United States Expansionism and British North America, 1775-1871

Reginald C. Stuart

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780807864098
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This sweeping study surveys nearly a century of diverse American views on the relationship between the United States and the Canadian provinces, filling out a neglected chapter in the history of aggressive U.S. expansionism. Until the mid-nineteenth century, many believed that Canada would ultimately join the United States. Stuart provides an insightful view of the borderland, the Canadian-American frontier where the demographics, commerce, and culture of the two countries blend. Originally published in 1988. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

PART 1
The Era of Defensive Expansion, 1775–1815

At the end of the War for Independence, despite its far-flung borders that stretched to the Mississippi River in the west, the United States was a small, economically weak, militarily slender power huddled between the Atlantic seaboard and the Appalachian mountains of North America. It was part of Europe’s North Atlantic world, yet geographically remote from Europe’s commercial, financial, industrial, and political centers.

European countries occupied parts of North America, however, and their influence touched the United States. Great Britain retained West Indian islands, Bermuda, and provinces on America’s northern frontier that extended to the limits of the Great Lakes Basin in the continental interior. This meant an insecure northern border for the United States because the British occupied fur posts on American soil and controlled Indian tribes linked with the fur trade. And the provinces also harbored many loyalist refugees who had fled from the United States during and after the Revolution. Spain controlled Florida and the Louisiana territory. Thus Spain’s capricious fingers rested on the throat of the Mississippi River, an increasingly important communications channel for Americans moving into the Ohio Valley after 1783. In addition, Spain held the Pacific Coast of North America, while England and Russia, by virtue of exploration and commercial activity, also sustained a Pacific presence by the end of the eighteenth century.

Internally, the United States had many potential fracture lines. The Confederation government struggled to gain control of western lands and to shape a national economy from what survived of the largely separate thirteen colonial economies. Production, trade, and finance gradually recovered from their postwar disruptions. The States grudgingly ceded their western claims to the Confederation government to form a national domain. And delegates hammered out a series of ordinances to transform portions of this territory into states that would be partners with the original thirteen. A major group of social and political dissenters had departed with the loyalist evacuations of 1783. Yet the loyalists remained politically contentious. The Treaty of Paris of 1783 theoretically allowed loyalists to recover lost property through legal action in state courts. But the states refused loyalists this privilege and in retaliation Great Britain held fur posts on American soil.

Americans had only begun to learn to live together instead of as a collection of English colonials. The War for Independence had created a foundation for union, but now Americans had to get to work on the upper stories of their nation. Problems on both American frontiers, international weakness, and what many revolutionary leaders saw as a dangerous tendency toward social anarchy, debt, and commercial chaos combined to produce the movement for a stronger central government that culminated in the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia in the summer of 1787.

Through these immediate postwar years, politically active Americans were deeply concerned about national security. Both practical and ideological difficulties threatened the survival of the United States in what many saw as a hostile world. Republicanism had found a lonely and isolated home in America, and revolutionary leaders were determined that their political experiment should have the best possible chance of success. They were convinced that republicanism created favorable circumstances for human progress. At the same time, American farmers needed markets, merchantmen needed protection and free access to other countries, and frontiersmen needed defending. If the United States could not achieve external security and internal stability, republicanism would collapse and its American supporters would become pawns in Europe’s games of power. The adoption of the Constitution of 1787 was a major step toward national security in the minds of the founding fathers.

The successful creation of a national government was only partly completed when new forces menaced national security. The wars of the French Revolution brought restrictions against overseas trade, and the impressment of seamen by the British an assault on national sovereignty. The governments of the Early National period pursued a tortuous route in their efforts to maintain international neutrality. They employed a combination of wishful thinking, economic coercion, diplomacy, and the limited use of military force, both on land and sea. The several wars between 1783 and 1815 played an important role in allowing the new nation to survive.

Many who considered themselves heirs to eighteenth-century ideas about politics saw a greater danger in domestic factionalism. It took some time for the idea of a legitimate opposition operating within a patriotic consensus to take hold in the American mind. American leaders may not have accepted two-party politics as natural until the 1820s. But the first American party system of the 1790s nevertheless became a source of strength and union however much the two camps suspected each other of subversive intentions.

American expansionism during the Early National period occurred within this context. At the level of national policymaking, territorial expansion was primarily opportunistic and defensive. Another form of expansionism was undertaken by merchants who sought to extend commercial contacts and petitioned for federal support and protection in the form of legislation and even of military power when they encountered difficulties. But they did not intend that the flag follow their traders except on the flagstaffs of their vessels. Nor did they intend to spread direct political influence where their vessels called or their merchants established trading stations. Even if they had wanted to, such efforts were beyond the power of the American government. But leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Quincy Adams had a vision of America that reached beyond merely erecting outer barricades against foreign assault.

