The The Longest Boundary: How the US-Canadian Border's Line came to be where it is, 1763-1910 (Consolidated edition): Volumes 1 and 2

By John Dunbabin

A consolidated eBook of Volume one and Volume two of The Longest Boundary by John Dunbabin.
These volumes are firmly based on primary sources but written in a way that should appeal to the general reader as much as to specialised historians. Its chief actors are politicians and administrators, but there is a range of others, extending from First Nations chiefs to goldminers, railway entrepreneurs, prophets, and policemen. In the concluding chapter the book's general historical approach is supplemented by assessment of the main perspectives of international relations theory. Finally, attention is drawn to small anomalies created by the boundary line.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grosvenor House Publishing
• Release date: Apr 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9781803816395

Book preview

Preface

During a splendid Alaskan holiday, we were given what seemed to be two contradictory accounts of how the local boundary with Canada had been determined (though I now believe one informant was talking of the Chilkoot, the other of the Chilkat, Pass). Shortly afterwards, while gazing up Glacier Bay (rightly awarded to the United States in 1903) towards the Canadian mountains beyond, I decided to explore the surprisingly neglected process through which what is now the US-Canadian border, the world’s longest, came by stages between 1763 and 1910 to its present line – the precise location of its disputed starting point, the ‘true St. Croix’, being ascertained in 1797-8 largely through archaeological excavation …

‘Of the making of books there is no end’; and this one has taken far longer than I anticipated, so long indeed that doubts were widely voiced as to whether it would ever emerge. Delay did, though, have the unlooked-for effect of extending my research into the internet age, and so opening sources I would not otherwise have encountered. The outcome has been a long book, too long, many people rightly warned, for today’s academic publishers. So I am very grateful to Grosvenor House Publishing for producing it, rapidly, helpfully, and efficiently, on a self-publishing basis.

More could usefully have been done. But while writing I have consulted and been helped by archives extending from the Algemeen Rijksarchief at The Hague to the Levens Hall MSS., Cumbria – and more especially by Libraries and Archives Canada in Ottawa, by Maine State Archives in Augusta, by the Library of Congress and the National Archives in Washington, by the National Archives and the British Library in London, and by All Souls College and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. I have enjoyed the hospitality of the William L. Clements Library at Ann Arbor, Michigan, and (as a British Academy Exchange Fellow) of the Newberry Library in Chicago. I must also thank Georgetown’s Professor John Hirsh, both for entertainment and encouragement in Washington and for copying a document from the Library of Congress, and my Combe neighbour, Sue Goodman, Architect, for drawing the ‘North-East Boundary disputes’ map.

This book might best have been written in Ottawa, using the resources of Libraries and Archives Canada. But almost as well placed has been the University of Oxford, relatively close to the UK’s National Archives, with the impressive and helpful Bodleian Library (and more especially its Vere Harmsworth Library/Rothermere American Institute component), and with the stimulus and encouragement (extending long after my formal retirement) of my colleagues and college, St. Edmund Hall.

In my last book I wrote that my grandchildren were too young ‘to have yet made any academic contribution’; this time, when Bodley’s hard copy was locked up through Covid, Callie extracted for me material held electronically by her university, Exeter. Over a longer period, I have received love, care, interest, and encouragement, from my daughters Bridget and Penny, and above all from my wife Jean (despite my strewing our rooms with disorganised book papers).

About the Author

J.P.D. Dunbabin was for many decades Fellow & Tutor in Politics and Modern History at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford (acting as its Principal in 1998–9), and latterly also University Reader in International Relations. He retired in 2004 but has continued to be academically involved. His previous books are Rural Discontent in Nineteenth Century Britain (1974) and International Relations since 1945, Volume 1 The Cold War (2nd edn. 2008), Volume 2 The Post-Imperial Age (1994). He has also published articles and chapters on a wide range of nineteenth and twentieth century British, and twentieth century world, history, plus four articles on Canadian history.

