During the Napoleonic Wars, the young United States attempted to remain neutral. Since this meant American merchant vessels continued to ship goods and supplies to France, Great Britain began a policy of impressment, attacking American vessels and forcing their captured crews to serve in the Royal Navy. This led the United States to declare war on Great Britain in 1812.
The British, eager to teach their former Colonies a lesson, acted quickly, using their superior navy to blockade American ports. British forces captured and burned Washington DC, forcing Congress and President James Monroe to evacuate.
A month later, British forces attempted to sail up Chesapeake Bay and capture Baltimore. The British failed to overtake Fort McHenry, Baltimore's main artillery battery, and withdrew on September 14, 1814. An American lawyer named Francis Scott Key, who witnessed the battle from behind British lines, inspired to see the Americans still held the fort, wrote a poem called The Defense of Fort McHenry:
O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watch’d were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream,
’Tis the star-spangled banner—O long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave*
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand
Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with vict’ry and peace may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the power that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto – “In God is our trust,”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
These lyrics were later set to a tuned composed by John Stafford Smith called "The Anacreon Song." This was the anthem of the Anacreon Society, a group of amateur musicians in London. The tune and lyrics together were officially used by the U.S. Navy from 1889 and were declared the national anthem of the United States in 1931.
The United States went on to repel a British invasion of New York. The British fleet then sailed to New Orleans in an attempt to prevent the United States from expanding westward by gaining control of the Mississippi River, but were decisively defeated by American forces under General Andrew Jackson. The Battle of New Orleans was actually fought after a peace treaty had been signed in Europe, but communication was too slow to reach the combatants in time.
(*) This verse is often misunderstood. Key uses the phrase "hireling and slave" to refer to the British, contrasting their status as subjects of a monarch with the Americans' status as free citizens of a republic. Ironically to be sure, many enslaved African Americans were freed during the War of 1812 upon being captured by British soldiers or escaping to British Canada. While both nations had outlawed the slave trade by 1808, Britain would outlaw slavery altogether in 1833, thirty-two years before the United States.
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