Continental migration patterns constituted a third form of expansionism. American settlers had moved into the Ohio Valley even during the Revolution. After 1783, they pushed against frontier Indian tribes from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. American settlers spilled over national boundaries into the British provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, and into Spanish Florida and Louisiana. American policymakers extended unofficial support to an 1810 rebellion of the Florida settlers, but made no other direct political efforts to aid other countrymen settling outside the national boundaries, as in the British provinces, for example.

Territorial acquisitions came from cautiously limited ambitions linked with opportunities and a fundamentally defensive strategy for national security. The negotiators at Paris before 1783 had obtained generous boundaries, far more than the United States required for its population. But Benjamin Franklin, the most influential and perceptive American agent overseas, believed that Americans would eventually spread deep into North America. And many revolutionary leaders gazed westward when they thought of national development.

Specific acquisitions suggest the pattern of defensive territorial expansion. In 1802 Jefferson’s government sought a small strip of land along the Mississippi River so that Ohio settlers could deposit their goods to await shipment to outside markets. But shifts in European politics produced an unexpected windfall in the vast and undefined Louisiana., Jefferson did think in terms of American exploitation of the interior, even to the Pacific Coast, as his sponsorship of the Lewis and Clark expedition before his government learned of the Louisiana Purchase indicates. He also talked about an empire of liberty in North America. But he was not clear whether this would be several countries under one government, or a loose affiliation of independent republics. During the War of 1812, James Madison’s administration had limited territorial ambitions, if any. Madison and his secretary of state, James Monroe, would have kept Upper Canada if American armies had ejected British power. But the British remained. Few, apart from Westerners, had territorial ambitions in the North, and their principal goal was to sever British links with the Indians in the Old Northwest.

American expansionism in the Early National period therefore had three fundamental components. First, merchants had particular interests in free trade and in expanding opportunities now that they could no longer circulate within the British Empire. Second, western settlers wanted access to the Gulf of Mexico down the Mississippi River and frontiers secure against what they saw as the Indian “menace.” These restless and ambitious frontiersmen also wanted to move where they chose, and for the most part were able to do so. Both British and Spanish officials became alarmed at the influx of Americans. They considered them potentially disloyal elements that would eventually rebel against colonial rule and seek annexation to the United States. Third, successive administrations wanted international respectability and secure borders for the United States.

Each of these three fundamental elements of expansionism contributed to a diversity of American perceptions of the British provinces. Most Americans below the northern tier of states were unaware of a series of borderlands that began to form after 1783 from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Sandwich, on the Detroit River. Most Americans perceived the northern provinces through the veils of ambition, fear, and prejudice. American officials, for example, saw the provinces as an enemy base. Policymakers therefore sought to eject the British from the Northwest Posts they had retained since 1783. They also sought to define and secure boundaries, and sever the British links with Indian tribes on American soil. American settlers and merchants, on the other hand, saw the provinces, not as a threat, but as a source of opportunity. The former migrated into the eastern townships of Lower Canada, across the St. Lawrence, Niagara, and Detroit rivers into Upper Canada, and even in small numbers into the maritime provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

Northern merchants sought access to borderland markets and resources. In Halifax, New England entrepreneurs saw a backdoor to the coveted West Indian market. Farmers along the northern border were cut off from the centers of American economic activity. Their natural outlets lay through British territory with Montreal as their entrepôt. For certain groups of Americans, the provinces provided opportunity of another kind—free land, or the chance to join friends and relatives who had left during the War for Independence.

American borderlanders began to see the provincials as neighbors as the British regime in the provinces began to be distinguished from the people it ruled. The provincials were also potential recruits to American republicanism, or at least this was the belief of many in the United States on the eve of the War of 1812. Proximity, cultural similarity, kinship, and economic links encouraged this view. For still others, the provinces were an object of curiosity. Yankee travelers visited to see for themselves how the provincials lived and what they were like. Finally, the provinces offered a refuge to some Americans. Quakers sojourned in Nova Scotia, Moravian Indians and their missionary leaders fled to the Thames Valley in Upper Canada, and a few Dunkards and former Whiskey Rebels of 1794 also found a refuge outside of, but nearby the United States.

These various perceptions solidified in American thinking during the Early National period, and carried through to Canadian Confederation in 1867 and beyond. They constitute the pattern of American views of British North America after 1783 and provide in turn a framework for understanding how national expansion of the United States intertwined with the development of Canadian history. Most Americans were indifferent to the provinces, but many were not. Those who were informed and interested provide a window on American national behavior between 1783 and 1871.

