5
THE WARS FOR AMERICA (2)
The harbour and defences of the British base at Halifax, 1780, during the Revolutionary War.
The Anglo–French wars of the eighteenth century supplanted one North American empire, the French, with another, the British. Contemporaries perceived the importance of the event and predicted, rightly, that great things would come of it. As often with such predictions, the details of the future foreseen proved to be quite wrong.
One consequence of the war was definitive. The political links between the French of North America and the French of France were severed. No French army would ever again march through Canadian forests. Louis XV and his successors in royal, republican, and imperial France never thought it worthwhile to reclaim North America with money or ships or soldiers— although, in one notable aberration, they would try it with words. But that is a much later story. (See Chapter 15.)
The economic links that bound New France to old France were also broken, to the relief of the French taxpayer. Military expenditures were gone, as were the subsidies that kept the fur trade afloat and the Indian allies friendly.
Culturally, the break wasn’t nearly as clear. Law and religion had taken a distinctly French form. The Canadian Church was bound not just to Rome but to the French crown, which appointed the bishops and thus had a strong influence over how the Church on French territory conducted itself. As for justice, the law in New France was naturally French law: it was the “custom of Paris” (coutume de Paris) that regulated contracts and obligations and protected property. Secular culture must also come from Paris, for there were almost no alternative publications in the French language. In terms of material culture, matters weren’t as serious. What could be made in France could be made in Great Britain, sometimes better and usually cheaper. What could be made, or grown or caught, in Canada could still be exported to Europe, although to Great Britain rather than France. Nor did traditional enmity preclude admiration or imitation—British styles, British goods, and British culture were admired, envied, and increasingly aped in Europe—and, of course, in Europe overseas.1
How to make permanent the break with France was the main question facing the new masters of Quebec, but it was only one issue among many for the imperial authorities in London. How to manage an empire that had more than doubled in size on the North American continent alone, how to pay for the war just past, and how to pay for the administration of the empire in the future were some of the issues that confronted George III and his ministers in 1763. Even more intractable than finance (and its accompanying nightmare, taxation) was a cultural question: How to absorb a substantial number of Catholics into a kingdom and an empire that were, by legislative definition, Protestant?
The British government tried to act responsibly, but in acting they disturbed the sleeping dragons of taxation and religion. They intended to put the empire on a firmer footing, but by their actions they undermined it, losing most of their American colonies in the process. If the fifty years before 1763 guaranteed that Canada would be British, the fifty years after 1763 ensured that it would not, at the same time, be American.
ACCOUNTING FOR EMPIRE, 1763–1774
Northern North America in 1763 had about 300,000 people—200,000 Natives and 100,000 whites, Europeans or the descendants of Europeans. It was divided into two colonies with one fishery, Newfoundland, and one commercial domain, the Hudson’s Bay Company territories. The colonies were Quebec and Nova Scotia. Thanks to the defeat of the French, Nova Scotia expanded to include all of the former Acadia, including Cape Breton, Isle St. Jean, and what would later be New Brunswick. It was governed from Halifax, where the governor resided and where an elected assembly periodically met. In the structure of its government, its laws (English common law), and its language (English) it was the same as the other British colonies to the south. Its low population, partly caused by the Acadian deportation of 1755, was being remedied through the steady immigration of New Englanders and the arrival of shiploads of immigrants from Scotland and other parts of Europe, such as Germany. They joined the remnant of the Acadians, both those who had evaded deportation and those who had returned after the war. Nova Scotia was less a continuous colony—land communication was difficult and much of the province a howling wilderness—than a series of coastal pockets inhabited by Europeans and imposed on an undeveloped interior that was still occupied by the local Indian nations, especially the Mi’kmaqs and the Malecites.
