The Lost World of Francis Scott Key

Copyright © 2014 Sina Dubovoy.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-3117-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-3119-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-3118-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014905456

WestBow Press rev. date: 5/8/2014

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Citations, Punctuation, and Other Matters

Part I The Settlers

Part II The Red Land

Part III Annapolis Youth

Part IV Francis Scott Key, Esq.

Part V The House on Bridge Street

Part VI The Havoc of War

Part VII Victory and Peace

Part VIII Liberia and Other Causes and Cases

Part IX Even More Causes and Cases

Part X Farewell to Bridge Street

Part XI Home and Abroad in the Jackson Era

Part XII A Time of Trials

Part XIII All Passion Spent

Part XIV There Is No Home

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations and Collection Numbers

Notes and Citations

Select Bibliography

Pipe Creek (Terra Rubra) as it looked in Francis Scott Key’s time, by his grandson, the artist John Ross Key (1837–1920). As the artist was only seven when the mansion passed out of the Key family and twenty-one when it was demolished, the painting may represent how others remembered Pipe Creek.

(Printed with permission, The Star Spangled Banner Flag House, Baltimore.)

To good books and their authors

Preface

Francis Scott Key was born during the Revolutionary War on his family’s Maryland estate and died suddenly and unexpectedly in Baltimore at age sixty-three. History remembers him best as the composer of The Star-Spangled Banner and least of all as a noted poet and eminent lawyer. Time and again, his career propelled him into the limelight, which explains how he happened to find himself aboard a truce ship during the massive British bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1814. As he watched the assault all night long with the aid of a spyglass, the poet-lawyer was inspired to compose the ode that became the anthem of a nation.

Delving into the life and milieu of this extraordinary man was akin, at times, to visiting an unfamiliar culture. For instance, I found it difficult to imagine an American nowadays who would be capable of composing—let alone at the spur of the moment, as did Key—a complex, four-stanza rhymed poem like The Star-Spangled Banner-and even harder to comprehend its sudden, incredible popularity. (Weren’t most Americans semiliterate back then?) In the aftermath of 9/11, when there was a similar urge, as in 1814, to express one’s patriotic feelings in song, all that emerged was a resuscitation of Irving Berlin’s simplistic God Bless America. I wondered what this said about the mentality and language of men and women in Key’s day, in contrast to our own.

This book, however, is an account of the life of Francis Scott Key and of his milieu, including the people closest to him, not a vindication of them. May the reader decide whether the lost world in which Francis Scott Key lived and breathed is irretrievably lost or in any sense worth retrieving.

During his forty-plus years as a lawyer, Key argued well over one hundred appeals before the Supreme Court in Washington and countless other appeals and cases in the lower courts. In 1825, he stirred the public’s attention with his eloquent defense of imprisoned Africans captured aboard the slave ship, the Antelope, one of the Supreme Court’s longest-running appeals. He prosecuted the failed assassin of President Andrew Jackson in federal district court, a trial sensationalized in the press. In 1835, he was the district attorney during Washington DC’s first race riot, which grew so violent that he ordered guards to defend his home from rampaging whites.

Key was also a devout, evangelical Episcopalian and lay leader, who found himself steeped in the divisive issues sundering his church. Married in 1802 at age twenty-two, he fathered eleven talented children, composed inspiring religious verse (as well as zany rhymes and riddles), and was a first-rate orator. His restless intellect and spirit sought an outlet in a mind-boggling array of philanthropic projects, which included the founding of the free African republic of Liberia. Despite his public profile, Key was neither an office-seeker, nor a man of wealth. While his law practice flourished, at his death, he left behind a mountain of debt.

As a result of new, as well as overlooked, sources and materials, new facts about Francis Scott Key have emerged and some age old myths have been dispelled. What still remains true and enduring about the man, however, are his genius, piety, and service to his country and fellow man.

Introduction

Key Biographers (or): the Foreignness of Francis Scott Key

Congress’s approval of The Star-Spangled Banner as the national anthem in 1931 ignited an explosion of interest in its little-known author, with nothing to satisfy the public’s urge to know other than F. S. Key-Smith’s shallow little book, published in 1911.¹ Two Marylanders, Victor Weybright, a journalist-turned-publisher, and Edward S. Delaplaine, a judge, rode the wave of this sudden national interest, producing the first full-length, critical accounts of the poet-lawyer and songwriter. Weybright’s Spangled Banner: The Story of Francis Scott Key appeared to notable acclaim in 1935, followed two years later by Delaplaine’s Francis Scott Key: Life and Times.²

Weybright had grown up near Key’s Maryland home and was well-versed in the lore surrounding him and his family. Judge Delaplaine’s more solid account ignores most of these myths; Delaplaine also sorted out, and delved into, the complex legal career of Francis Scott Key, which spanned over forty years.

It is regrettable that neither biographer chose to cite his sources in detail (with footnotes or endnotes). One longs to know, for instance, where Weybright learned the anecdote of twelve-year-old Francis Scott Key riding horseback all the way from Annapolis to his home at Pipe Creek, a distance of some seventy miles, or the source of Delaplaine’s (and Weybright’s) dramatic accounts of how Key’s grandmother, Ann Arnold, lost her sight. A few of the sources they mentioned have vanished, including four personal letters of Key’s reproduced in Delaplaine’s biography. Another is the poetry album of Key’s beloved sibling, Ann. (It was donated to the Taney-Key Museum when it opened in Frederick, Maryland, in the 1930s.) Its loss remains a mystery, as does the disappearance of Francis Scott Key’s house in Georgetown DC shortly after the Second World War.

Most striking about both biographers was their discomfort with Key’s deep piety. Weybright (an agnostic) could not resist the occasional jab at Key’s sanctimoniousness. Indeed, one is left wondering just what Weybright admired about Key, who represented upper-class Maryland mediocrity, was mildly boring, and whose versifying was not really that capable. His opinion is in stark contrast to how Key’s contemporaries viewed him and his talents.

