At the time, it was a dangerous idea.
PART II
FRANK’S SONG
Francis Scott Key, witnessing the British bombs bursting in air over Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor on September 14, 1814, the day he wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.” (illustration credit p.2)
6
AS BEVERLY SNOW welcomed diners to the Epicurean Eating House at Sixth and Pennsylvania, Francis Scott Key often passed by his corner on foot or in a carriage. At fifty-two years of age, Key was the sort of gentleman whom Beverly hoped to attract. An attorney-at-law, Key often argued cases at the courthouse up the street in Judiciary Square or down the Avenue at the U.S. Supreme Court in the basement of the Capitol. A longtime resident of nearby Georgetown, Key was known about Washington City for his philanthropy, piety, ambition, and, of course, his famous song, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” whose lyrics he had composed some eighteen years before. The stirring anthem launched by the words “O say, can you see” made Key famous in his own lifetime, serving as background music for an eventful career in law, politics, and public service that is oddly omitted from American memory.
Key wore the fame of his song lightly. He, his wife, Polly, and their ten children occupied a two-story brick home at the far end of Bridge Street (now M Street) in Georgetown, where the little ones frolicked in terraced gardens and a lawn that sloped down to banks of the Potomac River. By 1830, his two oldest daughters, favorite Elizabeth Phoebe and free-spirited Maria, had grown and married, as had his oldest son, Francis Jr. Ann, a sensitive nineteen-year-old, had just married and moved out. They all lived in Maryland, while John Ross, a dutiful twenty-year-old, attended a boarding school in New York. Remaining at home was the volatile fourteen-year-old Daniel; twelve-year-old Philip Barton, who would prove the most intelligent of them all; as well as three children under ten—Ellen, Mary Alicia, and Charles Henry. Key tried to instill religious feeling in them, not always successfully. He clashed with Maria and Daniel, who did not take to the Bible and skipped their prayers.
Another child, Edward, had died tragically in 1822 at the age of eight when he was pulled under by the Potomac’s tricky currents while playing in the shallow waters near the family house. Key, away on a business trip, returned to comfort himself and his wife with the belief that “such an awful shock as this is never ordered by a merciful God, but for some wise and good purpose.”
On weekdays, Key walked to his nearby law office or took a carriage to the courthouse in Washington. His practice, representing claimants to the War Department and the Land Office, was lucrative, especially when bankrolled by Alabama landowners who routinely paid a thousand dollars for his services. In the evenings, Key attended meetings of various philanthropic and religious causes. On Sundays he prayed in pew 40 of Christ Church of Georgetown, located at Congress and Beall streets. In his later years he would undertake at least four sensitive political missions on behalf of President Jackson. On occasion, he spent time with his family.
Key was no Epicurean; he renounced luxury in all of its forms. But he might well have dined at Snow’s new restaurant. He certainly passed by Snow’s corner often enough. As an attorney he met out-of-town clients at Brown’s Hotel and caught the coach to Annapolis in front of Gadsby’s. Snow’s place offered a natural rendezvous for him and his associates, not that Key would have much cared for the mulatto proprietor. Key prided himself as a humanitarian and as a young lawyer relished defending individual colored people in court. Some even called him “the Blacks’ lawyer.” At the same time, Key shared a general view of the free people of color as shiftless and untrustworthy: a nuisance, if not a menace, to white people. He spoke publicly of Africans in America as “a distinct and inferior race of people, which all experience proves to be the greatest evil that afflicts a community.” He nurtured a vision, expressed in deed (though not song), in which African colonization would solve the problem of the free blacks by helping them emigrate to Liberia. Key had worked ceaselessly and ineffectively on behalf of this dream for more than twenty years. He was, as one biographer admitted, a distressingly serious man.
