The Bombardment of Baltimore

After a night of shelling in the War of 1812, Baltimore was unsure if its fort had survived. At dawn, observers saw an American flag over the fort. Francis Scott Key composed a poem about the night -- and that poem eventually became the national anthem.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm to blame a truck rewarding.
And just the other day we got an email from
listener and Jacob suggesting that we cover the two anniversary

(00:22):
of the War of eighteen twelve, and I wrote back
telling him, you know, Jacob, your luck. Katie and I
recorded not one, but two episodes on the War of
eighteen twelve a couple of years back, when was on
two Kumsa and the other was on the bombardment of Baltimore.
And we'd already been considering revisiting that episode, the Baltimore one,

(00:42):
for this Fourth of July, because it's just as patriotic
as can be. But Jacob's note made me realize that
this is also still a somewhat popular suggestion. I mean,
I think it's a good sign when we still get
suggestions for topics we've already covered people. Those are clearly
the topics people really love. True, probably also because it
contains many American history legends, such as why is the

(01:06):
White House white? What is the Star Spangled Banner really about?
I know a lot of people probably want to know that,
and did Dolly Madison really save George Washington's portrait? And
because it along with the two comes, the episode covers
a largely forgotten war in American history and a time
when the United States was really just getting on its feet. Yeah,
those are all things that contribute to the War of

(01:28):
eighteen twelve being a popular suggestion and just the things
you mentioned being being suggested from time to time. So
to mark the fourth of July will be real listening
to this podcast on the battle or rather the bombardment
of Baltimore, So enjoy, Hello and welcome to the podcast.

(01:49):
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sara Dowdy. And contrary to
our title the Bombardment of Baltimore, we are not starting
off on a battlefield as you might think, but rather
on a brewery floor in Baltimore where several women were
piecing together a flag. Yeah. That was Baltimore flag maker
in widow Mary Pickersgill, and she had gotten the order

(02:10):
for the flag in July of eighteen thirteen from Major
George Armistead, and he was the new commander at Fort McHenry,
which was a really important defense position for the city
of Baltimore was defending the river, and he wanted a flag,
an enormous flag that the whole city could see, something
really big, thirty by forty two ft, which is about

(02:32):
the court a quarter of a basketball court, so larger
than even the biggest flag you've probably seen. And he
needed that flag soon because the war that had started
a year before the War of eighteen twelve was spreading
through the country. Action at the Canadian border had leaked
down to the Chesapeake Bay where the British were menacing

(02:52):
ships and scoping things out. So Armistead knew battle was
going to come to Baltimore sooner or later, and so
he it in this rush order for his enormous flag
from Picker Skill, as well as a smaller storm flag,
because you know, when it's raining, you don't want to
fly your to rip apart thirty by forty two foot
flag and pick or Skill works with three hundred yards

(03:13):
of English worsted wool bunting, piecing together red and blue
stripes and sewing on fifteen because they're only fifteen stars
at the time, um enormous cotton stars. And uh, she
carefully picked the wool off the back too, so she'd
so on the star and then pick the blue off
the back so the white star could show from both sides.

(03:34):
So this is a quality flag. She's helped by her daughter,
two nieces, and an African American indentured servant, and the
women are done by August. They make four hundred and
five dollars and ninety cents for the garrison flag, and
one hundred and sixty eight dollars and fifty four cents
for the storm flag, which was very good money. Flagmaking

(03:55):
was a pretty lucrative profession of the time. And it's
just in time for Armistead of the British have arrived
at the Potapsco River. They're eyeing the city's defenses and
they're planning an attack for the following year. But to
understand that, we're going to have to go back in
time a little bit and give you all some context
about the War of eighteen twelve. And at the time

(04:15):
armist Did commissioned the flags, it was starting to become
pretty clear to a lot of Americans that the country
had rushed into a war against Britain. It wasn't strong enough,
it wasn't prepared enough to fight against these highly trained troops,
and the declaration of war had come in eighteen twelve,
and it was over this dispute America had with Britain

(04:37):
over maritime rights, and the British had been battling Napoleon
for global control for decades, and uh, they didn't like
that their former colony, America, which was officially neutral, was
trading with both of them. I mean, it's understandable. It
seemed to them as though the Americans were aiding Napoleon.

