France. After Napoleon crowned himself as the French emperor and assumed dictatorial powers in 1803, Britain joined a coalition of royalist European states in opposing Napoleon's militarty ambitions for extending French rule throughout Europe. For the next several years, battles raged back and forth across the continent and on the high seas.
         America was pulled into the European conflict when Britain imposed blockades against maritime trade with France, stopping and impounding neutral ships, including American vessels. The growing harassment of American ships and disputes over other maritime issues brought the United States Congress to declare war on Great Britain on June 18, 1812. Although there was an unsuccessful American invasion of Canada and a few naval skirmishes along the Atlantic coast and on the Great Lakes, Great Britain's attention was largely focused on Europe and the ongoing war with Napoleonic France.
         In 1814, England and its European allies defeated Napoleon and banished him to the Mediterranean island of Elba. The British then focused the full force of their military might on the war with America, initiating a series of attacks on the new nations's major east coast cities. In the late summer of 1814 British troops sacked Washington, burned the Capitol and the President's mansion and forced President James Madison and his wife Dolly to flee before the city was captured. The fires in Washington could be seen 40 miles away in Baltimore, America's third largest city at the time and the next objective of the British forces. The British planned an assault that combined land troops moving toward Baltimore from Washington with the support and firepower of a large fleet lying offshore in Chesapeake Bay. Fort McHenry, guarding the entrance to Baltimore