The Western and Southern gentlemen are alarmed at a point very seriously insisted upon by the Northern—that in case Canada is conquered it shall be divided into states and inalienably incorporated into the Union. You will see the great and permanent weight such an event would throw into the Northern scale.
Senator James Bayard, 1812
On October 26, 1774, the First Continental Congress unanimously and “with universal pleasure” invited the colony of Quebec to join its ranks.1 The desire to include Quebec was widespread during the American Revolution but vanished among later generations of U.S. leaders, who declined to renew the invitation despite plenty of pretexts for renewed expansionism. Time after time events plunged U.S.–British relations into crisis, and time after time large swathes of the U.S. public clamored for war: in the 1800s, when the British navy kidnapped U.S. sailors and restricted U.S. trade; in the 1830s, when a Canadian rebellion sparked conflict along the border; and again in the 1860s, when Confederate raiders employed British ships during the Civil War. Yet in each case U.S. leaders preferred maintaining a stable border with Quebec, limiting their territorial ambitions to the sparsely populated expanse of central and western Canada. U.S. interest in northern annexations disappeared entirely by the twentieth century, as the U.S.–Canadian border became the world’s longest nonmilitarized international boundary.
In this chapter, I examine why U.S. leaders lost interest in annexing Canada across case studies of the Revolution, the War of 1812, the crises of 1837–42, the Oregon controversy, the Fenian Raids, and the post–Civil War push for the Pacific Northwest. I use the term “Canada” to refer to the entirety of that modern country despite the changing labels given to its regions over time.2 Canada’s early European settlers were concentrated along the St. Lawrence River Valley, which held the only large population centers within a thousand miles of the thirteen colonies. The population of modern Quebec, Ontario, and the Maritime provinces was only 130,000 during the American Revolution, but it swelled to more than 510,000 by 1812, surpassing 1,600,000 by 1841 and 3,500,000 by 1871. In contrast, fewer than 2,000 settlers lived west of modern Ontario in 1812, their numbers growing to 4,800 by 1841 and 27,800 by 1871.3 In other words, the case studies considered here saw U.S. leaders confront a sparsely populated western Canada alongside a relatively densely populated, rapidly growing eastern Canada. This contrast sets the stage for a natural experiment observing which territories they targeted as the expansionist (the United States) and defender (Britain) remained constant.
Beyond its population, U.S. leaders recognized a wealth of other material benefits in eastern Canada, including timber, furs, fisheries, and the added security of expelling British forces from North America. Given these benefits, profitability theory predicts that early U.S. leaders should have craved eastern Canada as adamantly as they craved New Orleans and Florida, pursuing it whenever its military costs seemed affordable. They saw less value in western Canada, being mostly unfamiliar with the region beyond having a basic sense of its inhospitable climate, so profitability theory predicts that it should have been only a secondary objective, one worth taking if it could be easily had but not worth substantial costs or risks.
The British military was consistently formidable throughout these cases, but it maintained only a small detachment in Canada and was frequently distracted by the delicate balance of power in Europe and the diverse commitments of a global empire. As a result, U.S. leaders rarely doubted their ability to defeat the British in North America. Especially during peaks of U.S. military confidence in the War of 1812 and the post–Civil War period, profitability theory predicts that U.S. leaders should have worked to realize the goal of their revolutionary forebears and seize the most valuable target available: Quebec.
Domestic impact theory predicts different behavior. If U.S. leaders thought that annexation might weaken them politically or worsen their country, they should have pursued only territories minimizing those domestic costs. During the Revolution the United States was not a unified nation-state, and Quebec’s participation in the rebellion against Britain would have strengthened the rebel cause without generating domestic repercussions. By 1812, in contrast, the potential addition of northern states worried southerners in Congress and the Madison administration, and some saw Quebec’s French and Loyalist populations as being too monarchical to participate in democratic governance. Despite its perceived lack of natural resources, sparsely populated western Canada posed no such domestic costs. As a result, domestic impact theory predicts that U.S. leaders under the Constitution should have rejected the annexation of Quebec while remaining open to affordable opportunities to annex western Canada.
My central argument here is that material benefits, military costs, and domestic costs all mattered to U.S. leaders considering northern annexations. Of the three, domestic costs played the most prominent role in reversing the early desire for Quebec and enabling the neighborly relationship that endures today. As federal leaders considered whether or not to pursue Quebec, they focused less on economic and military factors than on the colony’s impact on the sectional balance of power within the United States, the potential for that impact to spark disunion, and the undesirable alien qualities of its French and Loyalist population. Consequently, the annexation of Quebec was a nonstarter as early as the War of 1812, and in later periods, U.S. leaders did not seriously consider it. Western Canada, on the other hand, remained attractive enough to rouse the interests of the administrations of Madison, James Polk, and Andrew Johnson, though given its perceived lack of resources, none was willing to invest enough in its pursuit to actually acquire it. Once British Columbia joined the Dominion of Canada in 1871, U.S. leaders grew content to renounce northward territorial ambitions and instead cultivate a stable, friendly northern neighbor.
For seven weeks in the fall of 1774 delegates from the British colonies of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina gathered in Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress.4 What began as collective bargaining transformed into armed rebellion by the following spring, when they reconvened with the addition of Georgia, and one year later those colonies declared independence from the British Empire.5 Although Quebec never joined the Revolution, U.S. leaders consistently hoped to convince it to do so. How seriously did the United States pursue Quebec during the Revolution, and what role did material interests, military costs, and domestic costs play in driving that pursuit?
The main benefit Quebec offered the Continental Congress was leverage. Its leaders planned to use economic sanctions to coerce the British Parliament into repealing the Intolerable Acts. These acts, passed in reaction to the Boston Tea Party, revoked Massachusetts’s charter, closed Boston’s port, tried accused officials in Britain, and quartered soldiers in private buildings. Realizing that their bargaining position would be stronger if more colonies participated, the Congress formally invited Quebec, St. John’s Island, Nova Scotia, Georgia, East Florida, and West Florida to participate in October 1774. Quebec’s population made it easily the most important of these—its 130,000 inhabitants more than doubled Georgia’s 56,000—so Congress issued a letter appealing directly to its citizens.6 Labeling “the violation of your rights . . . a violation of our own,” it invited them to join “our confederation, which has no other objects than the perfect security of the natural and civil rights of all the constituent members . . . and the preservation of a happy and lasting connection with Great Britain.”7 When the Second Continental Congress convened the following spring and Quebec’s representatives remained absent, it sent additional letters lobbying the people of Quebec to join their cause.8
The United States was a confederation of “free and independent states” during the Revolution and not a unified nation-state, as noted above, so Quebec’s participation would not have entailed annexation.9 It would have been more analogous to NATO expansion than to German reunification, strengthening the states’ collective bargaining leverage while preserving their domestic autonomy. Congress emphasized this as a selling point in its second letter to the residents of Quebec, urging them to join the struggle for self-determination and renounce their subjection to Parliament, “a legislature in which you have no share, and over which you have no control.”10 The Continental Congress was not immune to politics; mutual suspicions ran rampant among the delegates, many of whom were experiencing their first sustained interaction with the other colonies. Yet its loose institutional structure ensured that adding Quebec would fortify the states’ independent sovereignties rather than compromise them.11 As John Adams declared, “The unanimous voice of the continent is Canada must be ours; Quebec must be taken.”12
For similar reasons, U.S. leaders during the Revolution were also less worried than their successors about the alien characteristics of Quebec’s population, chief among them their Catholicism, a “religion, fraught with sanguinary and impious tenets,” as John Jay wrote in a letter approved by the First Continental Congress.13 Many U.S. leaders worried that “Catholic emigrants from Europe” would “reduce the ancient free Protestant colonies to the same state of slavery with themselves,” but they were willing to paper over these religious differences along with linguistic and cultural ones.14 Greeting Quebec’s residents as “friends and fellow country-men,” they emphasized their common identity as “English subjects” and cited the Swiss cantons, which were independent sovereign states with their own armies and currencies until 1848, as “furnishing proof that men of different faiths may live in concord and peace together.”15 Since membership in the Continental Congress required no domestic political integration, U.S. leaders could fear the spread of Catholicism yet also pursue Quebec’s participation.
