This essay was originally published by the American Thinker on September 14, 2014, commemorating the 200th anniversary of Francis Scott Key’s writing of the Star Spangled Banner.
This Saturday marks the 210th anniversary of that fateful early morning when Key, along with the British Navy, looked toward Fort McHenry in foggy, smokey Baltimore Harbor to see the result of the previous night’s enormous bombardment — and was inspired to write America’s most famous poem. I thought it appropriate to republish it.
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Two hundred years, on September 14th, it was the unlikely convergence of a physician and a lawyer that produced the most recited poem in American history. Its inspiration occurred just a few miles from Fort McHenry, located in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, the site of one of our nation’s most important military conflicts.