(04:59):
But by block in them, they're interfering with American neutrality,
which we didn't think was very fair. And not only
was it bad for business, it also offended the relatively
new America. Historian Douglas Egerton wrote to England still regarded
American trade as part of their domain even after the Revolution.
And to make matters worse, the British needed all the

(05:20):
men it could find to fight in the Napoleonic Wars,
so they would impress American citizens, charge them as Royal
Navy deserters, and force them into service. And impressment is
never very popular, not a good way to win fronts,
stealing them off boats and making them join your army.
So it's the Warhawks, though, that really pushed this battle

(05:41):
ahead in this war. And these are Southerners and Westerners
who are mostly too young to have actually seen action
in the Revolution, so they're kind of itching for their
own war um. But they're also expansionists. They're offended over
the violation of the maritime rights. Sure, you know that's
a problem. They don't like the impressment, but they're are
really eyeing British Canada to the north and Spanish Florida

(06:04):
to the south and hoping that maybe this growing country
can grow a little more, and they think Canada will
be easy pickings. Even Thomas Jefferson says, the acquisition of
Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec,
will be a mere matter of marching, and we'll give
us an experience for the attack of Halifax the next

(06:24):
and the final expulsion of England from the American continent.
So basically he thinks we'll just walk in and that
will be the end. Yeah, but the warhawks are still
just a very small majority in the votes to the
Claire war are really really close in both the House
and the Senate. It's an unpopular fight in a lot
of the country, and actually a year and a half
into the war, some of the northern states are actually

(06:47):
considering the idea of succession so they could pick up
trading again. The idea of war is pretty unpopular with
a lot of Brits too, because, after all, Britain is
still busy fighting Napoleon, but in a team fourteen Napoleon's
defeated and now Britain can focus on the conflict happening
in North America. And focus they do, dispatching five thousand

(07:08):
troops from Europe and naval support from Bermuda, and their
plan is really intense. You know, they finally have full
attention to devote to North America, and they're going to
use their navy to attack coastal areas and then they're
going to use the army to take the east coast cities.
And they're hoping that all of this action will distract

(07:29):
Americans from the battles that are going on at the
northern boundaries between the Canadians and the Natives and the British.
So during that scouting mission the Brits were doing in
eighteen thirteen that made Armistead really want to get this
flag of flying they had decided that taking Washington and Baltimore,

(07:50):
the third biggest city in the country, would be a
piece of cake, and that it would be payback for
the American sacking of York, which is of course Toronto.
And they've put Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane in charge
of the naval forces, in Major General Robert Ross in
charge of the land forces. And one important thing to
note with a lot of the British troops is they

(08:12):
are fresh out of the Continental Wars, so these are
seasoned soldiers and they really know what they're doing, contrary
to the American forces, which don't have much training, and
a lot of them are commanded by revolutionary veterans who
are getting up there and um haven't really fought in
a serious war in decades. The British plan is to

(08:35):
attack Washington first since it would be off guard, and
they're right. The Americans are totally expecting Baltimore to be
attacked first, since that's where all the privateers are. Actions
started June eighteen fourteen, when American commodore Joshua Barney sailed
south from Baltimore to fight the British on one of
their island naval bases, but he couldn't get out of

(08:55):
the mouth of the Potomac and was forced to retreat.
So he holds up in St. Leonard Creek and the
Brits can't get to him there, so they raid the area,
burning plantations, kind of trying to lure him out to
engage again. And um, he finally does come out, they fight,
he's able to escape up the Patuxent River, and um,

(09:16):
the British change their plan of attack. They're going to
have a three pronged approach and the plan is to
divert American forces all while while pressing on towards Washington.
So the American forces will wonder are they going for Washington, Baltimore,
which way are they going to go? What's going on?
And just this sense of confusion will be created. By

(09:37):
August twentieth, more than four thousand troops have disembarked at
Benedict on the Potoxant River, which wasn't far from the city,
and smaller ships continued upstream and these are the British.
Right sorry, Barney was ordered to destroy his flotilla at
Pig Point to prevent its British capture. So things aren't
looking great for Americans at this point. So the British

(09:58):
decided to take the route to Washington through Bladensburg, and
they do run into American troops along the way, but
the Americans are so unorganized there's hardly a fight. They
flee and the Battle of Bladensburg is just this terrible humiliation.
I mean, Washington has no protection now. And by August

(10:18):
the British arrived in the capital and they burn the
Library of Congress, They burned the capital, the Treasury, departments
of State, War and Navy, and the Executive Mansion, which
is of course not the White House at this time
um and the President and his cabinet actually have to
flee the city because they're concerned about what might happen
to them. We owe some thank yous to some quick thinkers,

(10:42):
like First Lady Dolly Madison, who made an arrangement to
protect some White House treasures. She stuffed Congressional papers into
chests and waited for word from her husband, and when
it became clear that he wouldn't be able to come
back and she would have to flee, she wrote to
her sister, our kind friend Mr Carroll has come to
hasten my departure. And in a very bad humor with