With no domestic costs to fear, Congress strove ardently to add Quebec. In the summer of 1775 Congress authorized a military invasion of the province after learning that its British governor, Guy Carleton, was recruiting militia, building new ships on Lake Champlain, and inciting the Iroquois against the rebellious colonies. General Philip Schuyler mustered U.S. militia to march north, sending Ethan Allen and John Brown ahead “with letters to the Canadians . . . to let them know, that the design of the army was only against the English garrisons, and not the country, their liberties, or religion.”16 Richard Montgomery assumed command after Schuyler fell ill, taking Fort St. Johns and Montreal by early November and continuing diplomatic outreach efforts among local residents.17 Montgomery’s force merged with another under Benedict Arnold in early December, and their combined army of nine hundred men laid siege to Quebec City, where Carleton was fortified with eighteen hundred defenders. Because many soldiers’ enlistments were about to expire, the pair launched a disastrous assault on December 31 in a heavy snowstorm. It was a debacle, as Montgomery was killed and their forces were decimated.18
The invasion sparked resentment among Quebec’s people, prompting a fresh diplomatic initiative from Congress to convince them that it wanted only “to adopt them into our union as a sister colony” and allow them to establish “such a form of government as will be most likely, in their judgment, to produce their happiness.”19 Within two weeks of arriving in Montreal Benjamin Franklin became convinced that this mission was hopeless: “The priests, who monopolized all the learning and most of the intelligence of the French population, had been prudently conciliated . . . by the British government,” and propaganda attempts ran aground on the reality that “not one in five hundred” Canadians could read.20 Most French Canadians preferred to stay neutral, just as suspicious of their rebellious neighbors as they were of the British. In the historian George Wrong’s words, “Quebec remained British because it was French.”21 Congress remained “fully convinced of the absolute necessity of keeping possession of that country,” commanding its forces in May 1776 to “contest every foot of ground.” By then, however, British reinforcements had driven out Arnold’s remaining soldiers, many of whom were suffering from smallpox.22 On May 17 George Washington wrote to Schuyler lamenting “the melancholy situation of our affairs in Canada” and observing that “the prospect we had of possessing that country, of so much importance in the present controversy, is almost over.”23
The signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4 transformed Quebec’s appeal from bargaining leverage to geopolitical security and economic gain. If Britain retained Quebec, it would hold a dangerous platform for future invasions. Washington expected it would “be at least a troublesome if not a dangerous neighbor to us,” while Franklin declared, “It is absolutely necessary for us to have them for our own security.”24 Driving Britain from North America would leave only the ailing Spanish Empire as competition for regional dominance, virtually ensuring eventual U.S. domination of North America. The Revolution also accentuated Quebec’s economic advantages: controlling the St. Lawrence River (the second-largest waterway into the continent after the Mississippi) would boost the emerging economies around the Great Lakes, and fisheries off the coast of Nova Scotia offered prosperity for the Northeast. With these benefits in view, Congress included in the Articles of Confederation a specific allowance that “Canada, acceding to this confederation, and joining in the measures of the United States, shall be admitted into, and entitled to, all the advantages of this union.”25 Since the Confederation preserved the states’ domestic autonomy, Franklin proposed leaving the door open not just to Quebec but also to the West Indies, St. Johns, Nova Scotia, Bermuda, the Floridas, and even Ireland.26
U.S. leaders remained focused on obtaining Quebec throughout the Revolutionary War, periodically planning fresh northward invasions but unable to launch them as the Continental Army struggled desperately to secure the rebellious colonies themselves. While Britain reinforced its 8,000 prewar colonial troops to a wartime high of 56,000, colonial enlistments averaged around 20,000 and fluctuated wildly throughout the war, dipping below 2,200 in March 1777 and to roughly 6,000 in 1781.27 The Continental Army not only lacked soldiers; it struggled to adequately supply those it had. Arnold’s Canadian invasion forces so nearly starved that they ate their dogs and leather accessories, begging Congress, “For God’s sake send us pork.”28 During the critical winter of 1777–78 at Valley Forge, Washington wrote to Congress, “We have . . . no less than 2,898 men now in camp unfit for duty because they are bare foot and otherwise naked.”29 The Marquis de Lafayette described how “the unfortunate soldiers were in want of everything; they had neither coats, nor hats, nor shirts, nor shoes; their feet and legs froze till they grew black, and it was often necessary to amputate them.”30 Meanwhile, hyperinflation gutted the value of Continental paper dollars, making it that much harder for Congress to finance military supplies. Many soldiers grew mutinous for lack of pay.31
Barely able to field his own army, Washington could spare no troops to conquer Canada. In late 1777 he dubbed a planned northward invasion “the child of folly . . . circumstanced as our affairs are at present,” and the following year he ruled out a proposed three-pronged invasion supported by a French fleet as “not eligible” because all available forces were still needed further south.32 Nevertheless, Congress continued to discuss taking Quebec, as did military leaders like Washington and Lafayette.33 The French alliance raised the prospect of a joint invasion, but it also raised U.S. fears that France would try to keep the province or control its fisheries and fur trade.34 Despite viewing “the emancipation of Canada as an object very interesting to the future prosperity and tranquility of these states,” Washington wrote to Congress in November 1778 that “a co-operation by the French would in my opinion, be as delicate and precarious an enterprise, as can be imagined.”35 For their part, French leaders preferred that Canada remain a geopolitical liability ensuring U.S. suspicion of Britain and amiability toward France, so when Washington proposed a joint northward campaign in late 1781 the French minister reiterated his support for U.S. independence but not for U.S. conquests.36 Washington continued planning new invasions of Quebec until Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown brought the war to an end.
Where invitations and invasions had failed, peace negotiations offered one last chance to gain Quebec. Franklin had included the remaining British colonies in North America among his potential demands as early as 1776, and three years later Congress told the U.S. negotiators to claim all territory east of a line connecting the Mississippi River and Lake Nipissing in present-day Ontario.37 Their instructions emphasized that “it is of the utmost importance to the peace and commerce of the United States that Canada and Nova Scotia should be ceded,” but they left no doubt that independence took priority over expansion, specifying that “a desire of terminating the war hath induced us not to make the acquisition of these objects an ultimatum.”38 Those priorities persisted throughout the negotiations. When Franklin distinguished the necessary and desirable terms of peace to the British negotiator Richard Oswald in 1782, Canada’s cession fell into the latter category. Although Oswald was willing to cede Canada, since “Franklin from the first had prepared him for that as the simplest way of settling the whole business,” Prime Minister Shelburne preferred ceding Transappalachia instead, so the Treaty of Paris left Quebec in British hands.39
U.S. leaders persistently targeted Quebec during the Revolution, limited though they were by military deficiencies and the priority of achieving independence. The precedent set during this formative period of U.S. foreign policy should inform the future course of events, implying that overwhelming military or domestic costs should have been necessary to convince later generations of U.S. leaders to abandon their predecessors’ ambitions. As the following cases show, domestic costs did increase under the Constitution, which notably lacked any invitation to Quebec in the manner of the Articles of Confederation. Future debates over annexation took on overtly sectional and racial tenors as U.S. leaders weighed its domestic consequences. As a result, the widespread desire for Quebec during the Revolution dissipated entirely by the War of 1812.
The United States invaded Canada for a second time after declaring war on Britain in June 1812. Profitability theory strongly predicts that U.S. leaders should have pursued annexation in this case: the decades since the Revolution had only enhanced Quebec’s material benefits, and U.S. leaders widely assumed it could be easily conquered given that Britain was distracted by the Napoleonic Wars. This should be a particularly easy case for profitability theory because U.S. leaders initiated the war and because the precedent set during the Revolution works in its favor. In contrast, domestic impact theory predicts that U.S. leaders under the Constitution should have been concerned with the identity of Quebec’s population and its likely domestic political impact, rejecting even profitable annexation if they feared its domestic costs.
The War of 1812 was a far more important event in U.S. foreign policy history than most people realize. For the first time U.S. leaders consciously declined a profitable opportunity for annexation due to its domestic costs, establishing a precedent that would echo throughout subsequent U.S. policy toward Canada, Mexico, and countries overseas. Unfortunately, its significance is often overlooked due to the stubborn myth that the United States launched the war to annex Canada. As I have previously detailed in the pages of Diplomatic History, this notion is false: U.S. leaders did not declare war in 1812 hoping to achieve their predecessors’ goal of securing Quebec’s representation in Congress. They declared war in the hope it would force Britain to remove its restrictions on U.S. maritime trade.40 The War of 1812 was not a land grab; it was an attempt at coercive bargaining, Carl von Clausewitz’s “politics by other means.”41
During Jefferson’s presidency U.S.–British relations suffered under Britain’s policy of impressment—searching U.S. merchant vessels for suspected British subjects and, when discovered, forcing them to serve in its navy.42 Yet few saw war on the horizon. Jefferson’s territorial ambitions aimed not northward but southward, and as late as the summer of 1805 he plotted to ally with Britain against Spain to conquer the Floridas.43 Unfortunately for Jefferson, Britain’s campaign against Napoleon focused on strangling his seaborne trade, including trade with the United States. As the naval historian Alfred Mahan wrote, “While Great Britain ruled the sea, the neutral was the ally of her enemy.”44 In November 1807 Britain banned all foreign trade with France in its most notorious Orders in Council.45 The Orders in Council sparked a furious backlash among the U.S. public, which clamored for war in the name of “free trade and sailors’ rights.”46 Senator John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts howled that “the Orders of Council . . . strike at the root of our independence.”47 Kentucky’s Henry Clay condemned “British slavery upon the water.”48 Congressman John Calhoun of South Carolina protested, “If we submit to the pretensions of England, now openly avowed, the independence of this nation is lost—we will be, as to our commerce, recolonized.”49 This outrage resounded across the Atlantic but had little effect there since “the British government preferred to risk war with the United States than to risk defeat by Napoleon.”50
With the public demanding war and Napoleon occupying the British military, the Orders in Council offered a ripe opportunity for the United States to renew its former pursuit of Quebec. Instead, Jefferson and congressional leaders tried to coerce Britain to repeal its maritime restrictions by using economic sanctions. After an 1806 Non-Importation Act proved ineffectual, the Embargo Act of December 1807 forbade all U.S.–British trade. This “act of self-immolation” failed to coerce Britain but ravaged the U.S. economy, slashing imports by 60 percent (from $144,740,000 to $58,101,000) and exports by 80 percent (from $103,343,000 to $22,431,000) the following year.51 After losing ground to the opposition Federalists in the 1808 elections, the Democratic-Republican majority in Congress replaced the embargo with various lesser sanctions over the ensuing years until all hope they might prove effective had evaporated. Secretary of State James Monroe wrote, “We have been so long dealing in the small way of embargoes, non-intercourse, and non-importation, with menaces of war, &c., that the British government has not believed us. . . . We must actually get to war before the intention to make it will be credited either here or abroad.”52 After five years of failed sanctions, Congress declared war on June 18, 1812.
The war was a diplomatic gamble, “a desperate act on the part of U.S. leaders brought to their wits’ end by British maritime restrictions, which were themselves desperate acts by a British government fighting for its life against Napoleon.”53 President Madison condemned British leaders for “trampling on rights which no independent nation can relinquish,” noting that submission “would recolonize our commerce by subjecting it to a foreign authority; with the sole difference that the regulations of it formerly were made by acts of Parliament and now, by Orders in Council.”54 Yet Madison did not want war.55 He hoped that the declaration of war would serve as an effective bluff and finally convince Britain to come to terms. From the moment he signed it he actively sought a peace agreement.56
On June 26 Monroe informed the U.S. chargé d’affaires in London, Jonathan Russell, that Congress had declared war because “it was impossible for the United States to surrender their rights . . . [or] to rely longer on measures which had failed to accomplish their objects.” Nevertheless, he wrote, “this . . . is the most favorable moment for an accommodation with England.” He instructed Russell to tell his British counterparts that “this government looks forward to the restoration of peace” and that it was “in the power of Great Britain to terminate the war.” He suggested two arguments that might drive home the benefits of an early peace for Britain: (1) that U.S. leaders might choose to annex Canada if their forces occupied it, and (2) that a long war would increase the chances of a formal U.S.–French alliance being forged. The former argument—that it might be “difficult to relinquish territory which had been conquered”—is frequently referenced as evidence of U.S. expansionism, but its context as an argument for avoiding war reveals its true nature as precisely the opposite.57 The question of whether the United States should pursue territory in Canada—and, if so, which territory—arose as a result of the war rather than as a driving cause.
