Francis Scott Key

Francis Scott Key
Francis Scott Key circa 1825
Born	(1779-08-01)August 1, 1779 Carroll County, Maryland, U.S.
Died	January 11, 1843(1843-01-11) (aged 63) Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
Nationality	American
Ethnicity	English
Occupation	Poet, lawyer, district attorney
Religion	Episcopalian
Spouse(s)	Mary Tayloe Lloyd
Children	Philip Barton Key II Alice Key Pendleton
Relatives	Philip Barton Key, uncle Francis Key Howard, grandson F. Scott Fitzgerald, 2nd cousin

Francis Scott Key (August 1, 1779 – January 11, 1843) was an American lawyer, author, and amateur poet, from Georgetown, who wrote the lyrics to the United States' national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner".

Early life and family

Francis Scott Key was born to Ann Phoebe Penn Dagworthy (Charlton) and Captain John Ross Key at the family plantation Terra Rubra in what was Frederick County, Maryland (now Carroll County).^[1] His father John Ross Key was a lawyer, a judge, and an officer in the Continental Army. His great-grandparents on his father's side were Philip Key and Susanna Barton Gardiner, both of whom were born in London and immigrated to Maryland in 1726.^[2]

Key graduated from St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland and also read law under his uncle Philip Barton Key.^[3] He married Mary Tayloe Lloyd on January 1, 1802.^[1]

"The Star-Spangled Banner"

During the War of 1812, Key, accompanied by the British Prisoner Exchange Agent Colonel John Stuart Skinner, dined aboard the British ship HMS Tonnant, as the guests of three British officers: Vice Admiral Alexander Cochrane, Rear Admiral George Cockburn, and Major General Robert Ross. Skinner and Key were there to negotiate the release of prisoners, one of whom was Dr. William Beanes, a resident of Upper Marlboro, Maryland who had been arrested after jailing marauding British troops who were looting local farms. Skinner, Key, and Beanes were not allowed to return to their own sloop because they had become familiar with the strength and position of the British units and with the British intent to attack Baltimore. Thus, Key was unable to do anything but watch the bombarding of the American forces at Fort McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore on the night of September 13–14, 1814.^[4]

At dawn, Key was able to see an American flag still waving and reported this to the prisoners below deck. Back in Baltimore and inspired, Key wrote a poem about his experience, "Defence of Fort M'Henry", which was soon published in William Pechin's^[5] the American and Commercial Daily Advertiser on September 21, 1814. He took it to Thomas Carr, a music publisher, who adapted it to the rhythms of composer John Stafford Smith's "To Anacreon in Heaven",^[4] a popular tune Key had already used as a setting for his 1805 song "When the Warrior Returns," celebrating U.S. heroes of the First Barbary War.^[6] (Key used the "star spangled" flag imagery in the earlier song.)^[7] It has become better known as "The Star-Spangled Banner". Though somewhat difficult to sing, it became increasingly popular, competing with "Hail, Colombia" (1796) as the de facto national anthem by the Mexican-American War and American Civil War. More than a century after its first publication, the song was adopted as the American national anthem, first by an Executive Order from President Woodrow Wilson in 1916 (which had little effect beyond requiring military bands to play what became known as the "Service Version") and then by a Congressional resolution in 1931, signed by President Herbert Hoover.^[8]

Legal career

Key was a leading attorney in Frederick, Maryland and Washington, D.C. for many years, with an extensive real estate as well as trial practice. He and his family settled in Georgetown in 1805 or 1806, near the new national capital. There the young Key assisted his uncle, the prominent lawyer Philip Barton Key, including in the sensational conspiracy trial of Aaron Burr and the expulsion of Senator John Smith of Ohio. Key made the first of his many arguments before the United States Supreme Court in 1807. In 1808 Key assisted President Thomas Jefferson's attorney general in United States v. Peters^[9]

A supporter of 7th President Andrew Jackson, Key, in 1829 assisted in the prosecution of Tobias Watkins, former U.S. Treasury auditor under former 6th President John Quincy Adams for misappropriating public monies, and also handled a scandal concerning the new Secretary of War, John Henry Eaton who had married a widowed saloonkeeper.^[10] In 1832, Key served as the attorney for U.S. Representative (congressman), Sam Houston (1793-1863), during his trial in the U.S. House of Representatives for assaulting another Congressman in the House chambers at the Capitol.^[11]

President Jackson nominated Key for United States Attorney for the District of Columbia in 1833. After the U.S. Senate approved the nomination, Key served from 1833 to 1841, while also handling his own private legal cases.^[12] In 1835, in his most famous case, Key prosecuted Richard Lawrence for his unsuccessful attempt to assassinate President Andrew Jackson at the entrance doors and top steps of the Capitol, the first attempt to kill an American chief executive.

