O Canada

Why the United States stops at the 49th parallel

Donald Trump has repeatedly proclaimed that Canada should be part of the United States. He speaks of it as the “51st state,” perhaps not appreciating that Canada is as large as all fifty of the American states together. Nor has he shown any knowledge of why it isn’t already part of the United States.

He’s in good historical company. When the thirteen lower colonies seceded from the British empire in 1776, many American rebels assumed that the grievances they felt toward London were shared in Canada. And that the Canadians merely had to be nudged to join the Americans’ revolution. The Continental Congress sent a delegation north to Canada to give the nudge. No less a figure than Benjamin Franklin headed the delegation.

The mission failed. The Canadians were mostly French and had been handed by France over to Britain at the end of the French and Indian War — in Europe called the Seven Years War — in 1763. To smooth the process, the British government had agreed to let the Canadians run their own affairs to a greater degree than the French had allowed. And they carved out special treatment for the Catholic church, to which most of the Canadians belonged.

The Canadians had never had things so good, and they told Franklin so. They wanted nothing to do with the Americans’ war against Britain.

George Washington was disappointed. The commander of the Continental Army sent two columns of soldiers to Canada to compel its joining the revolution. One column was led by Benedict Arnold, then the bravest and most active of Washington’s lieutenants. Arnold’s march through what would become Maine created an instant legend. Yet Arnold’s efforts and those of the other column failed to accomplish Washington’s purpose. The defeated Americans barely made it home.

Canada remained securely British for the rest of the war. It grew even more British afterward as tens of thousands of American loyalists – opponents of independence – fled north to avoid reprisal at the hands of the victorious rebels.

Consequently, when unfinished business from the first Anglo-American war produced a second conflict – the War of 1812 – the Canadians resisted American advances more stoutly than ever. A promise of the American war hawks was that Canada would fall easily into America’s lap. Henry Clay of Kentucky boasted that a regiment of his state’s bold riflemen could conquer Canada by themselves.

Reality proved the opposite. British and Canadian forces, aided by Indians, rebuffed the Americans and then invaded the United States, capturing Detroit and terrifying settlements all along the border. In 1814 a British raiding party burned Washington, humiliating the war-leading administration of James Madison. An eleventh hour victory – which actually took place at the thirteenth hour, two weeks after a treaty to end the war had been signed in Europe – by Andrew Jackson at New Orleans salvaged some American pride but neither altered the terms of the treaty nor brought the covetous dream of Canadian conquest closer.

Officially the United States acknowledged the separate existence of Canada under British rule during the next half-century. Unofficially members of a group called the Fenians – Irish nationalists hoping to free their native land from British control – conducted raids into Canada from bases in the United States. The tactical objects of the raids varied, but the basic idea was that a war between America and Britain might lead to Irish independence, much as the war between France and Britain in the 1770s and 1780s led to American independence.

During all this time, Americans could claim with at least some plausibility that American efforts to capture Canada were for the good of Canadians themselves. In the spirit of Manifest Destiny, many Americans swept Canada into an argument they made for the conquest of Mexico — that by spreading democracy to the north and the south, American troops would liberate Canadians and Mexicans from the thrall of misgovernment and sweep them into the realm of freedom. The Mexicans weren’t persuaded but nonetheless were divested of half their country. The Canadians weren’t persuaded either yet avoided further official molestation.

The Manifest Destiny argument, as it related to Canada, was largely neutralized when the British government in 1867 put Canada on track to effective home rule. From this point forward, Canadians had the best of both worlds: an assumption of British protection against American aggression, and self-government among themselves.

The timing of the British move wasn’t an accident. In the same year American secretary of state William Seward arranged the American purchase of Russian Alaska. He simultaneously proposed acquisition of Greenland and Iceland from Denmark. Seward’s strategy was to put Canada in an American vise, leaving Britain to conclude that Canada was indefensible and therefore ought to be relinquished to the United States. The Danish deal fell through. Yet the British had concluded that Canada would be more easily defended on a loose leash than a taut one, for the Canadians would more readily spring to their own defense under the former regime.

American ardor for Canada cooled. No longer could it be rationalized as liberation. Moreover, the industrial revolution was under full steam, and land for the sake of land was not as appealing as it had been when most Americans were farmers. With the important yet impermanent exception of the Philippines, the United States never again acquired large tracts of foreign territory. Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Panama Canal Zone and the Virgin Islands were rounding errors by comparison with America’s earlier acquisitions. Most Americans assumed their country’s days of territorial expansion were over.

Until Trump revived the issue. Maybe it wasn’t surprising he did. As a real-estate developer he thought of land in transactional terms. With Trump it was often impossible to know when he was speaking seriously. Yet it was perilous to assume he wasn’t. In threatening Canada was he joking? Bolstering his tariff campaign? Establishing an outer bound of craziness that would make his designs on Panama and Greenland look reasonable by comparison?

None could tell. Possibly Trump himself didn’t know and was winging it.

He wasn’t interested in history. He should have been. The United States had tried to take Canada in the past, and the efforts had been costly and counterproductive. Nothing suggested this time would be different.