In this thread there is a discussion of US and British (in Canada) citizenship just after the American Revolution:
I’ve always wondered, what separated the US and Canada in those days. It might seem that residents of what is now Canada who were mostly French would have been just as eager to split from British rule as those living in Carolina, for example. Were residents of Upper or Lower Canada or Newfoundland, say, invited to the Continental Congress that declared independence and declined to come? Were they not invited because they were French? Did residents of Massachusetts feel more kinship to residents of Georgia than to Quebec? This is certainly never discussed in U.S. history.
I understand that after the war many Loyalists left for Canada so the sentiment there later would have been pro-British and not pro-US, but why did it start out that way?
Well, the area now known as Ontario was part of Quebec, and almost unpopulated by Europeans. It got its first big push towards European settlement by the United Empire Loyalists, and subsequently bulked up with English-speaking peoples, leading to a split later from the French-speaking half of what was then the united Province of Canada.
I believe Quebec was invited to the Continental Congress, but refused, in part because the British had passed the Quebec Act, which guaranteed that Catholicism would survive. Letters to the Inhabitants of Canada were written by the Continental Congress.
There had been an influx of British immigrants to Canada in the 15 years before the American Revolution started, and most of them remained loyal to the King
The Canadians also saw the New Englanders as their chief trade rivals, so weren’t keen to support their cause.
And the King had addressed the grievances of folks in Quebec with the Quebec Act of 1774, so those folks were relatively content.
Newfoundland was governed directly from Britain, and at the time of the American Revolution was governed directly by the British Navy, only achieving colony status and any form of representative government in the early 1800s. I don’t know whom the American Colonies would have even contacted.
There was an uprising in Nova Scotia (the “Eddy Rebellion”) Cumberland County, Nova Scotia tended to be pro-rebel, and a New England Planter (New England Planters were settlers of Nova Scotia, primarily from New England, who were encouraged to settle the parts of Nova Scotia made vacant by the expulsion of the Acadians) from there named Jonathan Eddy, raised a force of about 400, and besieged Fort Cumberland.
The Articles of Confederation, the ‘Constitution’ for the first 15 years or so of the USA, allowed additional states to be admitted to the union, if approved by a majority of the current states. Except for Canada; they could become a US State without having to get approved. That’s a pretty clear invitation.
The Quebec Act was mentioned as one of the grievances in the Declaration of Independence. The American colonists were not particularly happy with the legal system in Québec, nor with its borders.
It’s unlikely that much sympathy for the revolution would have been aroused there, when it was clear that the revolutionaries wished to shrink the province and abolish French civil law. Of course, there was also the strong anti-Catholic sentiment in the 13 colonies to consider.
In the event, the rebels (always makes me think of Star Wars, heh) invaded Canada, and sent a delegation led by Ben Franklin to try to convince Québec to join the US. No luck. They ended up getting crushed at the battle of Québec, and that was that.
Nevertheless, some Canadians did fight on the American side during the War of Independence. But the Seven Years’ War was less than 20 years old at the time and Quebec City had suffered severe damage during the British siege, so most Canadians weren’t willing to go for another war so soon, and stayed neutral in the conflict. The British managed to get the Canadian clergy to support the Crown, and as pointed out most recent immigrants from the British Isles also remained loyal.
In a way the American Revolution was an extension of the French and Indian War. For the colonists, one of the main disputes with the French in that conflict was the competing territorial claims in the Ohio country. The resolution of that war just changed the dispute from being between the colonies and a foreign power, to being between the colonies and the British Province of the Quebec. The colonies still wanted to expand westward, and Quebec was still in the way.
I always imagined the specific complaints about Quebec’s legal system were the more palatable complaints to expound upon in polite company, and everyone just whispered “…and they’re parked on top of land we want” under their breath.
The mainland colonies weren’t the only British possessions in the area. There were also the island colonies. The Continental Congress sent messages to Barbados, Grenada, and Jamaica asking them to join the cause. The response was that while the islanders also felt they had some political grievances with London, they felt more vulnerable and couldn’t afford to abandon the protection of the British military much less leave themselves open to a British attack.
As for the OP I was going to come in and say that there were significant natural boundaries between the two countries – the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. But come to think of it, the lower SLR is entirely within Canada, and much of the international border east of Ottawa seems to be merely “drawn” rather than defined by a physiogeographical feature. From looking at the map, I suspect that the non-‘drawn’ parts of Maine’s border is a continental divide–the edge of the SLR watershed?