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Comment by hoofhearted | Hacker News Reader

Maryland resident as well. I believe you payed a few extra dollars for the commemorative license plate.

The war that is being advertised is the one where the British were a bit frustrated that we didn’t accept their ways, and they were coming back to take what was theirs. They rolled up to DC and burned everything except a few buildings. Legend has it that Madison and family left the White House so fast that when the British arrived, the food was still warm on the table.

The British then rolled up to Baltimore thinking it would be an easy capture just like D.C. was.

They were wrong, and we ended up causing them to pack up and leave in defeat.

The war is prestigious to Maryland because over 3,000 militia members from Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania successfully kept the worlds superpower at bay, saving Baltimore and probably the rest of the country.

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Unrelated to the license plates, but the war is remembered differently in Canada, in Britain, and by historians. I think Wikipedia has it right calling the war "indecisive". In Canada, the war is remembered as the time we trounced the Yankees and burned the White House. The Brits don't think much of the war at all. Historians say its much more complicated of course, but the key facts to remember are (despite what the Canadians say) the troops that burned the White House were British regulars, not Canadian militia, and that the militia was highly unreliable and had significant levels of desertions (despite the national pride now). It's also good to keep in mind that Britain was in the midst of a total war with Napoleonic France and that the Americas were a sideshow. The US distinguished itself early with the frigate battles, like the Constitution vs Java, but then there was the Shannon vs Chesapeake.

The high rate of desertions should be a point of pride, it was a dumb war.

It is embarrassing that the British Empire couldn’t achieve a full victory against what was, at the time, a regional power. It is embarrassing that the US couldn’t fend off a sideshow invasion. It is embarrassing the whole thing couldn’t have been sorted out diplomatically.

Nothing was accomplished by the war but a bunch of buildings burning down and some tens of thousands dying. The deserters look pretty good in retrospect.

> The Brits don't think much of the war at all.

I've never studied history, and especially have never studied it abroad, but I think I've just always assumed that nations who've lost wars don't generally spend a lot of time educating their students about them.

I'm sure there are exceptions to this - World Wars 1 and 2 seem too big to go missing from literature, for example, and perhaps this is my naive, too-literal interpretation of "history is written by the victors," but I'd just always expect losses to either be minimized, or be taught exclusively to vilify a persistent enemy.

Mostly just... the British have a LOT of history and so the stacked ranking of wars over the course of just the British Empire includes over a dozen more consequential wars than the War of 1812. The poor high school students have enough names and dates to remember!

The Vietnam war might be another exception.

it really is a shame we (the US) were not able to take all of the land that is now Canada...

Except for the Star Spangled Banner being written, it mostly isn't remembered at all in the US. The French and Indian War got more coverage in my US history class and that is a pre-revolution British/French war.

> I believe you payed a few extra dollars for the commemorative license plate.

I am absolutely 100% positive that I neither paid extra dollars for the War of 1812 commemorative license plate, nor was offered an option -- this was the "standard" plate in 2012, no other "standard" plate was available, this was what you got unless you wanted to pay for a "specialty" plate.

Perhaps in 2013-2016 it was different. Or perhaps if you already had a standard pre-2012 plate, you could pay to replace it with the commemorative one? But if you were getting new plates in 2012, you got this one as the default option. I am sure.

Other interesting historical facts about the War of 1812 include all the native indian nations who allied with Great Britain in the desperate futile hope that somehow they could stop their inexorable disposession and ethnic cleansing by the USA.

Indeed, it was the standard plate issued for several years (2010-2016). You could also pay a $20 fee to change from an existing plate to the 1812 commemorative one.

https://web.archive.org/web/20101128031616/http://starspangl...

Maybe they should have first checked with the other kind of Indians what it is like to live under the rule of Britain? :D

They referred to them as Indians because they resembled the people they had seen in India before.

> They referred to them as Indians because they resembled the people they had seen in India before.

No.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tribal-Nomenclature-America...

