In the Introduction to The Scarlet Letter, "The Custom-House," in what war did General Miller fight?

In
's novel , the General
is a minor character who appears in the Introduction
called "The Custom
House." This Introduction, originally written by Hawthorne as an
independent
and unrelated short story, sets the frame from which the story of ,and
Reverendis
told. General Miller is the head
customs collector at Salem Custom
House, a government installation for
collecting customs duties on items coming into America
through the Salem
seaport. He enters the story because the narrator of "The Custom
House," who
is presumed to be Nathaniel Hawthorne himself speaking as the narrator, takes
a
position at there and thus meets that General and the other colorful
employees, who all shave
either inherited their rather low-key work positions
in customs or been awarded their positions
as retirement rewards for other
services rendered to the government.

Typical
of this
trend, General Miller was awarded his position for
his
service in and record as a war hero of the War of
1812. At the time
that the narrator meets him, he has served
twenty years at the Salem Custom House:

[T]he Collector, our gallant old General, who, after his brilliant

military service, subsequently to which he had ruled over a wild Western territory, had
come
hither, twenty years before, to spend the decline of his varied and
honourable life.

This Introduction is
relevant to the story of The Scarlet
Letter because it
is at the Custom House, or "Custom-House" as the
Introduction puts it, that
the narrator finds the package that tells the story of Hester Prynne.
The
General is important to the story because it can be argued that Hawthorne uses him
to
foreshadow both the great weight that an error can have on a conscience
imbued with keen
integrity and the ability of some, like Hester and Pearl, to
survive great plights:

His integrity
was perfect; it was a law of nature with him, rather
than a choice or a
principle; .... A stain on his conscience, ... would trouble such a man ...

though to a far greater degree ... I had met with a person thoroughly adapted to the
situation
which he held.