Delaplaine (a practicing Episcopalian, like Key) gives the reader the impression that Key’s notable flaw was his religiosity. As this supposed flaw was the blood and marrow of Key’s adult life and thought, it became the source of Delaplaine’s unflattering judgments of Key: He was steeped in superstition. And this explains why at times he was a man of faltering courage … His faith failed him when he needed it most … it was the unseen that he [Key] feared. When any unfavorable events came to pass, he cringed in terror …³ Considering the many unfavorable events of Key’s life, cringing must have turned him into a hunchback.

Delaplaine’s disdain for Key’s faith in an irascible Sovereign and God of Wrath, and for some of his other Calvinistic religious beliefs, runs aground against Key’s religious poetry: here as nowhere else does he display his inmost feelings for his beloved and loving Master. Clearly, by the 1930s, there was a sea change, or at least the beginnings of one, in the mentality of Americans of which Weybright and Delaplaine were but two exponents—a shifting away from that which was a source of inspiration for the American revolutionary, the republican, and the abolitionist of Key’s generation and earlier. Francis Scott Key had already become somewhat of a foreigner.

Citations, Punctuation, and Other Matters

Quotations in the text are cited at the end, in a list that follows Notes & Citations.

Punctuation in pre-Civil War times was quite different from what it is today. Eliminated here are the many dashes (often used as periods), unless they represented commas, and the obsolete capitalizations. Dates are modernized, e.g., March 31 instead of 31. March.

Spellings in most instances are modernized: Phoebe rather than Febe, Frankie instead of Frankey; Higginbotham rather than Higinbotham; also, Georgetown rather than George Town. As Frederick Town and Frederick were both current in the late eighteenth century, this author, from Part 3 onward, used the more modern Frederick.

Key’s poems cited in this biography derive from Poems of the Late Francis Scott Key (1857). Excluded are poems attributed to Key, but not included in Poems or in Ellen (Key) Blunt’s 1855 notebook. Exceptions, however, are: On a Young Lady’s Going into a Shower Bath and Allegory.

Evangelical and low church are used interchangeably, as this author detected little meaningful difference between them. FSK, a low churchman, believed wholeheartedly in the primacy and inerrancy (but not literalness) of Scripture, man’s innate sinfulness, and salvation by faith alone.

PART I

The Settlers

My father came to America 1721 and my mother in 1722.

(Child’s handwriting on a slip of paper)

I

Late eighteenth-century America, when Francis Scott Key came into the world, seems like a primitive, distant place. Yet his forefathers in America would have been impressed, if not amazed, at the towns, roads, and industries visible all the way into the back country of western Maryland, where he grew up. His father’s graceful dwelling, between Big and Little Pipe Creeks, was not situated on any major waterway. Fifty years earlier, it would have been an unthinkable spot to establish a home and a farm. But by 1779, the year of Francis Scott’s birth, the network of roads made it possible to convey construction material, farm implements, and mail to these remote parts.

Major crossroads intersected in Taney Town (pronounced TAWNY-town), leading south to Frederick Town, a boomtown; westward to the Allegheny Mountains; eastward to Westminster and the deep-water port of Baltimore Town; and northward, five miles distant, to the Mason-Dixon Line. Four taverns in the village served as inns, mail and stagecoach stops. In contrast to its sleepy counterpart today, there was constant traffic of animals, vehicles, pedestrians, and, in 1779, soldiers and officers bound for or returning from battle. One of them was Militia Captain John Ross Key, age twenty-five when his only son, Francis, was born. The infant’s mother, Ann Phoebe, was one of six Miss Charltons, daughters of tavern keeper Arthur Charlton of Frederick Town, fifteen miles down the Frederick Town Road, today’s rural highway 194.

Although it was still the eighteenth century, the infant’s American roots stretched into the remote past. Both father and mother, grandfathers and grandmothers, were American-born and raised. John Ross Key bore the names of his English ancestors on his father’s and mother’s sides. His wife’s American lineage was so remote that nearly all memory of her earliest ancestor in America was lost. Patient genealogists have determined that he was Henry (Henrie) Charlton, nineteen years old when he arrived on these shores in 1623 aboard the vessel George. He must have been a man of means and education, a gentleman, since his family possessed its own coat of arms. Exactly where young Henry’s vessel took him is unknown, but from there, he proceeded directly over the bay and settled in Virginia.

At the time, there existed only one other English colony in North America, semistarving Plymouth in New England. By contrast, Virginia was prospering and growing rapidly. By 1623, a new settler in Virginia was automatically granted fifty acres of land and an additional fifty acres for each person whose passage he paid for.

The Virginia climate and soil were ideal for growing a new export crop, tobacco. Europeans were long familiar with this weed; some even smoked it. The wild tobacco plant was difficult to grow in quantity, however, until settler John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, cultivated a superior strain of it. Anyone willing to suffer the backbreaking toil to grow tobacco could make a fortune, a fact not lost on young Henry Charlton.

No sooner did Henry arrive than all trace of him vanishes. He must have married, for the names Henry and Edward (perhaps a son of his) persisted down through succeeding generations of Charltons. By the time the family trail picks up again a century later, they had come down in the world and were humble farmers in Chester County, Pennsylvania.

II

Less remote in time were Philip Key and John Ross, the great-grandfathers of Francis Scott Key. The similarities between the two men are certainly striking: they were born in England in the same year (1696), were gentlemen from well-to-do families, and emigrated to America within a year of each other. Neither knew the other until they had settled in Maryland.

In 1633, the Ark and the Dove deposited the first weary settlers in the new colony of Maryland astride the Chesapeake Bay. Eighty-five years later, having surmounted many a crisis, the colony thrived. In the fall of 1719, twenty-three-year-old Philip Key, accompanied by his younger brother, Henry, boarded the Minerva and left the coastal town of Plymouth for Maryland. Before setting sail, Philip and his brother had hauled aboard their farm animals and tools, as well as six precious family portraits. They intended to settle permanently in the colony. In fact, they were expected.

A land deed of 1692 recorded the name of Philip Key’s great-uncle, Henry Key, among the first Keys to arrive in America in the late 17th century.

This was four years before Philip’s birth in Covent Garden, so it is unlikely he ever laid eyes on this distant relation. Thanks to some judicious scheming on the part of his well-connected parents in London, Philip Key was awarded a land grant. With his law training at the Temple behind him, along with his lands, only good health was needed for him and his brother to make their fortunes in America.

