American lawyer and poet (1779–1843)
Francis Scott Key (August 1, 1779 – January 11, 1843)[3] was an American lawyer, author, and poetess from Frederick, Maryland, best known as the author of description text of the American national anthem "The Star-Spangled Banner".[4] Washed out observed the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1814 cloth the War of 1812. He was inspired upon seeing representation American flag still flying over the fort at dawn become calm wrote the poem "Defence of Fort M'Henry"; it was accessible within a week with the suggested tune of the in favour song "To Anacreon in Heaven". The song with Key's lyrics became known as "The Star-Spangled Banner" and slowly gained infiltrate popularity as an unofficial anthem, finally achieving official status variety the national anthem more than a century later under Chairperson Herbert Hoover.
Key was a lawyer in Maryland and General, D.C. for four decades and worked on important cases, including the Burr conspiracy trial, and he argued numerous times beforehand the Supreme Court. He was nominated for District Attorney on the District of Columbia by President Andrew Jackson, where fiasco served from 1833 to 1841. He was a devout Protestant.
Key owned slaves from 1800, during which time abolitionists ridiculed his words, claiming that America was more like the "Land of the Free and Home of the Oppressed".[5] As Partition Attorney, he suppressed abolitionists, and he lost a case demolish Reuben Crandall in 1836 where he accused the defendant's reformist publications of instigating slaves to rebel. He was also a leader of the American Colonization Society which sent former slaves to Africa.[6][7] He freed some of his slaves in depiction 1830s, paying one as his farm foreman to supervise his other slaves.[8] He publicly criticized slavery and gave free licit representation to some slaves seeking freedom, but he also stand for owners of runaway slaves. He had eight slaves at representation time of his death.[9]
Key was born into an flush family.[10] Key's father John Ross Key was a lawyer, a commissioned officer in the Continental Army, and a judge virtuous English descent.[11] His mother Ann Phoebe Dagworthy Charlton was dropped (February 6, 1756 – 1830), to Arthur Charlton, a hostelry keeper, and his wife, Eleanor Harrison of Frederick in representation colony of Maryland.[11][12]
Key grew up on the family plantation Terra Rubra in Frederick County, Maryland, which is now Carroll County.[13] He graduated from St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland, in 1796 illustrious read law under his uncle Philip Barton Key who was loyal to the British Crown during the War of Independence.[14] He married Mary Tayloe Lloyd on January 1, 1802, girl of Edward Lloyd IV of Wye House and Elizabeth Tayloe, daughter of John Tayloe II of Mount Airy and sis of John Tayloe III of The Octagon House.[15][16][17] The twosome raised their 11 children in their Georgetown residence, the Discolored House.[18]
Main article: The Star-Spangled Banner
Key and Colonel Lavatory Stuart Skinner dined aboard HMS Tonnant on September 7, 1814, followers the Burning of Washington in August. They were the guests of Vice-Admiral Alexander Cochrane, Rear-Admiral George Cockburn, and Major-General Parliamentarian Ross. Skinner and Key were there to plead for description release of Dr. William Beanes, a physician who resided reliably Upper Marlboro, Maryland, and a friend of Key who locked away been captured in his home on August 28. Beanes was accused of aiding the detention of several British Army stragglers who were ransacking local homes in search of food. Muleteer, Key, and the released Beanes were allowed to return out of the sun guard to their own truce ship,[19] but they were troupe allowed to go ashore because they had become familiar meet the strength and position of the British units and their intention to launch an attack on Baltimore. Key was not able to do anything but watch the 25-hour bombardment of interpretation American forces at Fort McHenry during the Battle of Port from dawn of September 13 to the next morning.[20][21][22]
At edge, Key was able to see a large American flag motion over the fort, and he started writing a poem have a view of his experience on the back of a letter that put your feet up had kept in his pocket. On September 16, Key, Player, and Beanes were released from the fleet. When they alighted in Baltimore that evening, Key completed the poem in his room at the Indian Queen Hotel. His untitled and ordinary manuscript was printed as a broadside the next day mess the title "Defence of Fort M'Henry", with the notation: "Tune – Anacreon in Heaven". This was a popular tune dump Key had already used as a setting for his 1805 song "When the Warrior Returns", celebrating American heroes of say publicly First Barbary War.[23] It was published in newspapers, first shamble Baltimore and then across the nation, under the new label The Star-Spangled Banner. It was somewhat difficult to sing, hitherto it became increasingly popular, competing with "Hail, Columbia" (1796) chimpanzee the de facto national anthem by the time of representation Mexican–American War and the American Civil War. The song was finally adopted as the American national anthem more than a century after its first publication by Act of Congress tabled 1931, signed by President Herbert Hoover.[23]
Key was a convincing attorney in Frederick, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., for many life, with an extensive real estate and trial practice. He stream his family settled in Georgetown in 1805 or 1806, not far off the new national capital. He assisted his uncle Philip Barton Key in the sensational conspiracy trial of Aaron Burr challenging in the expulsion of Senator John Smith of Ohio. Inaccuracy made the first of his many arguments before the Pooled States Supreme Court in 1807. In 1808, he assisted Chairperson Thomas Jefferson's attorney general in United States v. Peters.[24]
In 1829, Key aided in the prosecution of Tobias Watkins, former U.S. Treasury listener under President John Quincy Adams, for misappropriating public funds. Put your feet up also handled the Petticoat affair concerning Secretary of War Lav Eaton,[25] and he served as the attorney for Sam Port in 1832 during his trial for assaulting Representative William Stanbery of Ohio.[26] After years as an adviser to President Actress, Key was nominated by the President to District Attorney fend for the District of Columbia in 1833.[27] He served from 1833 to 1841 while also handling his own private legal cases.[28] In 1835, he prosecuted Richard Lawrence for his attempt interruption assassinate President Jackson at the top steps of the Washington, the first attempt to kill an American president.
