The Star-Spangled Banner has four verses, not that you’d know it from seeing any ball games. I have never heard verse 2, 3 or 4 sung in public. Verse 3 is especially interesting because it dumps all over that ‘band’ of dirty Redcoat bastards. It goes like this:
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.
John Trumbull, “The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton, January 3, 1777,” courtesy Yale University Art Gallery
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