Had the fort been captured? After watching the firefight rage for 25 hours from a British truce ship, the bombardment finally began to taper off. The question was: Had the fort been captured? As Francis Scott Key anxiously awaited the outcome of the Battle of Baltimore, he wrote words that would, more than 200 years after they were written, become our national anthem. Most everyone knows that Maryland Native Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner …showed first 75 words of 694 total…

…showed last 75 words of 694 total…a note "Tune: Anacreon in Heaven." In October a Baltimore actor sang Key's new song in a public performance and called it "The Star-Spangled Banner". Immediately popular, it remained just one of several patriotic airs until it was finally adopted as our national anthem on March 3, 1931. But the actual words were not included in the legal documents. Key himself had written several versions with slight variations so discrepancies in the exact wording still occur today.