The Newfoundland fishery was the part of North America most familiar to generations of Europeans. It attracted annual swarms of fishing boats to the Grand Banks from Western Europe to harvest the apparently inexhaustible cod. The French and the British both attempted to settle; thanks to the imperial wars only the British had the actual right to stay, though the French had a right of temporary residence on the north shore to dry and cure their catch. British fishing interests opposed the dilution of their fishery by a local population that might soon develop its own interests and divide the catch. Settlement was therefore officially discouraged, but it was hard to prevent a hardy few from taking root. As to the value of the fishery, there was no doubt: it was worth an estimated £600,000 in 1768, employing twenty thousand fishermen, twelve thousand of whom were from the British Isles.
Until the 1760s Newfoundland had no governor, no assembly, no elections, and no organized government. When a governor was appointed, he made it his business to deport as many of the inhabitants as he could. Nevertheless, officials estimated the permanent population at sixteen thousand, dispersed over many kilometres of coastline—a number and a space that defied the government’s best efforts at depopulation.2
The settlers were partly responsible for depopulation of a different kind: the disappearance of the Native population of the island, the Beothuks. As elsewhere, disease played a major role; but on Newfoundland there was no interaction through the fur trade, no sense of mutual advantage or tolerance. Never numerous (their population at the time of first contact with Europeans is estimated to have been about a thousand), by the end of the eighteenth century the Beothuks were a handful. And despite efforts by the government to establish friendly contact, with an eye to preserving the race, the last known member of the tribe died in 1829. By that time, all the Natives of the Atlantic region of what would become Canada probably numbered no more than ten thousand.
Farther north and west, in the commercial domain of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Indians were still economically and militarily significant in their interaction with white settlers and traders. The nations of the interior had long since adapted to European ways of warfare and commerce, equipping themselves with muskets and other trade goods. Farther west, on the prairies, another import from Europe, horses, had been adopted by the Plains Indians. The farther west and north, of course, the less likely were the Indians to be decimated by disease. Indeed, as late as the 1760s many had never even seen whites.3
Cultural differences mattered little compared with the attractions of trade with the Europeans. Even the Inuit of the far north weren’t immune: those living along shipping or trading routes, like Hudson Strait, both benefited from trade goods and suffered from disease and alcohol, the mixed consequence of contact with Hudson’s Bay Company ships.
The British government was uneasy about the Native populations of North America. The assistance or alliance of some Natives, and the neutrality of others, had been crucial in the war just past. In a sense, the Natives had become wards of the British crown, entitled to consideration and protection; as important, the occupation of the interior of the continent without their cooperation or at least their acquiescence would be a difficult and expensive proposition. It followed that British policies should be calculated to allay the fears of the Indians and gain their trust; unfortunately, the senior British general, Jeffrey Amherst, was inclined to do just the opposite.
As if to underline the point, war broke out around the western Great Lakes in the spring of 1763. One British post, Michilimackinac, fell to an Indian alliance led by the Ottawa chief Pontiac; another, Detroit, survived largely by luck. Pontiac’s “rebellion” wasn’t finally ended until 1765, and Pontiac himself submitted to the British only the following year.
The British government attempted to buy time by issuing a royal proclamation on 7 October 1763. The proclamation drew a line roughly along the Appalachians, reserving the lands to the west for the Indians and strictly regulating commerce there, to the irritation and frustration of land speculators, settlers, and merchants in the existing colonies to the east. The proclamation also constituted “the province of Quebec,” in a rectangle that covered roughly the St Lawrence Valley. Quebec would be a province, unlike the colonies to the south, or Nova Scotia: it would not have an assembly for the time being. It would, instead, be ruled by a governor and an appointed council.
The most notable feature of the proclamation was its futility. By the time it was issued, thousands of settlers were already pouring across the Appalachians. Thousands more arrived in the years that followed until, in 1768, the British government conceded the point by concluding with the Iroquois, as nominal suzerains of the interior tribes, a treaty that ceded lands in the Ohio Valley belonging to other Indian nations.
The proclamation was only one facet of British colonial policy. What consumed the government’s attention was revenue. Searching for money, the government found something else—colonial rebellion against imperial taxes imposed by a Parliament that did not represent the colonists.