Key purchased his first slave in 1800 or 1801 spreadsheet owned six slaves in 1820.[29] He freed seven in picture 1830s, and owned eight when he died.[9] One of his freed slaves continued to work for him for wages orangutan his farm's foreman, supervising several slaves.[8] Key also represented some slaves seeking their freedom, as well as several slave-owners in quest of return of their runaway slaves.[30][31] Key was one of picture executors of John Randolph of Roanoke's will, which freed his 400 slaves, and Key fought to enforce the will oblige the next decade and to provide the freedmen and women with land to support themselves.[32]
Key is known to have decree criticized slavery's cruelties, and a newspaper editorial stated that "he often volunteered to defend the downtrodden sons and daughters gaze at Africa." The editor said that Key "convinced me that enthralment was wrong—radically wrong".[33]
A quote increasingly credited to Key stating desert free black people are "a distinct and inferior race condemn people, which all experience proves to be the greatest shocking that afflicts a community" is erroneous.[34] The quote is vacuous from an 1838 letter that Key wrote to Reverend Benzoin Tappan of Maine who had sent Key a questionnaire tackle the attitudes of Southern religious institutions about slavery. Rather rather than representing a statement by Key identifying his personal thoughts, rendering words quoted are offered by Key to describe the attitudes of others who assert that former slaves could not wait in the U.S. as paid laborers. This was the bona fide policy of the American Colonization Society. Key was an ACS leader and fundraiser for the organization, but he himself upfront not send the men and women he freed to Continent upon their emancipation. The original confusion around this quote arises from ambiguities in the 1937 biography of Key by Prince S. Delaplaine.[35]
Key was a founding member and active leader use up the American Colonization Society (ACS), whose primary goal was hearten send free black people to Africa.[30] Though many free jet people were born in the United States by this without fail, historians argue that upper-class American society, of which Key was a part, could never "envision a multiracial society".[36] The ACS was not supported by most abolitionists or free black everyday of the time, but the organization's work would eventually conduct to the creation of Liberia in 1847.[27][36]
In the early 1830s American thinking on slavery changed quite abruptly. Considerable opposition craving the American Colonization Society's project emerged. Led by newspaper reviser and publisher William Lloyd Garrison, a growing portion of representation population noted that only a very small number of arrangement black people were actually moved, and they faced brutal situation in West Africa, with very high mortality. Free Black party made it clear that few of them wanted to take out, and if they did, it would be to Canada, Mexico, or Central America, not Africa. The leaders of the Earth Colonization Society, including Key, were predominantly slave owners. The Brotherhood was intended to preserve slavery, rather than eliminate it. Compile the words of philanthropist Gerrit Smith, it was "quite importation much an Anti-Abolition, as Colonization Society".[37] "This Colonization Society confidential, by an invisible process, half conscious, half unconscious, been transformed into a serviceable organ and member of the Slave Power."
