What does the reference to hirelings and slave in the Star Spangled Banner means?

Answer 1

There is a controversy is regarding the use of hireling and slave as derision toward African Americans in general. Francis Scott Key wrote the song after the defeat of the Battle of Ft McHenry in 1814, during the War of 1812. The British had recruited slaves as mercenaries to fight during 1812. The British had promised the slaves their freedom in return for fighting. Francis Scott Key never wrote more about his choice of these words, and so it is unreliable to assign any particular meaning to them - more than 200 years later. (To me, it seems like it wasn't their fight, yet they died bravely in a terrible war.)

The third stanza, rarely sung reads:
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.