Profitability theory predicts that U.S. leaders should reject annexation when they fear its military costs: was this the case in the War of 1812? U.S. military deficiencies are glaring in hindsight. “The Royal Navy possessed three warships for every U.S. cannon,” and historians agree that “no nation could have been less fitted to wage war than America in 1811.”58 The antiwar congressman John Randolph complained that his colleagues were “outquixoting Quixote himself ” by plotting to coerce mighty Britain, crying out, “Go to war, without money, without men, without a navy! . . . The people will not believe it.”59 The U.S. army numbered a mere 6,000 soldiers in 1812 and peaked at 30,000 during the war. Its officer corps of 191 under Jefferson ballooned to 3,495 by 1814, many “utterly unfit for any military purpose whatever” in the eyes of General Winfield Scott.60 This woeful unpreparedness reflected Jefferson’s and Madison’s lack of interest in a northern war of conquest, which could have been feasible with greater planning given Canada’s equally meager defenses (5,000–10,000 troops).61
Yet despite the sorry state of their military, most U.S. leaders were “supremely confident of success.”62 Jefferson boasted, “The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching,” maintaining further that “upon the whole, I have known no war entered into under more favorable auspices.”63 Monroe forecast that “we shall experience little annoyance or embarrassment in the effort.”64 Congressmen outbid each other in predicting how quickly U.S. forces would occupy Canada and how small a force could accomplish the task. Calhoun expected that within “four weeks . . . the whole of Upper and a part of Lower Canada will be in our possession.”65 Jacob Crowninshield of Massachusetts insisted, “Vermont and Massachusetts will ask no other assistance than their own militia to take Canada and Nova Scotia,” and Clay proclaimed, “I verily believe that the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet.”66 Randolph scoffed, “It seems this is to be a holiday campaign. . . . Canada is to conquer herself.”67 In light of this widespread overconfidence, profitability theory cannot explain why U.S. leaders declined to pursue Quebec.
After all, the colony’s material benefits had increased since the Revolution. The population of eastern Canada had grown to roughly 510,000 by 1812, and Jefferson’s embargo catalyzed a dramatic transformation of its latent natural resources into economic production.68 As J. C. A. Stagg describes, the region experienced “simply astronomical” growth: “Between 1807 and 1811, the volume of Canadian exports of oak and plank timber rose 549%, of great and middling masts 519%, and of fir and pine timber 556%.”69 Madison recognized this change. Before the embargo he had opposed the notion of threatening Quebec as saying, “Do us justice or we will seize on Canada, though the loss will be trifling to you,” but after 1808 he “never again made any remarks suggesting that he still felt Canada was of little or no value to the British Empire.”70 By 1812 Canada was producing enough timber to sustain the British navy even if Napoleon’s upcoming invasion of Russia shut down its other suppliers on the Baltic Sea.71 As New York Congressman Peter Porter observed, Canada was “almost indispensable to the existence of Great Britain, cut off as she now in a great measure is from the north of Europe.”72
Instead of luring U.S. leaders to pursue annexation, however, Quebec’s development offered them exactly the bargaining chip they had been seeking in their quest to get Britain’s maritime restrictions repealed.73 Moreover, Quebec was “tangible,” lying within range of U.S. forces rather than being insulated by British command of the seas.74 The fact that U.S. forces invaded Canada may seem expansionist at first glance, but if one recognizes their strategy it becomes easy to understand why leaders with no desire to annex Quebec still chose to invade it. As Henry Clay explained in 1813, “Canada was not the end but the means; the object of the war being the redress of injuries, and Canada being the instrument by which that redress was to be obtained.”75 Monroe supported the invasion of Canada “not as an object of the war but as a means to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.”76 Madison himself later reflected, “Had the French Emperor not been broken down, as he was, to a degree at variance with all probability, and which no human sagacity could anticipate, can it be doubted that G. Britain would have been constrained, by her own situation and the demands of her allies, to listen to our reasonable terms of reconciliation?”77
Although they did not fear the military costs of annexing Quebec, southern leaders like Jefferson and Madison had good reason to fear its domestic costs since one or more new Canadian states joining the northern bloc would have weakened their dominant political position. Senator James Bayard of Delaware described how “the Western and Southern gentlemen are alarmed at a point very seriously insisted upon by the Northern—that in case Canada is conquered it shall be divided into states and inalienably incorporated into the Union. You will see the great and permanent weight such an event would throw into the Northern scale.”78 Virginia Congressman Hugh Nelson feared that even sparsely populated areas north of the border would be filled by northern settlers and hence believed that “the New Yorkers and Vermonters are very well inclined to have Upper Canada united with them, by way of increasing their influence in the Union.”79 Annexing new territories meant granting federal representation to their inhabitants, a threatening prospect for those who saw the interests of those inhabitants as conflicting with their own.
If the United States did annex Canada and create “a prepondering northern influence,” it was widely feared that southern leaders would secede from the Union to preserve their political control.80 Postmaster General Gideon Granger asked, “But will not the addition of these territories accelerate a dissolution of the Union? Or can it spread securely over the continent? I fear, I doubt.”81 Randolph also feared that his colleagues would “take Canada, at the risk of the Constitution,” declaring, “You are laying the foundation for a secession . . . by the possession of Canada.”82 Foreign leaders expected as much: Napoleon had foreseen U.S. dissolution since 1803, and the British colonial secretary Liverpool wrote in 1810, “If some material change should not occur in the system of the government, the result will probably be, the separation of the Eastern from the Southern states. . . . [I]t will take place at no very distant period.”83 Neither Jefferson nor Madison had any interest in annexing a territory that threatened to strengthen their domestic political rivals or disintegrate the Union, especially with their Democratic-Republicans firmly in control of the federal government and the opposition Federalists on the verge of collapse.
Indeed, the Virginia Dynasty’s dominance of the federal government was so extensive that it survived not only self-flagellating economic sanctions but also the War of 1812 itself. Although both involved tremendous costs, both aimed to defend the interests of producers in the South, West, and Central states.84 In contrast, the Northeast reacted to Jefferson’s embargo with smuggling so rampant that he thought it “amounted almost to rebellion and treason.”85 When Congress declared war, New Englanders refused to acknowledge it.86 Connecticut’s General Assembly denied that it was constitutionally obligated to participate, declaring itself “a free sovereign and independent state” and the United States “a confederated and not a consolidated republic.” The governor of Massachusetts secretly offered Britain part of Maine to end the war.87 In December 1814 New England Federalist leaders at the Hartford Convention composed a list of constitutional amendments to safeguard their states’ influence within a federal government controlled by the South and turning toward the West: removing the three-fifths clause that boosted southern representation, prohibiting successive presidents from the same state, and requiring a two-thirds majority for declaring war or admitting new states (affording New England a veto).88 Some spoke of northern secession, a prospect that drove U.S. peace negotiators to press claims to northern fisheries, though not to press the annexation of Quebec.89
Beyond sectional political concerns, the identity of Quebec’s population also deterred U.S. leaders from pursuing annexation. The majority of its inhabitants were French Catholics, whom many Americans “deemed unfit by faith, language, and illiteracy for republican citizenship.”90 Congressman Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts worried that annexing Quebec without granting representation to the French Canadians, which he was unwilling to do, would corrupt American democracy by creating a “dynasty by the sword.”91 Many also viewed British Loyalists with suspicion, regarding their devotion to the British Crown as a sign of the same monarchical spirit associated with Catholicism. They too were concentrated in the east, about 70 percent of the fifty thousand who fled to Canada after the Revolution having settled in its Maritime provinces.92 As Randolph declared, “I have no desire to see the senators and representatives of the Canadian French, or of the tories and refugees of Nova Scotia, sitting on this floor or that of the other House—to see them becoming members of the Union, and participating equally in our political rights.”93 These prejudices caused operational problems for the U.S. military when soldiers who shared them refused commands to advance across the border lest their efforts be utilized to conquer Canada.94
Upper Canada (modern Ontario) remained sparsely populated enough, having only sixty thousand residents in 1811, that future settlers could determine its political destiny.95 This attracted a small cadre of frontier expansionists in Congress led by John Harper of New Hampshire and Peter Porter of New York.96 Consistent with domestic impact theory, they specifically targeted that low-population region, against the wishes of other War Hawks who valued it only as a bargaining chip. Porter’s blueprints for a hypothetical postwar North America featured “a separate French-speaking state” in Quebec that would remain independent. As he declared, “I would content myself with the possession of the open country.”97 These few expansionists failed to achieve much support: the House pledged only to protect Canadians’ “lives, liberty, property, and religion,” and the Senate rejected even that limited measure.98 Most saw any gestures toward annexation as counterproductive: they had voted for war hoping that a credible threat to Canada would finally compel Britain to repeal its maritime restrictions. Why sacrifice their last best hope to achieve what they really wanted? As the historian Roger Brown writes, “Once a pledge had rendered Canada non-negotiable, its diplomatic value was at an end,” so “Congress never came close to voting the measure that Harper labored to obtain. In point of fact there had been strong opposition to annexation of Canada from the very beginning.”99
The Madison administration continued to demonstrate its lack of interest in annexing Canada as the war progressed, suppressing expansionism and jumping at any chance to restore peace. The administration refused to endorse the efforts of certain U.S. military officers to curry local support by promising liberation to the Canadians.100 When Russia offered to mediate peace negotiations in early 1813, Madison issued a “hasty” acceptance “without waiting to learn whether England would agree to negotiate” (it did not).101 He optimistically instructed his peace commissioners to offer to exchange any areas currently occupied by U.S. forces in return for political concessions: “A reciprocal stipulation will be entered into for the restoration of any territory which either party may have acquired by the war. The probable state of the war at the date of the treaty will render this stipulation favorable to G. Britain.”102 Publicly, Madison insisted that “conquest, with a view of extending our territory, and enlarging our dominion, was not the wish of this government.”103 His lack of enthusiasm for expansion was so evident that Harper complained, “The executive are not disposed to prosecute the war with vigor, provided they can find any hole through which they can creep out and avoid the contest.”104 Congressman Cyrus King of Massachusetts put it plainly: “This administration never intended to conquer Canada.”105
As domestic impact theory predicts, when Madison did entertain the possibility of territorial gains, he too had eyes only for sparsely populated Upper Canada. In June 1813 Jefferson advised him to acquire “all westward of the meridian of Lake Huron, or of Ontario, or of Montreal . . . as an indemnification for the past and security for the future.”106 Accordingly, Monroe told the U.S. peace commissioners to request “a transfer of the upper parts” or “at least of that portion lying between the western end of Lake Ontario and the Eastern end of Lake Huron.”107 This untenable claim was probably another bargaining ploy to be traded away rather than a serious demand, given that U.S. forces had failed to occupy any substantial stretch of Canadian territory during the war. Even had Britain accepted it, though, Upper Canada would have threatened minimal domestic costs as a sparsely populated extension of the Louisiana Territory that could be settled and divided into several new states. Britain finally agreed to negotiate in 1814 after Napoleon’s defeat, and that December the Treaty of Ghent restored the status quo ante bellum.