Table of Contents

Notes

  i) The usual exchange rate was just under $5 to the £

 ii) The military ranks in use were often brevet ones, thus Captain (not Lieutenant) Pickett

iii) The book contains some maps, but others are readily available from the internet, as are portraits or photographs of most people mentioned

Preface

About the Author

Volume 1 – Coast to Coast

1 Before the Revolution

2 Peace-making, 1781-3

3 From one peace to another, 1783-1815: Indian Wars; locating the ‘true St. Croix’; Jefferson’s claim of a 49th parallel border; the War of 1812 and the Treaty of Ghent

4 Attempts at boundary settlements, successful and otherwise, 1817-32

5 Local Frictions: the ‘Republic of Indian Stream’, and the 1839 ‘Aroostook War’

6 Resolution through the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842

7 Nootka Sound, Alaska, and ‘Oregon’, 1789-1839

8 The Oregon Treaty of 1846: Developments on the Ground; projects for a US-British-Mexican settlement; Texas, ‘Manifest Destiny’; President Polk’s election and Inaugural; Polk’s opening offer mishandled, 1845; interpretations of Polk’s handling of the subsequent crisis; the evolution of British policy, 1844-6; Britain’s 1846 offer accepted unchanged

9 ‘Pig War’ (1859) and the Gulf Islands Dispute (1846-72)

Volume 2 – Consolidation, Confirmation and Completion

10 The road to Canadian Confederation

11 From Rupert’s Land to Manitoba: Canada’s purchase arranged, 1869; Métis ‘Resistance’, Louis Riel’s Provisional Government, and the 1870 entry into Confederation as ‘Manitoba’

12 The Crown Colony of British Columbia, 1858-71

13 Consolidating Canadian Control: Manitoba under Canadian rule; the North West Mounted Police; treaties ‘extinguishing’ First Nations territorial ownership of the Plains (1871 to 1877); the extinction of the buffaloes; Cree resentment becomes organised in 1884; Riel’s Rebellion and loosely associated Indian risings, 1885; railways – American aspirations; the 1872-3 ‘Pacific Scandal’; delays prompt British Columbian separatism; the Canadian Pacific escapes bankruptcy in 1885 by rushing troops to suppress Riel’s rebellion, and next year opens transcontinental service

14 Alaska: Russia’s sale, 1867; ‘Pelagic sealing’; settling the Alaska boundary, 1898-1903; Mudflats in Passamaquoddy Bay, 1910

15 Concluding Thoughts

Maps

The US Northern Frontier 1783-1812

The Maine-New Brunswick Border

The Gulf Islands Boundary Dispute

The Alaska Boundary Dispute

Cartoon

British Columbia in a Pet

Bibliography

Index

Copyright

VOLUME 1

Coast to Coast

CHAPTER 1

Before the Revolution

G.K. Chesterton drafted a famous overarching explanation of the curves in the ‘rolling English road’, but held that they really resulted from a long sequence of more mundane factors, each explaining the course of a given stretch:

The road turned first towards the left

Where Parker’s quarry made the cleft;

The path turned next towards the right

Because the mastiff used to bite,

Then left, because of Slippery Height,

And then again towards the right …¹

Most historical constructs have evolved in this way, and the line of what is now the US-Canadian border is no exception. This now runs from coast to coast and then north from Portland Canal to the Arctic Ocean. But precise location of what would become its line began in the eighteenth century in the then wilderness between the colonies of New York and Quebec, and was completed only in 1910 among the mud flats of Passamaquoddy Bay.

* * * *

In 1763 George III provided, by Royal Proclamation, for the boundaries of his recent ‘extensive and valuable Acquisitions in America’. Those appointed for the settlements of French Canada, now the diminished province of Quebec, were, in part, to pass along the 45th parallel from the St. Lawrence to Lake Champlain, and thence ‘along the High Lands which divide the Rivers’ running into ‘the St. Lawrence from those which fall into the Sea’ – terms that would, over the next eight decades, often compel the attention of politicians, diplomats, and surveyors.

In mid-1766 Governor Moore of New York met Quebec’s Lieutenant-Governor near the northern end of Lake Champlain to locate the 45th parallel, to which end a New York Professor of Mathematics, Mr. Harper, and Quebec’s Deputy Surveyor, John Collins, took sights with their quadrants.² In itself the episode was unremarkable: Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon were similarly establishing the boundary between Delaware and Maryland and much of the more famous Mason-Dixon Line between Maryland and Pennsylvania. But as things turned out, New York’s northern border on the 45th parallel would become part of the longest international boundary in the world, that between the United States and ‘British North America’.