The province of Quebec played little part in the drift to war and revolution. From the outset, British authorities were conscious that Quebec posed a problem because of its Catholicism, its French language, and its fresh loyalty to the French crown. To address these problems the local governors, James Murray and Guy Carleton, urged accommodation. Their choices were few. They hadn’t enough troops to garrison a large province, and not enough money to pay for a domineering administration. The government of Quebec must depend on the consent of the governed, tacit or overt, and the best way to secure such consent was to employ what was left of the officials and officers of the previous French regime.
An important factor in governance was the Catholic Church, which in the early 1760s was headless in Quebec after the death of the previous bishop in 1760. Without a bishop, priests couldn’t be consecrated, and without priests, parishes—the basic social and political unit of the countryside—would eventually lose their pastors. The problem was that the rulers of Great Britain, Protestants to a man, believed that Catholicism was the enemy of liberty, especially Protestant liberty, and the bulwark of tyranny. Expediency dictated a temporary compromise with Catholicism, involving the toleration of Catholic religious practice, but as a long-term measure such a policy was most undesirable, if not actually subversive. The superiority of Protestant liberty was surely demonstrated in the triumph of British arms, sustained by British (and colonial) prosperity, in the late war.
Despite these anti-Catholic sentiments, Catholics resident on British territory, even in the British Isles, weren’t actually persecuted for their faith, and Catholic priests were winked at, provided they weren’t too obtrusive. Political power rested securely with the Protestants, even when, as in Ireland, they constituted only a small fraction of the island’s population. The Catholics submitted politically, and in return the Protestants ignored the small matter of their religious practice. It was natural enough to extend the same official oblivion to the colonies, even if many of the colonists also fervently believed that Catholicism was inimical to their country’s well-being.
It was mainly because of religion that the British government hesitated over the form of governance for Quebec. Even a colony like Maryland (which had a Catholic lord proprietor) had removed the vote from Catholics in 1718. With the population at seventy thousand and rising in the 1760s, Quebec was larger than Georgia, Delaware, and Nova Scotia, and arguably as deserving as they to elect an assembly. The real problem was that all but a few hundred of Quebec’s inhabitants were Catholics.
The few hundred Protestants saw nothing wrong with the notion that they alone should vote, monopolize a future assembly, and occupy all public offices. The successive governors, Murray (1760–66) and Carleton (1768–78), took a different point of view. How could they maintain order, enforce laws, and raise revenue in a system that discriminated against almost all the inhabitants of the province?
James Murray, younger son of a Scottish noble family, found the immigrant British merchants, whether from the American colonies or from Great Britain direct, objectionable: a bunch of “licentious pedlars,” he grumbled. Their interests were not his, nor those of the whole colony, he was sure. Objections to his style of government reached London and offered his political opponents there a chance to unseat him. The merchants hoped for better from his successor, the lieutenant governor Guy Carleton, but Carleton, too, eventually disappointed them.
From the point of view of later centuries, the real issue in Quebec after 1760 was the fate of the French Canadians, the Canadiens: their place in politics, in society, and in the economy. Many of the economic actors of the period were also political actors, and attempted to influence the British government to serve their own interests.
But in fact there wasn’t much to be said or done about the economy. New France had been propped up by French subsidies, its social structure reinforced by infusions of French gold and French honour and the prospect of warlike employment for its gentry. Not surprisingly, many of the latter departed for France in search of a familiar paymaster. As for the merchants of New France, some left and some stayed, but the commercial links on which they depended changed inevitably as New France passed from one empire to another and, accordingly, from one source of capital and markets to another. In a mercantile world—that is, a world ruled by theories of mercantilism—this was simply assumed to be natural.