The historian Jon Latimer claimed that “if the war had one concrete result, it was the guarantee of Canada’s existence as a separate nation.”108 His assessment was based on a fundamental misreading of U.S. intentions: the War of 1812 was not “a failed war of conquest” proving that Canada could defend itself; it was a failed war of coercion proving that the United States could not threaten Britain more gravely than Napoleon. Nevertheless, Latimer’s conclusion rings true: the War of 1812 guaranteed Canada’s independence not because the United States failed to conquer it but because U.S. leaders decided they didn’t want to conquer it. After all, Canada’s military is not what prevents the United States from conquering it today. Confronted with the domestic consequences of absorbing a populous neighboring society, as Bradford Perkins writes, “the United States did not go to war to add new states to the Union.”109 In the War of 1812 U.S. leaders defied the Revolution’s precedent and initiated a new pattern (interest in sparsely populated western Canada but not in populous eastern Canada) that would echo through the decades that followed.
Rarely in history have two countries endured as many crises in as short a time without descending into war as the United States and Britain did between 1837 and 1842. Rebellions, border raids, military standoffs, territorial disputes, international trials, and yet none led to full-scale war. Why did this rash of crises, any of which offered a credible pretext for expansionism, end in stabilized relations rather than the U.S. annexation of eastern Canada? By the late 1830s the population of modern Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritime provinces had swelled to 1.5 million, and their economy (focused on staple products like furs, timber, fish, and wheat) had grown apace.110 These increasing material benefits combined with faltering British control to open the door for U.S. leaders to pursue as much or as little of Canada as they pleased.
Profitability theory predicts that U.S. leaders should have desired eastern Canada and so should have exploited these crises to pursue it. But the Canadian rebellion caught U.S. leaders by surprise, as most of their military was deployed against the Seminoles in Florida, making sudden war with Britain a costly prospect. Therefore, profitability theory expects them to have rectified their military deficiencies, employing subtler means of expansionism until they were ready for a more vigorous northward push. Conversely, domestic impact theory predicts that most U.S. leaders should have seen eastern Canada’s booming population as a deterrent and hence lacked any interest in annexing it. Why didn’t the United States annex eastern Canada during this period?
The rebellion began in November 1837 with Lower Canadians led by reformers like Louis-Joseph Papineau and was joined the next month by Upper Canadians led by William Lyon Mackenzie. Unlike the two previous cases in this chapter, when most Canadians had little desire to break with Britain, this rebellion offered U.S. leaders their first major opportunity to harness a wave of local anti-British sentiment.111 Had they been interested in annexing eastern Canada, the fruit finally would have appeared ripe. Several private organizations south of the border saw it that way, including the Hunter’s Lodge, which claimed fifty thousand members at its peak and recruited forces to invade Canada.112 Yet instead of pursuing annexation “Washington carefully avoided any involvement” with the rebellion.113
President Martin Van Buren displayed a “profound commitment to neutrality,” ordering governors and district attorneys in Michigan, New York, and Vermont to prevent U.S. citizens from interfering.114 Instead of using private citizens to fan the flames of rebellion, as Madison had in the Floridas, Van Buren prevented them from doing so despite its popularity, complaining, “It is utterly impossible to prevent the young . . . from embarking in those enterprises, so long as their conduct is indirectly applauded by public expressions of sympathy.”115
British soldiers escalated the crisis on December 29 by sneaking across the Niagara River and storming the Caroline, a steamboat used to supply Mackenzie’s rebels. They set the boat ablaze and cast it over Niagara Falls, killing a U.S. citizen in the process and provoking a storm of anti-British fury throughout the United States (the number of casualties rapidly inflated as rumors of the incident spread). Henry Clay described the assault as an “unparalleled outrage.”116 The Pennsylvania senator James Buchanan protested, “The sovereignty and jurisdiction of the United States over our own territory have been grossly violated.”117 Van Buren himself described the incident to Congress as “a hostile though temporary invasion of our territory.”118 War fever spread with the news. Former president John Quincy Adams and Congressman Millard Fillmore of New York both sensed “imminent danger,” and the New York Herald wrote, “Surely war with England was unavoidable.”119
Yet despite American blood shed on American soil, the same pretext President Polk would use to launch the Mexican–American War eight years later, Van Buren responded to the Caroline incident by aggressively pursuing peace. Upon learning of the raid on January 4 he immediately sent General Winfield Scott to the border to dissuade local Americans from retaliating. The next day he issued a neutrality proclamation warning that any U.S. citizens who interfered would be prosecuted and promising “no aid or countenance” for anyone arrested in Canada.120 Van Buren asked a receptive Congress to revise existing neutrality laws to be preventive rather than merely punitive, and it did so, authorizing $625,000 for frontier defense and empowering the government “to seize and detain any vessel or any arms . . . provided or prepared for any military expedition . . . against . . . any colony, district or people conterminous with the United States.”121 Dismissing rumors of a warlike mood in Washington as “wholly unfounded,” Van Buren insisted that peace “would be the case if the wishes of the men in power in both countries were alone to be consulted.”122
British leaders recognized the absence of U.S. territorial ambitions. The British minister to the United States, Henry Fox, observed that “the president’s government is sincerely striving, as far as so weak and feeble a government can be said to strive at anything,—to fulfill its natural duties.”123 In fact, Van Buren cooperated to an unprecedented extent, allowing Britain to march troops from Halifax to Quebec across territory claimed by Maine in its ongoing boundary dispute with New Brunswick and to temporarily increase its naval forces on the Great Lakes in violation of the Rush-Bagot Agreement. Van Buren, Scott, and Secretary of State John Forsyth repeatedly shared information with the British regarding the activities of private interventionist organizations. Van Buren even sent his son to London in March 1838 to personally appeal to Foreign Secretary Palmerston for peace.124
Was this restraint driven by fear of annexation’s military costs? Britain maintained only about five thousand troops in Canada in 1837, but U.S. leaders entertained no delusions of grandeur with regard to their own armed forces, as they had in 1812.125 When the rebellion began virtually all able-bodied U.S. soldiers were fighting the Second Seminole War in Florida, leaving northern garrisons staffed with “the aged and infirm.”126 The situation left congressmen like Joseph Tillinghast of Rhode Island to marvel at “the upper coasts left entirely unprotected.”127 Regretting the “defenseless state of the northern frontier, owing to the military troops having been drawn away for . . . the war in Florida,” Isaac Bronson of New York observed, “The [war] department was now unable to send troops to the North, for the simple reason that there were none to send.”128 Fully aware of their military unpreparedness, U.S. leaders dreaded the costs of a sudden northern war. Massachusetts Senator John Davis declared, “Of all the evils that could now befall this nation, the most deplorable in its effects would be a war with Great Britain. We all well know the strength and power of that country.”129 Congressman Waddy Thompson of South Carolina feared the “tremendous consequences,” and John Calhoun the “terrible consequences of a war with Great Britain at the present time.”130
In the late 1830s, unlike in 1812, military costs did constrain U.S. decision-making. Yet if that were the whole story, the historical record should be filled with frustrated leaders complaining that military weakness had prevented them from seizing such a fine opportunity for annexation, and they should have moved quickly to redress the problem and achieve any gains still available. Such sentiments were absent from congressional deliberations, which instead reflected a genuine desire to maintain neutrality in the Canadian rebellion. When the London Times speculated about potential U.S. expansionism in Canada, Buchanan objected, “We are accused of a disposition to wrest it from Great Britain, and annex it to the United States. Here, we all know these accusations to be unjust and unfounded.”131 Henry Clay, often considered to be among the most expansionist leaders of his generation, emphasized how little he thought of northward expansion in 1839: “So far from conveying the idea that the U.S. would, at a suitable time, interfere on the question of that [British–Canadian] relation, I took pains to inculcate that they would not interfere, on Canadian account.”132
Domestic costs affected U.S. decision-making alongside military costs during the late 1830s, making the annexation of eastern Canada undesirable regardless of its profitability. Largely Catholic and French-speaking, the people of Lower Canada were seen as foreigners of questionable merit by many Americans (who were overwhelmingly Protestant), especially after their failure to support the United State in two previous wars. Catholicism remained inherently linked to monarchy and despotism in U.S. domestic political discourse at the time, and political mudslinging frequently saw rivals accuse each other of having Catholic sympathies. Van Buren himself had been targeted. As the biographer Ted Widmer writes, “Because of the letter he had written to the pope in 1829 assuring that Catholics were treated decently in the United States, Whigs accused him of being secretly pro-Catholic” and involved in a “popish plot.”133 In this environment, absorbing a large Catholic population was an unappealing prospect. Upper Canadians, though mostly Protestant, were also problematic due to their willing submission to the British Crown. The Detroit Advertiser drove this point home by juxtaposing them with the settlers in Texas, who had recently declared independence and requested annexation, advising its readers to “remember that Upper Canada is not Texas; that Canadians are not Texans; and that Great Britain is not Mexico.”134 Senator John Norvell of Michigan explained his opposition to intervening in the Canadian rebellion by declaring, “Our own rights and liberties were too precious to be jeoparded in those premature and badly digested civil broils between different portions of the same foreign people.”135
Despite both Van Buren and Congress working to ensure U.S. neutrality, the crisis worsened in late 1838 with the Aroostook War. This militarized dispute, in which no battles were fought, concerned the border between Maine and New Brunswick, which had remained ill-defined since the Revolution. Commissions established by the Jay Treaty and the Treaty of Ghent had failed to resolve the issue, as had several attempted negotiations and a Dutch arbitration effort. The government of Maine, a state since 1820, proved to be a particular obstacle: unwilling to surrender any of its claimed territory, Maine’s legislature resolved that no federal treaty on the issue was binding unless a majority of its own people approved in town meetings.136 The federal government backed Maine until January 1839, when Governor John Fairfield dispatched a posse to expel Canadian timber poachers from the disputed area. When the posse’s leader was captured and New Brunswick’s governor claimed the right to repel the invasion by force, an outraged Maine legislature approved $800,000 in emergency funds and called forth ten thousand militia. Fairfield sent them north in late February, only then notifying Van Buren of his fait accompli and demanding federal support.