The brothers’ long, tedious voyage came to an end when the Minerva entered Chesapeake Bay waters to rest in Annapolis, in what must have been late December 1719 or early 1720. Philip and Henry immediately boarded another craft for the short journey to Charles County, where they met their kin, who helped them adjust to their strange new world. Within a few months, the brothers had recuperated enough to face yet another watery journey, this time down to St. Mary’s County, where Philip’s land grant was located and where they, the travel-weary pilgrims, meant to settle down.

Philip’s land grant, awarded earlier by the absentee owner of Maryland, the Lord Baltimore, lay along the banks of the scenic Wicomico River. Seeing it for the first time, he might well have had a rude awakening. His social status, coat of arms, and elite education would avail him little as he faced taming a wilderness and building a home. Any indentured servant, released from his seven-year bondage and with his newly acquired fifty acres, had an equal chance of success. As Philip would come to learn, not a few of the owners of the impressive manors dotting the shores and riverbanks of the county had started out as indentured servants.

To Philip’s great sorrow, Henry died not long afterward. It was all too common for new settlers, rich and poor, to fall victim to debilitating fevers. Henry’s young widow, Elizabeth, soon remarried, yet she remained friends with Philip, who remembered her in his last will. As for him, he was destined to survive many such sorrows. The years to come confirmed Philip Key to be a man of energy and initiative, character and ability, a builder of Maryland. Yet for the next few years, nothing is heard of him. Meanwhile, John Ross, the maternal great-grandfather of Francis Scott Key, arrived in Annapolis a year after Philip Key.

III

John Ross was twenty-four years old when he embarked on his hazardous ocean voyage. He went alone, with no relations in the New World to welcome and guide him. His status-conscious in-laws had pulled strings to get him a coveted official post in Annapolis, the colonial capital.

Only a few months before he set sail, Ross married Alicia Arnold in St. James Church, Westminster. She planned to join him after he procured his appointment and settled in—a year at most. Unlike Philip Key, we know nothing of Ross’s voyage or sailing vessel or whether he hauled livestock and farm implements aboard. He did bring along some family portraits, as well as the indispensable family coat of arms and crest.

John Ross, too, was in for a rude awakening. No government post awaited him when he arrived, perhaps only the promise of one. Other young men, residing longer than he in Maryland, were waiting their turn to nibble on the fat of government employment. Nearly every gentleman, like Ross—provided he was a Protestant—pined for government patronage as a supplement to tobacco farming. Hence, Ross’s separation from his bride stretched out to more than two years, far longer than their married life together.

Ross bided his time in the provincial capital. A young man of means, he could afford to take the time to explore his new environment and, most important, cultivate friends. Every inch of this colorful capital on the banks of the Severn River, serenely flowing into the Chesapeake Bay,⁴ became familiar to him and Alicia. In fifty years, the city would sparkle as America’s cultural capital, its streets adorned with splendid town houses. In the early 1720s, however, Annapolis was a village of no more than forty wooden houses crowding the waterfront. Dominating the landscape were St. Anne’s Church and the domed capitol or State House, the town’s only brick buildings. All avenues in Annapolis, as yet rude and unpaved, led to either Publick Circle (soon to be called State Circle) or to Church Circle.

Annapolis may have been a crude pioneer town, but it was well-governed by an elected mayor and board of aldermen, a city council, and a recorder (city attorney), no different from any English town. The harbor dominated commercial life—warehouses lined its wharves, bulging with tobacco for export. Where the Naval Academy now stands, a shipyard built or repaired seaworthy vessels. The owners of these warehouses and ships were the wealthy elite—the Catholic and Protestant Carrolls, the Dulanys, and the Bladens, who also owned most of the lots in town—rich Londoners owning the remainder. From one of them, Ross rented a house with a small garden within walking distance of the bustling riverfront. It would do until he could realize his dream of owning his own country estate with outbuildings, servants’ quarters, and lush flower gardens descending to the river.

Originally, the colony of Maryland was intended as a haven for dissenting Protestants as well as Catholics, who were oppressed in England. By 1715, however, the Protestant majority in the General Assembly, which included the Anglicans, proceeded to disenfranchise Catholics, to close down their churches and to forbid the construction of new ones. Private, at home worship went undisturbed, however, and there were no impediments to Catholics becoming rich.

By the time settlers Philip Key and John Ross arrived, the colony was a tranquil, prosperous place. And despite the previous century’s bloody religious conflicts, the province had grown rapidly. A colonial census in 1715 revealed a population of 40,700 adult white males (females were excluded!) and 9,500 blacks, only eighty-three years after Maryland’s founding. For this growing population, food was cheap and abundant. Newly arrived settlers and visitors alike marveled at the abundance of crabs swimming just below the surface of bay and inlet waters. The surrounding woods were home to herds of wild pigs and flocks of canvass-backed ducks (a local delicacy). Every man and boy hunted and fished. Every farm had its orchards, and farmers in growing numbers were switching from tobacco to the less back-breaking cultivation of wheat.

At last, John Ross’s long wait ended sometime in December of 1723, when a civil service appointment—as royal examiner general—came through for him, after it was vacated by a man named Gresham. It is unclear whether he received a fixed salary or was paid in fees. The office, moreover, was for life and even hereditary. For Ross, it was the start of a successful career in the patronage-driven royal civil service in Maryland. Evidently, he knew how to please and impress the right people. It was high time for twenty-three-year-old Alicia Ross to come home and join her husband in America.

IV

St. Mary’s County, at the southern tip of Maryland, was now home to Philip Key. In April 1721, he was accepted at the bar of St. Mary’s County, and was soon arguing cases. In 1725, a man named Charles Ashcom left a bequest to Philip Key and to his young son Richard Ward Key. So a few years after arriving in Maryland, Philip Key had wed and was already a father.

