Did
you know that Francis Key Howard, the grandson of Francis Scott Key, was imprisoned
in Fort McHenry forty-seven years to the day (September 13, 1861) after his grandfather had
witnessed the British Royal Navy bombard that fort during the War of 1812 on September 13, 1814?
Not long after the South had seceded
from the United States, President Abraham Lincoln authorized his general,
Winfield Scott, to suspend the writ of habeas corpus on April 27, 1861.
Lincoln gave power to the army to arrest and detain American citizens at will
and without the due process of law:
“You are engaged in repressing an
insurrection against the laws of the United States. If at any point on or in
the vicinity of any military line which is now or which shall be used between
the city of Philadelphia and the city of Washington you find resistance which
renders it necessary to suspend the writ of habeas
corpus for the public safety, you personally or through the officer in
command at the point where resistance occurs, are authorized to suspend that
writ.”
With that right suspended, thousands of Northern citizens were illegally
arrested by the army and held in military prisons from months to years during
the duration of the war. Francis Key Howard was one of the many who were
arrested.
Many were incarcerated simply for exercising their First
Amendment right to speak their opinion and criticize the actions of the Lincoln
Administration. No state in the North was safe, as many would find out in the
State of Maryland. With disregard for constitutional law and due process,
Lincoln disbanded the police force in Baltimore and had the Mayor, a member of
Congress, editors, and private citizens arrested without any specific charges
against them. Howard, an editor for a
newspaper which had been printing anti-Lincoln sentiments in Baltimore, was one
of the many men who were arrested in that city during the first year of the war.
Just after midnight on September 13, 1861, several
men under orders from Secretary of State Seward entered Howard’s home and
arrested him. The “gang” of men, who entered
his home, also violated his Fourth Amendment right; when without a warrant, they
ransacked every room of his house and carried off all his “private memoranda,
bills, note-books, and letters.”
Howard was taken to Fort McHenry, where he was accompanied by fifteen others that
day, who were also arrested and drug out of their homes; “most of the members
of the Legislature from Baltimore, Mr. Brown, the Mayor of the City, and one of
[their] Representatives in Congress, Mr. May” joined Howard at the fort.
He was aware of the irony of the situation and later wrote about it in an
account of his imprisonment:
When I looked
out in the morning, I could not help being struck by an odd and not pleasant
coincidence. On that day, forty-seven years before, my grandfather, Mr. F. S.
Key, then a prisoner on a British ship, had witnessed the bombardment of Fort
McHenry. When on the following morning, the hostile fleet drew off, defeated,
he wrote the song so long popular throughout the country, the “Star-spangled
Banner.” As I stood upon the very scene of that conflict, I could not but
contrast my position with his, forty-sever years before. The flag which he had
then so proudly hailed, I saw waving, at the same place, over the victims of as
vulgar and brutal a despotism as modern times have witnessed.