Harper and Collins fixed on lines some eleven miles apart, but it was decided to adopt that of Collins, the more northerly, since his equipment was the better. Collins merely marked the border on Lake Champlain, the obvious route between Albany and Montreal. But the Privy Council also ordered the line to ‘be run out as far as each Province respectively extends’. So surveying was resumed in 1771. Workmen’s wages then totalled £51.15; alcohol-related expenditure came to £29.85 - one historian is unsurprised ‘that the line they surveyed was so far from straight!’. By September 1772 Collins and New York’s Valentine had reached the Connecticut River, 90 miles east of Lake Champlain. The local Abenakis were ‘much displeased’, saying that their Hunting Grounds were being encroached on, and they ‘pull’d down a [marker] Post that we erected’.³

When he set up the 1766 survey, Governor Moore thought he would have ‘no [land claims or] disputes to encounter’. But in the past, French power, and land grants, had extended well below 45º. So Moore was met by ‘several French gentlemen’ seeking confirmation of their pre-war claims. These encompassed the whole Lake and conflicted with grants already made by New York to ‘disbanded Soldiers’. The question was argued to and fro, and it left people in Quebec uneasy about any further tracing of the parallel and its confirmation as the border. 1773 was meant to see it traced westwards to the St. Lawrence; and though the Quebec Council was pressured into approving the work, it sought to restrict this to a mere geographical survey, reserving questions of ‘Jurisdiction’ and ‘Property’ to ‘His Majesty’s pleasure’. In forwarding this, the Lieutenant-Governor added the hope that the King would recognise that ‘were the present Boundaries confirmed’, the New Yorkers’ ‘superior Wealth … would probably put them in the full Possession’ of the valuable fur trade.⁴ In London, Lord Dartmouth was pleased by Quebec’s agreement to extend the survey to the St. Lawrence and sympathetic to its pleas for a relaxation of the 1763 Proclamation’s ‘narrow limits’.⁵ Further west, these limits would soon be relaxed by the 1774 Quebec Act, but this did not alter the New York border. Meanwhile New York produced another surveyor. By October 1773, he and Collins had run the line for some 50 miles west from Lake Champlain. Collins then offered to complete the survey himself for £100. He finished the work in 1774, and his line still stands, though, as we shall see in chapter 4, it does not trace the 45th parallel quite accurately.

* * * * *

More immediately important were the lands further west. British fears that French control there would pen them into a narrow coastal strip, French that British expansion inland would drive a wedge between Canada and Louisiana, had underlain two recent wars. In 1760 Canada had surrendered to British forces. But the land above Montreal, the pays d’en haut, was another matter. To European eyes, it was nearly empty. For though the First Nations did raise crops, they lived largely by hunting; and their populations never attained agricultural densities. Their overall numbers can only be guessed at. For 1763, the British Indian agent Sir William Johnson produced confessedly incomplete figures for Canada and much of the northern and middle American provinces. These give 11,980 ‘warriors’, suggesting a total population of 59,000; a French 1736 paper covering much the same area had given 15,873 ‘warriors’, suggesting one of some 79,400. In 1782 the British counted 11,403 Indians in the ‘Detroit’ district (extending south to the Ohio and west to the Wabash country).⁶ And in 1812 ‘a tolerably correct list of the Indian warriors on the frontier of the United States … from Sandusky on Lake Erie to the River Mississippi’ gave a total of 8,310 Warriors, with a further 1890 in Canada and an unspecified number at St. Regis (New York).⁷ By 1790, Kentucky already had a non-Indian population of 73,700, and by 1810 it was 406,500.

The Indian country’s status was anomalous. European states accepted that the First Nations owned the land until they alienated it but claimed for themselves an ultimate sovereignty. In their view – which ultimately prevailed -, this gave them the exclusive right to purchase land from the Indians within their domains, and the right to trade parts of America between themselves. The First Nations’ view was more complicated. They had no doubt that where they had not alienated it to Europeans, their various tribes owned the land, either outright or in vassalage to other Indian nations. They operated within an established ‘international system’, with alliances, dependencies, enmities, and diplomatic practices mostly stemming from the conflicts and migrations of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century.⁸ When occasion arose, notably after France’s 1760/3 surrenders to Britain and Britain’s 1783 cession to the United States, they could assert their independent sovereignty very clearly:

‘although you have conquered the French, you have not conquered us … These lakes, these woods and mountains … are our inheritance and we will part with them to none…’