Humanitarian ambition drove him. In his younger days, Key often left Polly and their growing brood to travel throughout the mid-Atlantic promoting the establishment of what were known as Lancaster schools, institutions of learning open to all white children, which evolved into the region’s first public schools. He attended the annual General Convention of the Episcopal Church, where he denounced popular amusements like gambling. While some of his coreligionists chafed at his harsh pronouncements, none doubted his piety. Said his friend John Randolph, the brilliant and eccentric Virginia senator, “His whole life is spent in endeavors that do good for his unhappy fellow-men.” Randolph, an iconoclastic bachelor fond of opium and poetry, admired Key’s benevolence but did not entirely trust it.
In his relations with enslaved people, Key was decent by the standards of the day. He had grown up on his family’s plantation in the hills of northern Maryland surrounded by slaves and an ethic of service. His mother read the Bible to the blacks in residence. Family lore held that his grandmother had been blinded by smoke while rescuing a black family from a fire. Key abhorred the mistreatment of bondsmen and the sundering of families by slave dealers. A prim man, he was incapable of brutality. Condescension came more easily. During his lifetime, Key freed seven of his slaves. He said that all but one of them—whom he did not identify—had thrived in freedom. But in general, Key expressed disappointment at the results of his efforts on behalf of colored people. “I have been thus instrumental in liberating several large families and many individuals,” he told a contemporary. “I cannot remember more than two instances, out of this large number, in which it did not appear that the freedom so earnestly sought for them was their ruin.” Key concluded Negroes could not handle the responsibilities of liberty in America. When they moved back to Africa, the United States would then be free of slaves (and former slaves) and could thus fulfill its destiny as a “land of the free” for white people.
Key was a colonization man. He had helped organize the first meeting of the American Colonization Society in 1817, unquestionably sincere in his belief that African emigration would bring about the end of chattel slavery in America, perhaps within a century. He had served as one of the group’s twelve managers, or agents, ever since. But what had he achieved? In the fourteen years of Key’s service, the society arranged transportation for no more than two thousand freed American slaves. Those numbers showed that colonization could succeed, Key said to many a meeting room, often to applause. Critics like Benjamin Lundy pointed out that during the lifetime of the society the enslaved population in America had grown by nearly four hundred thousand people. Numerically speaking, colonization had failed to diminish slavery in any way. Key did not waver. When Congress balked at funding the scheme, Key took on the chore of fund-raising—“the begging business,” he called it—for the selfless cause of sending the blacks back to Africa.
So when Isaac Cary, John Cook, and other free blacks spoke out against colonization at the AME church meeting in April 1831, Key probably took exception. Their avowed “distrust” of the American Colonization Society could have only irked his sense of benevolence. But Key preferred not to respond to the critics of colonization. And at that moment, he had a rather more important matter to ponder:
President Jackson wanted to see him personally.
Key had made the trip from Georgetown to the president’s house many times before and he knew the route well. His carriage went down Falls Street, which turned into Bridge Street, which took him over Rock Creek and into Washington City. He continued down Pennsylvania Avenue as the fields gave way to houses and then past the popular Franklin House on Twenty-First Street. From there it was a short jaunt to President’s Square. The carriage pulled into the semicircular driveway of the executive mansion. As Key entered the building through the north portico, a Negro servant, dressed in a blue coat with brass buttons, a white shirt,
and white breeches, ushered him in.
Inside some of the rooms looked elegant, carpeted with tapestries displaying national emblems. Others stood almost empty, thanks to a penurious Congress. Key mounted the stairs and passed through a large square audience room where the president received petitioners and other business callers. He arrived at Jackson’s personal office, which featured silk curtains crowned by gilded-eagle cornices and a long table once owned by Thomas Jefferson.
Key found the president looking tired and a bit worn. At sixty-four years of age, Andrew Jackson was a tall, spare rooster of a man with a high forehead and brushed-back gray hair. He had keen eyes, and on occasions like this—important decisions in the offing—a good-natured, almost childlike expression about his mouth. He smoked a reed pipe and did not waste time.
“I want to tell you confidentially that I wish to offer Taney the place of Attorney General,” Jackson began. “Would that be acceptable to him?”