An expansionist president might have leapt to Maine’s defense and seized the opportunity to broaden U.S. territorial claims. Instead, Van Buren immediately denounced Fairfield. In a special message to Congress he supported Maine’s claim but condemned its military action, pledging not to defend it in any self-initiated conflict. Leaders from the other states, continually jealous of each other’s domestic influence under the Constitution, condemned Maine for trying to co-opt their foreign policy by unilaterally attacking Canada. Clay declared that he “could not consent . . . that the will of one of the twenty-six members of the confederacy should control the entire Union, or that one should draw the entire Union, without their consent, into a war with a foreign power.”137 The Senate Foreign Relations Committee introduced resolutions supporting Maine’s territorial claim but vowing that if Britain acted peacefully and Maine determined “to settle the controversy for herself by force . . . there will be no obligation imposed on that [federal] government to sustain her by military aid.” Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts supported these resolutions by arguing, “We could have no war by states any more than by counties or by multitudes of armed persons, acting without any authority at all,” to which Calhoun replied, “Certainly not.”138 In early March Congress empowered Van Buren to spend up to $10 million and call out fifty thousand militia, enough to overwhelm both Maine’s force and any Canadian adversaries. In doing so, congressmen demonstrated that they were willing to fund an army to rebuke one of their own states but not to pursue conquest. Van Buren proceeded to negotiate a joint memorandum with Fox calling for the withdrawal of all forces from the Aroostook Valley and the prevention of trespassing, to which both governors agreed by the end of March.
Fresh incidents continued to strain U.S.–British relations, however. In November 1840 a British Canadian named Alexander McLeod was arrested in New York for the murder of Amos Durfee during the Caroline affair. When an angry mob prevented McLeod’s release on bail and pushed for a speedy trial, Palmerston ordered Fox to return to Britain if he was found guilty (the crucial diplomatic step preceding a declaration of war). McLeod was acquitted in October 1841, but the previous month a group of British soldiers crossed into Vermont to beat and abduct James Grogan, a U.S. citizen who had seen his family’s farms in Lower Canada burned during the rebellion and had burned several nearby farms in revenge.139 British leaders released Grogan in October hoping to soothe the outrage his abduction had fanned along the border, but in November slaves on the U.S. ship Creole revolted and reached the Bahamas, where they were declared free because slavery had been outlawed in British territories. The local U.S. consul’s attempt to retake the ship failed, and among the ship’s passengers only the mutineers were briefly detained by British authorities. Despite crisis upon crisis, President John Tyler maintained Van Buren’s peaceful course after ascending to office in early 1841 when William Henry Harrison died after scarcely one month in the White House. Tyler sent Secretary of State Daniel Webster to negotiate a final settlement on the northeastern border, which resulted in the Webster–Ashburton Treaty, an agreement that restored cordiality to U.S.– British relations. Tyler wrote, “The peace of the country when I reached Washington . . . was suspended by a thread, but we converted that thread into a chain cable of sufficient strength to render that peace secure.”140
U.S. leaders during this period feared the military costs of war with Britain, but that fact alone cannot explain why they rejected a prime opportunity for expansion. Contrary to profitability theory, the historical record indicates that they genuinely prioritized neutrality in the rebellions in Canada instead of exploiting them for territorial gain, as they had in the Floridas. Although military unpreparedness was a factor, it cannot explain why Congress proved willing to field a large army to rebuke Maine but not to pursue Canadian territory. Domestic concerns are a more compelling explanation of why U.S. leaders lacked interest in annexing eastern Canada and of why their behavior toward it in this period contrasted so starkly with their approach to Oregon.
Though they declined to pursue eastern Canada in the late 1830s, U.S. leaders aggressively targeted western Canada in the mid-1840s. The Oregon Country, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains and from Mexico’s northern border at 42° to Russian Alaska’s southern border at 54°40', had been left open to joint U.S.–British occupation since 1818, when the U.S.–Canadian border east of the Rocky Mountains was set at latitude 49° north. Daniel Webster and Alexander Baring, 1st Baron Ashburton considered addressing the Oregon boundary in 1842, but their negotiations were cut short by that summer’s oppressive heat and humidity. Secretary of State John Calhoun resumed Oregon talks in 1844 with the new British minister to Washington, Richard Pakenham, but he rejected Pakenham’s suggestion that they submit to international arbitration. Calhoun was content with a “masterly inactivity,” at least until U.S. settlers venturing there forced the issue.141
Oregon’s status remained unresolved for decades because it lacked substantial consequences for either side. British leaders saw little value in the area, Foreign Secretary Aberdeen referring to it as merely “a few miles of pine swamp.”142 Its primary export, furs, had dwindled by the 1840s, and the Hudson’s Bay Company abandoned the Columbia River in favor of more northern regions still suitable for trapping.143 Congressman Thomas Bayly of Virginia saw Oregon as a generally “inhospitable territory” in which “only a very small portion of the land is capable of cultivation.” He said of the upper Columbia River, “There is no freshness in the little vegetation on its borders; the sterile sands reach to its very brink.”144 Its greatest economic appeal was as a conduit for Asian commerce via a port on the Puget Sound, widely seen as the economic key to the entire region.145 The most enthusiastic description of its resources had been composed by the United States Exploring Expedition, which charted eight hundred miles of Oregon while exploring the Pacific Ocean, but President Tyler had suppressed its 1842 report to avoid jeopardizing the Webster-Ashburton negotiations.146
If most U.S. leaders saw Oregon as relatively valueless, why did they pursue it so soon after declining to seek more valuable territory in the Northeast? Unlike eastern Canada, Oregon would bring minimal domestic costs because it had few people and was rapidly attracting U.S. settlers by the mid-1840s. Oregon had virtually no European inhabitants beyond several hundred employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company (the Vancouver area didn’t attract substantial settlement until the 1858 gold rush), and European diseases had devastated its Native American tribes. A U.S. visitor in 1844 reported that perhaps 150,000 Native Americans had inhabited Oregon fifty years earlier “but a small remnant now remain . . . not more than 18,000,” with two-thirds of its former tribes “utterly extinct.”147 The early 1840s also saw U.S. settlers begin following the Oregon Trail, their numbers growing from 1,000 in 1843 to about 6,000 by 1845.148 As the British foreign minister Castlereagh reportedly told a U.S. diplomat, “You need not trouble yourselves about Oregon, you will conquer Oregon in your bedchambers.”149
President James Polk declared in his inaugural address that the U.S. claim to Oregon was “clear and unquestionable,” and in December 1845 he called for Congress to abrogate the joint occupation agreement.150 Asserting that “our title to the whole Oregon Territory” was “maintained by irrefragable facts and arguments,” Polk adopted a strategy of diplomatic brinksmanship.151 He broke off negotiations on August 30 when Pakenham rejected a proposed border at 49° without British navigation rights on the Columbia River, a deal Tyler had previously offered. Throughout the fall Polk continued “to assert our extreme right to the whole country,” remarking that this was “the decision to which I have irrevocably come in the Oregon question” and leaving “the British minister to take his own course.”152
Many in Congress supported Polk’s bold approach.153 Congressman Andrew Kennedy of Indiana vowed, “Oregon is ours. This no man, friend or foe, can gainsay or dispute.”154 David Reid of North Carolina agreed: “I believe the country is ours to 54°40'.”155 David Starkweather of Ohio insisted, “Our title to Oregon is perfect.”156 Many newspapers supported Polk’s stand as well, encouraging him to claim the entire Oregon Country with slogans like “The Whole of Oregon or None!” and “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!” As the journalist John O’Sullivan wrote, the United States should demand all of Oregon “by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the entire continent.”157
Few U.S. leaders wanted to fight for Oregon, but most supported Polk’s bluster because they assumed that Britain had even more to lose and less to gain from a war. In Cabinet meetings, Polk dismissed Secretary of State James Buchanan’s fears that his approach might lead to war, maintaining that “if we do have war it will not be our fault.”158 Even as he called for “vigorous preparations for defense,” Polk remained confident in his brinksmanship, telling Calhoun that “Lord Aberdeen and Sir Robert Peel would be averse to going to war . . . and that until . . . the American government boldly faced the British power & asserted their rights, that the latter would yield nothing of her pretensions.”159 Certain that British leaders would rather negotiate than fight over Oregon, he considered offering a tariff reduction as a bargaining chip for which “that government might be willing to surrender her claim to the whole Oregon territory.”160
Polk’s confidence was echoed in Congress, where John Wentworth of Illinois argued that the northeastern crises would pay off out west: “No, no; much as this nation of hypocrites wants Oregon, she would not go to war with us for it. She knows us too well. She knows the soreness of feeling along our whole frontier engendered, during the late Canadian troubles, by the burning of the Caroline, the murder of Durfee, and the capture of Grogan.”161 Georgia Congressman Robert Toombs maintained that “England will not fight for that which does not belong to her. She has something to risk by war as well as ourselves.”162 Samuel Gordon of New York agreed, saying, “War with the United States would be the most suicidal policy she could pursue; and she is not so blind as not to see it. The whole of Oregon is of vastly less importance to her than a year’s supply of raw cotton. . . . Hence there will be no war declared by Great Britain for this territory.”163 When James Black of South Carolina expressed doubt, Polk reassured him: “The only way to treat John Bull was to look him straight in the eye.”164
By June 1846 Polk abandoned his claim to all of Oregon and signed the Oregon Treaty, extending the U.S.–Canadian border at 49° to the Pacific. Why did Polk curtail his territorial ambitions so soon after championing U.S. claims to the entire Pacific Northwest? Several events early that year dramatically increased the perceived military costs of maintaining the all-Oregon claim. First, Polk received reports in February of British military “preparations which might be deemed necessary not only for the defense and protection of the Canadas, but for offensive operations,” including “the immediate equipment of thirty sail of the line beside steamers and other vessels of war,” which called into question Britain’s presumed unwillingness to fight.165 Second, Congress declared war on Mexico in May, raising the prospect of simultaneous wars against Britain and Mexico. Third, Pakenham proposed a new draft treaty in early June, and “all [in the Cabinet] agreed that if the proposition was rejected without submitting it to the Senate . . . war was almost inevitable.”166 As the military risks of pursuing all Oregon increased dramatically, Polk submitted the treaty to the Senate and signed it on June 15. Pakenham reported, “The positive impatience shown by Mr. Buchanan, to sign and conclude, convinces me that the fear lest any complication should arise out of the Mexican war has done a great deal in inducing the American government to accept Your Lordship’s proposal without alteration.”167
Despite their low esteem for its material value, U.S. leaders pursued all Oregon aggressively in 1845 because its demographic future was malleable, and they assumed Britain would rather cede its claim than fight for it. They curbed that ambition in 1846 once the outbreak of war with Mexico and new evidence of British willingness to fight increased the perceived military costs of further expansionism. Although this behavior is consistent with the predictions of both profitability and domestic impact theories, it differs markedly from U.S. leaders’ nonpursuit of eastern Canada in the late 1830s—a contradiction best explained by eastern Canada’s domestic costs and Oregon’s lack thereof. Furthermore, in contrast to the emerging stability of the northeastern border, U.S. ambitions to annex western Canada did not evaporate with the Oregon Treaty; they were merely placed on hold.
