higan 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.

My next question is, what did you know about the Mexican War of
1846-1847, when you came out of school? The names of our victories,
I presume, and of Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott; and possibly the
treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, whereby Mexico ceded to us the whole
of Texas, New Mexico, and Upper California, and we paid her fifteen
millions. No doubt you know that Santa Anna, the Mexican General, had
a wooden leg. Well, there is more to know than that, and I found it out
much later. I found out that General Grant, who had fought with
credit as a lieutenant in the Mexican War, briefly summarized it as
"iniquitous." I gradually, through my reading as a man, learned the
truth about the Mexican War which had not been taught me as a boy--that
in that war we bullied a weaker power, that we made her our victim, that
the whole discreditable business had the extension of slavery at the
bottom of it, and that more Americans were against it than had been
against the War of 1812. But how many Americans ever learn these things?
Do not most of them, upon leaving school, leave history also behind
them, an