A century later, it became our national anthem. It was renamed “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and it became a popular patriotic piece meant to commemorate American freedom and the bravery of those who fought to preserve it. Madison narrowly escaping.Īfter the British tired of the war and went home, Key’s poem was set to the tune of a drinking song, popular among British soldiers and sailors. Capitol and the White House were burned and severely damaged, with President and Mrs. Notwithstanding its origins, the War of 1812 brought Americans perilously close to being British subjects again. They thought this even though the Treaty of Paris, signed by the United States and Great Britain in 1783, unambiguously recognized the United States of America as a free, independent and sovereign nation. The Americans argued that the British government’s stated reason for its attack was a pretense, as its real goal was to recapture what many Britons still considered to be their colonies. The British government claimed that President James Madison had designs on the British king’s lands in Canada, and so it attacked the U.S. This was the War of 1812, the origins of which are lost to history.

When Francis Scott Key wrote the words “the land of the free and the home of the brave” in 1814, he did so in a poem called “The Defense of Fort McHenry.” The battle of Fort McHenry in Baltimore was a decisive one in which Americans truly demonstrated bravery and fought for freedom.

And the home of the brave