The President’s Mansion received a hasty coat of white paint over its stone exterior to hide the black smoke marks, though the interior took years to restore; from this cover dates the new name “White House.”22 The paint job symbolized the country’s attitude perfectly. Americans reinterpreted the War of 1812 as a second war for independence, a vindication of their national identity rather than a revelation of its precariousness. “Seldom has a nation so successfully practiced self-induced amnesia!” the historian Bradford Perkins has commented.
