“In June 1774 political leaders in Massachusetts called for a congress to meet, and all of the colonies except Georgia responded by sending delegates. Georgia did not participate in this Continental Congress, but did in a second congress convened in 1775.” – From Compton’s Encyclopedia On Line.
“All” of the colonies? I am sure Great Britain had other colonies in North America, including
Jamaica
St. Christopher’s & Nevis (small, yeah, but so was Rhode Island)
Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Quebec (were these all under one governor or separate?)
Why didn’t any of these guys participate? Were they invited? Were they subject to the Intolerable Acts? Was their form of government different?
Actually, Nova Scotia was invited and sent observers/delegates, but they chose not to participate in the insurrection.
Quebec and New Brunswick were basically French colonies under British rule. The number of British settlers to arrive in those locations between their acquisition by Britain in 1763 and the beginning of the insurrection twelve years later was very small. They were vastly outnumbered by the (still very small) French population.
The Carribean locations were never closely allied with their North American neighbors. Most of the taxes against which the colonists rebelled had been levied to reimburse the British government for the defense of the 13 colonies during the French and Indian War, and the Caribbean colonies were not assessed the same taxes because they were not part of that situation.
At the time of the Revolution, there were four colonies in what is now Canada. Their names and borders were not all the same as the later provinces.
Newfoundland
Nova Scotia (included New Brunswick)
Abegweit (later changed its name to Prince Edward Island)
Canada (everything else)
After the war, as loyalists moved into what were largely unoccupied areas (except for Indians, of course), they started agitating for their own colonies. Eventually Canada was split into Upper (later Ontario) and Lower (later Quebec) and New Brunswick was split off from Nova Scotia.
Why didn’t Quebec join the revolution? Because one of the reasons the 13 colonies rebelled was the passage of the Quebec Act by the British Parliament in 1774. This was one of the so-called Intolerable Acts, and it gave Quebec all the land north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi. Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania all had claims on that area. Had Quebec joined the rebellion, it probably would have lost its claim to the land. (Quebec lost it anyway, when it was given to the U.S. by the Treaty of Paris in 1783).
Why didn’t Nova Scotia join the revolution? At first, the people of Nova Scotia were favorably disposed toward the rebellion, largely because about two-thirds of the new settlers after the expulsion of the Acadians came from New England. But harrassment of Nova Scotia’s fishing and shipping by American privateers turned them against the revolution. At this time, New Brunswick was administered as part of Nova Scotia.
As for P.E.I. and Newfoundland, I couldn’t find anything specific. P.E.I. was already separate from Nova Scotia, but I suppose they just followed their larger neighbor’s lead. Possibly Newfoundland was concerned about Americans’ encroaching on their fishing.
I did want to mention that the question of why the other colonies didn’t join the revolution should, I think, be distinguished from why they didn’t go to the Continental Congress. A number of the delegates to the Congress, as I understand it, were opposed to separation from the mother country. Was it Nova Scotia’s and Jamaica’s feeling that, even if they had no interest in leaving the United Kingdom, they were just as happy to let the other colonies go their own way? If not, why didn’t they join the Congress to fight against independence?
The Carribean colonies didn’t send delegates because of geographical distance, and also because they didn’t have an identity of interest with the North American colonies. As long as the government kept the price of slaves low and the price of sugar high, the colonists were more concerned about slave revolts against them, than they were about revolting themselves. As Tommndeb said, Nova Scotia did send delegates to the First Continental Congress, just not to the second.
With regard to Newfoundland, in the 1770s it was largely a fishing post, in transition from a seasonal fishery (with the fishers coming out each year from the West Country) to a land-based fishery (with the fishers living on the island year-round). British colonial policy at that time was that it was not really a colony, but a fishing outpost. Although it had courts and some local governments, I don’t think it had a colonial Assembly until around the 1830s.
Given the small population, the distance from the mainland, and the lack of a well-developed colonial government, it’s not surprising that Newfoundland wouldn’t send delegates.
Vermont was not a separate colony prior to the Revolution. It was shared by New Hampshire and New York. Much like today, not a lot of people lived there.
Actually the area that is now Vermont was more populated than New Hampshire. Vermont was actually a quasi independent country. New York controlled it officially (most of it) but had little control. The people constantly played off one side against the other to maintain their independence. Vermont was an independent republic.
Geo Washington wrote that it would be favourable to overthrow the government. Then Vermont said if they did they would allow the British to annex them.
On another note. What about Florida. That was ceded by Spain to England and wasn’t returned till after the revolution was over.
The article in Britannica.com implies that the Floridians stuck with the British because they were the recipients of some beneficial economic investment on the part of the English.
So, unlike the 13 Colonies in the Continental Congress, the Floridians had no beef with George III.
Also Britannica.com says that Vermont’s population prior to the Revolution was about 20,000. New Hampshire’s last census prior to the Revolution was in 1767 and it reported 52,700 people.
However, New Hampshire claimed many parts of Vermont as its own, so I don’t know how the people were apportioned.
Vermont’s population grew rapidly after the Revolution and was at 85,000 in 1790.
correct, in that Nova Scotia included what is now New Brunswick.
PEI was then called St. John’s Island.
Quebec (which included much of what is now Ontario)
NB was carved out of NS in 1784, partly in response to the Loyalist settlement out of the rebellious colonies to the south. PEI became PEI in 1798. Quebec was split into the two Canadas (Upper and Lower, approximately present-day Ontario and Quebec) in 1791. Labrador was under Newfoundland jurisdiction from 1784 to 1774; Quebec/Canada from 1774 to 1809; back to Nfld in 1809, with part of it partitioned back to Lower Canada in 1825. The rest of Labrador is still under Newfoundland colonial rule.
Somewhere on the net, I read that for a few years, including those of the American Revolution, the colony was called by its Micmac Indian name. However, I can’t seem to find that place anymore.
I’m fairly certain that the official name of the colony that included present day Quebec and Ontario was Canada. That is until it was split into Lower Canada and Upper Canada. I think modern writers call it Quebec because 1) it was inhabited almost entirely by French speakers (and Indians) and 2) to avoid confusion with what we call Canada today.
Quebec is a bit harder to nail down without a specific, detailed history. Britain initially established a colony with the enactment of the Quebec Act (1775 - to thwart attempts by the colonists to the South from encouraging rebellion among the French-speaking locals), but continued to identify the political entities as Lower Canada and Upper Canada. The region was referred to as Quebec for quite a while, but whether that (along with the Quebec Act) was simply letting the principal city stand in for the region or whether the region, itself, took the name I can’t quite tell. The earliest political/legal use of the name seems to be at the creation of what would develop into the nation of Canada, the 1867 British North American Act.