Slavery

Key purchased his first enslaved person in 1800 or 1801, and owned six slaves in 1820.^[13] Mostly in the 1830s, Key manumitted seven enslaved people, one of whom (Clem Johnson) continued to work for him for wages as his farm's foreman, supervising several other enslaved people.^[14]

Key throughout his career also represented several slaves seeking their freedom in court (for free), as well as several masters seeking return of their runaway human property.^[15][16] Key, Judge William Leigh of Halifax and bishop William Meade were administrators of the will of their friend John Randolph of Roanoke, who died without children and left a will directing his executors to free his more than four hundred slaves. Over the next decade, beginning in 1833, the administrators fought to enforce the will and provide the freed slaves land to support themselves.^[17]

Key was considered a decent master, and publicly criticized slavery's cruelties, so much that after his death a newspaper editorial stated "So actively hostile was he to the peculiar institution that he was called 'The Nigger Lawyer' .... because he often volunteered to defend the downtrodden sons and daughters of Africa. Mr. Key convinced me that slavery was wrong--radically wrong."^[18]

Key was a founding member and active leader of the American Colonization Society, and its predecessor influential Maryland branch, the primary goal of which was to send free African-Americans back to Africa.^[15] However, he was removed from the board in 1833 as its policies shifted toward abolitionist.

Anti-Abolitionist

A slave-owner himself,^[19] Key used his position as U.S. Attorney to suppress abolitionists. In 1833, Key caused a grand jury to indict Benjamin Lundy, editor of the anti-slavery publication, the Genius of Universal Emancipation, and his printer, William Greer, for libel after Lundy published an article that declared, "There is neither mercy nor justice for colored people in this district [of Columbia]". Lundy's article, Key said in the indictment, "was intended to injure, oppress, aggrieve, and vilify the good name, fame, credit & reputation of the Magistrates and constables" of Washington. Lundy left town rather than face trial; Greer was acquitted.^[20]

In August 1836, Key agreed to prosecute botanist and doctor Reuben Crandall, brother of controversial Connecticut school teacher Prudence Crandall, who had recently moved to the national capital. Key secured an indictment for "seditious libel" after two marshalls (who operated as slave catchers in their off hours) found Crandall had a trunk full of anti-slavery publications in his Georgetown residence, five days after a riot caused by rumors that a mentally ill enslaved man had attempted to kill an elderly white woman. In an April 1837 trial that attracted nationwide attention, Key charged that Crandall's actions instigated enslaved people to rebel. Crandall's attorneys acknowledged he opposed slavery, but denied any intent or actions to encourage rebellion. Key, in his final address to the jury said:

"Are you willing, gentlemen, to abandon your country, to permit it to be taken from you, and occupied by the abolitionist, according to whose taste it is to associate and amalgamate with the negro? Or, gentlemen, on the other hand, are there laws in this community to defend you from the immediate abolitionist, who would open upon you the floodgates of such extensive wickedness and mischief?"

A jury acquitted Crandall.^[21][22]

This defeat, as well as family tragedies in 1835, diminished Key's political ambition. He resigned as district attorney in 1840. He remained a staunch proponent of African colonization and a strong critic of the antislavery movement until his death.^[23]

Religion

Key was a devout and prominent Episcopalian. In his youth, Key almost became an Episcopal priest rather than a lawyer, and throughout his life he sprinkled biblical references in his correspondence.^[24] Key was active in All Saints Parish in Frederick, Maryland, near his family's home. He also helped found or financially support several parishes in the new national capital, including St. John's Church in Georgetown, Trinity Church in Washington, D.C. and Christ Church in Alexandria.

From 1818 until his death in 1843, Key was associated with the American Bible Society.^[25] Circa 1838, he successfully opposed an abolitionist resolution presented to that group.

Key also helped found two Episcopal seminaries, one in Baltimore, as well as the Virginia Theological Seminary across the Potomac River in Alexandria, Virginia. Key also published a prose work called The Power of Literature, and Its Connection with Religion in 1834.^[3]

Death and legacy

In 1843, Key died at the home of his daughter Elizabeth Howard in Baltimore from pleurisy^[26] and was initially interred in Old Saint Paul's Cemetery in the vault of John Eager Howard. In 1866, his body was moved to his family plot in Frederick at Mount Olivet Cemetery.

The Key Monument Association erected a memorial in 1898 and the remains of both Francis Scott Key and his wife, Mary Tayloe Lloyd, were placed in a crypt in the base of the monument.