Despite his land grant, Philip was not yet lord of his own manor. He may even have been living with his new in-laws in their nearby palatial home of Hillilee, since four of his seven children were born there. His young wife, Susanna Barton Gardiner, descended from old American stock. Her father, John Gardiner, and even her grandfather had been born and raised in this country and had done well for themselves as tobacco growers and merchants, despite the fact that they were unswerving Catholics.

By the time Susanna was born in 1705, hardship lay far behind the Gardiner family. She and her sister, Elizabeth, and their two brothers lived a privileged life, with imported goods from Europe arriving in the family’s private dock and servants at their beck and call.

Hillilee was only one of many plantations in picturesque St. Mary’s County, a peninsula jutting into the Chesapeake Bay. To this day, the county is lush, well-watered, and heavily wooded. Here, earlier than elsewhere in Maryland, slave labor began replacing the short-term labor of indentured servants. And with labor in such short supply, Philip Key, too, began acquiring slaves—dozens of them. In time, he even compiled an inventory, which has survived the centuries, Acct. of What Negroes it has pleased God to bless me with … Philip knew every one of his slaves by name, including their children, and presumably had them baptized. In his will, he doled them out to his surviving children and grandchildren.

There is no reason to doubt that love, rather than fortune, had prompted Philip to marry Susanna. From what is known of Philip Key and his male progeny and descendants, the Key men made good husbands. They were every mother’s dream of a son: mild-mannered, kind, and unselfish. It speaks volumes for a man to add in his last will, as did Philip Key, that great tenderness [is] to be used by executors in demanding payment for my mortgages. Not only did the Catholic Gardiners consent to a mixed marriage, they embraced Philip as one of their own. He lived with them, and he and his young bride, nine years his junior (seventeen or eighteen when she married), had a happy marriage—the norm within the Key clan.

The first ten years of their long union were strenuous and busy for both husband and wife—he because he was forging a successful career (and soon, constructing his own estate) and she because of continuous child-bearing. Only five years after arriving in Maryland, the thirty-two-year-old Philip Key was elected to the General Assembly in Annapolis (the first of his many terms). He also had the honor of being appointed one of the commissioners who were planning a new county seat with its own courthouse, near Hillilee, to be named Leonard Town. As a delegate for his district (and as a practicing lawyer), Philip may well have had something to do with bringing the seat of justice so conveniently close to his home.

In colonial Maryland, during that Age of Enlightenment, it was not unheard of to establish a town by government fiat (despite the lack of popular demand for a town) in the reasonable belief that if you offer them the lots, the people will come. As a commissioner, Philip assisted in purchasing the land for the town, fifty acres, and subdividing them into eighty town lots, one of which he promptly bought. Yet Leonard Town, located on a navigable estuary, never realized the high hopes of its founders. Nearly three centuries later, Leonardtown remains the county seat, an aging city with a population of fewer than 3000 (which nonetheless is host to a drug-and-alcohol rehab center).

With his career on the upswing, a happy marriage, and his land grant, Philip Key was poised to begin the construction of his dream home, a stately manor house overlooking the Wicomico River, which he named Bushwood Lodge. After it was built, he never left Bushwood for long and died there at the age of sixty-eight.

V

No sooner did John Ross’s appointment as examiner general come through for him, than his wife Alicia made plans to join him. Early in the twentieth century, Alicia’s descendant, McHenry Howard, would exhaustively trace her family roots. We know, for instance, that Alicia’s mother, Ann, died in 1703, several weeks after giving birth to her son Michael, when Alicia was only three; their father, Michael Arnold, a wealthy London merchant, never remarried. Alicia grew up living a pampered life in the bosom of a warm extended family. She wore fashionable clothes and jewelry, and led a life of leisure. Nor did she marry as young as the norm, between fifteen and seventeen, but waited until she was twenty. And she married for love. This girl of superficial education and frivolous pursuits must have known on her wedding day that marriage would entail giving up all that was dear to her for an uncertain life in America. A few months later, her young husband departed England for good, no doubt expecting their separation to be a year at most. Instead, it lasted over two years, a harsh test of a young couple’s devotion to each other.

Now it was this brave young woman’s turn to board the vessel that would take her away from her family and friends forever. The ship’s name is unknown, as are any details of this first great adventure of her life. The delay in her travel may have been related to her not sailing alone, but with a friend and companion, almost a relative, the governor of Maryland’s mother, a Mrs. Calvert. The Arnolds were kin to the aristocratic, wealthy Calvert family, and both the younger and the older woman were no doubt glad of each other’s company. Had a local newspaper existed at the time, surely the arrival in Annapolis of the governor’s mother would have been noted.

Years later, one of Alicia’s young daughters wrote, on a scrap of paper, perhaps as an exercise, My father came to America 1721 and my mother in 1722. Yet it is improbable that Alicia arrived in 1722. In a letter dated August 18, 1724, Alicia’s great-aunt thanked her for her two letters written before you was saild. Benedict Leonard Calvert, the future governor of Maryland, also recorded that Mrs. Ross was preparing to leave for America at the end of that month, September 1723.

How could Alicia have forgotten the year she came to America? Perhaps the many stressful experiences of her life since then had overwhelmed the memory of her coming to these shores.

VI

Not long after she arrived in Annapolis, Alicia fell gravely ill, the norm for new arrivals. She was one of the lucky ones and recovered. For the next twelve years (or thereabouts), this born-and-bred Londoner would reside in a modest frame house with a yard, no doubt a rental, in a wee town that was dirty even by the standards of the day.

Alicia soon was writing back home that this was a pleasant country, though she was unused to so much wilderness. And wilderness was only a stone’s throw from the city gate—for the city had one, to discourage both wild animals and cows. When writing to loved ones, she may have put on a brave face, for we know, from hints in her only surviving letter, that she was having a rough time adjusting to her new life. … I was bron in a country ware I was not used to so much trouble and new none till I came here …

In the weeks and months ahead, Alicia poured her heart out in writing to her great-aunt in London, Helen Sprat, the woman who may have raised her. Helen Sprat’s few extant letters to Alicia are full of advice, concern, helpfulness, and good cheer. Despite their wretched grammar and spelling (for even well-to-do Englishwomen were scantily educated), they must have soothed and consoled Alicia’s homesick heart, and she in turn lovingly preserved them.

