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