The governors plied London with their views on Quebec, its inhabitants, its economy, and its prospects. The dispatches from Quebec were scrutinized by ministers who had to fit them into their own frame of reference and adjust them to the political realities of Great Britain, which in the 1760s and 1770s endured unstable politics, with the king, George III, hovering uneasily—presiding over, interfering in, but not controlling his governments.
The question of Quebec occupied a considerable amount of official and ministerial time in the British capital in the early 1770s as the government gradually and hesitantly reached a consensus on what to do. Finally, in 1773, the government, headed by Lord North, nerved itself to draft an act that did four things: it lifted restrictions on Catholics in Quebec, allowing them to assume public office; it extended the boundaries of the province to include all British territory south of Hudson Bay, east of the Mississippi, and north of the Ohio; it authorized French civil (but not criminal) law; and it established rule by governor and appointed council, without an elected assembly.
Of these by far the most important political item was the first, not because of anything it did in Quebec, but because it created a precedent that might eventually be used at home, in Great Britain and Ireland.4
THE PROGRESS OF THE REBELLION
The British government, meanwhile, had other things to preoccupy it. The late war with France had to be paid for. Arguably the chief beneficiaries of the war were the American colonies, through the removal of the French threat to their borders, their commerce, and their territorial expansion. It followed that the colonies should assist in paying debts incurred on their behalf.
The colonists did not see the matter that way. They resisted attempts to tax them by staging boycotts and riots. Eventually the government sent troops to Boston, the most obstreperous centre of colonial resistance, only to find that there were never troops enough to overawe the Americans.
Not all Americans were rebellious. One leader of the resistance to the British, John Adams, later estimated that a third of the colonists favoured resistance, a third were loyal to the crown, and a third were neutral or undecided. It was the resisters, or patriots, as they called themselves, who proved better organized and more politically skilful, playing on colonial fears of ministerial conspiracies against their property and their liberty. The protection of property and preservation of liberty were among the chief ends of government, and it followed that a government that subverted them must be illegitimate.
The timing of the Quebec Act, in 1774, was accidental, but it didn’t seem that way to the fearful and resentful colonists. The Quebec Act had almost nothing to do with the larger colonial problem facing Great Britain—nothing but an unhappy coincidence. But the coincidence was enough to reawaken colonial fears of Catholic aggression, to remind colonists of the arbitrary nature of a French power propped up by a compliant Church.
Catching the spirit of the moment, General Gage, the king’s governor in Massachusetts, advised ministers to raise troops and money, a million pounds or more. Loyal Americans from outlying areas began to arrive in Boston, fearing for their safety. Those who stayed faced ostracism, vandalism, and occasionally violence. Gage understood that authority was slipping from his control and into that of the “congresses,” provincial and “continental,” the latter meeting in Philadelphia in 1774 and 1775.
Ministers in London did not believe Gage until it was too late. They sent troops, but not enough, until Gage found himself besieged in his capital of Boston, surrounded by a growing colonial army. He appealed to his fellow governors to send reinforcements, and Carleton in Quebec sent most of what was already a small garrison to assist. Meanwhile the “Continental Congress,” in Philadelphia, invited Quebec and Nova Scotia to send delegates and join in a united front against the government.
Nova Scotia took no action. Quebec had no mechanism to appoint delegates, having no assembly; even the Council provided in the Quebec Act couldn’t come into being until the Act took effect on 1 May 1775. Carleton reasoned that he had little to fear from direct subversion in his province, and he was right. But subversion was just across the border, in New York and New England, where rebels seized the forts along Lake Champlain, opening an avenue for invasion.
The Congress prohibited trade with any colony that hadn’t sent delegates to its sessions, and then authorized privateers to prey on British shipping and other property, including that of the fishermen of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. The economic weapon was powerful, but it cut both ways: it harmed even as it impressed, and it created an opportunity for Nova Scotians to fill the gap in the imperial economy left by the rebels. It was also possible that Nova Scotia itself could outfit privateers and return with interest the harm done by its neighbours.
