It did
not seem patriotic to him to dodge the fact that lack of wisdom at
Washington had let our Army run down before the war, so that our
attempts to invade Canada were failures, and that we suffered the
disgrace of having Washington itself captured and burned by the
enemy.
There was a great deal to be proud of in what our Navy did, and in
the Army's victory in the Battle of New Orleans, and these things
Roosevelt described with the pride of every good American. But he
had no use for the old-fashioned kind of history, which pretends
that all the bravery is on one side. He did his best to get at the
truth, and he knew that the English and Canadians had fought
bravely and well, and so he said just that. Where our troops or
our ships failed it was not through lack of courage, but because
they were badly led, and what was worse, since it was so
unnecessary, because the Government at Washington had lost the
battle in advance by neglecting to prepare.
Before he was twenty-four, Roosevelt was so well-informed in the
history of this period that he was later asked to write the
chapter dealing with the War of 1812 in a history of the British
Navy.
At his graduation from Harvard he stood twenty-second in a class
of one hundred and seventy. This caused him to be elected to the
Phi Beta Kappa, the society of scholars. Before he graduated he
became engaged to be married to Miss Alice Lee of Chestnut Hill,
Massachusetts.
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