The American Response to Canada Since 1776

II. “Tendencies to Bad Neighborhood” 1783-1854

II "Tendencies to Bad Neighborhood" 1783-1854 The United States and Canada began as bad neighbors. During the first seventy or so years after independence, the American response to Canada was characterized by suspicion and hostility. The War of 1812 (during which William Hull, Governor of Michigan Territory and Brigadier General in the Army of the Northwest, led an invasion and declared Upper Canada to be conquered by the United States) was the most dramatic manifestation of the tension and distrust between the two countries. The outbreak of war only served as confirmation to Americans that the Canadian colonies were a threatening and destabilizing force in North America. The constituent elements in this American view were a mixture of old and new attitudes. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, American colonists had interpreted French policy in Canada as one of encirclement.1 From their base in Canada, the French design was to expand into the Great Lakes and Ohio country, travel down to the Gulf of Mexico, and keep the American colonies hemmed in between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean. When the British replaced the French in Canada, the Americans saw the same geopolitical pattern repeating itself. While the boundary line had been established along the Great Lakes in 1783, the Canadians and the British continued to intrigue with the Natives of the Old Northwest in an attempt to block American settlement and maintain a British influence throughout the region. The arrangements at the Treaty of Ghent in 1814 seemed to put an end to those particular Anglo-Canadian designs, but Americans remained suspicious of continuing British links with Native Americans inside the United States. Moreover, in the 1830s and 1840s, the presence of the Hudson's Bay Company in the Oregon country and British soundings toward Texas were worrying signs that Britain was still prepared to experiment with the old French policy.2 23 New concerns about Canada emerged in the difficult, first years of independence. Several leading Americans were convinced that the loyalists who fled to Canada during and after the revolution carried with them virulent, anti-American values, schemed against the new nation by encouraging internal revolts (such as Shays' rebellion in 1786) and attempted to dismember the United States through fomenting secession in the western territories. While these fears were most acute in the decade after independence-when the American federation felt particularly vulnerable-they persisted into the first two decades of the nineteenth century. There was also a clear American sense that Canada was playing an obstructionist role in trade matters throughout the period until the 1830s. This was especially so with respect to the vexing West Indian trade issue that bedeviled Anglo-American relations for fifty years after independence . The new United States wished to regain access to the British West Indies market, which had been such a source of prosperity during the colonial period.3 The British excluded the nowindependent United States from that trade, and American officials and politicians were convinced that the British colonists in Canada and Nova Scotia had influenced the imperial authorities to keep up the restrictive policies. The British colonies would then be able to replace the United States as the main supplier in the British West Indies. Canadian intransigence on the trade issue was seen as one factor cutting off hitherto profitable avenues of American trade. Americans also developed a critical view of internal developments in Canada. In both Upper and Lower Canada there were armed uprisings in 1837, when radical reformers lost patience with the patronage-ridden, local ruling groups. These rebellions were interpreted in the United States as valiant struggles for independence and democracy-an attempt to follow the American example. There was widespread sympathy among Americans for the radicals' cause. Armed clashes broke out along the frontier between British and Canadian forces. Britain and the United States appeared on the brink of war over the "Caroline" incident when a small party of Canadians crossed the border to burn a ship that was carrying arms to the radicals. Such incidents heightened the American image of Canada as an undemocratic polity still very much under British imperial sway. In short, because of traditional fears of encirclement , resentment against loyalists, and a generally critical view of Canadian politics and society, the American perception of Canada in this period was negative. 24 1. This American view of Canada was set firmly, almost from the...