How Vain an Attempt

In October 1774, the First Continental Congress, gathered in Philadelphia, approved an open letter to Canadians. “You are a small people, compared to those who with open arms invite you into a fellowship,” it read. “A moment’s reflection should convince you which will be most for your interest and happiness, to have all the rest of North-America your unalterable friends, or your inveterate enemies.” The Americans, who had not yet openly rebelled against the Crown, believed that their fellow British subjects, mostly consisting of French Canadians in recently conquered New France, shared their desire to throw off the shackles of the monarchy and unfair taxation from across the Atlantic. The letter carried with it the threat of invasion should the “small people” ignore the offer of friendship that came with the slight inconvenience of annexation. Local authorities did ignore it, though. And the Americans, after taking up arms in April 1775 and engaging in some minor skirmishes north of the border, began planning a full-fledged military campaign in June.

Reading He Did Not Conquer: Benjamin Franklin’s Failure to Annex Canada in the age of Donald Trump, one can’t help but hear echoes of this dangerous period, when the larger population sought “fellowship” with the smaller one by way of a takeover. Guiding the reader along is Madelaine Drohan, an experienced journalist who returned to the University of Ottawa to write this history. Her focus is on the printer, inventor, and statesman Benjamin Franklin, who harboured an intense hatred of Catholic francophones in Canada and sought to drive Britain from North America. This is a good book that has arrived at an opportune time.

Before jumping into the story, Drohan provides useful notes about terminology: for example, the hazily defined name “Canada” applied to the huge territory that the French had called New France and to the smaller one that the British called the Province of Quebec. (Two maps, drawn from the competing perspectives of both colonial powers in 1755, help to illustrate the lack of agreement on the region’s borders.) America consisted of thirteen colonies — more a geographic unit than the patriotic concept of the United States we have come to know. Drohan also explains that many First Nations were involved on multiple sides of the conflict that followed.

Drohan has done some heavy lifting in multiple national archives to restore to the record Franklin’s deep revulsion toward Catholicism and what he saw as “tyrannical” popery. The French Canadians who occupied most of the St. Lawrence Valley (Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and other Crown possessions are largely left out of this account) were seen as both a threat and a barrier to westward American expansion. Having a financial stake in the Grand Ohio Company of land speculators, Franklin advocated for the French Canadians to be evicted, much like the unfortunate Acadians of 1755. Failing that, they could be forced onto the path to assimilation by revoking the religious, legal, and linguistic rights granted by the Quebec Act of 1774. Franklin offered few thoughts on Indigenous peoples, but he appears to have assumed they would die off or be driven away.

From 1757 to 1775, Franklin lived in London, where he pursued his scientific interests. He also served as deputy postmaster general of British North America and as a diplomatic representative for some colonies. In January 1774, he was dressed down by the Privy Council for his growing rebel sympathies and especially for having leaked to colonial authorities British intentions to send military reinforcements. The following year, the Second Continental Congress appointed him as the first postmaster general of the United Colonies.

Drohan argues that Canadians might have joined the fight against the “intolerable” imperial regime, but they lacked leaders. Furthermore, Sir Guy Carleton, the governor of British North America, accommodated religious freedoms and French civil law, and he limited interference with the merchant class, though many were still angry over taxes. Even when Carleton invoked martial law in June 1775, which made militia duty compulsory, there was little resistance, beyond the defacement of a statue of the King in Montreal.

In a two-pronged American invasion, the eventual turncoat Benedict Arnold led a force through what is now northern Maine, encountering no opposition. Arnold’s men —“army” would be too grand a name — had chosen a harrowing route, with too few supplies. Starving soldiers were forced to eat their dogs and gnaw on their shoes before arriving at Quebec City.

Richard Montgomery led a second force, which captured forts along the Richelieu River as well as Montreal before meeting Arnold’s ragtag mob at Quebec City, considered the key to making Canada the fourteenth colony. Its imposing stone walls were well defended by British regulars and Carleton’s militia. Standing before the fortifications, the 1,000 or so Americans wisely settled in for a siege while they recuperated. Delegates to the Second Continental Congress were shocked when Montgomery and many of his men were killed on December 31, having finally attacked in a snowstorm. Arnold’s force, too, was defeated, and he was injured. Quebec City had resisted, and the Americans had to lick their wounds.

Despite the loss, revolutionary leaders were resolute in their belief that they could conquer the Canadians into liberty, and Montgomery became a martyr. Paintings, poems, plays, and pamphlets were created or written in the fallen general’s honour. Thomas Paine, widely known for the pamphlet Common Sense, published A Dialogue Between the Ghost of General Montgomery, Just Arrived from the Elysian Fields; and an American Delegate in a Wood near Philadelphia. In it, the shade of Montgomery explained the just actions of those taking up arms against George III, whom he called a “royal criminal.”

In February 1776, the congress sent a small group of commissioners, including Franklin, to Montreal, to explore ways to defeat the Canadians, but they found the withered American forces lacking the resources to mount another assault. “For God’s sake,” one officer pleaded, “send powder & Pork.” The underfunded army could do no such thing, and in the spring, British and Canadian forces drove out the invaders. All of this occurred before July 4, when the Declaration of Independence was signed and prepared for distribution.

Having restored their flagging health, some of the American invaders continued the fight against the British elsewhere until the fledgling United States eventually won the war in 1783 — a victory that, ironically, would have been impossible without material support and military assistance from Catholic France.

Franklin was involved in negotiating the Treaty of Paris, which awarded vast tracts of land to the new nation but left Canada and the Maritime colonies in British hands. Many in the U.S. assumed those isolated regions would fall prey to American expansionism or that their inhabitants would come to their senses and join the republic. Instead, the colonies that survived both the American Revolution and the War of 1812 later united to become a great nation.

“I am confident, that Canada might have been purchased from France for a tenth part of the money England spent in the conquest of it,” Franklin once said of the Seven Years War. Indeed, there was more than one way to acquire territory and convince a people to surrender. Now, 250 years later, the second Trump regime seems to have taken such sentiments to heart. It is not a physical invasion but economic force that the White House seeks to use in bringing Canada to its knees. But it also is worth remembering how we fought back in 1775 and have fended off other military, trade, and cultural invasions. If geography is no longer our greatest shield, it may be that time remains our ace in the hole, with delay, prevarication, and postponement as the better parts of valour.

Drohan ends her book with a fascinating exploration of how Franklin’s desire to conquer Canada was largely forgotten, to the point that a stamp honouring the famous polymath who sought to annex us was created by the Canadian postal service in 1976, to commemorate the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence. She has some choice words for historians, cultural producers, and mythmakers who have ignored our history at our collective peril. In 200 years, will Canadians dedicate a stamp to Donald Trump, the latest in a moderately long line of Americans manoeuvring to conquer Canada? One shudders to think.

It is our duty to remember the past and to arm ourselves in the present for whatever threat we face today or in the future.