Discussion - If Canada had joined the American Revolution?

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.

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.