Who won the Battle of Baltimore and Fort McHenry?
The Battle of Baltimore, fought from 12 to 15 September 1814, was an American victory in the War of 1812 and the turning point of the war in the Chesapeake. After burning Washington, the British attacked Baltimore but lost their general at North Point and were halted before the city's earthworks, and their fleet failed to batter down Fort McHenry in a bombardment of about twenty-five hours. Watching the fort's flag still flying at dawn, Francis Scott Key wrote the poem that became the Star-Spangled Banner.3
Three weeks after the British burned Washington, they came for Baltimore. The city held, the guns of Fort McHenry refused to fall, and a lawyer watching from a ship wrote the words that became the American anthem.4
Part of The greatest battles in American history · Before: The Battle of the Thames · Next: Battle of New Orleans
After the burning of Washington
Napoleon's abdication in April 1814 freed British troops and ships for the war in North America. In August a force under Major General Robert Ross, carried by Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane's fleet, landed at Benedict on the Patuxent, scattered the American militia at Bladensburg and on 24 August entered Washington, where it burned the public buildings before withdrawing to the ships. From Baltimore people could see the glow of the fires in the sky.5
The next target was obvious. Baltimore was the third-largest city in the United States, a busy port and a center of shipping and industry. On the evening of 10 September the fleet, 55 ships in all, was sighted at the mouth of the Patapsco River.6
A city digs in
Baltimore had not waited. Major General Samuel Smith of the Maryland militia took command of the defenses. The city was divided into four districts that took turns at the digging, and everyone was expected to help, free Black residents and enslaved workers among them. In about three weeks they threw up more than a mile and a half of earthworks along Hampstead Hill, the high ground east of the city that is now Patterson Park.7
Commodore John Rodgers brought sailors and marines from Philadelphia to man the batteries. In all, somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 men and about sixty guns waited behind the lines, by the count of the National Park Service at Fort McHenry; another National Park Service account puts the defenders of the approaches to the city lower, at 10,000 to 15,000. The harbor itself was closed by a boom and barges, covered by eleven armed barges, and at its mouth stood Fort McHenry, armed with heavy 36- and 42-pounder guns and garrisoned by about 1,000 men under Major George Armistead.8
The stand at North Point
The British plan was a combined blow. The army would land at North Point, at the tip of the peninsula between the Back and Patapsco Rivers, and march on the city from the east, while the fleet silenced Fort McHenry and came up the harbor. In the early hours of 12 September some 2,500 soldiers and about 1,300 marines and seamen came ashore, roughly fifteen kilometers from Baltimore.9
Smith sent Brigadier General John Stricker forward with the city's 3rd Brigade, about 3,200 militiamen by the American Battlefield Trust's count and nearly 4,000 by the National Park Service's, to delay them. Stricker drew up across the neck of the peninsula, using creeks and marshes to cover his flanks. Early in the afternoon Ross rode forward with Rear Admiral George Cockburn and was shot by one of the American riflemen pushed out ahead of the line. He died soon afterward, and command passed to Colonel Arthur Brooke.10
Brooke attacked at about three o'clock, pinning the American front and sending a column around its flank. The militia fought hard for a short while, then fell back in reasonable order toward the city. Tactically it was a British success. But it had cost them their commander and, by Brooke's own count, 38 dead, 251 wounded and 50 missing, against Stricker's return of 24 killed, 139 wounded and 50 captured.11
Before Hampstead Hill
On 13 September Brooke's column came up in the rain within sight of the earthworks on Hampstead Hill. What he saw was far stronger than the British had expected: more than two kilometers of trenches, batteries with dozens of guns, and thousands of men behind them. He decided he could not attack without the navy's help, and prepared a night assault that depended on the fleet getting past Fort McHenry first.12
The bombardment of Fort McHenry
The water was too shallow for Cochrane's big ships of the line, so the work fell to five bomb vessels, Terror, Volcano, Meteor, Devastation and Aetna, and the rocket ship Erebus, which fired the new Congreve rockets. Anchored about three kilometers out, beyond the reach of most of the fort's guns, they opened fire early in the morning of 13 September and kept it up, through driving rain, all day and through the night.13
Estimates of the shells and rockets fired run from more than 1,500 to about 1,800, some 400 of which fell inside the fort. Armistead's men could do little but take it. Around three in the morning on 14 September a flotilla of boats with about 1,200 men tried to slip past the fort in the dark, to land behind the American lines and draw troops away from Hampstead Hill. The guns of the smaller forts upriver drove them off. At dawn the bombardment stopped.14
For all the noise, the losses inside Fort McHenry were small: four killed and twenty-four wounded, according to the American Battlefield Trust. Brooke, without naval support, called a council of war, and the army began to fall back to North Point. By the afternoon of 15 September it had re-embarked, and the fleet sailed away.15
By the dawn's early light
Watching the bombardment from the water was Francis Scott Key, a 35-year-old lawyer and amateur poet. With John Skinner he had come out under a flag of truce to negotiate the release of Dr. William Beanes, a physician from Upper Marlboro held by the British, and the two were kept with the fleet until the attack was over so they could not give it away.16
At dawn on 14 September, after some twenty-five hours of bombardment, Key saw the great garrison flag being raised over the fort. Some historians believe a smaller storm flag flew through the rainy night and the big flag went up only at first light. Key began writing on the spot. His four stanzas, "The Defence of Fort M'Henry," were set to the tune of a popular song and soon renamed "The Star-Spangled Banner." It was sung at patriotic occasions for more than a century before it was made the national anthem in 1931.17
The newspapers caught the mood before the poem did. In its account of the battle that September, the Baltimore Register described the observer on the truce ship at dawn, when "his eye was again greeted by the proudly-waving flag of his country." The rockets' red glare and the bombs bursting in air were not poetic license: they were the Congreve rockets of Erebus and the mortar shells of the bomb ships. Not everyone loved the result: the New York Herald Tribune once complained that it was hard to remember and hard to sing.18
Why Baltimore mattered
Baltimore was saved, and with it the war in the Chesapeake turned. The British had underestimated both the city's defenses and its will, and the failure left them without a base for further operations in the bay. Coming weeks after the humiliation of Washington, the defense restored American confidence, and it strengthened the American hand in the peace talks at Ghent. It also damaged the reputations of Cochrane and Brooke. Cochrane took the fleet back to Halifax, while Cockburn and the troops went to Bermuda, and the British turned their next blow south. It broke at New Orleans.19 › Battle of New Orleans, 1815
The fort and the flag today
The flag that Key saw was made by Mary Pickersgill of Baltimore and delivered to the fort in August 1813. She was paid $405.90 for it. It measured 30 by 42 feet, with fifteen stars and fifteen stripes each two feet wide, because Armistead wanted a flag the British could see from a distance. It stayed with the Armistead family for decades, was lent to the Smithsonian in 1907 and given outright in 1912, and was reduced in size when it was repaired. It is now on permanent exhibit there.20
Fort McHenry itself is preserved by the National Park Service as Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine, and Hampstead Hill is now Patterson Park. Mary Pickersgill's house survives in Baltimore as the Flag House. The anniversary of the battle falls on 12 to 14 September.21
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