Great-Aunt Sprat was much concerned for her niece’s spiritual welfare and promised to send her a Bible, which I begg you will read constantly … Surprisingly, this was an article that neither Alicia nor her husband had thought to bring with them. Aunt Sprat’s Bible, when it arrived, was one of the great, leather-bound tomes of the day, and destined to survive the centuries. Its inside cover would be filled with dates of family milestones. Yet, to this good aunt, a Bible was not enough. She was sending along, too, a book about fasting which I desire you to read[,] and keep strictly to the church fasts that the people there may not think us such monsters as they generally do (perhaps referring to Protestant dissenters; the Rosses were Anglicans). Fasting, a spiritual exercise discarded by Anglicans over time, did not, as Aunt Sprat hoped, assuage hard feelings against the Established Church. Many years later, Alicia, too, admonished her daughter to keep the great fast or abstinence which our church directs before Easter and not to mind my dear people that laugh at you for doing so ….

Two years after leaving England, Alicia’s irreplaceable Aunt Sprat died, she who had known Alicia all her life—but not before bequeathing to her great-niece some of her best clothing (new smocks, also cloaks, aprons, petticoats, and more), also some furniture and plate. One can hardly imagine an aged person today bequeathing her clothing to her twenty-something niece to wear. Clearly, they were costly items, as, no doubt, was the furniture (and china). One imagines these pieces—described as a cabinet, a chest of drawers, and a box with china—being hauled aboard ship to make the long voyage to America, and Alicia Ross welcoming these fine pieces, and plate, as reminders of the homeland she would never see again.

In the absence of kin, friends had to be a substitute. And these Alicia and John Ross found at St. Anne’s Church, a short walk from their home. Constructed in the previous century, St. Anne’s was the only church in the province built of brick, a costly material that had to be imported from England. The church was T-shaped, its belfry crowned by an improbable golden ball—rather than a cross. (This was so as not to offend the town’s Puritan majority, which viewed crosses as idols.)

Over the years, St. Anne’s was to be the couple’s, in particular Alicia’s, home away from home, a beacon and a refuge, where she met women much like herself. She wrote home about them. While her letters are lost, there is a reference to her friends in a letter from her cousin Elizabeth in 1732: I am glad to here [sic] you have so many gay & agreeable ladys … A loss of even one of them was keenly felt. What was true for Alicia was no less so for her husband, whose closest friends were parishioners of St. Anne’s.

In 1728, John Ross quite likely crossed paths with Philip Key in church. Philip was representing his county in the assembly that year and attended St. Anne’s regularly. It was far too soon for these ancestors of Francis Scott Key to foresee the marriage of Ann Arnold Ross and Francis Key, their respective children.

Mrs. Colvert [Calvert] tould you had a girle, wrote Alicia’s cousin Elizabeth on March 14, 1730. She had obviously no recent news of the Rosses. In fact, this girle was already two and a half years old, and Alicia was now expecting her second child.

For someone who yearned for family as much as did Alicia, she was condemned to waiting year after year for a child of her own. Nearly four years after her arrival in America, in the seventh year of her marriage, Alicia gave birth, on October 9, 1727, to the daughter referred to in her cousin’s letter. She promptly noted this birth in her great-aunt’s Bible. Alicia imparted her long-dead mother’s name to the infant, Ann (to which she added her own maiden name, Arnold). This child was to become the beloved grandmother of Francis Scott Key.⁵ Three years later, again in the month of October, daughter Elizabeth was born. No doubt Alicia would have been glad to have a large family; instead, she had to wait six more years to give birth to her third and last child, Jane Alicia, born when her mother was already thirty-six years old.

They were still living in their rental in town when, in 1730, John Ross’s career was capped by a prestigious, lifetime appointment as clerk to the governor’s council. He could retain his two other well-paid, lifetime civil service appointments. Right around this time, he engaged a well-known artist of the day, Gustavus Hesselius, to do his and his wife’s portraits.

In an era when having one’s portrait done called for dressing up, Alicia instead wore a plain gown and no jewelry. Beneath her delicate features, Hesselius captured the pensive eyes and somber expression that bespoke a person who was either not lighthearted by nature, or who had suffered much.

VII

By the early 1730s, Philip Key was a busy lawyer and a representative of St. Mary’s County in faraway Annapolis. Distance proved no obstacle to overseeing the construction of his new estate, Bushwood Lodge, overlooking the romantic Wicomico River.

There is no doubt that it was an impressive place. Bushwood Lodge is known to have had a parlor beautifully paneled with floor-to-ceiling inlaid mirrors. Architects being nonexistent in St. Mary’s County, a talented indentured servant may have been put in charge of designing the house.

Bushwood Lodge, not having survived the ages, was completed in or about 1730. The following year, Philip’s fruitful wife, Susanna, gave birth to her son Francis, her fifth child. The exact date of the birth of this grandfather of Francis Scott Key is unknown, there being no church in the vicinity to record it. Preceding him were four brothers—Richard Ward, Thomas, Philip Barton, and their brother John.

The two years following Francis’s birth were a break for Susanna, leading one to surmise that she became pregnant after weaning each child. Hence in 1733 was born Edmund, the sixth son, and finally, this time, nine years later, came into the world a sister, named after her mother, Susanna. This great-aunt of Francis Scott Key’s, whom he must have known well, was fated to survive her parents and all six of her brothers.

Judging from his surviving personal letters, Philip must have been a tender father. Even when his three youngest sons were grown men, he referred to them as Tomy, Edy, and Frankey, and he provided generously for the widows of sons Richard Ward and John. Generosity seemed ingrained in him. Philip donated some of his own land to erect, at last, an Anglican church (in a neighborhood that was largely Catholic). Christ Church, in the hamlet of Chaptico, was founded in 1736, a small, squarish edifice that has remained an active parish to this day.

Tradition has it that the rector would not begin the Sunday service until Philip Key arrived. But did his wife, Susanna, arrive with him? When Philip’s son Edmund was eventually sworn in as Maryland’s attorney general, long after his mother died, a record of the day listed him as Edmund Key (Prot., mother, Cath.). Clearly, she remained Catholic, though all of her children grew up Anglican. That she would have attended church with her husband, therefore, is unlikely. For Philip Key, donating his own land for a new church, supervising its building, and remaining its chief benefactor were indications that religion was, for him, more than a mere formality.