In Nova Scotia there was some sympathy for the rebel cause among the recently arrived New England immigrants. (But recent arrivals from Great Britain or other parts of the empire were not immune to revolutionary sentiments.) It was a backwoods movement, far from the capital, Halifax, where the assembly, compared with those in the other colonies, remained respectful if not entirely deferential to imperial authority. It was also remote from the nearest New England towns, separated by hundreds of kilometres of trackless wilderness, and by Indian nations who were at best neutral to the rebel cause.
The rebel commander, George Washington, authorized the invasion of Quebec, which along with Nova Scotia would, he hoped, become the fourteenth or fifteenth colony to join the rebellion. In the fall of 1775 two rebel forces converged on Quebec, one directed at Montreal, where Carleton was trying to direct his province’s resistance, and one overland through the Appalachian wilderness toward Quebec City.
Carleton hoped in vain for assistance from the nine thousand Canadien veterans of the Seven Years’ War or from their numerous children. Some seigneurs rallied to his cause, but far too few. Most of the Canadien farmers—the habitants—felt no ties of loyalty to George III. They had suffered severely at the hands of the French authorities during the Seven Years’ War, with high casualties and sizeable economic losses, and the British had capped the war by burning and looting up and down the St. Lawrence. It was enough to encourage caution in the face of the seigneurs’ enthusiasm for a war that would justify their social status (as officers) and give them glory and rewards.
Beginning in 1775 Carleton received support from an unexpected quarter. The English-speaking immigrants to Quebec, whether they came from the British Isles or from the colonies, rallied to the government. Their main interest was the fur trade, and their markets were in Great Britain, not America. The war relieved them of American competition and returned Montreal to its former status as North America’s fur-trading capital. Better still, those Canadiens engaged in the fur trade were also likely to see the advantage of the British connection. This was a growing sentiment over the years of war that followed, but initially it didn’t do Carleton much good.
Finally, in mid-November, the governor abandoned Montreal to the Americans and fled down the icy St. Lawrence to Quebec, where another American army awaited him. Luckily for Carleton, he was able to form a defensive force from his few troops and from volunteers in the city; they were enough to resist an American army that fortunately lacked siege artillery and therefore had to rely on blockade or assault to take Quebec. Because many of the American troops hadn’t enlisted past the end of the year, their commander, Richard Montgomery, attacked the city in a snowstorm on New Year’s Eve, 1775. The British repulsed his assault, and Montgomery died in the fighting. The besiegers held on under Montgomery’s successor, Benedict Arnold, until spring.
Spring brought British ships, troops, and supplies. The Americans fled to Montreal and then up the Richelieu. Carleton slowly followed, perhaps hoping that the less the bloodshed, the greater the chance of winning the Americans back to loyalty to the crown.
It was a vain hope, and Carleton has been justly criticized for failing to take the opportunity to destroy the American army in Quebec. The Americans retreated to fight another day, which they did under Benedict Arnold’s command at Lake Champlain. As a result, a sizeable British army did not sail up Lake Champlain toward Albany and ultimately New York City in 1776, but awaited events in camps around Montreal. It seemed a poor return to ministers who had raised taxes and hired an army to crush the rebellion; Carleton would not again command an offensive army.
In March 1776 the British evacuated Boston and sailed away to Halifax, where a new British general, Sir William Howe, concentrated a large army, the biggest ever seen in North America. He sailed his army to New York, and hovered offshore while the rebels in the city celebrated the declaration of American independence from Great Britain on 4 July. From that point on, attempts at reconciliation were futile: the British alternatives were war or surrender to American independence.
