27. The Man Who Wrote “America”

The beautiful hymn, “America,” our national anthem, which is loved and sung all over our land, and all over the world wherever the Stars and Stripes is honored, was composed by Dr. Samuel Francis Smith. He was born in Boston, Mass., October 21, 1808. In childhood he lived not far from the Old North Church. When he looked up at the tower in which Paul Revere hung the lantern, perhaps there came into his heart that love for his country which years afterward he put into his song. One holiday when his grandmother was coming on a visit to his home, he stood at the window, expecting she would bring him a present. When she came without a present the little fellow said solemnly, “All days are alike!” He was so obedient that when he went out to play he would ask, “How many slides may I take, mother?” And when he had taken just the number his mother told him, he would come in.

When Samuel was eight years old a pet cat belonging to one of the neighbors died, and was buried in the garden. The next morning the owners of the cat found on its grave a stick with a piece of paper fastened to it, and on the paper some verses. This was his first poem. At twelve he wrote another, and after that, many more. He went to what is now the Eliot School in North Bennett Street, Boston, where he won the gold medal. From there he went to the Boston Latin School, and there, also, he won the medal. Then to Harvard, and to the Andover Theological Seminary. He graduated from Harvard in 1829, in the class with Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who sang of him in his poem, “The Boys”:

Doctor Holmes wrote further: “The name of Dr. Samuel F. Smith will be honored by every school child in the land when I have been forgotten one hundred years. He wrote ‘My Country.’ If he had said ‘Our Country,’ the hymn would not have been remembered, but that ‘My’ was a master-stroke. Every one who sings it at once feels a personal ownership in his native land.”

During the senior year at Andover Seminary, in 1832, W. C. Woodridge, a friend of young Smith, brought from Germany a book of patriotic songs and said, “Please make me a poetical translation.” As this young senior and poet was turning over the leaves of the song-book he came across the air of an easy patriotic tune which pleased him. As he was translating “God Save the King,” taken with the words, he thought how fine it would be to have an American patriotic anthem. Under the impulse of the moment he picked up a scrap of waste paper and his quill pen and began to write, and in half an hour the four verses of the poem, “America,” were written as they stand to-day. Later his friend Lowell Mason saw the poem, liked it, and put it into his music-book, and it has floated around the world. Doctor Smith said he heard it sung above the earth, on Pike’s Peak, and under the earth, in the Cave of the Winds, and on the earth in a great many lands. It was first sung publicly at a Sunday-school celebration, in the Park Street Church, Boston, and since, in days of peace and prosperity, through the crisis of the Civil War, and on almost all public occasions, it has gradually won recognition as our national anthem, without the ceremonial of adoption in any historic sense. Public-school teachers find it most helpful in awakening a love for the new country among the mixed races of child immigrants who must be molded into patriotic American citizens. In association with Lowell Mason, Doctor Smith wrote the first song-book for boys and girls ever published in the United States. It is remarkable that the national anthems of America, of England, and of Prussia should have the same tune. Henry Carey is often credited with this tune. The English, however, did not invent it. The Germans got it from the Norsemen, who had heard it sung by Finns, who got it from Huns, who brought it from Asia. Something like it was sung by the Jews in the first temple, and it may have come from the Egyptians. It is a solemn and majestic strain, suitable to some of the Psalms of David: