jjohnson
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Post by jjohnson on Mar 4, 2021 13:39:58 GMT
Just for the sake of discussion, let's say that Canada joined the USA during the Revolution, Quebec and Nova Scotia/St Johns Island/New Brunswick. Newfoundland remains loyal, however. At the end of the war, the US includes the 1783 area plus the St Lawrence watershed area to the north. Where to the United Empire Loyalists go? How long would the United Kingdom try to hold on to the Hudson Bay Territory?
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stevep
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Post by stevep on Mar 4, 2021 15:24:04 GMT
View AttachmentJust for the sake of discussion, let's say that Canada joined the USA during the Revolution, Quebec and Nova Scotia/St Johns Island/New Brunswick. Newfoundland remains loyal, however. At the end of the war, the US includes the 1783 area plus the St Lawrence watershed area to the north. Where to the United Empire Loyalists go? How long would the United Kingdom try to hold on to the Hudson Bay Territory?
That's probably the big issue, as some refuge would be needed for them. I suspect either some of the northern colonies, i.e. say Nova Scotia/New Brunswick or possibly say in the south with Georgia or Florida.
The other issue would be Quebec as it definitely wouldn't want to be part of the US. Assuming France is still aiding the revolution as much as OTL - fighting the bulk of the British forces, funding and arming the rebels etc - it might regain control of the region. In which case it might also seek to maintain southern Canada, i.e. the region between the Ohio and Mississippi, which was largely influenced by fur traders from Quebec. Probably couldn't hold it indefinitely, even if the revolution is somehow avoided but might complicate matters.
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oscssw
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Post by oscssw on Mar 4, 2021 17:17:35 GMT
View AttachmentJust for the sake of discussion, let's say that Canada joined the USA during the Revolution, Quebec and Nova Scotia/St Johns Island/New Brunswick. Newfoundland remains loyal, however. At the end of the war, the US includes the 1783 area plus the St Lawrence watershed area to the north. Where to the United Empire Loyalists go? How long would the United Kingdom try to hold on to the Hudson Bay Territory?
That's probably the big issue, as some refuge would be needed for them. I suspect either some of the northern colonies, i.e. say Nova Scotia/New Brunswick or possibly say in the south with Georgia or Florida.
The other issue would be Quebec as it definitely wouldn't want to be part of the US. Assuming France is still aiding the revolution as much as OTL - fighting the bulk of the British forces, funding and arming the rebels etc - it might regain control of the region. In which case it might also seek to maintain southern Canada, i.e. the region between the Ohio and Mississippi, which was largely influenced by fur traders from Quebec. Probably couldn't hold it indefinitely, even if the revolution is somehow avoided but might complicate matters.
Got to agree with Steve; we had to keep France happy.
That said, I have read that there was a strong faction among the Nova Scotian merchants to join our revolution. They even sent a delegation to Washington at Cambridge and he passed them along to the congress but nothing came of it. The total non-Indian population of Nova Scotia in 1775 was about 20,000 people, three-quarters came from Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. The few French and German were ambivalent while Irish immigrants actively assisted the rebels. Only a small percentage of Nova Scotians were Loyalists from England and Scotland. The "provincial" Governor Francis Legge expressed his concern in a letter to London-based colonial secretary Lord Dartmouth that residents with New England roots might raise arms and join the rebellion.
I wonder if those "Canadian" states would not be a better fit for the USA than the shotgun marriage of North and South?
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stevep
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Post by stevep on Mar 5, 2021 10:27:40 GMT
That's probably the big issue, as some refuge would be needed for them. I suspect either some of the northern colonies, i.e. say Nova Scotia/New Brunswick or possibly say in the south with Georgia or Florida.
The other issue would be Quebec as it definitely wouldn't want to be part of the US. Assuming France is still aiding the revolution as much as OTL - fighting the bulk of the British forces, funding and arming the rebels etc - it might regain control of the region. In which case it might also seek to maintain southern Canada, i.e. the region between the Ohio and Mississippi, which was largely influenced by fur traders from Quebec. Probably couldn't hold it indefinitely, even if the revolution is somehow avoided but might complicate matters.
Got to agree with Steve; we had to keep France happy.
That said, I have read that there was a strong faction among the Nova Scotian merchants to join our revolution. They even sent a delegation to Washington at Cambridge and he passed them along to the congress but nothing came of it. The total non-Indian population of Nova Scotia in 1775 was about 20,000 people, three-quarters came from Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. The few French and German were ambivalent while Irish immigrants actively assisted the rebels. Only a small percentage of Nova Scotians were Loyalists from England and Scotland. The "provincial" Governor Francis Legge expressed his concern in a letter to London-based colonial secretary Lord Dartmouth that residents with New England roots might raise arms and join the rebellion.
I wonder if those "Canadian" states would not be a better fit for the USA than the shotgun marriage of North and South?
If they joined a successful break-away of the northern states yes. It might mean a less united 'union' if the slave states feel their too outnumbered. Although IIRC virtually all the colonies/states had slavery at this point and I think New York was actually the one with the largest slave population at this stage so this might be less of an issue, at least initially. However assuming slavery dies out in the norther states as OTL you could see an earlier attempted break-away from the south. This might be even worse if say its Florida and an enlarged Georgia - thinking with its historical claims extending to the Mississippi - providing the refuge for the loyalists as the slavery faction would have lost some of its most important regions. Or possibly slavery dies a fairly quiet death in the US due to markedly less land for plantation slavery?
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jjohnson
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Post by jjohnson on Mar 23, 2021 2:26:44 GMT
I read a few places that there were rumblings in the 1790s that the southern states didn't want to be in a union with the north, aside from the Chisholm v Georgia (1794) ruling saying the states could be sued (aka are not sovereign states) being part of that. An early parting of ways after the purchase of Louisiana would be interesting, or at or around the War of 1812, if both of those still happen. Imagine a "Canada+New England" or a "Canada plus the northern states east of the Mississippi" nation.
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stevep
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Post by stevep on Mar 23, 2021 10:53:06 GMT
I read a few places that there were rumblings in the 1790s that the southern states didn't want to be in a union with the north, aside from the Chisholm v Georgia (1794) ruling saying the states could be sued (aka are not sovereign states) being part of that. An early parting of ways after the purchase of Louisiana would be interesting, or at or around the War of 1812, if both of those still happen. Imagine a "Canada+New England" or a "Canada plus the northern states east of the Mississippi" nation.
Well if Britain has lost all its possessions on the mainland then there's no incentive for a conflict as the US already has all the territory. Unless the south wants to make a bid for some of the Caribbean Islands, but then there's more French and Spanish islands than British. There would be the issue of Britain reclaiming British deserters - and picking up a few American born sailors occasionally - but then that was sorted out in 1812 anyway.
If it does occur Britain has a smaller base having only Newfoundland but then also only really needs to defend that and the Caribbean possessions. Commerce raiding would be an issue but then Britain frequently used convoys for the big stuff and depending on what the size of the USN is a blockade and counter attacks on US coastal and international shipping could be quite a deterrent.
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eurofed
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Post by eurofed on Mar 26, 2021 17:31:57 GMT
View AttachmentJust for the sake of discussion, let's say that Canada joined the USA during the Revolution, Quebec and Nova Scotia/St Johns Island/New Brunswick. Newfoundland remains loyal, however. At the end of the war, the US includes the 1783 area plus the St Lawrence watershed area to the north. Yay. For simplicity's sake, I suggest that the divergence caused SJI to stay part of Nova Scotia indefinitely, whileas New Brunswick (quite likely with a different name, such as Acadia) later split off to become a separate state just like Maine. If mainland settled Canada and the Great Lakes route are lost to the Patriots, the Loyalists obviously can't go to the Hudson Bay Territory since America now stands in the way and controls the easy routes to the area. Newfoundland and the British West Indies can certainly take a few but I suspect not all or even most. The British Isles are crowded enough as they stand. I tend to assume most of them go to Australia and South Africa. Quite possibly these circumstances motivate Britain to grab the Cape Colony in 1784, at the end of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War. For that matter, it seems reasonable near-complete loss of British North America in the ARW may drive Britain into more expansionism in other areas to compensate, such as making a greater effort to seize Southern Africa and the Rio de la Plata region before and during the Napoleonic Wars, or keeping the Dutch East Indies in their aftermath. Not that long, since loss of the Great Lakes and settled Canada makes trying to hold on to Western Canada a fool's errand for Britain. The Americans now control all the easy land routes to the area and have a lot of nearby settlers to fill it up, while the British face opposite conditions. As the value of fur trade gradually declines, the natural solution becomes to sell it to the USA, much like Napoleon did with Louisiana, as soon as the Americans show some serious interest. This might easily happen as soon as the 1800s-1810s in the right circumstances, such as the War of 1812 not occurring thanks to sufficiently good Anglo-American relations or the USA making enough of a decent performance in it. Otherwise, it is gonna happen in the 1830s-1840s at the very latest as the vanguard of US colonization reaches the outskirts of the region, but in all likelihood sooner rather than later. Almost surely, the package deal is going to include the Pacific Northwest too; in these circumstances, the British have no more of a good reason to try and hold on to Rupert's Land and British Columbia against the pressure of American colonization than they did for Oregon. Besides these issues, inclusion of Canada in the American Revolution as a willing participant is going to have several important consequences for the future of North America. Of course, the right PoD is required to change the attitude of the Canadian settlers this way. It may vary but I tend to favor the British colonial policy turning out more repressive and intolerant for the Canadian colonies than OTL. This might happen b/c of political variables, Québec and Nova Scotia getting brutal and inept administrators, and the start of a rebellion-repression cycle causing the British Parliament to enact a much more punitive version of the Québec Act that is similar to the other Intolerable Acts and burdens the Franco-Canadians with the same legal penalties the Catholics faced in the British Isles. I am rather skeptical about Québec being returned to France since historically neither the French government nor the Franco-Canadian elites showed any real interest for that. Québec (with the pre-1774 borders) might certainly become an independent republic closely allied to America. However, especially in the case it sided with the Patriots willingly, it seems a less likely outcome than it joining the USA. The shared experience of fighting the ARW with the other 14 colonies is surely going to create strong feelings of revolutionary solidarity and awareness of the practical advantages of sticking together than may easily overcome cultural and religious differences. Moreover, participation of the Canadiens to the American Revolution as a major actor is almost surely going to tone down anti-Catholicism and prejudice against Romance-speakers considerably. This is going to ease their integration in the American system and may well create a good precedent for the annexation of Spanish-speaking territories when the USA gets the opportunity to expand southward. Last but not least, the early version of US federalism is going to offer a sizable degree of autonomy to the Canadiens and means to protect their culture and religion, esp. since they are going to be the majority in their state. At the most, I expect the inclusion in the original US Constitution or the Bill of Rights of a clausle that forbids the federal government from discriminating on the basis of language or creed to appease them. Apart from this, I expect they are going to find their cozy place in the American experiment w/o excessive difficulty. Of course, inclusion of Canada in the USA is going to seriously tilt the political balance between the free and slaveholding sections in favor of the former from the beginning. Keeping parity, much less the prevalent political influence the slave section enjoyed up to the mid 19th century, shall be impossible for the South. Dixiecrats shall have to settle for being a veto-yielding minority, and shall experience growing difficulty over time to keep even that position. We may expect the early constitutional and statutory settlement to be somewhat less favorable to slavery although still within the bounds of what the South may deem acceptable in the Founding Fathers period. Likely changes include immediate abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the 3/5 Clausle being replaced with a 1/2 one, and/or lack of a Fugitive Slave Clausle. Much the same way, the trans-Appalachian territories may well get a different, less pro-slavery settlement that causes states like Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and Arkansas to become free. Quite possibly there is not going to be any Fugitive Slave Law, or at least not any effective one, with the free states being left free to decide whether to return fugitive slaves or not. Almost surely they won't, to the impotent frustration of the slaveholders. Of course, the slaveholding states might react by greatly accelerating the timetable of secession, or even failing to join the USA in the first place. However, in the late 18th century and early 19th century mainstream Southern public opinion was much less radicalized and intransigent about protecting and expanding slavery at all costs than it became by the middle 19th century. At least for a good while, the most likely Southern reaction to the Canadian states tilting the political balance shall be a heightened drive to compensate by setting up more slave states through southward expansion. Dixie ambitions on Mexico, Cuba, St. Domingo, and Central America are going to increase. Chances are the rest of the USA decides to humor them, since they come to regard expansionism as a less costly and troublesome course than domestic strife, and also b/c the presence of Canada creates a strong precedent for including more Catholics and Romance-speakers in the Union. Hence, the USA likely annexes Northern Mexico or even All of Mexico at the end of the Mexican-American War, gives much more support to filibuster adventures such as William Walker's seizure of Nicaragua, and makes a serious bid to acquire Cuba and St. Domingo by peaceful purchase or conquest, as the case may be. The slaveholders are only really likely to turn their sympathies to secession out of desperation when expansionism proves not to be that much of an effective strategy to help the South keep its ground for a variety of reasons. These may include freesoiler settlers outcompeting slaveholding ones in the Western territories, Creole inhabitants of annexed Mexican and Central American territories opposing restoration of slavery, prevalent Northern influence driving the federal government and the courts to enact increasingly antislavery policies and decisions, and the free section inevitably growing closer to yielding a veto-proof supermajority and becoming increasingly intolerant of the burden of slavery for the whole nation. By that point, however, and for the same reasons the demographic, economic, and military balance is going to be skewed so much against the secessionists that one of two things is going to happen, barring foreign intervention to help the Confederates. Either the Union wins the ACW with much less effort and bloodshed than OTL, say one year or two at the most; or the Southern elites read the writing on the wall despite their notorious stubborness and overconfidence and settle for gradual, compensated emancipation with the freedmen being sent to West Africa to form a super-Liberia. In these circumstances, the only likely case secession may occur with a broadly familiar course is if the Confederates may expect foreign support from the beginning, say b/c Britain and/or France decide a North American USA is best cut down a peg or two. Even in such a case, however, we may still expect the Union to win the ACW, if with an effort similar to OTL. Of course, if such intervention occurs, the Americans shall be extremely unlikely to side with the powers that tried to break it up in any equivalent of the World Wars, unless possibly the other side is as nasty and threatening as the Nazis or Soviets.
