On September 13, 1814, America was under attack.<\/p>\n
Just three weeks earlier, the Capitol had been stormed and almost burned to the ground by looters and rioters. The British soldiers burned the White House, U.S. Treasury, and other institutions, too.<\/p>\n
Only a ferocious and miraculously timed storm broke the invaders’ hold on the nation’s capital. At one point a tornado even touched down on Constitution Avenue, flinging cannons through the air.<\/p>\n
The British may have given up on their occupation of Washington, but they continued their assault on the United States. British warships amassed in Baltimore Harbor, and on September 13th, the invaders began an attack on Fort McHenry, raining rockets and shells upon it ceaselessly.<\/p>\n
The attack lasted for\u00a0twenty-five hours. <\/em><\/p>\n Imagine that: try to picture what it must have felt like to sustain a non-stop assault for twenty-five hours.<\/p>\n It must have felt like four years.<\/p>\n Francis Scott Key, an American lawyer, didn’t have to imagine it. He witnessed it all from his ship on the harbor, where the British kept him detained while they attacked the fort.<\/p>\n Key was certain that the Americans couldn’t withstand such a sustained barrage, but when the sun rose the following morning and the smoke cleared, a giant American flag flew proudly over the fort<\/p>\n America had held the line.<\/p>\n The British detained Key’s ship for another two days. Able to do little else, Key was moved to write. By the time he left the ship, he’d written his account of the previous day on the back of a letter, a poem paired to the music of a popular song in the U.S. at the time: “To Anacreon in Heaven.”<\/p>\n