Despite several efforts to preserve it, the Francis Scott Key residence was ultimately dismantled in 1947. The residence had been located at 3516–18 M Street in Georgetown.^[27]

Though Key had written poetry from time to time, often with heavily religious themes, these works were not collected and published until 14 years after his death.^[3] Two of Key's religious poems used as Christian hymns include "Before the Lord We Bow" and "Lord, with Glowing Heart I'd Praise Thee".^[28]

In 1806, Key's sister, Anne Phoebe Charlton Key, married Roger B. Taney, who would later become Chief Justice of the United States. In 1846 his daughter Alice married U.S. Senator George H. Pendleton.^[29] In 1859 Key's son Philip Barton Key II was shot and killed by Daniel Sickles – a U.S. Congressman who would serve as a general in the American Civil War – after he discovered that Philip Barton Key was having an affair with his wife.^[30] Sickles was acquitted in the first use of the temporary insanity defense.^[31] In 1861 Key's grandson Francis Key Howard was imprisoned in Fort McHenry with the Mayor of Baltimore George William Brown and other locals deemed pro-South.

Key was a distant cousin and the namesake of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose full name was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. His direct descendants include geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan, guitarist Dana Key, and American fashion designer and socialite Pauline de Rothschild.

Monuments and memorials

• Francis Scott Key Monument in Baltimore
• Two bridges are named in his honor. The first is the Francis Scott Key Bridge between the Rosslyn section of Arlington County, Virginia, and Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Scott's Georgetown home, which was dismantled in 1947 (as part of construction for the Whitehurst Freeway), was located on M Street NW, in the area between the Key Bridge and the intersection of M Street and Whitehurst Freeway. The location is illustrated on a sign in the Francis Scott Key park.^[32]

• The other bridge is the Francis Scott Key Bridge, part of the Baltimore Beltway crossing the outer harbor of Baltimore. Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge is located at the approximate point where the British anchored to shell Fort McHenry.
• St. John's College, Annapolis, which Key graduated from in 1796, has an auditorium named in his honor.
• Francis Scott Key was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.
• He is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Frederick. His family plot is next to Thomas Johnson, the first governor of Maryland, and friend Barbara Fritchie, who allegedly waved the American flag out of her home in defiance of Stonewall Jackson's march through the city during the Civil War. Fritchie's resistance was memorialized in a poem by Poet Laureate John Greenleaf Whittier.
• Francis Scott Key Hall at the University of Maryland, College Park is named in his honor. The George Washington University also has a residence hall in Key's honor at the corner of 20th and F Streets.

• Francis Scott Key High School in rural Carroll County, Maryland.
• Francis Scott Key Middle School (at least three)
• Francis Scott Key Elementary School (several, including California,^[33] Maryland, Virginia, Washington, DC); Francis Scott Key School in Philadelphia.
• Francis Scott Key Mall in Frederick County, Maryland.
• The Frederick Keys minor league baseball team – a Baltimore affiliate – is named after Key.
• A monument to Key was commissioned by San Francisco businessman James Lick, who donated some $60,000 for a sculpture of Key to be raised in Golden Gate Park.^[34] The travertine monument was executed by sculptor William W. Story in Rome in 1885–87.^[34][35] The city of San Francisco recently allocated some $140,000 to renovate the Key monument, which was about to be lost to environmental degradation if repairs weren't made. Repairs were recently finished on the monument located in the music concourse outside the de Young Museum.
• The US Navy named a submarine in his honor, the USS Francis Scott Key (SSBN-657).

Media

	The Star-Spangled Banner (1942) Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians sing The Star-Spangled Banner in 1942 The Star-Spangled Banner (1915) A 1915 recording of the Star-Spangled Banner as sung by Margaret Woodrow Wilson, daughter of Woodrow Wilson
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See also

• War of 1812

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Francis Scott Key.

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Francis Scott Key

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Francis Scott Key

• Works by Francis Scott Key at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Francis Scott Key at Internet Archive
• Works by Francis Scott Key at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Francis Scott Key at the Songwriters Hall of Fame
• Short biography
• Francis Scott Key biography at Cyber Hymnal
• Preservation of the Residence of Francis Scott Key, Special Collections Research Center, Estelle and Melvin Gelman Library, The George Washington University. This pamphlet was written by the Columbia Historical Society in an effort to save the Francis Scott Key home from destruction in the 1940s.
• Booknotes interview with Irvin Molotsky on The Flag, The Poet and The Song, September 9, 2001.
• Find A Grave
• "Francis Scott Key's OTHER Verse" – selections from Key's other poetry and verse.
• "Francis Scott Key's OTHER Verse" -- selections from Key's other poetry and verse.

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