It was the attacks connected with the controversy about the "Naval History" that more than anything else embittered Cooper's feelings. He had striven hard to write a full and trustworthy account of the achievements of his country upon the sea. Because he had refused to pervert what he deemed the truth to the gratification of private spite, he had been assailed with a malignity that had hardly stopped short of any species of misrepresentation. Rarely has devotion to the right met with a worse return. The reward of untiring industry, of patriotic zeal, and of conscientious examination of evidence, was little else than calumny and abuse. He felt so keenly the treatment he had received that he regretted having ever written the "Naval History" at all. In (p. 233) a published letter of the early part of 1843 he expressed himself on the matter in words that come clearly from the depths of a wounded spirit. "Were the manuscript of what has been printed," he wrote, "now lying before me unpublished, I certainly should throw it into the fire as an act of prudence to myself and of justice to my children." In his triumphant reply to Burges, Duer, and Mackenzie, while he showed the haughty disdain he felt for the popular clamor which had condemned him without knowledge, he did not seek to hide the bitterness it had caused. "This controversy," he said, "was not of my seeking; for years have I rested under the imputations that these persons have brought against me, and I now strike a blow in behalf of truth, not from any deference to a public opinion that in my opinion has not honesty enough to feel much interest in the exposure of duplicity and artifice, but that my children may point to the facts with just pride that they had a father who dared to stem popular prejudice in order to write truth."