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CANADA

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In 1820 Canada was little more than a patchwork of British colonies. The following decades, however, would bring great change to British North America. Rebellions in the late 1830s led the British authorities to join the colonies of Upper and Lower Canada, now Ontario and Quebec, into a united Province of Canada. During the next decade London gradually repealed the legislation that had allowed its North American colonies to enjoy preferential access to the British and West Indian markets, and internal autonomy was granted in return. Economic disruption and widespread discontent ensued and British North America desperately sought to reorient its foreign trade toward the United States. Nevertheless, by the mid-1860s it became increasingly clear that the various British North American colonies would have to work together for the purposes of trade and protection. After much deliberation and with the approval of Great Britain, the Province of Canada and the maritime colonies of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick entered into a federal union in 1867. By 1871, with the admission of British Columbia, the Dominion of Canada stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But the new nation was not yet fully independent; Britain would retain control of its external affairs until 1931.

Under British stewardship Canada's relationship with the United States experienced a number of ups and downs during the antebellum age. After the War of 1812, which was fought between the United States and Great Britain over, among other things, maritime rights and trade policies, peace returned to the North American continent. By the 1830s and 1840s, however, tensions arising from boundary disputes along the Maine–New Brunswick border and in the Pacific Northwest brought Britain and the United States to the edge of war. Diplomacy nonetheless prevailed and a short-lived era of Anglo-American harmony followed the signature of the Oregon Boundary Treaty of 1846, which divided the Oregon Territory along the forty-ninth parallel between Britain and the United States. Britain concluded a comprehensive trade agreement—the so-called Reciprocity Treaty—with the United States on behalf of British North America in 1854, and Canadian-American trade soared during the decade that followed. But the outbreak of the Civil War renewed tensions between Great Britain and the United States and, once again, Canada would pay the price for Anglo-American squabbling. Upset by British support for the Confederacy, Congress repealed the Reciprocity Treaty in 1866 and for a time Washington turned a blind eye to the activities of the Fenian Brotherhood, a group of Irish American terrorists who launched a series of ill-fated raids on British North America. By doing so, the Fenians hoped to divert British forces away from Ireland, where they planned to foment an uprising. Tensions simmered along the Canadian-American border until the 1871 Treaty of Washington, which settled the Alabama claims made by the U.S. government against Britain's part in outfitting Confederate cruisers to fight against the Union. The treaty normalized relations between Britain and the United States.

In the nineteenth century the general American perception of Canada was negative and, to a large extent, uninformed. Anglophobia and anti-Catholic nativism, for instance, were common during this period and they influenced domestic perceptions of Canada. As a result, many Americans saw the British North American colonies as proxies for what they believed were two of the greatest external threats to the new republic: British imperialism and Roman Catholicism. The issue of slavery, which dominated antebellum discourse, also colored attitudes toward Canada. Indeed, as a haven for fugitive slaves, British North America gained the respect of many abolitionists but drew the ire of slaveholders.

THE BRITISH PROXY

During the antebellum age anti-British sentiment was founded on a rejection of hereditary privilege, deference, and militarism, which Americans saw as the social and political foundations of British society. Anti-British rhetoric affirmed America's faith in republicanism and democracy, but it also reflected widespread concerns regarding British attempts to check the nation's expansion and influence. In this sense, the very existence of a series of British colonies along America's northern frontier was seen as an affront to American values, a threat to American security, and an obstacle to Manifest Destiny.

Most nineteenth-century Americans viewed British institutions, and monarchy in particular, as archaic and tyrannical. Their survival rested, it seemed, on military repression. British North America was seen as a case in point because only the heavy hand of the British military—whose presence on the North American continent also threatened and contained Young America—was thought to keep Canada in Britain's orbit. The Michigan-born writer and artist Charles Lanman (1819–1895), for instance, bristled at the sight of Montreal's British garrison. "One of the most striking peculiarities of this city," he wrote in 1848, "is the fact that everybody has to live, walk and sleep at the point of a bayonet. Military quarters are stationed in various portions of the city, and soldiers meet you at every corner, marching to and fro, invariably puffed up with ignorance and vanity" (p. 117).

As far as most American observers were concerned Canada was destined to be annexed by the United States, or, at the very least, to gain complete independence from Britain. Accordingly, many Americans were angered and puzzled by the emergence of a transcontinental British dominion as their northern neighbor. They could not understand Canada's loyalty to Great Britain and saw the new nation as a fundamentally unnatural and hostile entity. In 1867 Maine's Republican governor, Joshua L. Chamberlain (1828–1914), warned that the federation of British North America was "part of a great conspiracy against Liberty on this youthful continent" (Warner, p. 66).

In the antebellum era Anglophobia, annexationism, and protectionist sentiment shared a deep intimacy. Indeed, American manufacturing interests often used anti-British rhetoric to promote high tariffs against British and Canadian products. They argued that shutting Canadian goods out of the American market would ruin the British North American economy, which in turn would hasten Canada's entry into the Union.

Nevertheless, a number of Americans were lukewarm, if not downright hostile, to the idea of bringing Canada into the Union. Many Southerners, for instance, favored free trade with British North America because they feared that economic collapse in the Canadas might bring some or all of the British North American colonies into the Union, thereby upsetting the fragile balance between free and slave states.

THE CATHOLIC THEOCRACY

The United States experienced a burst of anti-Catholic nativism in the mid-nineteenth century. Large-scale Catholic immigration was changing the nation's urban landscape and many Americans worried that these apparently unassimilable newcomers threatened America's Protestant values and republican institutions. Anti-Catholic enmity was generally directed at Irish immigrants; nevertheless, for many Americans, Canada also embodied the menace of Roman Catholicism. Indeed, since the seventeenth century, Protestant America had feared that a Catholic theocracy was forming on the shores of the St. Lawrence. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the antebellum era's most important nativist document, The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (1836), took aim at Quebec's Roman Catholic Church. Ghostwritten by a New York Protestant minister, Monk's best-selling book—300,000 copies were sold prior to the Civil War—was a fabricated tale that claimed to be the true experiences of a nun who had escaped from a Montreal convent. The book's wild allegations of sexual abuse and infanticide helped spark the Know-Nothing uproar of the 1840s and 1850s, doing for nativism what Uncle Tom's Cabin would later do for the abolitionist movement (Castillo, pp. 49–50).

A more subtle form of anti-Catholic rhetoric could be found in the work of the historian Francis Parkman (1823–1893). In his books on the history of the French regime in Canada, New France emerged as the embodiment of reaction, and its failings were also those of Roman Catholicism and autocracy. Parkman was undoubtedly awed by the exploits of French explorers like Samuel de Champlain and Cavelier de La Salle, but he did not believe that their heroism could redeem a society so thoroughly corrupted by despotism.

Invariably described as a swarthy, ignorant, backward, and priest-ridden people, French Canadians served as convenient foils for anti-Catholic rhetoric. "The population which we had seen the last two days," remarked the transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) during an 1850 tour of rural Quebec, "appeared very inferior, intellectually and even physically, to that of New England. In some respects they were incredibly filthy. It was evident that they had not advanced since the settlement of the country, that they were quite behind the age, and fairly represented their ancestors in Normandy a thousand years ago" (pp. 59–60). The Roman Catholic Church's aversion to liberty and enlightenment, Thoreau and others insisted, was largely responsible for French Canadian backwardness. This sort of bigotry dogged the hundreds of thousands of French Canadian immigrants who settled in the northern United States after 1840.

Nevertheless, anti-Catholic nativism was entirely absent from what was undoubtedly the most popular nineteenth-century work of fiction to deal with a Canadian theme: the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's (1807–1882) Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847). The epic poem told the story of two young lovers separated by the Acadian Expulsion of 1755 and was quite sympathetic in its treatment of Roman Catholics. Longfellow, to be sure, held nativism in low regard. His cosmopolitan conception of "a national literature . . . embracing French, Spanish, Irish, English, Scotch, and German peculiarities" (quoted in Seelye, p. 30) was at odds, however, with the forceful nationalism that characterized mid-nineteenth-century American literature.

THE CANADIAN CANAAN

Slavery, which was largely unsuited to Canadian agriculture, first fell into disuse as British North American courts refused to be involved in the pursuit of fugitives, and was officially abolished in the British Empire in 1833. Abolitionist sentiment ran high in nineteenth-century Canada, and Britain refused to extradite the fugitive American slaves that had sought refuge in its North American colonies. British North America was accordingly seen as a haven for African Americans, many of whom fled to Canada through the Underground Railroad. Several thousand fugitives settled in Upper Canada, especially after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made the Northern states unsafe for escapees. Most would return to the United States after the Civil War.

Canadians, to be sure, shared the general patterns of prejudice found in the free states. Nevertheless, most fugitive narratives were unflagging in their praise of the Canadian haven and scarcely mentioned the prejudice and segregation that black refugees encountered in British North America (Winks, pp. 241, 251). Likewise, a number of African American leaders were enthusiastic supporters of Canadian resettlement. Unlike the Liberian colonization schemes promoted by the American Colonization Society, which were essentially experiments in deportation, the resettlement of free blacks in the British provinces, particularly in Upper Canada, promised equality and prosperity in North America.

A number of white abolitionists were equally enthusiastic about the Canadian haven and helped fund a variety of education and resettlement schemes in Upper Canada. These programs bolstered abolitionist claims that blacks could be trained to enjoy freedom and that they might even prosper through cooperative activity (Winks, p. 157). The Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy (1789–1839), who visited Upper Canada in 1832, was particularly impressed with the province as a location to resettle manumitted slaves. In Upper Canada, he wrote in his diary, "every citizen, without distinction of color or caste, is entitled to all the privileges and immunities that the most favored individual can claim." "Our colored people," he concluded, would thrive in the British province: "The country in question will be very suitable for them, particularly those north of the Carolinas, if they choose to locate themselves therein" (pp. 114, 132).

Canadian policy and sentiment regarding fugitive slaves infuriated many Southerners. Senator Thomas Hart Benton (1782–1858) of Missouri, for instance, complained that the British North American colonies were lands "where abolitionism is the policy of the government, the voice of the law, and the spirit of the people" (Winks, p. 173). To discourage escape to the "Canadian Canaan," slaves were kept in ignorance of British North America. Masters warned their slaves that they would perish in Canada's harsh climate—the belief that Canada was a desolate, frozen wasteland was firmly entrenched in the American mind—and that French Canadians worshipped idols and killed black men on sight (Winks, p. 238).

The antebellum vision of Canada, though generally negative, was hardly univocal. The British provinces, indeed, embodied different things to different people. For some, they were the distant outposts of popery and British imperialism, whereas for others, they were a haven for fugitive slaves. In the end, however, American judgments regarding British North America had little to do with objective reality. They merely reflected domestic concerns regarding slavery, immigration, and expansion.

See also Abolitionist Writing; Borders; Catholics; Democracy; Slavery

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Lanman, Charles. A Tour to the River Saguenay, in Lower Canada. Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1848.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie. Boston: William D. Ticknor, 1847.

Lundy, Benjamin. "The Diary of Benjamin Lundy Written During his Journey to Upper Canada, January 1832, edited with notes and an introduction by Fred Landon." Ontrario Historical Society Papers and Records 19 (1922): 110–133.

Thoreau, Henry David. A Yankee in Canada, with AntiSlavery and Reform Papers. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866.

Secondary Works

Castillo, Dennis. "The Enduring Legacy of Maria Monk." American Catholic Studies 112 (2001): 49–59.

Doyle, James. North of America: Images of Canada in the Literature of the United States, 1775–1900. Toronto: ECW Press, 1983.

Seelye, John. "Attic Shape: Dusting off Evangeline." Virginia Quarterly Review 60 (1984): 21–44.

Stewart, Gordon T. The American Response to Canada since 1776. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1992.

Stuart, Reginald C. United States Expansionism and British North America, 1775–1871. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Warner, Donald F. The Idea of Continental Union: Agitation for the Annexation of Canada to the United States, 1849–1893. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1960.

Winks, Robin W. The Blacks in Canada: A History. 2nd ed. Montreal and Buffalo, N.Y.: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997.

Damien-Claude Bélanger