When you finished school, what idea had you about the War of 1812? I will tell you what mine was. I thought we had gone to war because England was stopping American ships and taking American sailors out of them for her own service. I could refer to Perry’s victory on Lake Erie and Jackson’s smashing of the British at New Orleans; the name of the frigate Constitution sent thrills through me. And we had pounded old John Bull and sent him to the right about a second time! Such was my glorious idea, and there it stopped. Did you know much more than that about it when your schooling was done? Did you know that our reasons for declaring war against Great Britain in 1812 were not so strong as they had been three and four years earlier? That during those years England had moderated her arrogance, was ready to moderate further, had placated us for her brutal performance concerning the Chesapeake, wanted peace; while we, who had been nearly unanimous for war, and with a fuller purse in 1808, were now, by our own congressional fuddling and messing, without any adequate army, and so divided in counsel that only one northern state was wholly in favor of war? Did you know that our General Hull began by invading Canada from Detroit and surrendered his whole army without firing a shot? That the British overran Michigan and parts of Ohio, and western New York, while we retreated disgracefully? That though we shone in victories of single combat on the sea and showed the English that we too knew how to sail and fight on the waves as hardily as Britannia (we won eleven out of thirteen of the frigate and sloop actions), nevertheless she caught us or blocked us up, and rioted unchecked along our coasts? You probably did know that the British burned Washington, and you accordingly hated them for this barbarous vandalism--but did you know that we had burned Toronto a year earlier?
I left school knowing none of this--it wasn’t in my school book, and I learned it in mature years with amazement. I then learned also that England, while she was fighting with us, had her hands full fighting Bonaparte, that her war with us was a sideshow, and that this was uncommonly lucky for us--as lucky quite as those ships from France under Admiral de Grasse, without whose help Washington could never have caught Cornwallis and compelled his surrender at Yorktown, October 19, 1781. Did you know that there were more French soldiers and sailors than Americans at Yorktown? Is it well to keep these things from the young? I have not done with the War of 1812. There is a political aspect of it that I shall later touch upon--something that my school books never mentioned.