USS Constitution In 4 Minutes Watch Video.African Americans During the Revolutionary War.The First American President: Setting the Precedent.“It takes an incredible myopia to not see this as people who were actually held captive as laborers,” he says, but obtuseness was a benefit of being a white American male in 1814.
Doing the bidding of the king made them slaves. “Hirelings and slaves,” he believes, refers to the British attackers, who were salaried soldiers while the Americans were volunteers. His conclusion is not flattering to Key or his target audience. I mean, the song has been around for 208 years." It wasn't until the Kaepernick firestorm, he concedes, that he started digging into the third verse, and he was stunned to learn that "no one had really looked at the word 'slave' in any depth. The volume was turned up again during World War I, as anthems and flags helped sort out which countries were on the side of right and goodness and which were in the other trench.īy the time Congress codified “The Star-Spangled Banner” in 1931, “it was just recognizing what was already true in ritual.”Ĭlague began teaching the anthem in musicology classes in 2004 and started research for the book six years later.
Like Key, who jotted down his poem after watching British ships bombard Fort McHenry two years into the War of 1812, it's been a witness to history. Sagal called it "immensely interesting," a status Clague achieved largely by treating the anthem as a historical figure in its own right. To his surprise and enormous delight, the book wound up on the cover of last week's New York Times Book Review, with an accompanying rave from Peter Sagal of NPR's "Wait Wait. "His legalwork resulted in the freedom of at least 189 people.”Īnd, while Key would be flattered that we sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" almost to the exclusion of every other patriotic tune, "he'd also think it was crazy."Ĭlague outlines all of that and much, much more in a vibrantly readable new book, "O Say Can You Hear? A Cultural Biography of 'The Star-Spangled Banner,'" (W.W. As an attorney, he prosecuted abolitionists, but “he also fought on behalf of Black Americans fighting for their freedom in court," Clague says. Likewise, Key isn't necessarily what we think he was, even though he owned slaves.
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