Philip’s civil service career was, like John Ross’s, on the upswing, and like him, Philip climbed the bureaucratic ladder as far as it would take him. In 1740, he was rewarded with the prestigious appointment of county clerk, a lifetime office that could be passed on to a son. His appointment paved the way for other, even more lucrative posts later on. All told, it is surprising that the patronage-driven civil service worked as well as it did, given the many opportunities for corruption and nepotism on the part of civil servants.

For nine years after the birth of their sixth son, Edmund, in 1733, Philip and Susanna stopped having children. For her, it must have been a welcome respite. In this time, they accumulated many personal possessions, costly plate, innumerable silver teapots and coffeepots, and silverware emblazoned with the Key crest—a griffin holding a key in its beak. There was also a silver tankard that Philip may have brought with him from England and family portraits. At this time artist Gustavus Hesselius also painted portraits of Philip and his wife. (These paintings, too, would come down to Francis Scott Key’s family, but what became of them is unknown.) Other personal property were slaves, although Philip preferred to call them negroes. Shortly before he died, Philip compiled a list of all forty-two of them on his plantation of Bushwood and recorded their ages.

In 1742, disaster struck at the heart of Philip’s existence. Thirty-seven-year-old Susanna died, in all likelihood, while giving birth to their daughter.

Philip had a vault constructed for her remains, located in the cemetery behind Christ Church. Many years later, he expressed his wish to lie in the same vault: That the coffin of my late deceased wife be put upon mine … He christened his infant daughter Susanna Gardiner, in memory of her mother. Philip’s life, hitherto brimming with activity, appeared to grind to a halt. Two years after this tragedy, he resigned his county clerkship in favor of his firstborn, Richard Ward; although appointed that year to an even more prestigious position, as high sheriff of his county, Philip resigned this, too, in favor of his son, Philip Barton. He grieved alone at Bushwood Lodge, his consolation his children, and in particular, his motherless daughter.

VIII

In contrast to the illustrious Philip Key, the whereabouts, and destinies, of Henry Charlton’s descendants are far harder to establish.

The 1730s found two of them, that is, Henry and his brother Thomas, living humble lives as yeomen farmers in Pennsylvania. The wife of Thomas Charlton, Alice Usher, was illiterate, another sign of the Charltons’ loss of status over the years. This couple, maternal forebears of Francis Scott Key, had eleven children born to them in their home in Londonderry, Chester County. They tilled their own land, acreage that had been sold, piecemeal, from the vast estate belonging to William Penn’s daughter, Letitia. Here Thomas died, leaving his widow with at least five dependent daughters.

Two of Thomas and Alice’s sons, John and Arthur (future grandfather of Francis Scott Key), resettled in Maryland. John became a prosperous farmer in Prince George’s County, though he had not long to live. As to Arthur, a marriage record dated July 14, 1742, indicates that at age twenty, he married Eleanor Harrison in All Saints Church in Frederick Town, in western Maryland. Most likely, the newlyweds settled down to farm.

A few years later, Arthur’s widowed mother, Alice, together with four of her surviving daughters, left Londonderry, Pennsylvania, for Frederick Town. Far from becoming a burden on her son, this energetic lady, though she could only sign her name with an X, leased property, opened a tavern (which was also an inn), and ran it successfully with her son and daughters for many years. Located on the southwest corner of Patrick and Market Streets, in the heart of town, the tavern was a civic and social hub, a stagecoach stop, a place where the county court might convene until a new courthouse was erected. And there Alice died in 1761, after bequeathing her prosperous business to her son and business partner, Arthur.

IX

For John and Alicia, the 1730s were good—if not golden—years. Though not as fruitful a wife as Susanna Key, Alicia also became a mother, putting an end to any lingering feelings of loneliness, and finally, some twelve years after arriving in America, she was mistress of her own manor. In 1736, John Ross purchased hundreds of acres of land in Anne Arundel County, including 438-acre Bear Ridge, overlooking Round Bay, a beautiful spot to erect his future home. By the standards of the day, it was a modest estate; situated nearby was Dulany Manor, consisting of twenty thousand acres.

Their two-story house, lacking wings to balance it architecturally, was solidly built of stone and brick. Close by lay outbuildings and slave quarters, for this young couple, too, followed the practice of their new country, rather than the old, and purchased slaves. Although their descendants would deplore the evil of slavery, it is doubtful that the two of them ever did.

Bear Ridge, a distance of four miles from Annapolis by water (seven miles over land), is to this day a secluded, heavily wooded property, much shrunken in acreage. Gone are the sloping gardens, carefully tended to afford a breathtaking panorama of Round Bay, so lovely that the estate was renamed Belle Voir (shortened to Belvoir) after the death of John Ross. The original house, enlarged over time, still stands. In good weather, the Rosses would have sailed to and from Annapolis from their own dock and received their goods in the same way, including the many items they purchased directly from England.

Here John and Alicia’s daughters grew up, and it is possible that it was here that Alicia gave birth to her third and last child, Jane Alicia, in 1736, the year in which they moved to Bear Ridge. Her birth was duly noted in the family Bible. It was a happy, close-knit family. John Ross had a solid career in the royal civil service and enjoyed a good income. In the absence of banks, however, he had to borrow money from wealthy Annapolitans to make large purchases, especially land. And John Ross acquired land with the same alacrity as did Philip Key. Both of them would turn their attention westward.

In 1732, wealthy Doctor Charles Carroll of Annapolis, who had arrived in America from Ireland a few years before John Ross, asked Ross to join him on an interesting trip to the Monocacy Valley in western Maryland. The two would oversee the surveying of thousands of acres of land that Carroll had purchased recently. Charles Carroll had no medical license and probably no medical degree, and, along with his wife, had made an abrupt conversion to Anglicanism aboard ship, before disembarking in Annapolis. This Dr. Carroll was already a wealthy tobacco merchant and parishioner of St. Anne’s when he and his wife met the Rosses. They became fast friends.