(11:04):
me because I insist on waiting until the large picture
of General Washington is secured and it requires to be
unscrewed from the wall. This process was found too tedious
for these perilous moments. I have ordered the frame to
be broken and the canvas taken out. It is done,
so thanks to Dolly for that one. Well, and we
also get things like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

(11:25):
They're all rescued from the State Department, and there's a
clerk who has been left in charge of the Senate
archival materials, and he tells his boss basically, either help
me get these documents out of Washington, or I'm going
to do it by myself. And it ends up being
the clerk in an African American office messenger who confiscate
a wagon and then loaded up with twenty five years

(11:46):
worth of Senate archives, which I mean, this is the
early history of our country that would be lost in
a fire. Sad. It should be clear that it's not
just this huge burning of the city. It's very controlled.
The British are hitting specific targets and they don't go
about looting or burning private homes there's actually a tornado
shortly after the burning that hurts and kills more people,

(12:09):
but there are some casualties. We lose three thousand books
in the Congressional Library that are completely destroyed, but re
established later with the purchase of Thomas Jefferson's private collection.
So the American troops, who are exhausted and defeated and
probably feeling pretty bad at this point, head to Baltimore
because they know that is where the fight is heading next.

(12:31):
And it's starting to seem like a pretty bad idea
to have declared war on Britain. But that brings us
to our Battle of Baltimore, our bombardment toe. We like alliteration.
The British troops join up with the fleet at Benedict
and head down the protection and up the Chesapeake Bay
towards Baltimore, and as Sarah wrote in her notes, there's

(12:53):
going to be a SmackDown. It's true that Baltimore privateers
have captured all these British ships over the course of
the war or destroyed them, and I mean the British
are looking for some payback time. All the privateers are
based here. It's a very wealthy city. Baltimore is going
to suffer at a greater extent than Washington did. General

(13:14):
Ross's British troops landed at north Point, Maryland on September twelve,
moving in toward the city, but they ran into the
American forward line that was actually prepared this time, and
Ross was killed in the fight by a sharpshooter. So
the surprised British make camp on the battlefield and planned
to attack again the night of September. And meanwhile, the Navy,

(13:36):
having already successfully attacked Alexandra, Virginia, UH is ready to
strike Fort and Kenry, which we mentioned at the beginning.
It's that crucial defensive point for Baltimore. It's it's the
key to the city. Yeah, And so the ships opened
fire on September and they lobby these one hundred and
ninety pound shells at the fort, and it's a new

(13:58):
arms technology where the shells actually explode, and so some
of them that don't quite reach their targets explode in
the air. You might call them bombs bursting in air.
It's a little hint for where we're going. But one
commander at the fort even finds a note written on
an unexploded shell, a present from the King of England,
which sounds like a scene out of a movie, or

(14:21):
it also reminded us of the Saint Paul's Watch Pie. Definitely,
things look bad for Baltimore because the ships are out
of Fort McHenry's range of fire, so they can't fight
back and they just have to sit there and take
it for twenty five hours. The British fire all day
long through the thirteenth and into the pre dawn hours

(14:41):
of the fourteenth, shooting one hundred and thirty three tons
of shells at the four which is nearly one per minute,
and people as far away as Philadelphia can hear the
racket from the Baltimore attack. And there's one important thing though,
The British can't advance either, so they can sit there
out of range of the gun fire at them all day,

(15:01):
but they can't get any closer because when they do,
the fort is actually able to hit them and does
some serious damage when the ships try to advance in
the afternoon of the thirteen and they're not doing too
much danger to the fort either. Only four men are
killed twenty four wounded, but out of one thousand, that's
not so many, and by dawn Admiral Cochrane halts the assault,

(15:24):
so it's rained the whole day and the whole night
of the attack. So it's likely that the fort was
probably flying its smaller storm flag, we should note that.
But as the British ships maneuver around to leave, Major Armistead,
who's in charge of the fort, orders that they hoist
the huge garrison flag that he's commissioned in fire rounds

(15:45):
in defiance of the retreating ships. So it's this very
patriotic moment Baltimore has pulled through, and lawyer and poet
Francis Scott Key has been watching the bombardment from a
ship in the bay. He was detained in the battle
after negotiating the release of an American and a Kinsman,
so all day long he's been able to see what

(16:06):
was likely the smaller storm flag flying from the fort,
knowing it was still in American hands. But at night
he can't see anything and doesn't know what's happening, which
must have been scary. Yeah, he wrote, it seemed as
though mother Earth had opened and was vomiting shot and
shell in a sheet of fire and brimstone. So he's
wondering all night if the Ford is still going to