‘You tell us that when you conquered the French they gave you this country. We tell you the French never conquered us neither did they purchase a foot of our territory…’

Similarly, American envoys were told in 1793 that the King of England ‘never did, nor never had a right, to give you our country’.⁹

Many Indians had, though, come to expect, even to some extent to depend on, European goods (like guns for hunting and pots for cooking), the repair services of European smiths, rum or brandy for periodic festivities, and, in the event of crop failure or other disaster, simple food relief: no ‘Indian nation’, one Wyandot chief had declared in 1759, ‘can live without being supported either by the English or by the French’. These needs were largely paid for by trading furs. But Indians also looked to what Europeans, and particularly European officials at a distance, regarded as ‘gifts’. To some extent these were seen as rent for the posts Europeans were ‘allowed’ to maintain in Indian territory. They were also viewed as a central feature of the mutual hospitality and present giving around which relationships were structured, a ‘covenant chain’ that both parties needed to keep in good repair. However Indians fairly readily adopted a suppliant position: in 1761 a Seneca chief begged Sir William Johnson to ‘consider their poverty and to allow … [their warriors] some ammunition to kill game’, while the Ojibwa at Michilimackinac declared that ‘We … [have] neither powder nor lead for hunting to support ourselves during the winter … If you have not compassion on us, our ruin must be inevitable.’¹⁰

The response might well be niggardly. But where the system was working well, First Nations were happy to see the relationship cast in paternalist terms.¹¹ This was particularly so in the case of ‘Onontio’, the French King and his Governor of Canada, to whom most Indians (apart from the Iroquois) looked. In 1762 the French governor of New Orleans invoked this sentiment by sending war belts north, accompanied by the message that the King longed ‘to see his children again’. The British had earlier ‘thrown him on his back’, but now ‘he was grown young again, and … determined with the assistance of his children to fall upon … the English’. This initiative was not immediately successful. But when, next year, the Ottawa chief Pontiac finally moved to take up arms, his appeal included the display of a war belt he claimed to have received ‘from his great Father, the King of France, inviting them to attack the English’.¹²

One feature of the French was their limited numbers. With perhaps only 50,000 people in Canada, as compared to one-and-a-half million in the British colonies, the French represented a much lesser threat; as one of their officers put it to Indians on the Ohio, ‘They plant all your country and drive you back so that in a little time you will have no land. It is not so with us; though we build trading houses on your land, we do not plant it.’¹³ Still, after the French defeats, many previously hostile Indians were prepared to give the British a trial. Pontiac was among those who visited Fort Pitt to ask ‘what treatment they would have, should the English succeed’. He was gratified to hear that all the rivers would ‘flow with rum’ and that goods would be plentiful and very cheap. Not so. There was heavy pressure for economies, and General Amherst had no intention of excluding Indian expenditures. He saw no reason to purchase Indian ‘good behavior’; ‘when men of what race so ever behave ill, they must be punished but not bribed.’ A little transitional aid might be in order, but once trade was established, the Indians should be able to get what they needed by trading furs. He also opposed the regular supply of food, since if Indians ‘find they can get it on asking … they will grow remiss in their hunting’.¹⁴ In practice, the early 1760s were a period of fatal Indian epidemics, in part the product of exposure to the diseases of soldiers from outside the continent.¹⁵ Moreover, though attempts were made in 1761 to restrict encroachments on Indian lands through prohibitions from military commanders and even the military destruction of a squatter settlement near Fort Pitt, they were not very successful.¹⁶