7
THE LARGELY FORGOTTEN friendship of Francis Scott Key and Roger Taney would soon shape the life of the United States and Washington City in profound ways. Taney, with Key’s help, would become the attorney general and then the chief justice of the Supreme Court and eventually the author of the Dred Scott decision, which hastened the coming of the Civil War. Key, in constant contact with Taney, would go on to serve the Jackson administration and the people of Washington through a seven-year stint as district attorney. The fraternal bond that sustained Key and Taney through the political wars of the Jackson era subjected them to danger, controversy, and tragedy. It also elevated them to positions of power in a formative period of the country’s political life. Not only did the modern two-party system of American politics originate during the Jackson administration, so did the “red-blue” dynamics that still animate partisan political conflict in the twenty-first century. Francis Scott Key and Roger Taney flourished as recognizably modern men. They were founding fathers of the enduring American political tradition that might be called “red patriotism.”
Key and Taney first met in the late 1790s. Both had grown up on bucolic slaveholding plantations in Maryland. Both read law in Annapolis, hoping to become lawyers in the Maryland courts. Key, a graduate of St. John’s College, got by on charm and quick intelligence. Taney, a more studious graduate of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, benefited from the profane tutelage of a brilliant, hard-drinking lawyer named Luther Martin. When Key and Taney were admitted to the Maryland bar, they started practicing law in Frederick Town, a growing manufacturing center in central Maryland near the Key family estate.
The two young men meshed in their differences. Roger was a gaunt, homely, dark-haired fellow, as lean as a Potomac herring (or so they said) and as shrewd as the shrewdest, despite the fact he could not see very well. Francis was almost pretty in his dreamy blond handsomeness. Taney was meticulous; Key impulsive. Taney was determined; Key vacillating. Taney knelt daily to pray but did not regard a whiskey or a wager as self-indulgence. Key was more abstemious and more popular with the ladies. The two men were already friends when Taney started courting Key’s only sibling, his younger sister Ann. In 1806 Roger Taney and Ann Key married in a lavish ceremony at the Key family estate known as Terra Rubra. Francis and Roger drew as close as brothers.
Taney was impressive in an odd way. He was, in the words of a friend, “a tall, square shouldered man, flat breasted in a degree to be remarked upon, with a stoop that made his shoulders even more prominent.” He had “a face without one good feature…[and] discolored and irregular teeth, the gums of which were visible when he smiled.” Taney always dressed in black, “his clothes sitting ill upon him, his hands spare with projecting veins—in a word, a gaunt, ungainly man.”
After his marriage Taney stayed in Frederick Town pursuing what he admitted was an “ambition for legal eminence—not so much for the emoluments it would bring, as for the high rank and social position which were in that day attached to it.” He soon became known as one of the leading lawyers in the area. He was democratic in his politics, probably because he was a Catholic. In an early political venture, he favored giving Jews in Maryland the right to vote. In 1819 he defended a white preacher named Gruber charged with inciting slaves to rebel. Preaching to a huge outdoor revival meeting attended by hundreds of blacks and whites, Gruber had declared that slavery was a sin. Taney argued that as long as the man did not urge the slaves to rebel, his sermon did not violate the law. The preacher was acquitted.
Meanwhile, Key had married Mary Tayloe, a pretty girl from another wealthy slaveholding Maryland family. He called her Polly and they moved to Georgetown to take over the law practice of his uncle Philip Barton Key, a retired congressman. Key soon established himself as a capable, even eloquent advocate in the courtroom. Polly bore their children and took care of them with the help of various slaves.
Taney eventually made his way to Baltimore, where he developed an expertise in maritime and insurance law and became a director of the Union Bank of Maryland, then the state’s largest financial institution. Taney’s connections and work ethic gained him a reputation for probity, and in 1827, the governor of Maryland appointed him to be the state’s attorney general.