"The word Indian came to be used because Christopher Columbus repeatedly expressed the mistaken belief that he had reached the shores of South Asia. "

They referred to them as Indians because Christopher Columbus was a lousy navigator.

Everyone knew the world was round in the 15th century.

They had a good idea how far it was from Europe to the east coast of Asia going westwards.

They knew that an ocean going ship wouldn’t have enough provisions to make the journey.

Columbus thought the earth was far smaller and he would be able to make it. He was wrong. Fortunatly for him there was a large landmass in the way which meant he could get restock his provisions (water, food etc)

That was still in formation in 1812, but, yeah, I don't have any particular reason to think the native nations would have done better with a different outcome of the war of 1812, but I certainly understand why some nations figured it was worth a shot and they probably wouldn't do worse.

Anyway, I still don't want to advertise war on my license plate.

The natives in Canada probably didn't do much better in Canada between the war of 1812 and the Riel Rebellion, but it certainly helps now. British law said we couldn't settle the land without a treaty with the natives. This didn't really stop settlement but it does mean that some tribes have forced significant monetary settlements from the Canadian government. Some money for broken treaties, and some for settling without a treaty.

Good point. Canada just being generally a lot less populated by Europeans for whatever reasons than the USA (presumably in large part climate?) probably helped too, creating a context with slightly better outcomes.

But different legal regime under Great Britain -- and different position as colony of a European state vs independent "we're all we've got" -- does seem likely to be relevant, good call.

I suppose the best case for native nations in the War of 1812 would be that both USA and Great Britain get weakened and distracted from further colonization for as long as possible.

I can see how it might be chosen as the "standard" license plate for 2012 - it is the anniversary of The War of 1812, after all.

That's a pretty one-sided description of the War of 1812. The whole thing was a bit of a fiasco and an attempted land-grab of territories controlled by Native American nations allied to the British by hawkish Senators from border states who wanted to make a name for themselves by advocating for it. The war ended with the British agreeing to status quo ante-bellum, even though America started the war. The general upshot is just that the British-allied Native Americans were, by treaty, supposed to have their territorial integrity respected but the British didn't think it was worth the hassle to enforce those provisions so those Native Americans all got pushed aside.

It doesn't really have clear "winners" or "losers." Really more like Britain getting stung by a bee while it was in the middle of something (War with France) and finding that rather inconvenient, but successfully fending off the bee's (America's) attempt to take its house.

Well, what you describe does actually have clear winners and losers -- just not between the US vs GB. The settlers are the winners, and the natives are the losers.

I love mandatory glorification of this on my license plate. Advertising for a casino is just icing on the cake.

> Well, what you describe does actually have clear winners and losers -- just not between the US vs GB. The settlers are the winners, and the natives are the losers.

True. That is often disregarded in how we talk about nation-state competition.

The US declared war. They were pissed off about many things, but one of the more notable ones was that they were frustrated that the UK was supporting the sovereignty of Native American nations, which hindered the westward expansion that many people in the US viewed as their birthright.

The UK was actively making concessions to try and avoid war. The United States declared war anyway.

The UK then taking the fight to DC was absolutely fair game. People are allowed to fight back when you attack them.

The UK made concessions too late. By the time they decided to stop kidnapping* American sailors and forcing them to work in the British Navy, the war had already started.

*impressment is the word they used.

I can think of at least a dozen other undeveloped peoples who successfully kept the Brits, then the worlds superpower, at bay. Superpower or not, infantry was never the British forte. In my opinion, logistics was. But logistics wins wars, not battles.

It was also during the attack on Baltimore that Francis Scott Key wrote the words to the Star Spangled Banner, a point of pride for Maryland

> The war is prestigious to Maryland because over 3,000 militia members from Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania successfully kept the worlds superpower at bay, saving Baltimore and probably the rest of the country.

They didn't learn from it, because at the other end of the war, the British regulars were decisively handled by another ragtag group that they didn't think much of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_New_Orleans

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