometimes meant hasty typesetting but usually referred specifically to ex-slaves. How many such "freemen" were left to give thanks for the preservation of Maryland? Between 1810 and 1820 the enslaved population of Maryland almost quadrupled, according to
http://slavery.msa.maryland.gov/html/research/census1820.html
...but the free population also rose, and the census counts don't show how many slaves were emancipated as a direct result of service in either army in 1814. The Maryland State Archives claim that Admiral Cochrane promised emancipation to more than 700 slaves (color unknown) who enlisted on the British side. In fact Cochrane's proclamation said nothing about slaves, although it was written with seditious intentions:
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- Whereas it has been represented to me that many persons now resident in the United States have expressed a desire to withdraw therefrom with a view to entering into His Majesty's service, or of being received as free settlers into some of His Majesty's colonies.
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- This is therefore to give notice that all persons who may be disposed to migrate from the United States, will with their families, be received on board of His Majesty's ships or vessels of War, or at the military posts that may be established upon or near the coast of the United States, when they will have their choice of either entering into His Majesty's sea or land forces, or of being sent as free settlers to the British possessions in North America or the West Indies where they will meet with due encouragement.
(Quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Refugee_(War_of_1812) .)
How many of those 700 enslaved Marylanders were, in fact, among the 4000 Black Americans who migrated to other British colonies under Cochrane's proclamation? How many actually fought, and how many died during the attack on Fort McHenry? Answers to those questions were poorly documented--on purpose. Attempts were made to prevent slaves being emancipated, partly to require owners to support slaves at least until they could sell them (rather than just driving them out into the cold), partly to prevent freedmen from forming networks and helping one another. Toward the latter goal, slaves' names were not officially recorded, and might be arbitrarily changed on purpose to separate slaves from their friends and relatives.
In Virginia slavemasters could emancipate slaves--and some of the richest ones were proud of saving up enough money to emancipate a few every year--by giving the slaves a generous supply of money and a plan for moving somewhere outside of Virginia. In Maryland, slaves had to be sold to someone outside of Maryland before they could be emancipated at all.
There are records of church groups in some of the other British colonies among whom ex-slaves from the United States did, in fact, "meet with due encouragement," whether they joined the British Navy or not. Ex-slaves who wanted to brave the cold in Nova Scotia or the tropical heat in Trinidad were allowed to do that, since those colonies were having a hard time recruiting free settlers, and they actually immigrated to those colonies as families. They were "landsmen" in the English sense, not trained for naval warfare, and training them for naval service would have been a liability in mid-war. They would have been more useful to the British Crown on land than on sea.
There are, on the other hand, plenty of records showing that Americans taunted Europeans with the claim that subjects to hereditary monarchs were slaves. (Interestingly, in American rhetoric "slave" often thus ceased to mean the people to whom it actually referred in the law. Legal documents referred to "condition of servitude." The very very nice sort of social-climber types upgraded their slaves to "servants," full-time hired servants costing more than slaves, so that calling a slave a servant was a bit like calling a little mall shop a palace.) "Rule Britannia," which acquired its current official tune in 1740, asserted that Britons never would be slaves; Americans retorted that they were.
During the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a fifth verse for Key's "Defense of Fort McHenry," which had by then become known as "The Star-Spangled Banner." Holmes' verse, which was definitely divisive, at the time, and meant to be, was never officially added to our national anthem. It's available for modern singers' consideration at the Wikipedia page for the song. It is not printed along with Key's four verses in schoolbooks, and I've never heard it sung. It does, in any case, affirm what had become the majority position of opposition to slavery, which by that time even the Confederate leaders recognized as having been a socioeconomic disaster:
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So, should we go back to singing "Hail Columbia" as our national anthem? Would people quibble about whether "Immortal patriots, rise once more" appealed to living veterans to turn out for the inauguration, as it clearly did, or sounded like some sort of invocation to the long dead? I wouldn't think so, but it can be hard to underestimate the intelligence of some of the people...
There are reasonable reasons why people might prefer any of our official or unofficial national songs to the others. "America" ("My country, 'tis of thee...") has much to recommend it, as has "America the Beautiful" and "God Bless America," all of which are easy enough to be sung by primary school children. A case might be made for "God Bless the U.S.A." I've always been partial to an eighteenth century ditty that was composed to displace "The British Grenadiers" in our ancestors' songbooks, with the inspiring lines, "Then guard your rights, Americans, nor stoop to lawless way: oppose, oppose, oppose, oppose for free Ameri-cay." (Yes, it was meant to be sung with a chortle, but not without serious feeling underneath. So was "The British Grenadiers.") Which one should we sing? Well, I have no objection if people want to sing all of them, although I see no valid reason to discard the one verse of "The Star-Spangled Banner" that's actually sung on occasions like sports events.
It would be good for some people if they stopped quibbling about the distant past, and just sailed around the natural "ramparts" Maryland's bluffs form around the Chesapeake Bay and Potomac River, for a few days, thinking about the brave souls that fought on both sides of the War of 1812 and the fundamental stupidity of war. Maybe communing with nature around the Bay would calm their minds long enough for them to think of something useful to do on behalf of living people.
I've not been told what, if anything, the young people quibbling about the reference to "slaves" in "The Star-Spangled Banner" are doing in aid of inner city schools? If they were no longer needed there, I'm sure this web site would have received that news.
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