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Do you ever wonder about stuff you encounter in your life, but never wondered about before ?


Page Turner

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I've always wondered about things from how local streets got their names to why Winter starts around the shortest daylight day of the year and doesn't start getting warmer as the days grow longer (a delay in the ground losing its heat starts winter late).

So when something pops up that I should have considered decades earlier, it both surprises and intrigues me.

I learned in the 2000's that the Battle of Baltimore, which our National Anthem is about, had almost nothing to do with the "rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air" over Fort McHenry - which was a diversion for the real attack.

The British Army under General Ross, fresh from defeating Napoleon and burning Washington, D.C. disembarked from ships SE of Baltimore at North Point on 9/12/1814 and began marching toward Baltimore.  Meanwhile, Admiral Cochrane began firing at Fort McHenry, the guardian of Baltimore's harbors, as a diversion and even sent a few rowboat-loads of men on a sham attack - which were shot apart by the tiny satellite forts American General Armistead set up.

The British Army had NEVER intended to burn Washington. They expected the political leaders to send representatives forward with lots of money to buy-off the British attack and make Ross and Cochrane richer.  Now, they expected to destroy Baltimore which was building the super-fast sloops that were ruining British merchant ships.

Unlike the idiotic solid-lines-that-crumbled tactics that failed to defend Washington, the Marylanders on North Point used a fire-and-fall-back strategy of Gen. John Stricker's Maryland Militia and snipers killed General Ross, who foolishly rode the only white horse in his army and the Marylanders knew to look for it.

Colonel Brooke took over for the British and finally, around 3 am, reached the outskirts of Baltimore.  There, he saw a more than a mile long earthen rampart that was bristling with cannon, carefully created by General Armistead.  Brooke knew he could not capture, so he sent word back to Admiral Cochrane that the party was over and his troops would soon be re-embarking at North Point.

Cochrane realized he'd just be wasting ammunition if he kept up the diversion of firing on Fort McHenry, which was NEVER under threat of being taken!  So he stopped firing on the fort around 3 am.

When the British had marched on Washington, their soldiers had raided some farms and a couple were shot by a local farmer who was imprisoned on a British ship awaiting trial.  The Americans dispatched a lawyer and his friend to get the farmer freed. The lawyer was Francis Scott Key.  Once aboard a British ship, Key and company were not allowed to disembark (Key won the farmer's freedom) until after the British attacked Baltimore.

So, without knowing Fort McHenry was a diversion, Key listened to the firing deep into the night and knew that meant "our flag was still there."

But, at 3 am, the firing stopped because the British had given up the idea of capturing Baltimore but Key didn't know that or if Fort McHenry had fallen.

So, THAT is why Key was waiting for the "Dawn's early light," to see if an American flag flew over the Fort.

From the position he was at on the outer Patapsco River/Chesapeake Bay intersection - and I've taken folks on my 21' boat to the spot and pointed to Fort McHenry - he would have needed the Hubble Space Telescope to clearly see the flag at Fort McHenry.

Maybe he could see something waving a little bit and, from its size, figured it was the fort's American flag.  But he sure didn't see "broad stripes and bright stars."  We have to allow here for "literary license."

So our National Anthem is about an attack on Fort McHenry that never threatened to take the fort and was a diversion for the Battle of North Point.

 

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