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Spring 1865. The United States had more than a million men under arms, and for two days that May, about 150,000 of them marched through Washington in a victory parade.
Why Canada never joined the United States: from the 1775 invasion and the Quebec Act to the Fenian raids, Alaska purchase, and Confederation of 1867.
Key Takeaways
- Canada's survival as a separate country was not inevitable; it depended on specific choices, threats, and community loyalties.
- Early American invasions failed largely because Quebec's population and Church leaders stayed loyal to the British crown.
- External threats such as American raids and annexation bills pushed the scattered British colonies toward unification.
- Economic ties and political decisions, like reciprocity and railway building, were crucial in binding Canada together.
- The founding of Canada was a deliberate response to American expansionist pressure, not merely a British gift.
What the video covers
- In 1865 the US had over a million soldiers while British North America had only about 9,000 British troops in Canada, yet the US never annexed Canada.
- American armies invaded Canada in 1775 and 1812, and Congress even wrote a standing invitation for Canada to join into the Articles of Confederation.
- The 1774 Quebec Act protected French Catholic faith and civil law, winning the loyalty of Quebec's clergy and elites, who rejected the 1775 invasion.
- Loyalist refugees after the American Revolution, including black loyalists, settled in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and were hostile to the new republic.
- The 1812 war ended with the border unchanged, defended by British regulars, local militia, and indigenous allies.
- Post-Civil War tensions over the Confederate raider Alabama and the St. Albans raid led to threats of invasion and the 1866 annexation bill.
- The Fenian raids and Seward's 1867 purchase of Alaska, along with the petition from Victoria, showed American interest in the British northwest.
- The Reciprocity Treaty's end, economic pressure, and fear of American expansion pushed the British colonies to form the Dominion of Canada in 1867.
- The Treaty of Washington (1871) settled disputes, and the Canadian Pacific Railway tied British Columbia to the rest of Canada.
- The video argues that Canadian loyalty was contingent, shaped by policies, threats, and identities, rather than inevitable.
Chapters
- 00:00The Puzzle: A Giant Army and an Unconquered Canada
- 01:30Civil War Anger and the Annexation Bill
- 03:50The 1775 Invasion and the Quebec Act
- 06:20Loyalists, Black Loyalists, and the War of 1812
- 08:50Rebellions, Raids, and Union Pressure
- 13:20Seward, Alaska, and the Petition from Victoria
- 16:40Confederation and the Pacific Railway
- 26:00Conclusion: Why Canada Stayed Canada
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Just across the northern border, Canada was guarded by about 9,000 British soldiers. So why did a country that took roughly half of Mexico never take Canada?
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The usual answer is that Canada belonged to Britain, and no American president wanted a war with the British Empire.
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It's not wrong, exactly, but it can't be the whole answer because American armies invaded Canada twice anyway, in 1775 and again in 1812.
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And Canada came much closer to joining than most of us learned. There's a winter night when an American army stood outside the walls of Quebec with Montreal already in its hands.
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There's a manifesto signed by more than 300 men in Montreal calling for Canada to join the United States. There's a petition from the Pacific Coast asking the American president to take in a British colony.
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And then there are two documents, a single day apart. Before dawn on March 3rd, 1867, William Seward, the American Secretary of State, signed a treaty to buy Alaska from Russia, hoping the British lands between Alaska and the United States would follow it into the
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Union. The day before, in London, a law about those same British lands had received its final approval.
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To see how close, we have to start back in 1865 with the army in that parade.
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Those soldiers had just won the deadliest war in American history, and the parade, the Grand Review, showed only a fraction of them.
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On May 1st, 1865, the Union had 1,516 men under arms, and a great many people in the north were furious with the British Empire. Britain had recognized the Confederacy as a warring power, and British shipyards had built warships for
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the south, including the relentless raider Alabama, which captured or burned dozens of Union merchant ships.
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That anger had a target right door. In October of 1864, about 20 Confederate soldiers who had slipped into Canada crossed into St. Albans, Vermont, robbed its banks of more than $200,000 and fled back north.
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When a Montreal judge, Charles-Joseph Coursol, set the raiders free on a technicality that December, many northern newspapers demanded that Lincoln invade Canada.
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General John Dix, the Union commander in New York, ordered his troops to chase any future raiders across the border, and Lincoln had to overrule him.
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Congress struck back with the tools it had. That winter, Washington gave notice that it would end the free trade treaty that had bound the two economies together for over a decade, a bitter blow to the colonies.
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And in the summer of 1866, Nathaniel Banks, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, brought in a bill laying out how the British provinces would be admitted as American states and territories.
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You could read the terms of annexation in black and white. On the other side of the line, the numbers looked absolutely hopeless. In 1861, all of British North America held about 3.3 million people, fewer than the 3.9 million who lived in New York state
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alone. In 1864, the province of Canada, the colony that covered what is now Southern Ontario and Southern Quebec, had about 9,000 British troops set against an army of more than a million men that had just learned how to fight a modern war.
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The army was there, the anger was there, the bill was there, and yet that army went home, and it never crossed the border at all.
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So why not? To answer that, we need to go back nearly a century, to the first time Americans marched north, and to a law that gave the people of Quebec a reason to think twice.
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In 1774, the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act. Britain had taken Quebec from France only 11 years earlier, and it now ruled tens of thousands of French-speaking Catholics living under a Protestant crown they had not chosen.
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The act let them practice their faith freely, kept French civil law for their property and contracts, and let the Catholic Church collect its tithes. In plain words, London won over Quebec's clergy and landowners.
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The colonies to the south were outraged. Their leaders counted the Quebec Act among the intolerable acts. It handed Quebec the Ohio Valley lands they wanted for themselves, and it protected a faith that Congress itself bitterly attacked that same autumn in an address to the
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British people. And yet, that October, the Continental Congress wrote to the people of Quebec and invited them to join the struggle against British rule.
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The Americans hoped the French Canadians would greet them as liberators. The next autumn, they came north to deliver that invitation in person.
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Richard Montgomery, a former British officer who had become an American general, led one army up Lake Champlain and took Montreal on November 13th.
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Benedict Arnold led another through the Maine wilderness, and he lost hundreds of men to desertion, hunger, and brutal cold before he ever reached the St.
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Lawrence. Together, they came to the walls of Quebec, the fortress city that controlled the river and with it the whole colony.
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In the dark hours before dawn on December 31st, 1775, in a blinding snowstorm, they attacked. It was a complete catastrophe. Montgomery was killed early in the assault. Arnold was wounded, and roughly 430 Americans were taken prisoner. Those walls of Quebec
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held, and the army that had taken Montreal 7 weeks earlier never got inside them.
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The Americans had hoped the French Canadians would join them. A few hundred did, serving in two regiments raised by James Livingston and Moses Hazen, but most stayed out of the fight.
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Bishop Jean-Olivier Briand, the head of the Catholic Church in Quebec, saw the Quebec Act as a guarantee for his church and his people, and he told the faithful to stand by the crown.
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Catholics who helped the invaders could be refused the sacraments. The next spring, Congress sent Benjamin Franklin himself to Montreal to win the colony over. He failed completely.
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The army had been paying for food and firewood with paper money that the habitants, the French Canadian farmers, didn't trust. And by that summer, the last soldiers had retreated from Canada in humiliation.
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But the hunger stayed. When Congress wrote the first Constitution of the United States, the Articles of Confederation, it kept a seat open for the north. The text survives.
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Article 11 said that Canada, acceding to this confederation and adjoining in the measures of the United States, shall be admitted into and entitled to all the advantages of this union. In other words, Canada had a standing invitation written into the founding law of the
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young republic, while any other colony needed nine states to agree. Canada never answered it.
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And the war itself sent the north a new population with every reason to refuse.
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When it ended, tens of thousands of loyalists, colonists who had sided with the crown, fled the new republic.
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Roughly 30,000 went to Nova Scotia, and Britain soon carved out a new colony for many of them, New Brunswick.
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They had lost homes, farms, and neighbors to the revolution, and they were not about to join the country that had driven them out.
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More than 3,000 of those who came north were black loyalists, men and women who had escaped slavery on the promise of freedom and land behind British lines.
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Many never got the land they were promised, and in the end, nearly 1,200 of them sailed for Sierra Leone.
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So when the Americans came again in 1812, they found a north that was not waiting to be freed. Thomas Jefferson had predicted that taking Canada would be little more than a march. Instead, the war ended with the border exactly
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where it had been, defended by redcoats, local militia, and the indigenous nations who fought beside them.
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That's the part the popular telling gets right. The people of the north had reasons of their own to say no.
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But that loyalty would be tested again and again over the next 50 years, sometimes by Americans and sometimes by Canadians themselves.
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So what happened when the Canadians rebelled? In 1837, uprisings broke out in both Lower Canada, today's southern Quebec, and Upper Canada, today's southern Ontario, against governors and small ruling circles who answered to London.
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Both were crushed within weeks, and in Lower Canada, rebels were later hanged or shipped to penal colonies in Australia.
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Americans were drawn straight in. That December, Canadian militia crossed the Niagara River, seized an American steamboat called the Caroline that had been supplying the rebels, set it on fire, and cut it loose into the current.
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And an American named Amos Durfee was killed. The border erupted in fury, and President Martin Van Buren sent General Winfield Scott north to stop Americans from starting a war of their own.
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They didn't all listen. Secret societies called Hunters' Lodges signed up thousands of Americans who wanted to liberate Canada.
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The next November, a few hundred of them crossed the St. Lawrence and seized a stone windmill near Prescott in Upper Canada, expecting the local people to rise and join them.
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Almost nobody did. After several days of fighting, they surrendered. And their commander, a Finnish-born adventurer named Nils von Schoultz, was tried at Kingston and hanged.
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The young lawyer who advised him at his trial was 23 years old, and his name was John A. Macdonald.
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Now, the 1840s brought a contrast that tells you a great deal. Americans claimed the whole Oregon country, the homelands of many indigenous nations, north to the edge of Russian Alaska.
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But in May of 1846, President James Polk went to war with Mexico, a catastrophic war that would take roughly half of Mexico's land.
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One month later, his government signed a treaty with Britain, splitting Oregon peacefully along the 49th parallel.
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Against Mexico, Washington seized vast stretches of land by force. Against Britain, it compromised. No American government wanted to fight Britain's navy over the northern colonies when a deal was on offer.
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But here's where it gets complicated, because the next great push for annexation didn't come from Washington at all. It came from Montreal. That same year, Britain began repealing the Corn Laws, the tariffs that had given colonial wheat and flour a protected
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place in the British market. For the merchants of Montreal, it was a devastating blow. Their whole business rested on shipping grain and timber down the St. Lawrence to Britain behind that wall of protection. And within three years, the wall was gone. Firms went
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bankrupt. Then politics made it worse. In 1849, the assembly of the Province of Canada, which had joined the two old colonies into one, passed a bill to compensate people in Lower Canada whose property had been damaged during the
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rebellions. Many English-speaking Tories saw it as paying rebels. When Lord Elgin, the British Governor General, gave his assent that April, a furious crowd stormed the parliament building in Montreal, which was then the capital, and burned it to the ground.
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That October, in the bitter aftermath, more than 300 men in Montreal, among them some of the city's leading merchants, signed the Annexation Manifesto, calling for a peaceful separation from Britain and union with the United States.
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This was the manifesto from the beginning of our story, and it was no fringe pamphlet.
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So why didn't it happen? Part of the answer lay in Washington, and it was slavery.
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The Senate was balanced on a knife's edge. 15 free states against 15 slave states, and every new state threatened to tip it. Canada would have come in as free soil, carved into several new free states with senators of their own, and
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many Southern leaders understood exactly how damaging that would be for slavery's future. The Manifesto landed in the middle of the long fight over the lands taken from Mexico, and very few in Congress wanted to open a second front.
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The annexationists of Montreal found that the country they wanted to join had no room for them.
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Lord Elgin saw another way out. If the colonies were turning south because they were poor, he would make them rich.
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In 1854, he went to Washington and pushed hard, with lavish dinners and relentless charm, for a reciprocity treaty that removed tariffs on natural products moving across the border.
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It was signed that June, and later writers said it floated through on champagne. Canadian timber, wheat, fish, and coal could now go south duty-free, and American fishermen won access to the rich waters off the Atlantic colonies.
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And the money flowed. During the years the treaty was in force, the north's exports to its neighbor grew by roughly a third. Rafts of squared timber and barges of grain moved south across the lakes. And then came the Civil War, when
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the Union was desperate for horses, grain, and lumber. The merchants who had wanted to join the United States were now growing rich by selling to it, and the annexation movement faded as good times returned.
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Think about that for a moment. The biggest annexation movement in Canadian history was not ended by soldiers, and it was not ended by loyalty.
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It was ended largely by a trade deal. Free trade gave the colonies a reason to stay apart while doing more business with the Americans than ever.
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But it also meant that when Washington killed that treaty, the old question would come roaring back, just as the largest army America had ever raised was coming home.
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The Quebec Act, the loyalists, the divided Senate, and the free trade had all helped keep Canada out for nearly a century. But none of them, alone or together, could have survived what came after 1865.
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What saved the north was the threat itself. Now, this is the turn that changed everything. In the summer of 1864, while the Civil War still raged, politicians from the British colonies were already talking about a Union.
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That September, delegates met at Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island, and in October they gathered at Quebec City to work out the terms. The Saint Albans raid struck while they were sitting at Quebec, and suddenly every argument for Union carried a new and
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terrifying weight. Separate colonies, each with its own small militia and its own tariffs, could be picked off one by one. A single country with one government and one defense might hold.
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The man driving that Union was John A. Macdonald, the young lawyer from the windmill trial, now the leading politician of Canada West, as the old Upper Canada was then called.
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He had come from Glasgow to Kingston as a small boy, and he grew into a quick-witted hard-drinking utterly relentless political operator.
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He believed, as deeply as he believed anything, that the colonies would either unite under the Crown or be absorbed one at a time by the Republic.
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And he wanted a strong central government, because he had just watched the American one nearly destroy itself over the rights of the states.
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In his last campaign, he would put his whole career into a single line. Then a private army raised on American soil handed McDonald the argument he needed. The Fenian Brotherhood was an organization of Irish nationalists in the United States, many of them Civil
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War veterans, who planned to seize Canada and hold it hostage for Ireland's freedom. In April of 1866, Fenians gathered at Eastport, Maine, on the border with New Brunswick. New Brunswick had voted against union only the year before. Now,
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with an armed force on its doorstep, it went to the polls again in May and June, and this time the supporters of union won a crushing victory.
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On June 1st, several hundred Fenians crossed the Niagara River into Canada West. The next day, at Ridgeway, they routed a force of Canadian militia, and nine Canadian volunteers were killed.
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The Fenians soon fell back across the river, where American authorities arrested many of them, and President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation against the raids, but the damage was done.
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Imagine you were a farmer in Canada West that summer. The free trade that had paid for your land had just been canceled by Congress. Men who had learned to fight in the Union army had just crossed the river and killed
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militiamen from towns like yours. And within a month, you could read in the newspapers that a bill had been brought into the American house to admit your province as a state.
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You didn't need a politician to tell you that standing alone was dangerous. And so the colonies did what they had talked about for years. Their delegates sailed to London, and the British North America Act, the law that joined three
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British colonies into one new country and split the province of Canada into Ontario and Quebec, received royal assent on March 29th, 1867.
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That is the law from the beginning of this story. The very next morning, before dawn, Seward signed his treaty to buy Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million.
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He made no secret that he hoped the British lands caught between Alaska and Washington Territory would one day choose to join the Union.
