Smithsonian, History Channel dis Baltimore, U.S. history

The original Star Bangled Banner is in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Enclosed in the climate-controlled laboratory, the restoration is expected to be completed this year.

That flag might well be in a British war museum, as a trophy of a British Army triumph, had it not been for “The Other Battle of Baltimore” – the Battle of North Point, which is unknown to most Americans.

The September 2004 edition of Smithsonian magazine, in an extensive article on Francis Scott Key, by Norman Gelb, (a London free-lancer), has the following as its sole reference to this enormously significant battle: “Maj. Gen. Robert Ross had been killed by a sniper en route to Baltimore.”

Nothing at all more about this land battle, which is virtually unknown to most Americans outside Maryland.

No mention of where Gen. Ross was killed – or by whom, or with whom he was marching.

From this Smithsonian magazine report, he could have been killed while on a solitary scouting mission.

In point of fact, which Smithsonian and the History Channel should surely have reported, Gen. Ross was killed by two young Baltimore boys, Daniel Wells and Henry McComas.

They were themselves killed in action after they got in close enough to draw perfect beads on the mounted Gen. Ross.

On Pratt Street in downtown Baltimore, there is a monument over the gravesite of these two boys.

Baltimore’s Mayor Martin O’Malley – who was in the History Channel’s “First Invasion: The War of 1812” – was asked for comment as to why this History Channel production altered the honored memory of these brave young boys to: “an anonymous (and adult) sniper.”

MAYOR O’MALLEY: “I was totally bothered and outraged. I forced the director to come with me to lay a wreath at Wells’ and McComas’ last Friday. History Channel wouldn’t let him re-edit more names into it. He tried.”

That morning, in 1814, at breakfast, at a local farmhouse, Gen. Ross, remembering the disastrous American loss at the Battle of Bladensburg and the British burning of Washington, had declared: “I don’t care if it rains militia. I’ll eat tonight in Baltimore, or I’ll eat in Hell!”

Gen. Ross had been leading troops of the world’s renowned British Army, who with the Prussians defeated Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo. With British Col. Arthur Brooke of the 44th Foot taking command, the British advanced to the juncture of North Point Road and what was then known as the Philadelphia Road. Here, they found blocking their triumphant entry into Baltimore, were 15,000 militia, well-armed and entrenched.

Col. Brooke recalled the determined stand of the Baltimore Brigade at Godly Wood, and the effectiveness of the city’s artillery. Moreover, when the Royal Artillery fired Congreve Rockets and bombs exploding into shrapnel, this militia did not run.

In 90 minutes of sharp fighting, and a series of British flanking with orderly American retreats, the British lost more than 300, but the United States lost nearly 200.

When His Majesty’s forces reached the second American line, with it’s 15,000 determined Americans, they decided on another line of attack: an amphibious assault on another front: Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

They believed this would surely fall, after the Royal Navy’s demolition of that harbor’s main defense, Fort McHenry.

Had the British Army not been stopped at North Point, they would have taken the city of Baltimore – and surely Ft. McHenry would have fallen.

What this Smithsonian article and the History Channel also failed to report was the superb leadership in organizing resistance in Baltimore, of one of Maryland’s greatest heroes of the Revolutionary War, Gen. – and Congressman, U.S. Sen., Gov. and Vice Presidential candidate – John Eager Howard.

The 40,000 residents of America’s third-largest city soon heard the news of what had happened at the disastrous U.S. defeat in Bladensburg. And if anyone doubted the word of the shattered militia men who began pouring into Baltimore, they could see evidence from their housetops For the sky lit up, that night of August 21, 1814, – with the fiery consequences of American defeat.

When there was an emergency meeting of the city’s Committee of Vigilance and Safety, a number of this committee earnestly suggested that the only way to save Baltimore from Washington’s fate would be to negotiate the city’s surrender to these invincible warriors of the world’s most powerful Army and Navy.

“Better-Redcoated-Than-Dead” ran the line of appeasement-reasoning, which has always afflicted parts of the United States. And they argued that (A) Given Bladensburg and (B) The enormous British fleet and army now heading back into the Chesapeake and toward Baltimore, resistance would be useless and bloody. Moreover, Adm. Cockburn, the notorious burner of American cities and towns, who had taken Napoleon to St. Helena, had repeatedly denounced Baltimore as “a nest of pirates.” So, any resistance meant a probability that prior to the torching of Baltimore, the admiral was, quite likely, to engage in a mass hanging, of all the Baltimore alleged pirates.

This peace-at-any price appeal might have prevailed, except for this reaction of one member of this Committee of Defense.

He was an old soldier of the Revolution, who was the hero of America’s victory at the Battle of Cowpens. He had been in the forefront of almost every major battle. He was among the officers of the renowned Maryland Line, who with the Marblehead boatsmen, saved the Continental Army from destruction at the catastrophic defeat on Long Island. He was with Gen. Washington in the frozen hell of Valley Forge. And when he was brought home, terribly wounded, from the Battle of Eutaw Springs, his commanding officer, Gen. Nathaniel Green, wrote that his courage and leadership, and the performance of his Maryland troops in bayonet charges, “exceeding anything I ever saw” so that he “deserved a statue, no less than Greek or Roman heroes.”

The people of Maryland responded by erecting his statue, along with statues to Washington and Lafayette, in Mt. Vernon Place. They also elected him, repeatedly to the Maryland General Assembly, to the U.S. House of Representatives, to the U.S. Senate, and, three times, as governor of Maryland.

So, when this man, John Eager Howard, stood to speak to this Committee of Vigilance and Safety, they all listened:

I have as much property at stake as most persons – and I have four sons in the field. But sooner would I see my sons weltering in their own blood, and my property reduced to ashes, than so far disgrace my country!

That utterly silenced the appeasers. The Committee voted to recruit an Old Guard, a near-regiment of senior citizens, to defend Baltimore from the British. And they unanimously elected Gen. Howard as its commanding officer.

This proved to be of utmost importance in saving the city. For Baltimore also had a younger and equally forceful statesman-soldier in Maj. Gen. Samuel Smith, a United States senator.

Smith was tough enough and wise enough to wrest command of the city’s defense away from the badly defeated Gen. Winder. And out of the British fleet’s successful blockade of all American ports, Smith inherited, as his subordinate officers, three superb U.S. Navy commodores: John Rodgers, David Porter and The Hero of Lake Erie, Oliver Hazard Perry.

Just as John Eager Howard’s epochal response to appeasers had resulted in successful resistance at North Point, there was, on the scene, another patriot of considerable courage and stature. He was Ft. McHenry’s commanding officer, Maj. George Armistead, Third United States Artillery. The previous year, knowing Baltimore might be attacked at any time, he called for production of a United States flag, that would, in his words: “Be so big that the British can’t possibly miss it!”

And Mary Pickersgill began work on just that – a flag that is 30 feet x 42 feet; and was destined to have a very special place in our nation’s posterity.