Why wasn't Canada rebellious?

[JonnyB]

I've never fully understood what separated Canada from the U.S. at the beginning of the American Revolution. Meaning, why didn't the British colonies north of the St.Lawrence also rebel? I know some of what is now Canada were still French, but not all of it. Was Ontario too sparsely populated, or too far away? What kept the maritime provinces allied with Britain?

I'm Canadian, But I can't remember Canada ever being mentioned in History in regards to the American revolution except as a haven for British forces and loyalists.

 

[sydhe]

The French Canadians were actually treated fairly well after the French and Indian War. (This was one of the causes of the Revolution.) The colonists had just gone through the French and Indian War, and were not as kindly disposed as the British. The French Canadians had no reason at all to support the American Revolutionaries.

 

[JonnyB]

I want to make sure I understand correctly.
So it was the French population living under British rule (in the U.S.) that largely instigated the rebellion after the French Indian war.
But the French living under British rule in Canada did not share the same grievances so they didn't get involved.
Am I correct? or did I misunderstand something?

 

[Evie]

You seem to be operating under two misconceptions.

1)It was English, not French people who stirred the revolution in the United States. One factor in this was the rights granted to the french people by the English king.

2)English immigration to Ontario, etc was largely a thing that happened with the loyalists during the revolution. Pre-revolutions, Ontario was mostly natives with perhaps a bare handful of french outposts here and there.

 

[JonnyB]

#2 I suspected in regards to Ontario, However weren't Newfoundland and P.E.I british? I'm wondering why they didn't rebel as well.

#1 I thought the same as you as well, I guess I just misunderstood sydhe's post.

 

[Evie]

Newfoundland was probably too sparsely inhabited for any sort of revolt to get going.

The Maritimes, on the other hand, would probably have had a noticeable english population (likely a majority), but a fairly new one, ie, people who would still have thought of themselves as "English" ; first-generation immigrants really.

 

[Kahran Ramsus]

There was an attempt to spark a revolt in Nova Scotia (Eddy's Rebellion), but it failed miserably.

 

[Drewcifer]

Quebecers had no interest in rebelling because British government was relatively honest and uncorrupt compared to what they had experinced from their French governors (remember, this was during the run up to the French Revolution, French government was not good at the time). Also the English colonists who were rebelling had been their mortal enemies for 150 years. This just wasn't their war.

Those in the maratimes who supported the revolution were geographically cut off from the rest of the colonies by Quebec. I suspect this helped put a damper on things

 

[Verbose]

Quebecers had no interest in rebelling because British government was relatively honest and uncorrupt compared to what they had experinced from their French governors (remember, this was during the run up to the French Revolution, French government was not good at the time). Also the English colonists who were rebelling had been their mortal enemies for 150 years. This just wasn't their war.

IIRC they were bloody disgusted with the way they, as Frenchmen, had just been traded away by the king of France for the suger islands in the Carribean. Whatever loyalty to the kings of France they might have felt evaporated there.

So, no point in joing the rebellion to again become His Most Catholic Majesty's (the Bastard!) subjects, and no point in joining the colonist bastards down south either.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

As said earlier, the Canadians didn't feel the weight of heavy taxes (or the Navgation Acts!!) that the colonists did, since they weren't the ones who the Brits had sent in the Army to defend. Thus, they really had no real source of empathy to join our revolution. Pity, though, I would have liked it had Canada and the Caribbean joined with us, imagine how different history would be!

 

[JonnyB]

All right, I think I get it now, Thanks everybody!

 

[Drewcifer]

IIRC they were bloody disgusted with the way they, as Frenchmen, had just been traded away by the king of France for the suger islands in the Carribean. Whatever loyalty to the kings of France they might have felt evaporated there.

So, no point in joing the rebellion to again become His Most Catholic Majesty's (the Bastard!) subjects, and no point in joining the colonist bastards down south either.

This was a part of it. Do a google search for "Francois Bigot Quebec" and add that to it and I think you have another part of the reason. He was a symptom more than a cause, Quebec government was full of people like Bigot. Work in a bit of frontier war for 150 years to add spice.

The British did not bring men like Bigot to govern Quebec because they wanted to hold on to it. The Quebecois appreciated this at the time.

Beyond this the British government was willing to work with their Voyageur nature rather than try to make them all settled farmers on the St Laurence which was the French goal.

The French government always wanted most of it's colonists to be settled peasant farmers like in France so Quebec could feed itself and therefore defend itself from the British, in reality what many wanted was to abandon the farm and be trappers/traders in the interior. The British were more open to that. The British cared less about farming in Quebec because they got enough food from elsewhere and had a strong enough navy that they could always feed the garrison by ship and didn't need to worry about Quebec's existence as an island in an English sea so to speak in the way the French had to. What they wanted were beaver pelts, their new subjects were often more interested in trading for pelts in the back country than farming because that was more profitable (and gave a better lifestyle). They were generally very good at that. So it was a matter of convergent interests.

After Marquette, Nicolet, etc. much of the interior of North America was first explored and settled by French Canadian Voyageurs in the name of trading and trapping with British support. It is not a coincedence that many of the place names in the Midwest are French and they were the first European settlers in many cases. Some were from the French colonial era but most were from the era after that. After American independence there were a number French Canadian fur trading outposts that were "discovered" by American explorers. They are amongst the oldest settlements in the region. Pembina, which was a town of over a thousand people on the Red River in far northern Minnesota was an example of that. It's existence was unknown until a group of American frontiersmen stumbled upon it at the beginning of the 19th century (it was already flying the US flag but spoke French, most of the inhabitants were Metis, part French Canadian, part Indian).

