Within a few months, the song’s title, “Defence of Fort M’Henry,” was replaced with its more recognizable name, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” (It is believed that Thomas Carr, a Baltimore publisher, coined the new title.) In the 1890s, the US Navy and Army made “The Star-Spangled Banner” an official song of the military. By October, seventeen newspapers had spread the song up and down the East Coast. A local printer first published the lyrics in a broadside and shortly after, two Baltimore newspapers picked it up as well. “Defence of Fort M’Henry” grew to be one of the most recognized songs in the United States.
Once he returned to the city, he drafted three more verses, completing what was then titled “Defence of Fort M‘Henry.” The words were put to the tune of a popular British song, “To Anacreon in Heaven.” Upon seeing the American flag still aloft, he wrote, on the back of a letter, the first verse of what would eventually become the national anthem of the United States.
After twenty-five hours of heavy bombardment, Key was sure that, come dawn, the British flag would be flying over Baltimore. Key had been negotiating the release of an American captive during the War of 1812 when the British attacked the fort. In September 1814, Francis Scott Key, an attorney and DC insider, watched the American flag rise over Baltimore, Maryland’s Fort McHenry from a British ship in the harbor.
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