Star-Spangled Seamstress
It
started with a snip, then a cut, and then stitch after tiny
stitch. Caroline Pickersgill was thirteen years old when
she began the largest sewing project of her life. It was
the summer of 1813. She had no idea that the finished product
would inspire a song Americans know by heart.
Caroline learned how to sew from her mother, a widow who was a “maker of colours,” as flag makers were called at the time. Like Caroline, Mrs. Pickersgill had learned how to make flags from her mother. Rebecca Young, Caroline’s grandmother, had made flags for the Continental Army during the American Revolution. The three women were a family of flag makers.
America was at war with the British again in the summer of 1813. The British navy was attacking towns up and down the Atlantic coast. Rumors spread that the British would attack Baltimore, where the family of flag makers lived at 60 Albemarle Street. Early in July, two officers from nearby Fort McHenry knocked at their door. Major George Armistead, the fort's commander, wanted the Pickersgills to sew a flag so big that “the British will have no difficulty in seeing it from a distance.”
Immediately, the family of flag makers began to work on the huge banner. They gathered materials: four hundred yards of red, white, and blue English wool bunting, and white American cotton for the stars. Next, they cut. Caroline and her mother snipped fifteen stars. Each measured two feet from point to point. They cut and sewed eight red and seven white stripes, each two feet wide.
When it came time to stitch the flag together, they had a problem. No room in their house was big enough to lay out a flag so large. Caroline and her mother asked the owner of a brewery down the street if they could spread the flag on the malthouse floor after the brewery closed for the evening. Night after night, Caroline, her mother, and her grandmother worked by candlelight. Using linen thread, they joined the stars and stripes with small, tight stitches. After six weeks of snipping and stitching, the finished flag measured thirty feet by forty-two feet. Hung lengthwise, it was as tall as a four-story building.
Soldiers from Fort McHenry picked up the flag from Mrs. Pickersgill on August 13, 1813. The flag makers were paid $405.90 for their efforts. (Many of the men who worked along the docks didn't earn that sum in a year.) The flag Caroline had worked so frantically to finish was put into storage as the men waited and prepared for the British. It would be more than a year before the flag would be hoisted over the garrison.
On August 19, 1814, the British fleet entered Chesapeake Bay. Their first target was the capital city, Washington. The night of August 24, Caroline saw the glow of flames on the horizon as Washington burned forty miles away. Would Baltimore be next?
Early in the morning of September 13, British ships turned their attention to Fort McHenry. The star-shaped fort was all that stood between the city of Baltimore and the British fleet. Into the rainy night, the British fired 1,500 bombs and Congreve rockets at the fort. Fiery red arcs blazed across the sky. Explosions mixed with thunder. All night, Baltimore shook with the sounds of war.
Two hours before dawn, an eerie silence settled over the harbor. No bombs burst. No rockets glared. What did the silence mean? Was the battle over? Had Fort McHenry surrendered? All of Baltimore wondered as they waited for dawn.
Francis Scott Key wondered, too. Key was a Washington lawyer and amateur poet waiting aboard a ship eight miles from the Baltimore harbor. After the burning of Washington, Key visited the British fleet anchored in Chesapeake Bay to ask for the release of a friend held prisoner there. While successful in his mission, Key was detained at sea by the British.
Using
a spyglas, Key searched the dawn sky until he saw what he
had been hoping for. Caroline’s banner—the great
red, white, and blue flag—was proudly waving in the
breeze above Fort McHenry! The British had given up. The
fort and Baltimore had been saved.
Sometime before dawn the rain-soaked storm flag had been lowered, and the great new flag had been hoisted for the British fleet to see as they sailed from the harbor. The sight of the flag inspired Key to write a poem that was soon set to music. A month later, a Baltimore actor who sang Key’s song in a public performance called it “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
The Americans went on to win the War of 1812. Many feel that the Battle of Baltimore was the turning point in the war.
In 1931, “The Star-Spangled Banner” officially became our National Anthem. Today, the banner Caroline helped to stitch—the fifteen-star-and-fifteen-stripe flag that inspired Francis Scott Key—is at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., where it is being restored.
