The Battle for the Fourteenth Colony: America’s War of Liberation in Canada, 1774–1776

1 | The Only Link Wanting: The First Continental Congress Invites Canada

Chapter 1 The Only Link Wanting The First Continental Congress Invites Canada Your Province Is the Only Link Wanting to Complete the Bright and Strong Chain of Union. | Continental Congress, “Address to the Inhabitants of the Province of Quebec,” 26 October 1774 On 26 October 1774, the fifty-two distinguished delegates of the first Continental Congress prepared to conclude their session; it was an unprecedented attempt to resolve the escalating political crisis in British North America while defending colonial rights. Before the representatives departed from Carpenters’ Hall that day, they approved one final message: the “Address to the Inhabitants of the Province of Quebec.”This letter served as the initial step in what would develop into a twenty-month campaign to bring Quebec into a confederation with its southern neighbors—an effort to help the Canadians free themselves from an “oppressive government.” Quebec Province would seem to be an odd field in which to expand the patriot cause.British colonists had been engaged in near-continuous conflict with Canada for generations, as part of the Atlantic struggle of empires that had ended only fourteen years earlier in the decisive conquest of New France. As a result, the British Empire formally incorporated the conquered colony only in 1763, when it was renamed the “Province of Quebec.” Quebec was decidedly different from the empire’s other North American colonies.In contrast to the dominant Anglo-Protestant culture of their neighbors to the south,the vast majority of the Canadian populace was francophone, ethnically French and homogenously Catholic.For more than a century,these particular characteristics had defined “the enemy” to Englishmen on both sides of the Atlantic.Despite these differences,Congress believed it had good reason to invite the Canadians to join its cause. This revolutionary new Canadian venture was born in the rational, dip- The Only Link Wanting 7 lomatic era of the first Continental Congress. Political developments earlier that year had forced the convening of an intercolonial body that would not focus simply on a single issue, like its predecessors, but would serve to unite liberty-loving North Americans as a bulwark of freedom to address the “series of oppressions” emanating from Parliament, perceived as “a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing” the colonists to political slavery.1 The British North American colonies and Parliament had drifted apart in the decade following the conclusion of the French and Indian War. The core of their conflict rested on diverging interpretations of the unwritten, tradition-based English constitution. Starting with the Stamp Act of 1765, many colonists believed the next ten years of Parliamentary acts represented constitutional innovations—a fundamental change in the relationship between the colonies and the motherland.As the London government seemed increasingly distant from the colonies and the train of perceived abuses continued , more and more American subjects saw the Ministry as an enemy of freedom. Many even believed there was some conspiracy among the King’s ministers to enslave the colonists politically by progressively denying their English rights. Those Americans resisting the government’s tyrannical policies identified themselves as patriots, because they felt they were defending traditional British liberty. Almost every action and reaction on either side of the Atlantic only served to reinforce and harden opposing sentiments, driving the parties farther apart. The situation escalated dramatically in December 1773. In the Boston Tea Party, patriot Sons of Liberty protested the latest tax policy by blatantly destroying commercial property.This act brought the British government to the point at which it felt obligated to take drastic and decisive action to rein in the radical vandals of Massachusetts. In the first months of 1774, Parliament implemented a new series of punitive laws, dubbed the “Intolerable Acts” in the colonies. These measures completely changed the character of the British imperial crisis.The London government was intent on vigorously enforcing order in North America. However, colonial patriots saw Ministerial conspiracy theories becoming fact: with the Intolerable Acts, arbitrary rule had become a reality in Massachusetts —a new government was imposed, trade was blocked, and rights were suppressed.These acts served as a harbinger of what could happen to the other colonies.Upon receiving first word of the Intolerable Acts in May 1774, patriot Americans raised an alarm from Georgia to New England. Within 8 The Battle for the Fourteenth Colony weeks, colonial Committees of Correspondence and radical Sons of Liberty cells responded,developing a plan for a collective...