Only a good friend would agree to such a strenuous journey into western Maryland, home to scattered tribes of peaceful Indians and itinerant Jesuit missionaries, none of whom spoke much English. But the trip was necessary. Back in England, the Lord Proprietor of Maryland was advertising western Maryland on the European continent, hoping to attract farmers. War-torn Germany, in particular the Protestant Palatinate (the Rhineland), proved the most receptive. Soon commenced the great migration of tens of thousands of Germans to scenic western Maryland, blessed with abundant waterways and fertile, reddish soil. Frederick County would fill up with these industrious, pious Germans, who grew wheat instead of tobacco, owned no slaves, and were averse to strong drink.

Ross liked what he saw and started purchasing land—and more land. At his death, over seven thousand acres, all the land that he owned, was located in the Monocacy Valley in Frederick County.

X

Back home in Bear Ridge, Alicia was raising her daughters, which included educating them. In the absence of any schools for girls, they may have had a tutor. One suspects that since they were girls, Alicia herself took charge of their instruction, for they were hardly more literate than she. To her credit, she loved to read, I would have you read as much as your time will let you[,] other books as well as religious books for nothing will improve you so much as reading …, she declared. She strongly recommended a favorite of hers, The Ladies Calling, a book which today would be consigned to the obscurity of a Christian book. Yet when it was first published in the seventeenth century and for nearly a century thereafter, The Ladies Calling was phenomenally successful, undergoing dozens of reprintings.

Despite their mother’s advice, neither of Alicia’s daughters gravitated to reading. Alicia, being the bookworm in the family (her husband preferred magazines), ordered her reading matter, including her husband’s favorite subscriptions, from distant London. A close friend of her and her husband, John Gibson, willingly became their agent after he left Maryland in 1736. … the two books I bought at second hand … sav’d you at least two shillings …, he informed Dear Madam in 1741, after receiving her purchase orders for books, costume jewelry, and a tea chest for her daughters.

As the years passed, correspondence from old friends and relatives in England all but ceased. John Gibson, former Annapolitan and ex-civil servant, a bachelor and a sensitive friend, became the Rosses, especially Alicia’s, faithful correspondent. He in turn encouraged the homesick Alicia to write often, even complimenting her on her long, entertaining letters, which may have alluded to her comically bad writing. (Her husband’s sole surviving letter is a model of impeccable English.)

In May of 1745, there was a strange hiatus in purchase orders. Gibson took it in stride. I beg the young ladies will accept my bow and service. I am sorry I am not favoured with any commands from your family this year. Illness would claim the life of the Rosses’ youngest, Jane Alicia, before she was ten years old. Could this devastating blow have befallen the little family at this time? Rather than bury their child in the churchyard of St. Anne’s, John and Alicia laid her to rest on their own property, a half mile from their manor. It marked the beginning of the Ross family graveyard.

Unlike most historic family cemeteries, which have been bulldozed, built over, and eradicated, the Ross graveyard has survived intact. It must have comforted the deeply bereaved mother to have her child lie so near. In a stark note penned by Alicia at the end of her life, she indicated … how I desire to be buryd to be layd by my little girl …

By the end of that year, in 1745, purchase orders from the Rosses once more resumed, but not for long. The following spring brought another hiatus. By then, Alicia Ross, forty-five years old, wished to speak to her two teenage daughters about her impending death. But it was difficult, for they would always break down in tears. So she decided to write a testamentary letter instead. It was addressed to her eldest, Ann Arnold, with a note appended at the end for her husband—as to how she wished him to dispose of her personal belongings—and with a promise to write a separate letter to her younger daughter, Elizabeth. But she died before she could write it.

Despite her lamentable writing skills, Alicia’s personal testament is a moving epistle, possessing the clarity of one who knows she is about to die. In it, she expressed her great love and concern for her young daughters. She warned them: … you must take great care how you behave for men will deceve woman if they can … (Certainly a sentiment many women still share, although the link between a woman’s conduct and how men treat her, is all but lost.) … be sure you love and honour your father and do everything you can to please him and … take his advice in all things. (Unimaginable advice for any mother, to her liberated daughter, in the present age.) Alicia had come to understand the truth of things. … I beg above all things you will take care and serve God let nothing my dear girl make you neglect your duty morning and evening and be sure not to neglect going to church as often as you can and to receive the Holy Sacrament … my child this life is nothing to that which will be for ever and ever …

Alicia closed with a postscript to her husband regarding the disposal of her personal effects. I desire my dear Mr Ross let all my best cloaths and linnen be divided between my two daughters … my watch I give Nancy [daughter Ann’s nickname] my two snuff boxes my medals and rings to be divided between them both. Alicia also owned a diamond buckle—perhaps used on a belt? This buckle she desired to be sent home, to England, and there to be made into hansome rings and given, once again, to her daughters. Some of my old cloathes and linnen and my old stays [corsets] and shoes were to go to my white maid. Her black female household slaves, Chloe, Moll, Beck, Nell, and Jenny, were to divide the rest of her old things among themselves. Finally, I beg mr Ross will give our old friend Gibson a ring, in remembrance of their friendship.

What ailed Alicia? Her brief obituary in the Maryland Gazette mentioned only that she died after a very short illness; no doubt the short illness was the tail end of her disease. Was it malaria (chronic and widespread in Maryland and Virginia)? Or consumption? (Also chronic, and she would have known her end was near.) Hastening her end may have been the recent trauma of her youngest child’s death.

According to her obituary, this stoic, devout woman died on a Wednesday, in the heat of a summer’s day, on the July 9, 1746; no doubt her wish to lie buried beside her little daughter was fulfilled. Time has effaced her tombstone.

This crushing blow, coming so soon after the death of the youngest child, reduced the little family to sisters Ann Arnold (Nancy), who was eighteen, and Elizabeth (Betsy), who was fifteen, and their fifty-year-old father. Possibly beset by feelings of guilt, John Ross never remarried. The sisters, alone in the world except for their father, had no kin to reach out to or to console them in turn. From then on, John Ross seemed to live only for his girls, as he referred to them, even when they were grown women. They in turn adored their father, and there is no reason to doubt that they followed their mother’s wish, to turn to him for advice in all things.

