Francis Scott Key: One of the anti-slavery movement's great villains
The history wars – the battle over how we teach our country’s past – are raging.
The United States is confronting the legacies of slavery as never before. This national reconsideration has been prompted by police killings of unarmed Black men and The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which reexamines the history of slavery in the U.S.
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And that is revealing some of the deepest contradictions in our history.
As a U.S. historian, I think few people embody those contradictions like the author of the country’s national anthem, Francis Scott Key.
Key’s complicated legacy
Like his idol Thomas Jefferson, Key – the man who wrote about the “land of the free” – was a slaveholder who opposed slavery in principle. He even viewed himself as an anti-slavery reformer.
But he also couldn’t fathom the idea of abolition. And the arc of his career as a Washington-area attorney reflects just how ingrained slavery was in early American life.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/francis-scott-key-one-anti-122225376.html
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for the link! 
