Who is Francis Scott Key? What to know in regards to the namesake of collapsed Baltimore bridge | EUROtoday

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A significant bridge that collapsed in Baltimore after getting hit by a ship is known as for Francis Scott Key, who turned a wartime expertise within the early nineteenth century into the poem that grew to become the nationwide anthem of the United States.

Key was a distinguished lawyer within the area throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. In September 1814, two years after the War of 1812 had began between the United States and the British, he was on a ship to barter an American prisoner’s launch and witnessed a 25-hour British bombardment of Fort McHenry.

From his vantage level on the Patapsco River, the 35-year-old Key was capable of see that the American flag stayed up via the dead nights and was nonetheless on the prime of the fort when the morning got here. He turned it right into a poem.

“And the rocket’s red glare, the bomb bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,” as one among Key’s unique strains says. The rockets and bombs later grew to become plural.

Initially often called “Defence of Fort M’Henry,” it was set to the music of a British music and have become often called “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Over the nineteenth century, it grew to become more and more widespread as a patriotic music. In March 1931, then-President Herbert Hoover formally made it the nation’s nationwide anthem. The Maryland bridge named for him was opened in 1977.

While the primary verse of the anthem is probably the most well-known, there are a complete of 4 stanzas; within the third, there is a reference made to a slave. Key, whose household owned folks and who owned enslaved folks himself, supported the concept of sending free Black folks to Africa however opposed the abolition of slavery within the U.S., in line with the National Park Service’s Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine.

His private historical past has made him a controversial determine in some quarters; in June 2020, a statue of him in San Francisco was taken down.

Key died in 1843.