Suppose the Americans had won the Battle of Quebec (1775), with the result that Upper and Lower Canada had entered the Revolutionary War on the American side and become independent with the other colonies. How would that have affected the subsequent development of the United States and of world politics in general? In particular:
Without British Canada to flee to after the war, what would have become of the United Empire Loyalists?
How would inclusion of a substantial French-speaking and Roman Catholic minority population have affected the new country’s sense of national identity?
What influence would Canadian delegates have had on the Continental Congress?
What influence would Canadian delegates have had on the Constitutional Convention?
Would Newfoundland also have been included? (In our timeline, Newfoundland was a separate colony, not even part of Canada until 1949.)
In our timeline, from independence to 1861, the landowning/slaveowning elite of the Southern states had one primary political concern: To protect slavery from political threats. To that end they determined to keep the number of slave and free states equal, to maintain representative balance in the Senate. The Mexican-American War was partly a Southern project to win more slave states. How would the inclusion of Canada in the Union have changed the political dynamics of that? Would slavery have been abolished sooner, or later? Would the Civil War have happened sooner, or later? Would the Mexican-American War have happened at all?
How would not including Canada have affected the subsequent development of the British Empire?
They probably would have ended up in the Carribean, for the most part. That’s where most of the Loyalists who didn’t end up in Canada went. Either that or they would have moved to South Africa and set up a racist imperialist state there that would end up taking over the world.
I wonder how long Quebec would have stayed French speaking and Roman Catholic. As it was, with the economic depression after the United States got its independence and scarcity of land in New England, you had a bunch of immigration from New England (the so called “economic Loyalists”) who ended up founding the Eastern Townships. If Canada had been joined to the US, you probably would have seen even more immigration.
Something else, of course, is that Canada was a refuge for American slaves, because it wasn’t subject to the American Fugitive Slave Act. That would have changed.
the Civil War may have started earlier. Who knows the Quebecois may have aligned themselves with the South in a marriage of convenience in a demand for states’ sovereignty.
The first thing that strikes my mind is, “Wasn’t the Quebec Colony extremely small in population at this time?”
Historically a large part of the reason that the British were able to seize New France during the Seven Year’s War is because of the massive population differences. New France was primarily scattered trappers and traders, with a population under 100,000. The British Colonies had over 2 million people at that time. While some English-speaking settlers had started to move into the newly British territory by the time of the Revolution, it is my understanding that at the end of the Revolution the population was quite small. Such that the 50,000-80,000 American Loyalists that moved into the region represented a massive increase in the population.
My understanding is much of Canada’s population growth really got started in 1800-1860, when something like 900,000 persons moved to Canada from overseas (many of them British looking to start a new life in North America.)
Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of digital data on this, I have some books at home that would give me more information (but not with me at the moment.) Unless I’m mistaken about the relative population levels then I’d say that Canadian identity as we know it today would not exist. The massive outnumbering would mean Canada would just be a large swathe of land from which several states were formed. The large influx of English immigrants would not have happened and thus a huge portion of the people who are “Canadian” today wouldn’t exist. French language/culture would be more or less non-existent (about as prominent as it is in New Orleans) simply because they would be but a drop of water in a huge bucket.
The majority of the loyalists fled to Nova Scotia/New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island (PEI); so presumably if the Americans captured Quebec, England’s Atlantic colonies would sill receive the American-English loyalists (in edition to the new Quebec-English loyalists too).
No clue
No clue
No clue
Newfoundland would probably be grouped with Nova Scotia/New Brunswick and PEI into a new country (“Atlantica?”).
And lot of Americans – that is, from the newly independent 13 colonies – also migrated north to Canada in the same period; I mean, after the Loyalists. That is probably why most dialects of Canadian English are nearly (not quite, but nearly) indistinguishable from standard American “Anchorman English.”
Here is an interesting link with some numbers. Given the numbers on that page I think it very likely that the big questions we would need to look at is “what would America have done with so much land?”
The political and cultural elements just don’t seem very compelling to me, without the many thousands of fleeing Loyalists and later waves of British immigrants in the 19th century there simply wouldn’t be a “cultural Canada” as there was in our time line.
There would be some questions as to what happened to French speaking people in the Province of Quebec but I just can’t imagine that in the face of 19th century American expansionism and population growth they’d be more than a historical footnote (not unlike the French speaking population of New Orleans and surrounding areas.)
Book of Negroes is an interest book about a real document (calledby the samename), which is about the group of “black loyalists” who settled in Nova Scotia (about 10% of the American-British loyalists were black). Some eventually went on to Serria Leone while most stayed in Nova Scotia who’s descendantslive there today.
My guess would be that the “Canadian” states would be less populated than the equivalent provinces are. Canadians in the east settled in the western provinces because that was where they had land available. But as Americans they probably would have settled more hospitable areas to the south. Farmers heading west would probably have rather ended up in Kansas or Nebraska rather than Manitoba and Saskatchewan if they had had the choice.
In the 19th Century, before the U.S. had any immigration laws to speak of except for those against the Chinese, what was there to stop eastern Canucks from settling in Kansas or Nebraska? Besides, both sides must have regarded Canada’s West as valuable, or there would have been no “54-40 or Fight!”
British colonies such as Vancouver Island, The Queen Charlottes, British Columbia, the Stikine and Yukon territories might well have developed into a sovereign or sovereign countries much the same way as the islands of the Caribbean .