The Star-Spangled Banner

The Star-Spangled Banner grew from the giant flag that Francis Scott Key saw at dawn after the British bombardment of Fort McHenry on September 14, 1814, during the War of 1812. Seeking a flag large enough for the British to see from a distance as Baltimore prepared its defenses, Fort McHenry commander Major George Armistead commissioned Mary Young Pickersgill to make a suitable ensign, and she and her 13-year-old daughter Caroline produced a fifteen-star, fifteen-stripe flag with stripes two feet wide, stars two feet across, and a final weight of eighty pounds, the largest flag ever flown in battle in U.S. history. Key's poem, originally titled The Defence of Ft. McHenry, dramatized the bombardment, the flag, and the feeling of the time, and when set to the tune To Anacreon in Heaven, also familiar in America as Adams and Liberty, it became known as The Star-Spangled Banner. The idea had earlier roots in George Town, where nine years before the bombardment Key wrote a poem about Commodore Stephen Decatur's victory over Tripolitan pirates during the Barbary Wars using the words "the star-spangled flag," the same tune, the same meter and verse length, and similar repeated closing lines. Americans soon adopted the song for patriotic occasions; its standing rose during the Civil War with Union troops, then through Army and Navy playing requirements, President Woodrow Wilson's 1916 declaration of it as the Armed Forces' official anthem, and President Herbert Hoover's signing of the law on March 3rd, 1931, making it the official National Anthem. The original flag is now displayed at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Washington, District of Columbia · United States