(16:28):
be in American hands. And then at dawn on the fourteenth,
he sees that the flag is still flying. He knows
the city has made it through the night. It's this
grand patriotic moment America is going to make it. After
the British leaved, he is so inspired that he checks
into a Baltimore hotel and finishes this poem. He started
thinking about about the flag, the star Spangled banner, and

(16:51):
he sets it to an English drinking song and publishes it.
Within a week, it's reprinted nationally, and by November it's
been print to as sheet music, and then long after,
in nineteen thirty one, it becomes the country's official national anthem.
And we'd like to note too that he had been
adamantly opposed to the war, but after the White House

(17:14):
was burned and Baltimore was attacked, he'd had it. So
not too long after Key's poem is set to music,
the war is over, and it's partly due to the
British loss at Baltimore and again at Lake Champlain. And
the British are just getting tired. I mean, they've been
fighting Napoleonic wars for that twenty years and they have
the taxes to show for it, and they're suffering from

(17:38):
the lack of trade with the US. That's a profitable
business for the British. The US has also realized that
it won't gain any of its objectives, so the two
countries work out a piece at the Treaty of Ghent,
and there are no major concessions and no major territorial exchanges,
so the impressment won't end. But that doesn't matter much anyway,

(17:58):
since Britain doesn't soldiers for its continental wars and England
promises not to mess with the Canadian boundary or try
to set up an Indian state. So really it seems
like a bit of a pointless embloid outcome here. No
one got anything, doesn't we're going to call it even so.

(18:20):
The news of peace comes too late though, to New Orleans,
where the British attacked the city and they're held off
by Andrew Jackson. Despite the end of the war, but
that victory, as well as the victory of Baltimore, kind
of help contribute to the American sense that we won
the war, and you can give a little credence to
it because it does help establish the um. It helps

(18:43):
establish American credibility abroad that we were able to fight
against UH, the larger world superpower and defend certain American cities.
It also gives us a bit of a desire to
keep out of Europe's business for a while. And Canada
comes out with a similar surge of patriotism because they

(19:04):
kept America out, although they remained British. But getting back
to the flag, we're not going to finish this podcast
before we wrapped that little bit up. Major arm instead
takes it home with him. It probably got pretty beat
up over the next few years, and he dies pretty
young and leaves it to his widow who keeps it
in Baltimore, and she takes it out every now and

(19:25):
then lends it to big patriotic events and helps sort
of build the cult of the Star Spangled banner, and
you know, people want to see it and get a
look at it in person. And his descendants keep it
through the Civil War, even though they have Confederate sympathies,
which is a really weird thing to imagine if they're
Confederates and here they have the symbol of the country

(19:46):
they're rebelling against, and they pass it on through the generations.
So later visitors are allowed to take little snippets of it.
So over time or flag becomes rather square, and it
also be comes a bit of a curse on their family. Yeah,
there's all sorts of infighting and it leads to bitterness
and paranoia. You know, why should this person get the flag?

(20:09):
And I think some of the later descendants feel like
they're being hounded by constant requests to to see the
flag and hold the flag and get snippets of a
family flag feud. Yeah, more lineration and um. One of
the family members even note that more battles have been
fought over the flag than under it. Finally, an exhausted

(20:31):
armistage descendant leaves it to the Smithsonian Institution in nineteen
o seven and it is there today. And as for Key,
his Georgetown house was removed for a highway in nineteen
forty seven, so two stories worth of his brick house
were dismantled, packed up and put into storage. But by

(20:51):
nineteen fifty every brick had disappeared, which reminded us a
lot of the Amber Room. Yeah, it's our American version,
I guess. So I really love that quote about the
star spangled banner. More battle spot over the flag than
under it. It really gave sort of a touch of

(21:12):
normalcy to something that's so symbolic and so majestic that
you can imagine a family just battling ever over this
flag and trying to handle the requests for scraps and
opportunities to view it. So hopefully replaying this podcast also
gives you some good trivia if you're headed to a
Fourth of July barbecue or a fireworks display tonight, and

(21:36):
if you're Canadian or British, then maybe really listen to
the two comes to episode instead. Well I remember at
the time we did get some emails from folks not
realizing it was a two potter on the War of
eighteen twelve. Uh, it is a very uncertain war. So
it's good for anybody to listen to both of those
episodes and get kind of two different sides of the story.

(21:57):
So anyway, have a great Fourth of July, And if
you want to email us some more of these classic
American history sort of stories, we are at History Podcast
at Discovery dot com. We're also on Twitter at missed
in History, and we are on Facebook. And if you
want to learn a little bit more about some of
the otter artifacts from American history other than just a

(22:19):
flat spangled banner. Right. We have an article on our
website called ten Strange Items in the Smithsonians Collection, and
you can look that up by visiting our homepage at
www dot how stuff works dot com for more on

(22:39):
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