September 13 · This Day in America
The British have already burned Washington. Now sixteen warships open fire on Fort McHenry, the star-shaped guardian of Baltimore harbor, at dawn on this day. The shelling will go on for twenty-five hours — rockets, mortars, a thousand-pound rain of iron through a September storm. Eight miles out, a 35-year-old American lawyer named Francis Scott Key watches from a truce ship, unable to leave, unable to do anything but count the flashes in the dark and wonder whose flag will be standing at sunrise. The fort's commander had ordered a flag so enormous "that the British will have no difficulty seeing it from a distance" — thirty by forty-two feet, sewn by a Baltimore widow named Mary Pickersgill. When the smoke clears the next morning, that flag is still there. Key takes out an envelope and starts to write. The country would eventually sing what he wrote.
Source: www.smithsonianmag.com
Also on this day · 1788
The Constitution had been ratified. Now the old Confederation Congress had to schedule its own replacement. On this day it resolves the practical machinery of a new republic: electors to be chosen, the first federal Congress to convene, and New York City named the temporary seat of the government soon to begin. A nation built on paper now had a date and an address. The Articles were ending, by their own hand, on purpose.
Source: www.loc.gov
“And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.”Francis Scott Key, "Defence of Fort M'Henry," 1814