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ask.heather@mail.house.gov
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In Washington DC
442 Cannon House
Office Building
Washington, DC
20515
202-225-6316 Phone
202-225-4975 Fax |
In Albuquerque
20 First Plaza NW
Suite 603
Albuquerque, NM
87102
505-346-6781 Phone
505-346-6723 Fax |  |
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Congresswoman Heather Wilson, First Congressional District of New Mexico
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| The Banner Still Waves |
January 07, 2004 |
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Dear Friends,
On Saturday night at Tingley coliseum, they opened the hockey game against the Oklahoma City Blazers the way we open most sporting events. A young man with a beautiful baritone voice sang the Star Spangled Banner. The audience of die hard fans and families with kids enjoying a last night out before school starts again stood and joined in, the hockey players shifting from one skate to another down on the ice.
On the House side of the U.S. Capitol, in a spiral staircase just off the rotunda, someone once showed me marks in the stone that, it is said, were made by the British when they burned the Capitol in 1814. I must admit, I cannot distinguish those marks from ones made by careless vacuum cleaner wands. But when I hear that song, I often think of the man who wrote it and the twists of history that have brought us to this moment in time.
Having burned the Capitol and the White House, the British withdrew from the banks of the Potomac and their powerful Navy sailed up the Chesapeake to attack Baltimore -- one of our most important ports -- in September 1814. A young lawyer from Georgetown named Francis Scott Key went to the British to secure the release of a friend taken prisoner outside of Washington. He was successful in negotiating his friends release, but, because they had learned of the British plans to attack Baltimore, they were detained on board a truce ship until after the assault.
Fort McHenry occupies a prominent point of land protecting the entrance to Baltimore`s harbor. Key watched the bombardment of the fort from the British point of view, peering through the smoke in the light of the explosions to see whether the American flag still flew over the fort. As dawn came, Key saw the flag still flew and penned his now famous verses.
The defeat of the British at Baltimore was one of only a few American victories of consequence in the War of 1812. It could have quite easily gone the other way. Fort McHenry`s commander estimated later that 1,500 to 1,800 shells and rockets were fired at the fort in the attack that went on for some 25 hours. In the end, the British withdrew their fleet and sailed off to invade New Orleans in January 1815 where they were soundly defeated by Andrew Jackson`s frontier army before word arrived that the British and Americans had agreed to end the fighting.
History is a woven figure. The young men on the ice at Tingley and all of us waiting to watch the game are part of a continuing experiment in self-government that extends over 225 years. And the banner still waves.
Good to be home,
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