British North America and American Expansionism

Canadian Review of American Studies Volume 23, Number 1, Fall, 1992, pp: 157-164 157 British North America and American Expansionism Francis M. Carroll Reginald C. Stuart. United States Expansionism and British North America, 1775-1871. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Pp. xvi + 374. Jane Errington. The Lion, the Eagle, and Upper Canada: A Developing Colonial Ideology. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987. Pp. x + 272. Martin Crawford. The Anglo-American Crisis of the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Times and America, 1850-1862. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press. 1987. Pp. x + 178. Each of these three books attempts to revise to some degree the conventional views of Anglo-Canadian-American relations in the century from the 1770s to the 1870s. The first two books deal with broad issues of expansionism and national character, topics that have not been ignored by historians, while the third, more limited in scope, looks closely at that still sensitive topic of British public opinion about the United States in the Civil War era. The most ambitious study is Reginald C. Stuart's United States Expansionism and British North America, 1775-1871. Stuart attempts to examine American expansionism over the dynamic and formative first hundred years of American history. Of course, during this period the United States rose from thirteen rebelling colonies along the eastern seaboard to an 158 Canadian Review of American Studies enormous transcontinental nation state (some would say empire). In the process of this growth and evolution, the United States clashed with Great Britain, largely, but not exclusively,along the northern frontier in two wars, numerous border squabbles, and protracted diplomatic negotiations. Was this process one of sustained, planned, deliberate, imperial expansion-the Americans relentlessly pursuing their Manifest Destiny to control most, if not all, of the North American continent? Not really, Stuart concludes. He sees the idea of straight line American expansion (Manifest Destiny) as too simple, and he sees three distinct phases of American expansion. Stuart argues that from 1775 to 1815, expansion was driven by defensive considerations. Stuart outlines at length the desire of the Continental Congress to persuade Quebec to join the Revolution in order, at the very least, to secure the northern flank of the thirteen colonies. This proved impossible to do either by persuasion or by force of arms, and annexation of Quebec, while not ignored, was eventually placed well down on the list of objectives in the peace negotiations of 1782-83. Although annexation was unattainable in 1782,the British presence north of the newly formed United States was recognized as an inevitable source of conflict. So it proved to be. Crown forces refused to surrender seven frontier forts on the American side of the border and, in fact, used them for advanced bases to maintain alliances with Indian tribes in American territory and also to support fur traders working out of Montreal. (Oddly, Stuart does not fully exploit the continuity of mid-eighteenth-century claims of seaboard interests to the trans-Appalachian and Great Lakes lands which led to the French and Indian War in 1754 and resulted in steady antagonism between these same interests and the British government from 1763 on.) This practice, exploiting the weakness of the United States, was to some extent the same as that followed by the Spanish in Florida and along the Mississippi. It led to an escalating level of violence along the frontier culminating, in the north, at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. Although the crisis with the British seemed to be resolved with the Jay-Grenville Treaty, the resumption of border difficulties and Indian warfare by at least 1808 proved to many Americans that the British threat to the border was unchanged. U.S. security could only be achieved by driving the Crown forces out of British North America and forcing the Indian tribes Francis M. Carroll I 159 to acknowledge American government authority on the frontier. Stuart concludes that the U.S. push for the War of 1812 can be explained in these terms. Stuart also develops another theme in his analysis of the border situation. He identifies a strong communal bond...