Strange Bedfellows

PETER: If you’re just tuning in, this is BackStory and we’re talking about the War of 1812 on the 200th anniversary of its beginning.

ED: You know, reading over the comments on our Facebook page and website, it’s really striking how many people identify the Star Spangled Banner as the most important thing that emerges from the War of 1812. And so I went back and looked at it. I was curious. It’s the sort of thing that we sing a lot but don’t really think very much about the words of.

It turns out there are important parts of the song that we don’t sing. Here’s a part of one verse that I was struck by. “No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave. And the Star Spangled Banner, oh, long may it wave.” The hireling and the slave? What’s that about?

PETER: Yeah. Well, here’s the story about the War of 1812 in the Chesapeake that’s not well known. And that is that just as in the revolution, lots of slaves escape Chesapeake plantations and joined the British forces. And so what Key is saying– and he’s a slave holder– he’s saying, these slaves who go to the British, they’re not going to be free. They’re going to die. This is going to be an awful outcome for them.

Of course, they’re happiest– and this anticipates a whole argument for slavery. They’re happiest and best off being our slaves. You know who’s terrified? It’s slave owners who are terrified.

They’re always terrified. And that’s what war means in the early period in slave holding areas. It means the possibility of two great powers are going at it, the British and the Americans. Well, there might be a third party that emerges and that would be slaves.

And a large number of them did escape. And this was something that, even worse than the desolation of Washington and the burning of the White House, the Bladensburg Races when Americans who were supposed to be defending the city ran away in terror. Well, the worst thing of all was the possibility that black slaves would rise up under the aegis of British protection and there would be payback time in a big way.

ED: And it’s interesting that, ironically, enslaved Americans were losers in the War of 1812. Once the boundary to the west is secured, once the American Indians are defeated and removed, the way is open for the vast expansion of American slavery. So it’s ironic that the national anthem would sort of gloat about the defeat of the aspirations of the runaway slaves and, in fact, they find themselves far less free in a more secure United States than they had been before.