 

[Stolen Rutters]

Yes, this one looks easy. The population of the Canadian outposts is initially pretty small and the population of the region is largely native, or French, or British military outposts, with control JUST transferred from French rule a decade earlier (from French Governors to the new rulers of the land, the English). Very few permanent colonists of the type that would have supported the goals of the revolution in the first place lived there.

The revolution starts, and English loyalist refugees start trickling north into the cities north of the St. Lawrence, like Montreal and Quebec. So the main populations are either loyalist refugees or people who just didn't care to join the fight in the first place. No incentive to join the revolution there...

You have the (at the time) Revolutionary hero Benedict Arnold attacking north to take these cities and, having failed to bring supplies or manpower for a real fight, ended up pushed back to the south. No incentive to join the revolution there....

Later in the war, the Canadian posessions become a place for the loyalists escaping the conflict to go and wait out the war, the larger loyalist population reducing the area's desire to join the revolution even further.

Thus, Canada never joined the revolution because they weren't pushed to, like General Arnold's gambit would have done, and didn't really have their own reasons for it. After the Revolution, it was a place for the loyalists leaving the new United States to move to without having to go back to England, so even post-Revolution, it wouldn't have switched.

The history of that time period (Seven Year's War through the American Revolution) was amazing, what I read of it.

I have ancestors from that general area, but they were Chippewa and from the Canadian side of the Sault, so I don't have tales of ancestors fighting in those wars (the European part of my family not showing up until the 1850s at the earliest).

 

[jonatas]

Most of the comments IMO in this thread have focused on the regions that would be called Upper and Lower Canada and unfortunately tend to ignore the Maritime regions. A couple of comments:

The experience of Acadie, the major Francophone region in the Maritimes, was completely different from Quebec. Many, many Acadians were forcibly deported to Louisiana (Cajuns) and the Carribean by the British in an attempt to clear the way for English speakers. These attempts were highly successful in some regions. So I view the claims that British government was benevolent to the French in mixed light. They were terrible in the Maritimes, as anyone who knows the region's history is aware.

Acadia and Quebec were different regions, geographically and linguistically. Even today, Acadian french dialect preserves very old vocabulary (pre-Revolutionary France) compared to Quebecois and originally maintained a somewhat closer relationship to the idea of the French Monarchy in that epoch than Quebec did IIRC.

Also, many Loyalists emigrated to what would become the Canadian provinces of course. And not only Upper Canada, but again the Maritimes. I find the mention of Benedict Arnold, the Revolutionary War Hero, most interesting, because he is also probably the greatest traitor in United States history. He became a loyalist and fled to what was then called Parrtown (modern day Saint John on the coast of New Brunswick) and settled there. In fact, Parrtown was basically created with Loyalist settlers. It had previously been settled by French at the beginning of the 1600s. So many of the English speakers who came to the Maritimes (then a very strategic and vastly more important region that today) and the rest of Canada were in fact Loyalists.

 

[Lockesdonkey]

Of historical interest:

Canada and Nova Scotia (then considered separate political entities) were invited to both Continental Congresses. They never showed up.

But otherwise, what they said.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Of historical interest:

Canada and Nova Scotia (then considered separate political entities) were invited to both Continental Congresses. They never showed up.

But otherwise, what they said.

Nova Scotia was separate because they had just been siezed from the French, right? Even though it wasn't a colony per se, it was administered by the French, at least until the end of the Seven Years' War.

 

[shortguy]

Of historical interest:

Canada and Nova Scotia (then considered separate political entities) were invited to both Continental Congresses. They never showed up.

But otherwise, what they said.

In a similar vein, an allowance for the Union to admit Canada if ever they requested is written into the Articles of Confederation.

 

[Mulholland]

In a similar vein, an allowance for the Union to admit Canada if ever they requested is written into the Articles of Confederation.

I want in!

 

[JonnyB]

In a similar vein, an allowance for the Union to admit Canada if ever they requested is written into the Articles of Confederation.

SSSHHH!! Don't tell Alberta!

 

[jonatas]

Nova Scotia was separate because they had just been siezed from the French, right? Even though it wasn't a colony per se, it was administered by the French, at least until the end of the Seven Years' War.

Large portions of French Acadia were ceded much earlier in the 1713 treaty of Utrecht (most of modern day Nova Scotia for example. But keep in mind Nova Scotia/Acadia was originally much larger and encompassed modern Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick). Many battles were fought for this region on the Atlantic seaboard over a long period of time. There were earlier attempts to settle this region with Scottish settlers (1600s) and struggles too with the English, but the French maintained control until the early
1700s. So really the British were in control of this region much earlier than the Seven Years war.

The severe problem began precisely with the Seven Years war, when the British wanted Acadians to swear an oath of loyalty to the British crown, which included potentially fighting against Quebecois (this was a new stipulation to the original oath). Of course Acadians would never do this. Samuel de Champlain (early 1600s) was really the founder of both Acadia and Quebec, and these regions had many bonds. This led to the expulsion of Acadians, and English settlers coming in to replace them. Some regions were cleared of French influence quite thoroughly, others held on. The Acadians have remained strong in the region of modern day New Brunswick (the only bilingual province officially, although official recognition of French actually came surprisingly late there, in the 20th century), for example.