Ann Arnold and Elizabeth, as the custom was in that remote era, lived with their parent until they married. A surviving portrait of Ann Arnold in her midtwenties, perhaps on the eve of her wedding, was painted by visiting English artist John Wollaston. She stands erect, her slim figure garbed in a shimmering, pale-yellow silk gown, richly trimmed with lace; a mass of curls encircles a face that was not in the least pretty. Unlike the portrait of her pensive mother, Ann Arnold can barely repress a smile and positively exudes good humor. Not until she turned twenty-five, considered to be an old maid, did she become the bride of Francis Key, Philip Key’s fifth son.

XI

Serving in the General Assembly in the year that Alicia died, Philip Key was well aware of her passing. By that time, he and John Ross were well-acquainted; both were now sad widowers.

Philip, however, had befriended a Mrs. Humphreys, a close friend of Alicia’s. How much romantic love played in Philip’s decision to marry her, the former Theodosia Lawrence, will never be known. Her late husband, Reverend John Humphreys, had been the rector of St. Anne’s for less than a decade. Fortune again favored Philip in the choice of a wife. All of his children found in her a warm and loving stepmother. Philip, of course, would provide generously for her in his will.

Having done well in his second marriage as in his first, Philip’s life resumed its busy course. He was reelected to the assembly and served there until 1754, the year he was appointed a judge on the county court in Leonard Town, a position he held until the end of his life. The county court, in colonial Maryland, was the seat of local government, making Philip not merely a judge, but an active participant in local affairs.

Philip’s judgeship was no obstacle to his appointment, in 1756, as high sheriff of St. Mary’s County. No government post was more sought after than that of sheriff, nor more lucrative, offering a salary of several hundred pounds a year. As judge and high sheriff, Philip Key had reached the pinnacle of his career. Yet at the heels of these honors came deep personal tragedy and loss.

Philip would do for his six sons what his own parents had done for him: provide them with an elite education and land of their own. He sent Philip Barton and eventually Edmund to London to study law at the Temple and John to Edinburgh, where the world’s most prestigious school of medicine was situated. What Richard, Thomas, and Francis studied is unknown, but as to the last, the future grandfather of Francis Scott Key, he had a head for business and inherited the bulk of his father’s landed estate. In the case of son Philip Barton, his father went so far as to hand over to him his county clerkship (in 1744) and his sheriff’s appointment (his first, in 1745). Evidently, no sacrifice on behalf of his children was too great for this devoted father. When his sons John and Philip Barton died within a year of each other, his grief must have been overwhelming.

The premature death, in 1755, of twenty-five-year-old John Key, a doctor with a young family and small estate of his own, resulted from poisoning. Two slaves were blamed, one belonging to Philip Barton, the other, to his father. They were caught and executed by hanging. Whether they were truly guilty or merely scapegoats may never be established. John’s older brother, Philip Barton, died a year later of natural causes.

Judge Philip Key spent his remaining years with his wife, Theodosia, at Bushwood Lodge, following with interest his sons’ careers, cheered at the birth of each grandchild, and aware that his strength was ebbing.

XII

In 1756, the year of his son Philip Barton’s death, Philip Key bequeathed to his son Francis (Frankey) the bulk of his real estate in western Maryland: tract of land in Frederick Co. called Epping Forest, 1020 acres [,] and tract called Tora Rubea 2798 acres … Philip Key had purchased this huge property, together with two much smaller tracts, back in 1753, land that he may never have seen, relying, most likely, on a land agent. However, none of the Keys moved to Frederick County until after the death of Philip Key, when the western frontier had been pushed further westward, beyond the Alleghenies.

Philip seems to have been well-pleased with his son Francis. Virtually nothing is known about this fifth son, not even the exact date of his birth. (Most likely, he was born in 1730.) His recorded life begins, it seems, on his wedding day, December 12, 1752. Yet even this date is inexact. The British colonies did not adopt the Gregorian calendar (i.e., the new style in use today) until the following year. So the actual wedding date was closer to December first.

As reported in the Maryland Gazette on December 14 (old style), 1752, Tuesday last Mr. Francis Key, of St. Mary’s County, was married to Miss Arnold Ross, eldest daughter of John Ross, Esq., of this city, a well accomplish’d and deserving young lady, with a pretty fortune.

Readers may have snickered at the marriage of Francis to Arnold, which would hardly be the case today. Unhappily, there are no details about the wedding, the guests, the reception, or the weather. Did Philip Key come up for the wedding? Protestant weddings almost always took place in the home of the bride, hence, out at Bear Ridge. In that case, the two settlers, Philip Key and John Ross, of the same age, background, and with similar personal histories and careers, were finally united as one family. This made it easier for them to borrow money from each other: at his death, Philip Key owed John Ross 367 pounds sterling and nine shillings, a small fortune.

It would not have escaped people’s notice that the bride, rather than the groom, was older, she being twenty-five and her new husband, twenty-one. How the two met is unknown but not a mystery. Philip Key and his sons were often in Annapolis, and knew John Ross well.

A portrait of Francis Key, painted by John Wollaston (who also did the portrait of Ann Arnold) around the time of his wedding in 1752, depicts a tallish, well-dressed, and chubby young man with fashionably powdered hair, and not at all handsome. Unlike his father and younger brother Edmund, Francis evinced little interest in forging a political career.

John Ross surely liked and trusted his new son-in-law. Shortly after the couple wed, he began transferring hundreds of acres of land in Anne Arundel County to their ownership. Philip Key, too, was anxious to help out, and readily gave his son fifteen slaves, a much-needed labor force.

John Ross’s ulterior motive may have been to keep his daughter near him. As her first son, and possibly her second son, were born in Annapolis, her father may have given the couple the use of his house in town, which he purchased when Alicia was still living. Situated on Duke of Gloucester Street, it was a stone’s throw from St. Anne’s Church, and a few minutes’ walk to the waterfront. Francis Key meanwhile was following in his father’s footsteps (as well as his father-in-law’s), forging a career in the royal civil