Why didn’t you put this in Breaking News?
Is it possible that an article can be so interesting and so stupid at the same time. The article leads with the arrest of Key’s grandson without explaining in any detail what he was arrested for. Then it meanders around with some very interesting information about the song, Key’s faith, his grandson’s faith and his grandson’s friendship with John Randolph. None of that information illuminates the lead paragraph about the arrest.
At the end we learn that he was arrested for criticizing Lincoln, was never charged and spent some time in prison. But it never tells us what he said about Lincoln. Very frustrating.
I think I am just cranky this morning, but if the story is about Key’s faith, the writer should have led with that and not with the arrest of the grandson, when no effort is going to be made to tell that story. This story needs an editor.
The other president from the Illinois legislature?
I wonder when the secessions will start. January? April perhaps?
Okay, here they claim that he criticized Lincoln’s decision to ‘invade the South’.
“One victim of Lincoln’s suppression of Northern newspapers was Francis Key Howard of Baltimore, the grandson of Francis Scott Key. Howard was imprisoned in Fort McHenry, the very spot where his grandfather composed “The Star Spangled Banner,” after the newspaper he edited criticized Lincoln’s decision to invade the South without the consent of Congress...”
http://www.321gold.com/editorials/mathid/mathid081308.html
I visited Fort McHenry on the way home from CPAC earlier this year. Civil War-era guns are still in place at the fort should anyone dare to attack Baltimore.
You should warn readers that this thread may offend some Lincoln worshippers.
Francis Scott Key’s son, Phillip Barton Key was shot and killed in 1859 by Dan Sickles (later Civil War General who lost his leg at Gettysburg). Key was a U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Sickles was a member of Congress (D-NY). Sickles, quite the ladies man himself, had learned that Key was having a very public affair with his young wife. Sickles shot and killed Key in Lafayette Park, which is just across the street from the White House, and just outside the Sickles home. Sickles was arrested and tried for murder. His attorney Edwin M. Stanton (later Sec. of War under Lincoln), successfully presented the defense of temporary insanity, and Sickles was acquitted. It was the first time in American history that a temporary insanity defense had been used, and Sickles was the first man in America to be acquitted under it. Sickles forgave his wife, but from what I understand, he forced her to write a letter of apology to him, which he insisted be published by the Washington press.