With such a great army to hand they naturally chose war, and initially fortune favoured the crown. Reconquering such a large territory as America was a daunting task; strategically it made sense not because of the size of the British army, but because the British government could rely, or believed they could rely, on large numbers of Americans to support them, “on helping the good Americans to overcome the bad.” As the historian Piers Mackesy puts it, “The British army would break the power of the rebels, and organise and support the loyalists who would police the country.”5 They also believed that in a straight fight the British could best the Americans. This appeared to be borne out when General Howe defeated Washington on Long Island in August, took New York City in September, and advanced through New Jersey on the rebel capital of Philadelphia. Howe hoped that the appearance of a great British power would rally loyal subjects previously intimidated by the rebels, and for a brief time it looked as if he might be right. And if the British continued to sweep the rebels before them, if the British army continued to seem irresistible, then the rebels might despair of their cause and the “loyalists” might finally assume control in the various colonies.
To demonstrate power, however, Howe had to occupy land, and occupation meant he had to scatter his troops in smaller garrisons across New Jersey, leaving them vulnerable to rebel counterattack. George Washington, the commander of the rebel army, did just that, rolling up several British outposts in New Jersey, driving the British back toward New York City, and, more important, negating Howe’s political gains among the American population. It was a serious setback for the British and for the American loyalists. On the American side, the rebels had gained time, politically and militarily, to organize themselves, consolidate their rebellion, and seek allies in the struggle. In Europe, Britain’s rivals, especially France and Spain, were taking notice, and while prudence dictated that the French government move cautiously, there was considerable enthusiasm for the rebel cause in intellectual and what would later be called “progressive” circles. But moderate and liberal Britons also found it hard to be truly indignant at their transatlantic cousins. As the American historian David Hackett Fischer observes, the English Whigs “could not crush American resistance without betraying the values which [they] believed that government to represent.”6
The British government had one more year, 1777, to end the rebellion before French interest evolved into French interference. Difficulties in communication—the fact that it took weeks for information to travel across the Atlantic or even from Quebec to New York—challenged attempts at a coherent strategy. But the memory of the previous war against the French—when three armies had converged on Montreal and forced the surrender of the French army—was fresh. This time the British government planned to use its bases in Montreal, New York City, and the Great Lakes forts to launch a three-pronged attack on Albany and the Hudson Valley. If it succeeded, the colonies would be cut in two with the centre of rebellion, New England, isolated from the other colonies.
But it all had to work simultaneously; the orders, once sent, had to stand, and be obeyed. But they were not obeyed, and the plan failed. The northern army, under General John Burgoyne, had to make up the lost opportunities of the previous year. It moved slowly and methodically south toward Albany, affording the rebels time to assemble a large army of their own. The southern army, under General Howe, didn’t move at all, and when it did went in the wrong direction, sailing around New Jersey to Philadelphia, the rebel capital. Howe took Philadelphia in September 1777 without much trouble, but having got there he wasn’t sure what to do with it. Its capture was in any case perfectly useless as far as helping his colleague Burgoyne was concerned. Burgoyne, harassed and surrounded by the rebels, was forced to surrender at Saratoga in October. A third British force, consisting of regular troops and Indian allies, was also defeated well short of Albany.
A useless victory and two serious defeats were disastrous for the British cause. Diplomatically, the news of Saratoga encouraged the French government to sign an alliance with the American rebels early in 1778. War followed, in which a greatly improved French fleet contested Great Britain’s mastery of the seas and forced the British government to divert naval resources from North America to home waters. The British evacuated Philadelphia in 1778 and retreated to New York. When in 1779 the Spanish declared war as well, Great Britain’s strategic position worsened again.
The British government did attempt, too late, to reconcile the colonies to the empire. In 1778 a Declaratory Act agreed to what had been the colonies’ main demand: Parliament solemnly conceded the right of taxation of the colonies. Henceforth, revenues raised in the colonies were to be spent in the colonies, not appropriated for imperial purposes. The Act wasn’t quite a dead letter, for it could be applied immediately to those colonies where the British government’s writ still ran, namely Nova Scotia and Quebec. The Declaratory Act would later be a founding principle for a renovated empire, but it was of no use in retrieving the lost colonies of America.
