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(The Root) — Though President Abraham Lincoln ended slavery with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, slaves in Texas had no knowledge of their freedom until two and a half years later. On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston and declared the end of the Civil War, with General Granger reading aloud a special decree that ordered the freeing of some 200,000 slaves in the state.
The story, as most of us are told, is that Francis Scott Key was a prisoner on a British ship during the War of 1812 and wrote this poem while watching the American troops battle back the invading British in Baltimore.
The spirit of the song sometime lies with the writer of it. To understand the full “Star-Spangled Banner” story, you have to understand the author. Key was an aristocrat and city prosecutor in Washington, D.C. He was, like most enlightened men at the time, not against slavery; he just thought that since blacks were mentally inferior, masters should treat them with more Christian kindness. He supported sending free blacks (not slaves) back to Africa and, with a few exceptions, was about as pro-slavery, anti-black and anti-abolitionist as you could get at the time.
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
My question is, who were the "free" that F.S. Key was talking about when he wrote this song? Since the slaves in this song weren't free, then it couldn't of been written for the slaves. I'll say it time and time again, why not just write a new song? I guess we would have to wait until we are actually free as a people?
Some Images of Prison Slavery
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Some may claim that we are in a new day and no longer are in the slavery mind. Then I say, that stupid folks hate correction. Proverbs 12:1 ....but anyone who hates a rebuke is stupid.
Supposedly slavery was ended but then more prisons got built so the fields could be kept up.
You do the math!
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