Against this background, there arose what proved to be the first of a long succession of millenarian religious cults based on the idea that Indians could find salvation, in this world and the next, only by a ‘total separation’. In late 1760 a Delaware, Neolin, was told by the Master of Life that there had once been a straight path from earth to heaven. But though their ‘forefathers used to ascend to happiness’, Indians now faced barriers, ‘the vices’ they ‘had learned from the white people’. Diverted by these, most fell off into hell. So they must disengage from commerce with Europeans, quitting ‘the use of fire arms’, and living ‘entirely in the original state that they were in before the white people found out their country’. Neolin’s message caught on, not only among the Delaware (who had, the Pennsylvania merchant James Kenny was told, all agreed ‘to follow their new Plan of Religion’), but more widely. In September 1762 some Iroquois told Johnson of a recent vision in which the Great Spirit explained that ‘when he first made the world, he gave this large island [America] to the Indians for their use’, reserving ‘the other parts … beyond the great waters to the rest of his creation’. He was not pleased to see ‘the white people … fighting’ for the Indians’ lands, and ‘would punish them if they did not desist’. Sometime in the next six months, Pontiac seems to have drawn out the implications, expounding Neolin’s vision to the Wisconsin peoples, and telling them they had ‘the power to force the whites back to their original settlements’. They must all ‘join in one common cause and sweep the white men from our country’, after which they could be ‘happy … having nothing more to do with the hated race’. Pontiac returned to this theme at the council in which he unveiled his plans for seizing Detroit. He repeated the story of Neolin’s vision and noted that formerly the Indians had not needed guns to hunt. But the Master of Life had said, ‘when I saw that you were given up to evil, I led the wild animals to the depth of the forests’; however ‘you have only to become good again and do what I wish, and I will send back the animals for your food’. The Master, though, wanted not only a moral reformation but geopolitical change. Indians might allow access to the French – ‘They know me and pray to me, and I supply their wants and all they give you.’ But as for ‘those who come to trouble your lands’, the British and Americans, ‘Drive them out … they … are my enemies and the enemies of your brothers … send them back to the lands which I have created for them’.¹⁷

1761 and 1762 had already seen projects for an attack by an Indian coalition, but without enough support to get off the ground. In 1763, two things seem to have tipped the balance. One, surprisingly, was news of the Anglo-French peace, whose terms seemed so unlikely that many saw them as British propaganda to conceal the arrival of a new French fleet. The other factor was the murder of the conciliatory Delaware chief, Teedyuscung, by would-be settlers on his land. Pontiac now managed to gain support for an attempt to seize Detroit by stratagem. It failed, and he settled down to blockade the town and raise the surrounding countryside.¹⁸ This proved the first of three attempts over the next six decades by a coalition of North Western Indians to hold back or reverse the advance of American settlement into their lands.¹⁹

Pontiac’s coalition initially enjoyed considerable success. Over four months, Colonel Croghan said, it laid

‘waste a large Tract of Country in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and the Jerseys on whose Frontiers they have killed and captivated not less than two thousand of his Majesty’s subjects, and drove some thousands to Beggary ... besides burning to the ground nine Forts or Block-houses in their Country and killing a number of his Majesty’s Troops and Traders, whom they plundered of goods … to the amount of not less than one hundred thousand pounds, … [including] large quantities of ammunition…’²⁰

Since Indians, lacking big guns, could only very rarely take forts, the tally of posts destroyed is impressive. But Detroit, Niagara, and Fort Pitt survived. And with little in the way of logistics, Indian warriors lacked staying power. In the autumn, the traditional hunting season, the forces around Detroit decamped. Moreover a number of tribes had, or said they had, taken up arms only under pressure, and were looking to make peace again.

By 1764 it was clear that the British held the initiative. Though Colonel Bradstreet then achieved little, Colonel Bouquet advanced on the Delaware settlements of the Ohio. Unable to ambush him, and short of ammunition and clothing, their leaders did not wish to add a winter flight into the woods with their houses and crops destroyed. Bouquet offered moderate terms, and these were widely accepted. More remote tribes remained anxious to resist. But now that peace had come, the French officers still in place pressed them not to. And in 1765 Pontiac concluded that he could hope for no more than an accommodation. He covered himself by pointing out that the Senecas and the Delawares, who had originally asked him to take up the hatchet, had already come to terms, and he joined Croghan on a mission urging a settlement based on formal submission and mutual reconciliation – in effect ‘a compromise peace to end a conflict that neither side could win on their own [original] terms’. Pontiac declared that he had ‘taken the King of England for my father’, while the Wabash peoples agreed to the transfer of posts held by ‘their former Fathers [the French], to the English now their present Fathers’.²¹ The British had stepped into the former French position, occupying, in Indian country, a scattering of strategic posts, and accorded by ‘their’ Indians the limited primacy that went with the status of ‘Father’.