In North America the rebels were unable to assault the British in New York, did not have the sea power to threaten Nova Scotia, and could not spare the troops to attack Quebec. A guerrilla war along the Appalachians pitted Loyalist units with some Iroquois allies against frontier farmers in New York and Pennsylvania. Losses were considerable on both sides, and Iroquois who favoured the British were driven from their homes, ending up as refugees under the guns of Fort Niagara. Fort Niagara then became a base for bloody Loyalist and Mohawk raids on the colonial frontier.7
General Howe lost his job, but his successor, General Sir Henry Clinton, had no better idea than to keep trying to rally Loyalists to the British cause and finally re-establish British rule. His hopes weren’t entirely unfounded, though the odds, after Saratoga and French intervention, were not good. There were, or had been, plenty of Loyalists in the south. Stalemated by the American army in front of New York, Clinton went south in 1779, taking Savannah and reoccupying Georgia, and then South Carolina, where Loyalists were numerous and active. For a brief moment it seemed the British might succeed in slicing up the rebellion colony by colony and rely on war weariness in the northern colonies to undermine the American cause.
Opportunity was fleeting. As in New Jersey in 1776, the British once again had to disperse their troops to protect their loyal supporters, and thus became exposed to a strategy of pinpricks from rebel guerrillas. The Loyalists reciprocated, and the result, as in most civil wars, was bloody and futile. The British were forced to retreat to the seaside towns of Savannah and Charleston, while the main British southern army was trapped by a Franco-American force at Yorktown in Virginia and forced to surrender in October 1781.
Charleston, Savannah, and New York were thereafter mainly useful as collection points for refugees fleeing the rebels’ retaliation. Some escaped down Lake Champlain to Quebec, where the authorities established a camp at Sorel. Many Loyalists moved on to Great Britain, while others fled to Bermuda or the West Indies.
It was clear by the end of 1781 that their prospects of returning home in triumph were lost. They had bet on British power and against rebellion, against a disruption of the natural order of things, against disorder and violence, and disorder and violence had prevailed. Their future now lay in the hands of British diplomats sent to Paris to make whatever peace they could with the Americans, the French, and the Spanish.
PEACE, THE AMERICANS, AND THE LOYALISTS
The British had suffered a great defeat in their attempt to suppress the American rebellion, which, having been successful, became known as the American Revolution. They hadn’t lost completely, however. At sea, the Americans could do little beyond raids or plundering British merchant ships. The British fleet maintained a sometimes precarious control over the Atlantic, enough to keep Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Quebec safe from invasion. The wilderness protected the approaches to Quebec and the Great Lakes, and the guerrilla war did not menace the main areas of settlement.
By the time the representatives of Britain, France, Spain, and the new United States of America sat down to discuss terms of peace, Nova Scotia and Quebec had already become a Loyalist refuge, and it was natural for the British government to view them in that light. The war hadn’t shaken British notions of the value of colonies, though it had had an impact on the government’s assumptions of how they could or should be treated. There was therefore not much disposition to give up the colonies: the French didn’t want them, the Americans couldn’t take them, and the British knew that under most foreseeable circumstances they could defend them against American attack. The French also knew this. North America might in the future be a steady drain on British resources as it dealt with a hostile American republic.
Crucial to the peace treaty was British recognition of American independence. Next in importance was the Americans’ acceptance that they could not drive the British entirely from North America. There would be two English-speaking nations occupying the continent, the United States and Great Britain, and eventually Canada. The treaty laid down a boundary from the Bay of Fundy to the headwaters of the Mississippi. It provided for American fishermen off the coasts of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, and allowed them to land and provision themselves in uninhabited bays. It “recommended” through Congress, the only common American institution, that the various states return property to Loyalists; but given the shadowy nature of Congress’s authority, this was doubtful at best. The Loyalists were net losers in the civil war of the American Revolution.
The Indians were not present in Paris to negotiate their future. Their sovereignty wasn’t recognized by any of the participants, and their territory was parcelled out like any other land.8 The Iroquois of New York State had already been disturbed and some of them dispossessed. Now the same fate awaited the Indians of the Ohio Valley in the new United States.