Unlike Taney, Key avoided politics for a long time, taking pride that “The Star-Spangled Banner” transcended the country’s political divisions. He told his friend John Randolph, “The worst men of a party will be uppermost in it.” (The acidulous Randolph replied: “You will put down party spirit when you put down whiskey drinking.”) But Taney’s sympathy for the presidential ambition of General Jackson proved contagious. In 1828, Key embraced the democratic charisma of General Jackson and discovered his own political ambition.
Frank, as Key was known to his political cronies, found Jackson capable and heroic. He offered the hope of shaking up a country that Key lamented was succumbing to “luxury,” a materialism that undermined faith and decorum. In 1828, Key held a barbecue for Jackson supporters in Frederick County where the liquor flowed freely. His hopes were fulfilled at Jackson’s inauguration in March 1829, when thousands of people jammed Pennsylvania Avenue to welcome the new president. Key thrilled to the crowd’s energy and deportment. “It is beautiful,” he exulted. “It is sublime.”
He might have been speaking of his own prospects. Key had come to professional maturity in the capital in the early 1800s, watching as clans of aristocratic gentlemen from Virginia and Massachusetts dominated the councils of government. They had effortlessly excluded men like himself. With Jackson’s arrival, the old order finally seemed to give way to a vigorous new democracy in which Key might play a leading role.
He offered his services to the new administration. He agreed to act as a special prosecutor in the case of Tobias Watkins, a government auditor in the Adams administration who had allegedly embezzled money from navy accounts. Some thought the prosecution a maneuver to justify Jackson’s plans for “rotation in office,” which many feared meant replacing civil servants with political hacks. Key’s nonpartisan reputation helped convince a jury otherwise. Watkins was convicted.
President Jackson had called Key to his office in the spring of 1831 and asked him about Roger Taney because he needed a new attorney general. In fact, Jackson needed an entirely new cabinet because his administration, from its very first day two years earlier, had been hobbled by a social and political debacle that came to be known as the Eaton Affair. Key had proved helpful once before in this matter, and the president wondered if he might be again.
The Eaton Affair blossomed in the early days of 1829 as the prototypical Washington sex scandal, a moralistic and vicious struggle for power. It began, as such scandals usually do, with rumors of a promiscuous woman. The lady in question was Margaret Eaton, the wife of John Eaton, Jackson’s secretary of war. Eaton, a handsome but not quite brilliant protégé of the president’s, had proven himself both fighting Indians and winning votes. Elected senator from Tennessee, he came to Washington and fell in love with Margaret, who h
ad grown up playing hostess in her father’s hotel, the Franklin House tavern at Twenty-First Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Margaret’s flirtatious style, lovely brown curls, and reputation for bedding the occasional swain deranged an entire government. By her own admission she was “the wildest girl that ever wore out a mother’s patience … as gay as a lark, full of fun and nonsense … sometimes, maybe, a little original and lawless.” In the eyes of one male admirer Margaret Eaton exemplified a strain of Irish beauty that combined the best of the Greek and the Spaniard. Margaret Bayard Smith, the matronly confidante of every first lady since Martha Washington and leader of Washington society, bristled at such masculine flapdoodle. Margaret Eaton was “very handsome,” she conceded. She was also “one of the most ambitious, violent, malignant, yet silly women you ever heard of.”
The ladies of Washington, including the wives of Jackson’s other cabinet secretaries, regarded Mrs. Eaton as little better than a whore. They felt obliged to snub her socially, refusing even to stay in the same room with her at state dinners, diplomatic balls, and punch-bowl receptions, where much of the business of government actually took place. Jackson regarded John Eaton almost as a son and reflexively defended his bride from the gossips. From the start he demanded that Vice President John Calhoun tell his wife to accept a visit from Mrs. Eaton, as capital protocol required. Calhoun, a brilliant but emotionally obtuse man, refused to get involved in what he dismissed as “a ladies’ quarrel.” Jackson, for whom loyalty was paramount, never trusted Calhoun again.
Snow-Storm in August Page 5