Eastern and western Canada grew even more different from each other by the late 1860s. Eastern Canada’s population approached 3,500,000, yet fewer than 28,000 had settled west of Ontario.168 Western Canada also remained almost entirely undeveloped while the eastern economy boomed, especially after Canadian Confederation in 1867: its exports increased from $58 million to $89 million, and its imports rose from $73 million to $128 million between 1868 and 1874.169 Like their predecessors in the 1830s and 1840s, post–Civil War leaders faced a natural experiment north of the border: a populous, productive society in the east and an untamed wilderness in the west. Moreover, U.S. leaders enjoyed their greatest military advantage to date during this period. As a result, profitability theory strongly predicts that U.S. leaders should have pursued the annexation of eastern Canada after the Civil War, while domestic impact theory predicts that they should have continued to reject populous eastern Canada in favor of sparsely populated western Canada.
Pretexts for expansionism were once again plentiful: crises ignited public opinion, internal rebellions rocked Canada, and U.S. citizens launched private raids across the border. The preference of many British leaders for a Confederate victory was among the worst-kept secrets of the Civil War, whipping public opinion throughout the Union into a fury that left U.S.–British relations perilously low in the war’s aftermath.170 Although Britain had not overtly aided the rebels, it had sold them several warships—including the Alabama, which inflicted substantial damage on Union shipping—and Confederate raiders had used Canada as a staging area for incursions into the Northern states. As Secretary of State William Henry Seward wrote, the U.S. public held “a profound sense that it sustained great injury from the sympathy extended in Great Britain to rebels during our civil war.”171 British leaders feared that this resentment would fuel an attempt to seize Canada. Prime Minister Palmerston warned Queen Victoria in January 1865 of “the very hostile spirit towards England which pervades all classes in the Federal States” and noted further that “the probability that, whenever the Civil War in America shall be ended, the Northern states will . . . either make war against England or make inroads into your Majesty’s North American possessions.”172
Had Seward and President Johnson wanted to annex eastern Canada, they had not only the public furor to sustain such a venture but also the military might to make it happen. For the first time in its history the United States enjoyed a military advantage over Britain in North America, having emerged from the Civil War with the most powerful military in the world.173 Its use of mass armies, mobilized industry, rifles, mines, railroads, steamships, telegraph communications, and other innovations heralded a new age of warfare and marked the United States as the most experienced operator with these tools of the future.174 Millions of Americans gained military experience during the Civil War. The Union army alone employed more than 1 million members in 1865, and in July 1866 Congress authorized a peacetime military strength of 54,302 soldiers, significantly higher than antebellum levels.175 In contrast, Britain maintained only about 15,000 troops in Canada during this period.176 Had U.S. leaders wanted to conquer eastern Canada, they had both the opportunity and the means to do so.
They also had a remarkable opportunity to outsource the military costs of a northward invasion to the Fenians, Irish-Americans looking to undermine British rule in Ireland. The Fenian Brotherhood was established in 1858 as the U.S. branch of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a precursor to the twentieth-century Irish Republican Army. Over 140,000 Irish-Americans fought in the Civil War, during which the Fenians developed their own government and military units.177 When the war ended, they set about obtaining surplus arms at low cost while making no secret of their intended target: Canada.178 Fenian leaders hoped to accomplish three goals by invading Canada: to distract Britain from reinforcing its garrisons in Ireland, thus enabling a general uprising there; to establish an Irish republic-in-exile on Canadian territory, thereby gaining belligerent status with its associated legal and diplomatic benefits; and to obtain a bargaining chip that could be exchanged for Irish independence.179 Since Canada’s defenses relied heavily on inexperienced militia, this plan seemed feasible. The British commander there estimated that “no more than five thousand Fenians could wreak considerable damage if they advanced simultaneously at several points along the colony’s defenseless frontier.”180 Given an anti-British public, overwhelming military might, and a ready vanguard for a northward invasion, U.S. leaders arguably enjoyed no better opportunity to conquer Canada.
Moreover, the Fenians were popular. The British consul in New York expected their planned invasion to receive “the undisguised approbation of a large portion of the American people.”181 A vengeful New York Tribune wrote in 1865, “Our Canadian neighbors have an opportunity of appreciating the conditions of America a year or two ago, when they permitted bands of Rebel robbers to ride across the border and sack American towns.”182 More than 1.3 million Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine during the 1840s and 1850s had created an important Irish-American vote, and the surest way to court that vote was “unscrupulous abuse of England.”183 Johnson himself admitted in an interview with the London Times that he was “desirous of avoiding, if possible, any collision with the popular sentiments of the Irish masses.”184 The British ambassador Frederick Bruce called on Seward after hearing of a prospective Fenian invasion of Canada in August 1865 but left disappointed, reporting, “The Secretary did not hesitate to make it quite clear that the administration had no intention of jeopardizing its domestic position by opposing an organization that appealed to a significant band of Irish sympathizers and tapped the widespread hostility toward Britain.”185 Irish-American influence was so great that Bruce feared that if the Fenians gave up their “piratical raids” and instead made “the adhesion of the Irish vote contingent on the adoption by some party of a war policy towards Great Britain, the maintenance of friendly relations between the two countries will become very difficult.”186 Johnson was particularly dependent on the Irish-American vote after his 1866 split from the Republican Party, and observers expected equally strong support from Seward, who had openly favored the Irish-American cause.187
Though many U.S. leaders resented Britain for favoring the Confederacy, only a few Radical Republicans voiced the territorial ambitions British leaders feared.188 Congressman Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts proposed a bill offering annexation to the Canadian provinces, but it was referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and never resurfaced.189 Others preached annexation, including Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, Congressman Henry Davis of Maryland, and the Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill, but their motives were “purely political and sectional,” Medill pointing out that “the admission of British American territory to the American Union as states would give the northern section of the United States a political predominance which the Southern states when readmitted to the Union, would never be able to overcome.”190 Their schemes failed to infiltrate federal policy, as Johnson and Seward displayed no interest in annexing eastern Canada.191
Instead, the Johnson administration materially and diplomatically under-cut the Fenian raids, carefully masking its anti-Fenian policies to avoid alienating Irish-American voters.192 As Johnson reassured Bruce, the Fenians “met with no sympathy on the part of the government, which on the contrary was anxious to discourage it.”193 At Seward’s suggestion, U.S. and British diplomats kept the Fenians out of official diplomatic correspondence, enabling the administration to covertly suppress them without sparking an electoral showdown.194 This secrecy was perhaps too successful: the uninformed Canadian administration repeatedly demanded a formal U.S. anti-Fenian declaration, and the Fenians themselves were emboldened by its absence.195 Yet Seward worked quietly to undermine the Fenians’ public relations, defusing the naturalization controversy that had reemerged as Britain denied consul access to Irish-Americans arrested for fomenting dissent in Ireland. Negotiating a compromise in 1866, Seward advocated a comprehensive naturalization treaty on the grounds that it “would tend considerably to weaken the hold which Fenianism has upon the minds of a part of the population of this country.”196 Ironically, British confidence in “the American government’s unavowed determination to prevent a raid” undermined Seward’s attempts to use the Fenian threat as diplomatic leverage, but nevertheless a naturalization treaty was signed in May 1870.197
Lacking any ambition to annex eastern Canada, the Johnson administration treated the Fenians with increasing firmness as they began launching raids across the border. When roughly one thousand Fenians assembled to invade Campobello Island in New Brunswick in April 1866, Treasury Secretary Hugh McCullough ordered customs officers to seize the Ocean Spray, a ship bearing 129 cases of Fenian arms, and Attorney General James Speed prepared the courts for action.198 Lacking weapons and opposed by U.S. agents as well as British-Canadian defenders, the Fenians resigned themselves to demonstrations and acts of mischief in the area. Two months later one thousand armed Fenians launched another raid across the Niagara River from Buffalo, New York, defeating Canadian militia at the Battle of Ridgeway before they withdrew.199 Again, U.S. authorities disrupted the invasion, closing the port of Buffalo and alerting the U.S.S. Michigan, a reaction which, according to the local British consul, “effectively cut off the Fenian reinforcements and operated powerfully in frustrating their plans.”200 In the days that followed, Johnson issued a fresh neutrality proclamation, dispatched Generals Ulysses Grant and George Meade to Buffalo, and instructed U.S. forces to seize Fenian arms and arrest suspected Fenians.201 A third Fenian raid launched from Vermont on June 7 proved abortive.202 Although thousands more Fenians had gathered in towns along the border, Johnson’s active opposition and neutrality proclamation convinced most to abandon the invasion. When many of them proved too poor to afford the trip home, some seven thousand were transported at public expense, “having first given their parole to desist from further adventures in Canada.”203
The Grant administration that took office in March 1869 maintained these anti-Fenian policies and grew increasingly open about them as public support for the Fenians waned even among Irish-Americans. President Grant moved U.S. troops near the Canadian border “on the pretext of giving them the advantage of a cooler climate during the summer, but really that they might be ready to prevent, if necessary, any hostile expedition which may be attempted by the Fenians against Canada.”204 In August he rejected a Fenian appeal to tolerate the group’s Canadian ambitions.205 When plans for a four-pronged invasion of Canada were discovered, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish “requested his colleagues at the Treasury, Navy, and War Departments to instruct commanders of vessels on the Great Lakes and officers commanding military posts close to the frontier to protect the territorial integrity of Canada.”206 The last major Fenian raid, launched from Vermont in May 1870, was a fiasco. Grant had dispatched troops to the border, and, after a brief skirmish, the Fenian leader John O’Neil was arrested by a federal marshal. A second force of some fifteen hundred Fenians crossed the border from New York but retreated before British-Canadian defenders and disbanded within days.207 Grant publicly condemned their “sundry illegal military enterprises,” even asking Attorney General Ebenezer Hoar if he could prosecute the railroads that had transported the Fenians to the border.208
Anti-British public opinion and impressive military power notwithstanding, U.S. leaders preferred not to take advantage of the Fenian raids to target eastern Canada. Instead, they consistently undermined the Fenians and defended Canada’s territorial integrity. Beyond a few radicals in Congress, no U.S. leaders seriously considered using the raids to pursue annexation. As Fish candidly told the British ambassador Edward Thornton in June 1870, prior public appeasement of the Fenians had been purely for domestic political benefit.209 Ironically, given the lack of U.S. interest in annexing eastern Canada, the Fenian raids jump-started the unification of Canada by sparking urgent security fears north of the border. As one newspaper wrote, “Nothing could have been done equal to it to carry [Canadian] Confederation.”210
The same U.S. leaders who showed no desire to annex eastern Canada after the Civil War did pursue the vast territories to its west, including Russian Alaska, British Columbia, Rupert’s Land, and the North-Western Territories overseen by the Hudson’s Bay Company. Those regions spanned more than three million square miles but contained fewer than 150,000 Native Americans, no more than 40,000 of whom lived in the Pacific Northwest. As for Europeans, there were virtually none outside of the settlements at Sitka (home to as few as 900), Vancouver (with fewer than 10,000), and Winnipeg (with perhaps 13,000).211 In light of such sparse populations and with the pre–Civil War sectional balance overturned, annexing these territories posed minimal domestic costs. As a result, both domestic impact theory and profitability theory predict that U.S. leaders should have seized any affordable opportunities to pursue these western territories. The Arctic climate of these areas severely limited prospects for settlement and hence their material value, however, so neither theory expects U.S. leaders to have been willing to pay much for them. How did U.S. leaders approach western Canada after the Civil War?