Who were the Loyalists? They came from every colony, but more came from the middle colonies, New York and Pennsylvania, than from New England. They were distributed across virtually all segments of society. In the northern colonies, Anglicans were more likely to support the British, as, naturally, were royal officials. Religious and ethnic minorities, and recent immigrants from the British Isles, were also more likely to be for the crown. Religious sects like the Quakers and the Amish in particular frowned on war and violence, and their members were unable to live up to the demands for conformity and support made by the revolutionaries.
Many Loyalists took up arms to fight for King George. Especially in the South black slaves escaped to British lines, and freedom.9 Some battles, particularly in the south, were fought entirely between Americans, nor were the rebels always victorious. When the Loyalists left many departed by units, which gave their new settlements a definite character.
In many, perhaps most, cases, the Loyalists did not differ greatly from their republican neighbours, even in terms of politics. They accepted the assumptions of British political practice, believed in representative government, prized liberty and the protection of private property. They took a more optimistic view of British institutions than did the rebels, of course, believing that redress and security of property were more likely to come from the crown than from the mob rule that some rebel Americans used against their opponents.10
The British agreed to withdraw their troops from American soil. The British commander, Sir Guy Carleton, was sent to New York to supervise the dismantling of the British garrison and the evacuation of the Loyalists. (Savannah and Charleston had already been vacated by British troops.) Carleton frostily refused to return to his opposite number, George Washington, the escaped slaves who had trusted in British promises of freedom. They were transported to Nova Scotia, and then, most of them, to the new free colony of Sierra Leone in West Africa.11 In November 1783 the British flag was hauled down and the last ships sailed.
CONSEQUENCES OF THE WAR
The Revolutionary War created two jurisdictions in eastern and northern North America instead of one. As a result of the war, a large number of Americans, perhaps eighty thousand, were dispossessed and became internal refugees. Of these, about half moved to Nova Scotia and Quebec, and were compensated by the British government with land and money. The size of the Loyalist migration, to largely uninhabited lands, meant that in some areas—backwoods Nova Scotia and western Quebec upriver from Montreal—the refugees became the majority. Their identity as loyal British subjects, but, equally important, as loyal Americans, with attitudes and identities formed on the west side of the Atlantic, would shape the politics and development of the colonies to which they moved.12
The Revolution divided Americans from each other, as it divided Great Britain and the United States. The experience of the war left many embittered. For some in the revolutionary generation on both sides the war never quite ended, and as long as that generation endured, the result of the war seemed accidental and impermanent.
It was by no means certain that the United States itself would endure and, if it did, what form the new republic would take. To many Americans a republic was a strange idea. Others had trouble adjusting to a federal form of government when the American constitution was adopted in 1787. The ex-Americans living in Canada took comfort from the teething troubles of the United States. Surely, they hoped, it would not, it could not, last.
Communication across the newly established border did not cease. The frontier stretched for well over fifteen hundred kilometres, and much of it was water and couldn’t be seen, let alone policed. Across the border travelled Indians who did not wish to recognize it and settlers searching for land and security to whom it was a matter of relative indifference. To the south, Americans continued to read British publications, buy English products, and trade with Scottish merchants. British goods did not cease to flow across the ocean, nor did British States. The English- speaking world around the Atlantic was not completely sundered, nor was all sentiment in one country hostile to the other. British radicals admired the American experiment, while American conservatives and American anglophiles continued to sympathize with many aspects of British life.13
The remaining British colonies became part of a larger Anglo–American relationship, but they were never the dominant part. Had the British government or the ruling elite been thirsting for revenge, obsessed with the shame of the loss of most of America, the future of Nova Scotia and Quebec, the nucleus of the future Canada, might have been different. But at no point was the notion of the reconquest of America ever seriously entertained in Great Britain. Nor would the remaining colonies have quite the importance of the old ones.