A Fictional Interview with Major George Armistead at Fort McHenry
TRAVEL IN TIME WITH DAN | Fort McHenry, Baltimore, Maryland — September 24, 1814
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following is a fictional historical interview. Major George Armistead (1780–1818) commanded the roughly 1,000-man garrison that withstood a nearly 25-hour British bombardment of Fort McHenry on September 13–14, 1814. His real official report to Secretary of War James Monroe, written on this date, opens by noting that “a severe indisposition, the effect of great fatigue and exposure” had delayed his account… those are his own documented words. One detail from that night is well established but rarely the center of the story: Armistead knew the fort’s powder magazine was not actually bomb-proof, and had its barrels moved and stored under the rear walls before the attack. During the bombardment, a British shell crashed through the magazine’s roof and failed to explode. Had it gone off with the powder still inside, the fort likely would have been destroyed. Armistead died only three years later, at age thirty-eight, still in command at this fort; the historian Benson Lossing later wrote that the strain of that bombardment had left him with a weakened heart. The specific reflections below, including his private accounting of that decision, are imagined — his real report to Monroe is procedural and does not dwell on his own state of mind.
SETTING: A small office inside Fort McHenry, ten days after the battle. Armistead sits at a writing table, the finished letter to Secretary Monroe drying beside him, his color still poor.
Dan: Major, you look like a man who hasn’t slept properly since the thirteenth.
Armistead: I have not, if I’m honest with you, and I doubt I look better than I feel. I have just finished the account Secretary Monroe will read, and even setting the words down again has cost me more than I expected it to. A man doesn’t walk away from twenty-five hours of that unchanged, whatever the newspapers decide to say about him afterward.
Dan: The newspapers are calling it a triumph of standing firm under fire… the men at their guns, the flag going up at dawn. Is that how you’d tell it?
Armistead: It is true, and it is also not the whole of it. The men did stand firm, and I will not take one ounce of credit from them for that. But if you want the part of that night that actually kept me awake afterward, it isn’t the part anyone is writing songs about.
Dan: What part is that?
Armistead: The magazine. I knew before that fleet ever appeared at the mouth of the Patapsco that our powder magazine was not built to withstand a direct hit… it was never constructed for that kind of siege. I said nothing about it publicly. I simply had the barrels moved out and placed under the rear walls, quietly, before a single shot was fired. Most of the men loading those guns never knew the difference. There was no ceremony in it. It was simply the kind of decision a commander makes and then never speaks of again, one way or the other.
Dan: And then a shell hit the magazine roof during the bombardment.
Armistead: It did. I watched it happen, and for the span of a single breath I believed I had just watched this entire garrison and this fort cease to exist. It did not explode. Whether that is providence or simple luck of the fuse, I could not tell you, and I have turned the question over more times than I can count since. What I can tell you is that if that powder had still been stored where it was originally meant to sit, providence would have had a great deal more work to do that night.
Dan: Does anyone else here know how close that was?
Armistead: A few of the officers, yes. Most of the men do not, and I see no particular reason to tell them now. They already carried enough fear through that night without adding a catastrophe that, in the end, did not happen. I have found that the decisions which matter most in a command are very often the ones nobody ever claps for, because if you’ve done your job correctly, no one ever finds out there was anything to clap for in the first place.
Dan: That seems like a strange kind of leadership to live with… the credit going to the flag going up, while the thing that may have actually saved everyone stays quiet in a letter to Monroe that barely mentions it.
Armistead: I have made my peace with that trade a long time ago. I did not take this command hoping to be remembered. I took it hoping that whatever needed doing would get done, seen or unseen, celebrated or not. If history chooses to remember the flag and forget the magazine, the fort is still standing either way, and that was the entire object of the exercise.
Dan: Thank you for your time today, Major. Please get some rest.
Armistead: I intend to, as soon as this letter is in the post. A commander’s paperwork does not know that his heart is tired, unfortunately.
George Armistead’s official report reached Secretary Monroe within days, and he was soon brevetted to lieutenant colonel for his defense of the fort. He remained in command at Fort McHenry until his death in 1818, at age thirty-eight, having never fully recovered from the physical toll of that September night. The garrison flag he ordered… deliberately oversized so the British could see it clearly from a distance… went on to inspire the poem that became the national anthem. The magazine decision that may have actually kept that flag standing did not make it into a single verse. The leadership lesson from this small office at Fort McHenry is one easy to miss entirely if you only read the popular version of the story: the most consequential decisions a leader makes are frequently the ones no one ever finds out about, precisely because they worked. A leader who needs the credit to feel the decision was worth making is solving for the wrong outcome. The object was never the applause. It was the fort still standing in the morning.
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