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The next year, Minnesota's legislature asked for the British Northwest to be handed over in exchange for American claims against Britain.
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Those two documents, a single day apart, captured the whole contest for the north. Seward's treaty closed in on it from the far side, and the law in London was built to hold it together.
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On July 1st of that year, the Dominion of Canada was born with McDonald as its first prime minister.
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It held four provinces, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, and well over 3 million people.
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It was small, but it was a country with its own parliament, its own militia, and its own ambitions.
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And it could do something the scattered colonies never could. It could grow. And it grew fast because the West was the next prize.
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Between Ontario and the Pacific lay Rupert's Land, the enormous territory of the Hudson's Bay Company.
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In 1869, Canada agreed to buy it for £300,000, about $1.5 million. At Red River, the Métis, a distinct indigenous people with their own language and culture, refused to be handed over without being asked. Led by Louis Riel, they formed a provisional
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government and forced Ottawa to negotiate. And the next year, the province of Manitoba was created.
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Out on the Pacific, the stakes were just as high. British Columbia was a remote colony, deep in debt and cut off from the rest of the empire by thousands of miles of mountains and prairie.
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Its trade ran to San Francisco. Alaska was now American to its north, and Washington Territory lay to its south.
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And on December 29th, 1869, a petition signed by 104 residents of Victoria, the colonial capital, was presented to President Ulysses Grant, asking him to bring British Columbia into the United States. This was the petition from the beginning of our story.
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It showed just how easily the West could slip away. So by the end of that year, the new country was real but fragile, and its West was in play. The causes so so explain why the north resisted. They
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don' explain why a United States with the anger, the openings, and the excuse stopped short of trying. And the most dangerous pressure of all had been building in Washington that whole year.
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came from Charles Sumner, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. On April 13th, 1869, eight months before the petition, he rose to attack a treaty that would have settled American claims against Britain.
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The direct losses from the Alabama and the other raiders, he said, came to about $15 million.
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The national loss to American shipping came to about $110 million. But the largest part by far was for prolonging the war itself. The war had cost more than $4 billion, Sumner said. And if British help to the South had doubled
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its length, Britain was responsible for the extra cost. Added up, his case meant that Britain owed America more than $2 billion.
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That same day, the Senate rejected the treaty by a crushing vote of 54 to 1.
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Nobody in London was going to pay $2 billion. And many in Washington read that enormous number as a bill that could be paid in land. Early in 1871, Sumner wrote that the withdrawal of the British flag from the hemisphere should be a
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condition of any final settlement. Think about what you're hearing there. The man in charge of the Senate's foreign policy was asking, in writing, for Britain to leave North America.
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So why didn't Grant, the general who had commanded those million men, simply take Canada? Because those million men no longer existed. By November of 1865, more than 800,000 volunteers had already been mustered out in an astonishing demobilization. And within a few years,
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the regular army stood below 60,000 soldiers. The national debt, about $65 million before the war, had climbed to nearly $2.7 billion. A country that had just lost more than 600,000 of its people was in no mood for another war,
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least of all against the largest navy in the world. Now, events in Europe began to change London's mind. In July of 1870, France and Prussia went to war.
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And within weeks, the balance of power on the continent was shattered. British leaders suddenly faced a dangerous Europe, and they could not afford an unsettled quarrel with the United States.
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Worse, if Britain ever went to war, an American government still nursing the Alabama claims could let raiders be built in American ports for Britain's enemies, a terrifying mirror of what British yards had done for the Confederacy.
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Settling with Washington became urgent. There's an explanation that many people on both sides of the border grew up with, and it's worth taking seriously.
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Canadians were simply loyal to the Crown, the argument goes, and the Royal Navy stood behind them, so annexation was never really possible. There's truth in it. Loyalty was real, from Bishop Brio's parishes to the loyalist towns of New Brunswick, and the Navy was a
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deterrent that every American president had to weigh. But as the whole answer, it falls apart.
