Hurrah for Sharon Myers for calling our attention to America’s “forgotten war” (“Veterans of 1812 won’t fade into past,” June 11). The importance of that war in establishing respect for United States as a nation cannot be minimized.

American historian Benson J. Lossing (1813-1891) in the introduction to Lossing’s Pictorial Field Book of the War of 1812, published in 1868, writes that while the American Revolution gained our freedom from the authority of King George III and the British parliament, it did not gain our independence. The British continued to harass American ships and impress American sailors, against their will, into British service. The British obviously did not feel that the American Revolution was over and control of their colonies lost.

On June 18, 1812, President James Madison, with the support of the U.S. Congress, declared war on Great Britain — a “David and Goliath” conflict, to say the least. The war ended less than three years later, on February 18, 1815, with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent. The United States had at last gained its independence and the respect of the rest of the world.

Akron has connections to that war, namely Gen. Simon Perkins, the founder of Akron in 1825, who commanded troops in the construction of forts in Northwest Ohio after the fall of Detroit, and Dr. Eliakim Crosby, founder of North Akron in 1833, who lost his property in Canada as a result of his service as a physician to the U.S. forces. Samuel A. Lane, in his exhaustive history, Fifty Years and More of Akron and Summit County (1892), lists the names of 12 “Soldiers of the war of 1812 resting in several cemeteries of our city.”

Kudoes to Sharon Myers for keeping the memories alive and honoring those who sacrificed to ensure that the new United States of America could take its rightful place among the independent nations of the world.

Robert A. Dill

Stow