Russian leaders had wanted to sell their unprofitable and vulnerable colony of Alaska as far back as the mid-1850s, but exploratory talks with the Buchanan administration fell apart as the country descended into civil war.212 When the Russian ambassador Edouard de Stoeckl approached Seward in March 1867 with a new offer for the purchase of Alaska, Seward quickly accepted. On March 30 they signed a treaty exchanging Alaska for $7.2 million.213 Russian leaders feared losing Alaska in a future war and preferred to sell to the United States rather than to any of their European rivals, so Seward’s main task in the negotiations was determining a suitable price: roughly two cents per acre. As the historian Frederick Merk wrote of Seward, “The province was thrown at him, much as Louisiana had been at Jefferson.”214
Critics lampooned Alaska as “Seward’s icebox” and “Seward’s folly,” skeptical that any price was low enough for a territory known for nothing but its unfitness for settlement. Seward himself knew little about Alaska, but he was content to purchase it first and explore it later, as Jefferson had done with Louisiana.215 Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts admitted in his influential speech supporting the purchase that “perhaps no region of equal extent on the globe, unless we except the interior of Africa or possibly Greenland, is as little known.”216 Its population of perhaps fifty thousand Natives and fewer than twenty-five hundred Russians was neither a lure nor a deterrent. Sumner observed, “The population . . . may be considered in its numbers and in its character. In neither respect, perhaps, can it add much to the value of the country.”217 Nor was Alaska valued for prospective settlement; after surveying the territory in 1869, General George Thomas reported: “I see no immediate prospect of the country being settled up. The climate is too rigid; there is too much rain and too little sun for agricultural purposes.”218 Indeed, there was little immediate prospect of Alaska’s becoming a state. It would be administered in turn by the U.S. Army, Treasury, and Navy until 1884 and not given the status of a U.S. Territory, the precursor to statehood, until 1912.
Nevertheless, the Alaska purchase did offer two attractive benefits: natural resources and Russian friendship. Sumner praised its reserves of timber, coal, copper, ice, furs, and fisheries, “which, in waters superabundant with animal life beyond any of the globe, seem to promise a new commerce to the country.”219 Thomas’s report vindicated this praise, noting Alaska’s rich supplies of timber, fish, and coal as well as iron ore and gold.220 Both Sumner and Seward looked to Alaska as a conduit for future trade with Japan and China.221 Its advocates further pointed to Russian support for the Union during the Civil War, arguing that the purchase would solidify Russian friendship in the future. Seward told the U.S. commissioner who formally accepted the territory that to Emperor Alexander II of Russia it was “a signal proof of that friendship for the United States which has characterized his own reign and that of his illustrious predecessor. It is hoped, therefore, that all your intercourse with the Russian commissioner will be friendly, courteous, and frank.”222 U.S. Minister to Russia Cassius Clay wrote to Seward that “England and France are no match now for the United States and Russia, and the weight of power with the coming years will be still more on our side.”223
The public came to favor the purchase not only for these reasons but also because Alaska was seen as a stepping-stone to further northwestern expansion.224 Editors at the New York Herald, New York Tribune, and The Nation initially panned the acquisition, calling Alaska “utterly worthless and good for nothing,” branding its purchase a “Quixotic land hunt” and declaring, “We do not want far-distant, detached colonies, nor ice and snow territories, nor Esquimaux fellow citizens.”225 Yet they changed their tune once they came to see the purchase as “a flank movement” on British Columbia.226 Russian leaders expected as much: Stoeckl assumed it would be “followed sooner or later by the annexation to the country of the immediate coast of the Pacific Ocean now forming a part of the British possessions.”227
British Columbia’s material benefits to the United States were marginal. Its port at Vancouver was largely redundant with Seattle (incorporated in 1865), its climate nearly as inhospitable as Alaska’s, its natural resources nearly as uncharted, and sea travel to Alaska was much more efficient than any possible land route. Nevertheless, annexing the colony offered the prospect of uncontested dominance of the northern Pacific Ocean. At the time, British Columbia was isolated from eastern Canada and economically dependent on San Francisco, and its residents craved tighter integration. Seward thus hoped to swing public opinion in favor of U.S. annexation, setting his sights on it as early as January 1866.228 That July he told U.S. Minister to Britain Charles Adams that the post–Civil War period offered a “peculiarly convenient” time to negotiate a laundry list of issues from the Alabama claims to “the North West Boundary.”229 Since British leaders seemed open to arbitrating the Alabama claims, Seward “hoped to raise the claims high enough to convince British officials to agree to a quid pro quo settlement, ceding British Columbia in exchange.”230
By the following year news of the Alaska purchase combined with rumors of Seward’s interest to drive public sentiment in British Columbia to favor U.S. annexation.231 In April 1867 the U.S. consul in Victoria reported that “the people . . . are now urging with great unanimity annexation to the United States,” and a petition circulated that July asking Queen Victoria for a lengthy set of concessions or, failing that, “the speedy transfer of this colony . . . to the United States.”232 Seward delayed claims negotiations to allow pro-U.S. sentiment to grow, telling Adams’s son that the Alabama claims “would soon be settled, but now they could be settled in one way, by such acquisition from England as would enable us to round off our North-Western territory.”233 When instructed to combine all outstanding issues into one negotiation, Adams confided to his diary, “I saw very clearly the drift of this to be a bargain for the British territory in the northwest.”234 The following month Seward told Senator Orville Browning that “we would pay for British Columbia with the Alabama claims.”235
Meanwhile, the formerly separate colonies of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia joined to form the Dominion of Canada, and their leaders began lobbying for British Columbia to join as well. By the winter of 1867–68 talk of annexation had faded from local newspapers. Attendees at a public meeting in Victoria that January favored confederation with Canada over annexation to the United States if certain conditions were met, chief among them the construction of a transcontinental railroad linking British Columbia with eastern Canada.236 Seward tried to counter by promoting construction of a U.S. railroad to the colony and urging U.S. capitalists “to organize a company for the purpose of buying up the rights of the Hudson’s Bay Company” in Rupert’s Land—de facto separating British Columbia from the Dominion—but both efforts fell through.237 Britain’s Parliament decided to build the transcontinental railroad that summer, and the following year it purchased the Hudson’s Bay Company charter to Rupert’s Land and the North-West Territories, paving the way for their integration into Canada.238
Still, Seward’s ambitions lingered. He noted during a trip to the Northwest in 1869, “British Columbia—We do not need it now, but we shall—we shall have it. G.B. . . . she doesn’t need it.” Given the region’s limited material value, he had no desire to fight for it, instead wondering “how to get it properly as we got Alaska.”239 Prioritizing U.S.–British relations, Seward put off any further expansionist attempts during his last year in office and instead oversaw negotiation of the Johnson-Clarendon Convention settling U.S. claims against Britain. Calls for western Canada continued to echo from Sumner and others in Congress. In January 1870 Senator Henry Corbett of Oregon proposed including British Columbia in any claims settlement, arguing that “a great proportion of the people of British Columbia are emigrants from the United States” and “if it were annexed to the United States it would be rapidly settled.”240 Corbett’s proposal proved fruitless, but Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan used it to draw attention to another opportunity for northward expansion: the “insurrection” in “the Red River country, lying directly north of the state of Minnesota.”241
The Red River Rebellion broke out in October 1869 when Métis protesters disrupted a British Canadian survey intended to prepare Rupert’s Land for integration into Canada. The Métis, of mixed Native and French ancestry, made up roughly half of Winnipeg’s twelve thousand inhabitants; another 35 percent were of mixed Native and English ancestry while fewer than 15 percent were solely European.242 Led by Louis Riel, the Métis feared Canadian integration would threaten their way of life, and in early November they seized Fort Garry.243 Like British Columbia, Winnipeg was geographically isolated from eastern Canada in the late 1860s, with most of its trade, mail, and visitors arriving by horse from the end of rail lines in Minnesota.244 That state’s rapid growth, from under 5,000 in 1849 to more than 172,000 by 1860, put pressure on Canadian leaders to integrate Winnipeg into the Dominion quickly. As the historian George Stanley wrote, “Peaceable American penetration had been the preliminary step to the annexation of Oregon and Texas, and it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that Rupert’s Land and the North-West might go the same way.”245 Minnesota’s state legislature, for its part, passed a resolution saying that it would “rejoice” at “the cession of North-West British America to the United States.”246
During the winter of 1869–70 U.S. leaders looked to take advantage of the Red River Rebellion and annex Winnipeg. The U.S. consul there described local popular opinion as being opposed to Canadian integration, emphasizing that the settlement was “unconnected” from eastern Canada due to “natural obstacles” and suggesting that Riel’s rebellion opened the door to annexation.247 That December Secretary of State Hamilton Fish sent former Treasury agent James Taylor to report confidentially on the rebellion as well as on the settlement’s geography and demography, “the political relations of the several British possessions between Minnesota and Alaska,” and the internal politics of the Dominion of Canada.248 As far back as 1861, when the Royal Canadian Regiment withdrew leaving Winnipeg without any established defensive force, Taylor had speculated to Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase that “the Americanization of this important section of British America is rapidly progressing,” and “in case of a collision with England, Minnesota is competent to ‘hold, occupy, and possess’ the valley of Red River to Lake Winnipeg.”249 Taylor had also pursued the Hudson’s Bay Company’s charter before the British government purchased it, telling a company man in St. Paul, “I know that President Grant is most anxious for a treaty with England, which shall transfer the country between Minnesota and Alaska, in settlement of the Alabama controversy. . . . I have no doubt that a clause could be inserted in such a treaty giving $5,000,000 to the Hudson’s Bay Company in satisfaction of the title to one twentieth of the land in Central British America.”250