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Loyalty was not constant. The manifesto came from the largest city in British North America, and the petition came from the capital of a British colony.
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In Nova Scotia, opponents of Confederation won 18 of the province's 19 seats in the first federal election, and they spent the next year trying to get out of the Union.
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And Britain itself was pulling back. By the end of the 1860s, the government in London had decided to bring most of its soldiers home from Canada and leave the new Dominion to defend itself.
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So loyalty and the Navy can't explain why the danger passed. Something had to change in Washington.
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That change came early in 1871. On February 27th, a joint high commission of five British and five American members sat down in Washington to settle every quarrel between the two countries at once. Hamilton Fish, Grant's Secretary of State, led the
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American side, and one of the five British commissioners was the Prime Minister of Canada, John A. Macdonald.
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Macdonald was in an extraordinarily difficult position. He sat at that table as a member of the British delegation, bound to follow London's lead, while the other British commissioners were pressing for a deal even at the cost of Canadian interests.
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The hardest fight was over the rich Atlantic that Canadian fishermen depended on. Macdonald fought for weeks, lost most of the arguments and signed anyway, because a settlement between London and Washington mattered more to Canada's survival than any fishing ground.
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The treaty was signed on May 8th, 1871. Britain expressed its regret for the escape of the Alabama and the damage the raiders had done.
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The two countries agreed to send the Alabama claims to an international tribunal. They settled fishing rights and opened the St. Lawrence to American ships forever.
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And here's what matters most for our story. There was no clause handing Canada over.
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There was not a word about ceding territory and not a word about the British flag leaving the continent.
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By sitting down with the Canadian Prime Minister and signing a treaty that dealt with the Dominion as a fact, the American government made a fateful choice and accepted that the country to the north was there to stay.
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The tribunal met in Geneva in Switzerland with five arbitrators, among them members from Italy, Switzerland and Brazil.
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In June of 1872, it set aside the indirect claims, the colossal losses Sumner had blamed on a longer war.
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On September 14th, 1872, the tribunal ruled that Britain must pay the United States $15.5 million in gold.
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Britain paid. Some Americans had hoped to collect that bill in Canadian land, but it was paid in cash.
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And the treaty ended a quarrel between two governments, not the future of a continent.
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Out west, the country still had to be built and that would cost far more than Geneva.
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To keep British Columbia, Macdonald had made an immense promise. When the colony joined Canada on July 20th, 1871, its terms included a railway to the Pacific to be started within two years and finished within 10.
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It was a staggering commitment for a country of fewer than 4 million people. The railway took 14 years, a scandal over campaign money that drove Macdonald from power for five years, and a fortune in public loans and land.
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And the people who paid most heavily were not the ones who planned it. Some 15,000 Chinese workers were brought in to build the hardest stretch through the mountains of British Columbia, and at least 600 of them died on the job.
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In 1885, the year the railway was finished, Ottawa imposed a head tax of $50 on every Chinese immigrant.
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On the prairies, the cost fell on the First Nations. The buffalo herds that had fed them for centuries collapsed, and when hunger spread, Ottawa withheld rations to force bands onto the reserves it chose.
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In the spring of 1885, desperate Métis communities in the Saskatchewan country rose in the Northwest Resistance, led by Louis Riel, who had returned from exile in Montana the summer before.
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Some Cree and Assiniboine warriors fought as well. Canadian troops crushed the rising within weeks. Lives were lost on both sides, and many of those troops had come west on the unfinished railway.
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On November 7th, 1885, at a place called Craigellachie in the mountains of British Columbia, Donald Smith, one of the railway company's directors, drove the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway.
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Troops, settlers, wheat, and mail could now cross the continent without touching American soil. The land that Seward had hoped would drift into the Union was tied to Ottawa by steel.
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Nine days later, Riel was hanged at Regina, and on November 27th, eight Cree and Assiniboine men convicted of murder for killings during the rising were hanged at Battleford.
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McDonald fought his last election in 1891, and once again, the issue was the United States.