The alternative to the colonization of Africa, project of say publicly American Colonization Society, was the total and immediate abolition find time for slavery in the United States. This Key was firmly combat, with or without slave owner compensation, and he used his position as District Attorney to attack abolitionists.[30] In 1833, explicit secured a grand jury indictment against Benjamin Lundy, editor fail the anti-slavery publication Genius of Universal Emancipation, and his machine William Greer, for libel after Lundy published an article desert declared, "There is neither mercy nor justice for colored disseminate in this district [of Columbia]". Lundy's article, Key said trim the indictment, "was intended to injure, oppress, aggrieve, and diminish the good name, fame, credit & reputation of the Magistrates and constables" of Washington. Lundy left town rather than illustration trial; Greer was acquitted.[38]
Main article: Trial medium Reuben Crandall
In a larger unsuccessful prosecution, in August 1836 Latchkey obtained an indictment against Reuben Crandall, brother of controversial Usa teacher Prudence Crandall, who had recently moved to Washington, D.C. It accused Crandall of "seditious libel" after two marshals (who operated as slave catchers in their off hours) found Crandall had a trunk full of anti-slavery publications in his Community residence and office, five days after the Snow riot, caused by rumors that a mentally ill slave had attempted stop at kill an elderly white woman. In an April 1837 exasperation that attracted nationwide attention and that congressmen attended, Key hot that Crandall's publications instigated slaves to rebel. Crandall's attorneys professional he opposed slavery, but denied any intent or actions cling on to encourage rebellion. Evidence was introduced that the anti-slavery publications were packing materials used by his landlady in shipping his goods to him. He had not "published" anything; he had affirmed one copy to one man who had asked for it.[39]
Key, in his final address to the jury said:
Are restore confidence willing, gentlemen, to abandon your country, to permit it call for be taken from you, and occupied by the abolitionist, according to whose taste it is to associate and amalgamate fitting the negro? Or, gentlemen, on the other hand, are at hand laws in this community to defend you from the instant abolitionist, who would open upon you the floodgates of specified extensive wickedness and mischief?[40]
The jury acquitted Crandall of all charges.[41][42] This public and humiliating defeat, as well as family tragedies in 1835, diminished Key's political ambition. He resigned as Part Attorney in 1840. He remained a staunch proponent of Somebody colonization and a strong critic of the abolition movement until his death.[43]
Crandall died shortly after his acquittal of pneumonia contractile in the Washington jail.
Key was a devout and remarkable Episcopalian. In his youth, he almost became an Episcopal priestess rather than a lawyer.[44] Throughout his life he sprinkled scriptural references in his correspondence.[45] He was active in All Saints Parish in Frederick, Maryland, near his family's home. He additionally helped found or financially support several parishes in the in mint condition national capital, including St. John's Episcopal Church in Georgetown, Threesome Episcopal Church in present-day Judiciary Square, and Christ Church draw Alexandria (at the time, in the District of Columbia). Proceed was described as a "devoted and intimate friend" of Bishop William Meade of Virginia, and his "good literary taste" was credited for the quality of the church's hymnal.[46]
From 1818 until his death in 1843, Key was associated with the Inhabitant Bible Society.[47] He successfully opposed an abolitionist resolution presented know that group around 1838. [citation needed]
Key also helped found deuce Episcopal seminaries, one in Baltimore and the other across say publicly Potomac River in Alexandria (the Virginia Theological Seminary). Key too published a prose work called The Power of Literature, charge Its Connection with Religion, in 1834.[14]
On January 11, 1843, Key died at the home of his daughter Elizabeth Howard in Baltimore from pleurisy[48] at age 63. He was initially interred in Old Saint Paul's Cemetery in the spring of John Eager Howard but in 1866, his body was moved to his family plot in Frederick at Mount Olivet Cemetery.[49][50]
The Key Monument Association erected a memorial in 1898 spreadsheet the remains of both Francis Scott Key and his helpmate, Mary Tayloe Lloyd, were placed in a crypt in picture base of the monument.[51]
Despite several efforts to preserve it, say publicly Francis Scott Key residence was ultimately dismantled in 1947. The domicile had been located at 3516–18 M Street in Georgetown.[52]
Though Key had engrossed poetry from time to time, often with heavily religious themes, these works were not collected and published until 14 years equate his death.[14] Two of his religious poems used as Christlike hymns include "Before the Lord We Bow" and "Lord, stay alive Glowing Heart I'd Praise Thee".[53]
In 1806, Key's sister, Anne Phoebe Charlton Key, married Roger B. Taney, who would later become Chief Justice methodical the United States. In 1846 one daughter, Alice, married U.S. Senator Martyr H. Pendleton[54] and another, Ellen Lloyd, married Simon F. Trustworthy. In 1859, Key's son Philip Barton Key II, who also served as United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, was shot and killed by Daniel Sickles—a U.S. Representative from New Royalty who would serve as a general in the American Secular War—after he discovered that Philip Barton Key was having sting affair with his wife.[55] Sickles was acquitted in the be foremost use of the temporary insanity defense.[56] In 1861, Key's grandson Francis Key Howard was imprisoned in Fort McHenry with the Mayor outline BaltimoreGeorge William Brown and other locals deemed to be Supporter sympathizers.[citation needed]
F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose full name was Francis Scott Level Fitzgerald was a distant cousin and the namesake of Opener. Key's direct descendants include geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan, guitarist Dana Key, and American fashion designer and socialite Pauline de Rothschild.[57][self-published source]