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eurofed
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Post by eurofed on Mar 26, 2021 19:31:09 GMT
Well if Britain has lost all its possessions on the mainland then there's no incentive for a conflict as the US already has all the territory.Unless the south wants to make a bid for some of the Caribbean Islands, but then there's more French and Spanish islands than British. There would be the issue of Britain reclaiming British deserters - and picking up a few American born sailors occasionally - but then that was sorted out in 1812 anyway. Well, I wouldn't say there is no incentive for a conflict; British blockade of US trade to Europe and heavy-handed impressment practices are still going to be significant friction issues that may well cause a conflict with the right political and diplomatic variables. But with American Canada being a settled matter or close to (depending on the timetable of cession of Rupert's Land) I agree a powerful source of tension is gone (also b/c the British shall not have much of a motive or means to support hostile Native tribes against the Americans) and this reduces the likelihood of a war considerably. If say the purchase of Rupert's Land takes place before the 1810s and the US did not take too much of a pro-French stance during the previous decade, chances are there is enough goodwill the conflict is averted. Of course, it also helps if say Jefferson never becomes President to enact his lamebrained embargo policy. Yeah, if the Americans already own Canada, any equivalent of the War of 1812 is going to be a Whale vs. Wolf strategic stalemate. The RN is going to wreck US trade (what survived the blockade, that is) beyond any ability of the Americans to retaliate, but the British cannot do any crippling damage to the USA on land. At the most, they can accomplish a few painful pinpricks like the Burning of Washington, but at least a few other British attacks are going to turn into American victories like the Battle of New Orleans.
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oscssw
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Post by oscssw on May 8, 2021 15:37:07 GMT
"the British cannot do any crippling damage to the USA on land. At the most, they can accomplish a few painful pinpricks like the Burning of Washington," Painful? If the Brits did it while congress was in session, they would have done us a favor!
In the words of John Adams
“In my many years, I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm and three or more is a congress.”
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stevep
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Post by stevep on May 9, 2021 11:18:10 GMT
"the British cannot do any crippling damage to the USA on land. At the most, they can accomplish a few painful pinpricks like the Burning of Washington," Painful? If the Brits did it while congress was in session, they would have done us a favor!
In the words of John Adams
“In my many years, I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm and three or more is a congress.”
Actually they could really do damage to the south and the 'western' parts if they: a) Made a better organised attack on New Orleans and took it as it blocks the Mississippi hinterland from the rest of the world.
b) As in 1776-83 offered freedom to slaves willing to fight against their masters. Coupled with aid for the Indian nations under attack this could cause a lot of havoc in the south. Might also prompt an earlier civil war or separation in the aftermath if the north is opposed to fighting to preserve slavery for the south - although if we're talking about an 1812 equivalent conflict slavery is a lot more widespread then.
Suppose you might also see an Hartford Convention equivalent that possibly gets somewhere. With OTL New England and the OTL Maritime Provinces breaking away over Congress's war and the devastation that was doing to their trade. The down side for the US would be if it would leave the rest of the union heavily dominated by slavery so an OTL later civil war over the issue might be the rest of the north breaking away from a south seeking to impose slavery on it.
One other possible cause of conflict in this scenario. If Quebec is returned to French rule and the revolution still goes as OTL, given how socially conservative it was its likely to stay a royalist stronghold. Which means there might be a clash sometime in the 1790's or 1800's decades as an expansive US seeks to take advantage of its vulnerability and Britain comes to the latter's aid. This would be doubly likely if Quebec keeps the Great Lakes/Ohio region.
A awful lot of butterflies that can occur.
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