The Grant administration monitored events north of the border with anticipation, poised to annex western Canada if a suitable opportunity arose but unwilling to take any step that would undermine U.S.–British relations. Upon receiving an annexation request from British Columbian residents in November 1869, Fish advised Grant “to keep our eyes fixedly on the movement, & to keep our hands off,” which the president considered “precisely” the right approach.251 In January 1870 Fish thought the movement in British Columbia, “together with the troubles in the Red River settlement, and the opposition to the union with the Dominion” would result in “the separation of the connection between Great Britain and the colonies,” concluding, “I think it must come before very long.”252 He instructed the U.S. minister to Britain to pursue the subject diplomatically, stating, “Should you find any inclination of opinion or of interest toward the annexation of these possessions to this country, you will discreetly encourage it . . . availing yourself of every opportunity to obtain information as to the sentiments of the British government on the question of the separation of the colonies from the Mother Country and when opportunity offers, indicating the facts which seem to make such separation a necessity.”253 In view of the importance of upholding good U.S.–British relations and the limited material value of the colonies, though, Grant and Fish were unwilling to move beyond quiet diplomacy, rejecting a suggestion by Senator Alexander Ramsey of Minnesota that “if about $25,000 could be sent to the insurgents they would be able to maintain themselves.”254
The early months of 1870 saw Métis leaders negotiate with Canadian representatives regarding the list of rights needing protection in order for them to join the Dominion. Fish continued his gentle diplomacy, repeatedly suggesting to Thornton that the province become independent and cautioning him against military intervention.255 Congress proved equally unwilling to force the issue. Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, one of Congress’s few remaining expansionists, observed in April, “The United States today have more men that have actually been in battle under fire than all the rest of the world put together, more experienced soldiers and more experienced officers. We are today the strongest military power on earth.” He urged his colleagues to “open negotiations with Winnipeg with a view to its annexation . . . and my word for it, you will have no fighting. There is no desire on the part of any nation on the earth to fight with us on the land.”256 Although Chandler harnessed profitability logic, his colleagues roundly rejected his ambitions and merely ridiculed him for “riding a favorite hobbyhorse.”257
When British Canadian leaders organized a military expedition under Colonel Garnet Wolseley to suppress the rebellion in May, Grant bought time for the rebellion by denying Wolseley transit across U.S. territory.258 This move held the door to annexation open a bit longer, but in vain. That same month Queen Victoria assented to an act of Canadian Parliament creating the province of Manitoba, including a list of protections based on the Métis demands.259 The province came into being in July 1870, when Canada officially absorbed Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory. Even as Treasury Secretary George Boutwell told Grant of his enduring hope for “arrangements with England by which she may be relieved from the Alabama claims and the transfer of the Canadas to the United States accomplished,” the writing was on the wall.260 Wolseley’s expedition reached Fort Garry in August to find that Riel’s forces had fled, and Manitoba became part of the Dominion of Canada. With central Canada integrated, British Columbia negotiated its own deal for debt relief and a transcontinental railroad, joining the Dominion in July 1871.261
That year, the Grant administration moved to resolve all major outstanding issues with Britain. The resulting Treaty of Washington provided for arbitration of the Alabama claims, addressed disputes regarding northeastern fishing rights, stipulated free navigation of border waterways, and arranged for international arbitration to settle a northwest boundary dispute involving the San Juan Islands, which dated back to an imprecision of the Oregon Treaty and had become militarized in 1859 during the so-called Pig War.262 That treaty set U.S.–British relations on the stable footing that would facilitate their peaceful power transition over the decades to come, and it also signaled the formal end of U.S. northward expansion in favor of a stable, demilitarized northern border.263 As the biographer Allan Nevins writes, Fish (who led the negotiations on the U.S. side) prioritized U.S.–British relations over Canadian territory: “Fish would have been quite as glad as Sumner to see it, or at least its Western half, attached to the republic . . . [but] whatever Canada’s destiny, they were intent upon restoring cordial Anglo-American relations.”264
When Riel launched a second Métis rebellion in March 1885, again protesting Canadian surveys to establish a new district (this time in Saskatchewan), it generated relatively little interest in the United States. Secretary of State Thomas Bayard reiterated U.S. neutrality policies toward the internal British conflict, telling his British counterpart that the United States “will take all available precautions to prevent the dispatch of hostile expeditions, or of arms and munitions of war, from within the jurisdiction of the United States to aid the insurgents in the North-West provinces.”265 The rebellion was short-lived: Canadian forces defeated the rebels by mid-May, and Riel was found guilty of treason and hanged later that year. The early 1890s saw calls for a voluntary annexation of Canada from some prominent voices such as Secretary of State James Blaine (who came from Maine) and the National Continental Union League (which included Charles Dana, Theodore Roosevelt, John Hay, and Henry Cabot Lodge). Most of these proponents, however, were businessmen from border states with material interests involved, and proposals by Congressman Amos Cummings of New York and Senator Jacob Gallinger of Vermont failed to gain any traction.266 By the beginning of the twentieth century congressional debates over a U.S.–Canadian reciprocity treaty saw annexation mentioned only by its opponents as a boogeyman to scare Canada into rejecting the treaty. Congress itself was “singularly lacking in the usual annexationist effusions,” as the historian Donald Warner writes, since “few Americans now wanted to acquire any more territory or population.”267
Why did the United States stop trying to annex Canada? The case studies examined here indicate that U.S. territorial ambitions north of the border excluded Quebec as early as the War of 1812 and continued shifting westward over time to avoid most of Canada’s population. U.S. leaders pursued Quebec only during the Revolution, when the United States was an international organization and its potential membership would have given Quebec no influence over their domestic affairs. That episode stands in marked contrast to the War of 1812, when U.S. leaders fretted over the sectional and normative consequences of annexing Quebec and entertained only sparsely populated Ontario despite initiating the war, recognizing Quebec’s material value, and expecting an easy victory.
As Ontario’s population grew in later decades, U.S. leaders prioritized border stability east of the Great Lakes and limited their ambitions to Canada’s sparsely populated western reaches. Numerous crises failed to kindle a pursuit of eastern Canada during the late 1830s or the late 1860s, despite federal leaders’ willingness to forcibly rebuke Maine during the former and their recognition of U.S. military power during the latter. Rather than take advantage of those crises to pursue annexation, Van Buren, Johnson, and Grant all dispatched U.S. forces to thwart private border raids and reiterated U.S. neutrality toward the Canadian rebellions.
In contrast, U.S. leaders actively pursued the sparsely populated Pacific Northwest: Polk threatened war over Oregon, Seward purchased Alaska, and both he and Fish pursued western Canada from Manitoba to British Columbia. Holding the material benefits of those territories in relatively low esteem, though, Polk compromised on British Columbia to ensure success in the far more valuable California, and post–Civil War U.S. leaders utilized only diplomatic means and ultimately conceded their territorial ambitions to ensure lasting amicable U.S.–British relations.
These findings are consistent with domestic impact theory. Quebec’s domestic political and normative implications explain why its annexation became a nonstarter among U.S. foreign policymakers as well as why Ontario joined it on the list of regions U.S. leaders were disinterested in between 1812 and the 1830s. In contrast, U.S. leaders’ behavior in these case studies repeatedly contradicted profitability theory. First, they consistently rejected the annexation of the territory they considered most valuable (eastern Canada) while pursuing areas they saw as far less valuable (western Canada). Second, their choice of targets was not driven by U.S. military strength, which was at its lowest during the Revolution (when they targeted Quebec) and at its highest after the Civil War (when they did not). Third, federal leaders were willing to use military force to bargain over maritime policies during the War of 1812, to pursue sparsely populated Oregon in the 1840s, and to prevent subfederal actors like Maine and the Fenians from invading eastern Canada, but not to annex their most valuable neighbor (Quebec). Finally, as domestic impact theory predicts but profitability theory does not, U.S. leaders saw the growing population of eastern Canada as a cost of annexation rather than a benefit, basing that assessment on their perceptions of its identity rather than materialistic assessments of its productivity and propensity for resistance. U.S. leaders’ reluctance to annex Canadian territory was driven by sectionalism and xenophobia, domestic concerns that ballooned as their eyes turned to the south.