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His opponents wanted unrestricted free trade with the Americans, and McDonald warned that it would end in annexation.
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In his final appeal to the voters, he delivered the line he had been living by since the windmill trial.
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A British subject I was born, a British subject I will die. He won. That June, three months after the vote, he died.
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There's one more moment worth telling because the old question came back again, wearing the same word if it worn in Elgin's day.
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In January of 1911, the government of Wilfrid Laurier, Canada's first French-Canadian Prime Minister, reached a reciprocity agreement with Washington, free trade in natural products across the border.
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Then, on February 14th, Champ Clark, soon to be Speaker of the House, stood up in Congress to support the deal.
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The record of that speech survives. "I am for it," he said, "because I hope to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British North American possessions clear to the North Pole."
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In Canada, it was an absolute bombshell. Laurier's opponents fought a bitter campaign with the old cry of no truck or trade with the Yankees, and they quoted Clark in town after town as proof of where free trade would lead.
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On September 21st, 1911, Canadian voters threw Laurier out of office. The same free trade that had helped keep Canada apart in Elgin's day now looked to a great many voters like the first step toward annexation.
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And a full trade agreement between the two countries would wait another 77 years. And the old suspicion never fully went away. In 1921, a Canadian staff officer, James Sutherland Brown, drew up defense scheme number one, a plan for Canadian
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forces to strike south into the United States if war ever came. In 1930, American planners approved War Plan Red, a plan for a war with the British Empire that would begin with an invasion of Canada.
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Neither plan was ever put into motion. Go back to that table in Washington where a Canadian Prime Minister sat across from Grant, Secretary of State.
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Four pressures had met there, and all four pushed against annexation. The people of the North supplied the first refusal, from Quebec's clergy to the loyalists of New Brunswick.
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Slavery and free trade drained the largest annexation movement because the South would not admit new free states, and Elgin's treaty made the merchants of Montreal rich enough to stop asking.
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The United States itself lost the will to fight with its army sent home and its debt in the billions.
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And the threat turned into a country. The Raiders and the Fenians pushed the colonies into one union. Seward's treaty and the petition from Victoria pushed that Union to the Pacific, and Washington then signed a treaty with it as if it had always been there.
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So, Canada didn't survive because America couldn't take it. It survived because by the time America could, there was a country standing in the way, and Americans had decided they didn't want that war.
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In this story, pressure from the South kept doing the opposite of what it was meant to do.
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Every raid across the border, every bill in Congress, every speech about the North Pole was meant to pull the North closer, and nearly every one of them pushed it further away. The Fenians did more for confederation than any speech
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in Ottawa. Samner's $2 billion helped convince London that it had to settle. Champ Clark's speech helped destroy a trade deal his own government wanted.
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This is also a story about who paid for the result. The country that held the line was built in part by Chinese workers, whose countrymen were then charged a head tax just to enter.
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It crossed prairie land where First Nations were pressed onto reserves when their rations were withheld, and its hold on the West was enforced by the hangings of 1885.
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Holding a border against a giant was never free, and much of the bill went to people who never chose it.
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Canada's survival is often put down to luck or to the British Navy, but calling it luck misses what actually happened.
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People in the North had to turn a set of scattered colonies into a country in a hurry, and the United States had to decide at a table in Washington that it could live with that country instead of swallowing it.
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Both sides made choices, and the border is what those choices left behind. Look at the map today, and that line from the Atlantic to the Pacific seems as if it was always there. It wasn't. It was held by people who refused, by a
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country built under pressure, and by a government in Washington that finally chose a treaty over a war.
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And that is the real reason Canada never became part of the United States. If this changed how you see that border, give it a like. The same country that never took Canada did take roughly half of Mexico, and in 1847, its army stood
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in the heart of Mexico City. So, why didn't it keep the whole country? That story is on your screen right now. I'll see you there.
Topics:Canada historyAmerican RevolutionWar of 1812Quebec ActFenian raidsConfederation of CanadaAlaska purchaseWilliam SewardCanadian history documentaryannexation
