Also it's not accurate to say the British got everything they wanted from the war. The Americans got the British to stop the impressment and harassment at sea, which is why the Americans declared the war to begin with. I think the British would have preferred not having the war at all in the first place since they had bigger issues with their own war with France.
American historians think that the British complied with the meager settlement of Ghent because of the battle of New Orleans.
We did get a nifty song out of it.
I don't remember if they taught the White House was burnt down in my history books.
I remember reading a article much later about someone from the US Patent Office begging the British Army not to burn down the Patent Office due to all inventions and history recorded there. They didn't, and that is my strongest recollection.
And a burned down White House
In fact, it's the reason the capital of Canada is Ottawa today. When the Province of Canada was established, it was deemed that York (which is now Toronto) was way too vulnerable since a US army could get there from Buffalo in less than a day and ships from Rochester even faster. By contrast, Ottawa (then called Bytown) was surrounded by swamps, further inland, well away from any US city, but still had access to rivers so it wasn't excessively isolated.
That and the fact that it was halfway between Toronto/Kingston (the English cities) and Montreal/Quebec City (the French cities) also made it a good political compromise.
So without that war, Toronto would probably be the Canadian capital and Ottawa would be a glorified rest spot between Toronto and Montreal.
Luckily during the war, a volcano (Laki, Iceland) threw Europe & much of the British empire (including India & Africa) into a multiyear drought, causing one of the coldest/longest winters in the USA.
About 3 months after the eruption formal negotiations to end the war began.
No eruption, possibly no USA but historical accounts I've seen rarely mention the role of mother nature.
"The system erupted violently over an eight-month period between June 1783 and February 1784 from the Laki fissure and the adjoining volcano Grímsvötn, pouring out an estimated 42 billion tons or 14 km3 (3.4 cu mi) of basalt lava and clouds of poisonous hydrofluoric acid and sulfur dioxide compounds that contaminated the soil, leading to the death of over 50% of Iceland's livestock population, and the destruction of the vast majority of all crops. This led to a famine which then killed approximately 25% of the island's human population.[4] The lava flows also destroyed 20 villages.
The Laki eruption and its aftermath caused a drop in global temperatures, as 120 million tons of sulfur dioxide was spewed into the Northern Hemisphere. This caused crop failures in Europe and may have caused droughts in North Africa and India."
It goes on, in relation to the UK...
"Inhaling sulfur dioxide gas causes victims to choke as their internal soft tissue swells – the gas reacts with the moisture in lungs and produces sulfurous acid.[20] The local death rate in Chartres was up by 5% during August and September, with more than 40 dead. In Great Britain, the east of England was most affected. The records show that the additional deaths were among outdoor workers; the death rate in Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire and the east coast was perhaps two or three times the normal rate. It has been estimated that 23,000 British people died from the poisoning.[21]"
> they too got everything they went into the war looking for
Did they even try trading beforehand? Going to war when there isn't a conflict of interests in the first place is particularly stupid.
I'd say there was a major conflict of interest there.
That said, it wasn't taught as a loss that we should learn any lesson from. Much like the Revolutionary War, it was just "oh heck, those crazy Brits vs the indomitable American spirit again!" If we weren't good allies of the British today, I wonder what the teaching would be like...