Chapter 1. Revolutionary Expansionism and the Provinces

The union is yet incomplete, and will be so, until the inhabitants of all the territory from Cape Breton to the Mississippi are included in it: while Great Britain possesses Canada and West Florida, she will be continually setting the Indians upon us, and while she holds the harbors of Augustine and Halifax, especially the latter, we shall not be able to protect our trade or coasts from her depredations, at least for many years to come.

—George Mason to Richard Henry Lee, 21 July 1778

After the fall of Quebec in 1759, American colonials began to celebrate Britain’s triumph in the Great War for Empire. In a 1760 sermon on the victories, the Reverend John Mellon of Lancaster recalled the long, dreary and violent history of French-English relations in North America. But only recently the French had been swept away from the northern border; the Spanish had been ejected from the southern. The war had been just, Mellon declared, and God had smiled. America could look forward to safe frontiers, the spread of the true gospel among the Indians, new land for settlement, the growth of British dominions, peaceful trade, and an end to wars.¹

George Mason’s letter and John Mellon’s sermon suggest the early pattern of American perceptions of the northern borderlands, whether in British or French hands. Except for the brief interlude between the Treaty of 1763 that confirmed British mastery of North America and the opening campaigns of the War of Independence, Americans saw the north as an enemy base. Before 1763, Britain’s national and imperial rival, and the deadly enemy of all Protestants, Roman Catholic France, had garrisoned the strongholds. After 1775, British officials and their troops threatened the colonial rebellion from this northern base. In both cases, enemy agents sought to enlist Indian allies to slaughter American frontiersmen. Sallies from northern bases also imperiled American coastal settlements and shipping. Finally, both the British and the French used their northern colonies as bases to vie with the Americans for resources nominally controlled by the Indians—land, transportation routes, and furs.

This fear of a northern enemy base became associated with a countervailing perception. The provinces represented opportunity. During the colonial era, these opportunities were agrarian and commercial. Who controlled the territory did not matter as long as Americans had free access. New England merchants, for example, traded briskly with the French at Louisbourg and in Acadia, whether peace or war prevailed between the home countries across the Atlantic. The frontiersmen wanted only to be left alone to carve out new homesteads. Finally, as Mellon hinted, the northern provinces offered religious opportunities—the occasion to spread the true Protestant gospel.

These northern provinces lay on the fringes of the American frontier and consequently New Yorkers and New Englanders in particular had been aware of the opportunities they offered for many years. New England merchants and fishermen had only a short voyage to the Bay of Fundy or a slightly longer one beyond to the waters off Cape Breton, St. John’s Island (later Prince Edward Island), and Newfoundland. For New Yorkers, the journey to the northern provinces was more difficult and dangerous. Yet the ancient invasion route down the Champlain Valley was also a commercial highway that had tempted entrepreneurial spirits even in the 1760s. Half-pay British officers and American merchants trekked north to seek patrimonies and penetrate the Montreal fur trade. By 1776 they formed a small but vocal group in Canadian provincial affairs, with southern contacts.

Mellon’s and Mason’s remarks, however, did not cover all facets of the American perception of the northern provinces. Perceptions varied with circumstances and individuals. For example, the provinces provided both refugees and a refuge. After 1755, refugee Acadians landed in Massachusetts from the Annapolis expulsion. In the 1760s, however, New Englanders migrated to the Annapolis area in Nova Scotia to farm or speculate in land. The provincials themselves were also objects of conquest, forced recruits either to British imperialism in the 1760s or to United States democratic republicanism after 1776. In other words, on this occasion provincials were potential Americans, even though they were products of an alien, even enemy, society and culture.

Revolutionary Americans have a historical reputation as aggressive conquerors casting covetous glances at Canada and Nova Scotia. Even before declaring independence, colonial revolutionaries launched a struggle for a fourteenth colony. Although Canada became both a political and military target, misadventure, bad luck, and later fear that France might regain Canada, combined to thwart American designs and insure Canadian survival as a British province.² The 1775 invasion was a strategic defense with only overtones of imperial ambition. “Manifest Destiny” has been wrenched from its nineteenth-century context to explain how expansionistic revolutionaries thought about British provinces other than the rebellious thirteen. Although a few of the revolutionaries hinted at territorial ambitions, most saw the 1775 expedition as an effort to guard against future wars.³

Were expansionism and the American Revolution functionally interrelated? The natural law Revolutionary leaders so frequently cited sanctioned an outward thrust. As self-appointed guardians of liberty, Americans inevitably looked beyond their as yet undefined borders to extend their sanctuary of freedom. At the same time, economic impulses arising in colonial times...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART 1 The Era of Defensive Expansion, 1775–1815
• PART 2 The Era of Manifest Destiny, 1815–1860
• PART 3 The Era of the New American Empire Dawns, 1850–1871
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index