But this position was always threatened by the intense land hunger of both would-be settlers and politically powerful speculators, something French officials had not had to contend with. Its recognition as a problem had led, during the French War, to the 1758 Treaty of Easton with 13 Indian nations, principally Iroquois, Delaware, and Shawnee. By this, Pennsylvania gave back 750,000 dubiously acquired acres, and the British Governors promised not to establish settlements west of the Alleghenies after the war. In return, the Indians undertook not to fight on the French side.²² During the war, British military commanders forbade settlement beyond the mountains. And the policy was continued by the 1763 Royal Proclamation on the future administration of the newly acquired provinces, which reserved, for Indian use, ‘all the Lands … lying to the Westwards of the Sources of the Rivers which fall into the Sea from the West’.

But difficulties arose over grants already made or claims patented before 1758, while the influx of frontiersmen was never entirely halted. Grievances over past, and fear of future, land seizures had helped spark Pontiac’s rising. And the Proclamation itself contained the escape clause ‘for the present’. So in and after Pontiac’s war, there was repeated pressure for a new and definitive settlement from both Indians and British Indian agents. The topic figured in the 1765 conference ‘with the Six [Iroquois] Nations and Delawares’, at which Sir William Johnson said that to ‘put a final end to disputes … concerning lands’, the King ‘has fallen upon a plan of a Boundary between our Provinces and the Indians (which no White Man shall dare to invade)’. ‘The Onondaga Speaker’ was sceptical:

‘The chief cause of all the late Wars was about Lands. We saw the English coming towards us from all parts, and they have cheated us so often, that we … were afraid that in a little time you would be at our very Castles, for this reason we thank the Great King for his good Intentions, and we hope he will make his People to keep within Bounds which they have not yet done.’

There followed bargaining over boundaries, in which the Iroquois showed stubbornness over their own immediate territory, but readiness to concede – at the expense of their Delaware vassals – lands extending down the Ohio as far as the mouth of the modern Tennessee River.²³

On Johnson’s side, these talks had been only exploratory. For London had not endorsed any specific line. But in December 1767 the Lords of Trade broadly commended the ‘Line’ the Iroquois had proposed in 1765, which would, ‘without confining the settlements of His Majesty’s subjects to too narrow limits’, probably ‘prevent the fatal consequences of an Indian War that seems at present to threaten the Middle Colonies’. They were, though, against extending the line any further down the Ohio than the Kanawha River, as this would lead to settlement on land that, while claimed by the Six Nations, was in fact occupied by the Cherokees.²⁴ Johnson was authorized to go ahead on this basis, but when concluding the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix he instead followed the 1765 Iroquois proposals.

General Gage had always had his reservations about a new boundary line, thinking it

‘only a Temporary Expedient, for the people on the Frontiers are not to be kept in by any Bounds. If the [provincial] Governments are too feeble to enforce obedience to Laws … at present, they can’t obtain more strength by being extended, and the new Lands would of course be very soon disposed of to People of Interest…; so that Lands being still very dear, the People would have the same Temptation as they have now, to emigrate beyond the Boundary, and the same complaints made by the Indians as are now made.’

Gage’s analysis was all too accurate. George Washington had never looked on the 1763 Proclamation ‘in any other light … than as a temporary expedient to quieten the Minds of the Indians’ that ‘must fall of course in a few years’.²⁵ And he, like such other ‘People of Interest’ as Governor and Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Galloway, and Samuel Wharton, joined Johnson, Croghan, and the British MP and banker Thomas Walpole in acquiring the land claim of the Pennsylvanian ‘suffering traders’ dispossessed by Pontiac’s rising, and in seeking permission to establish in the Illinois a new colony, ‘Vandalia’. Ministers were divided. Lord Hillsborough thought letting settlement cross the Appalachians would work against the interests of Britain and Ireland, and ultimately resigned on the issue. Lord Shelburne brought the Cabinet to approve the Vandalia project. But nothing came of it. For the wheels of imperial decision-making turned slowly, and the technical objections of the government’s law officers had not been met by the time Anglo-American relations became really strained in 1774.²⁶

On the ground, though, settlement continued, especially around Fort Pitt: in 1771 Croghan reported that 5000 European families (perhaps 20-25,000 people) now lived west of the mountains; and by 1774, Virginia’s Governor, Lord Dunmore, thought over 10,000 people had settled on the lands south of the Ohio.²⁷ The process led to many small clashes; and in the spring of 1774 the Virginia magistrate Dr. John Connolly wrote to urge settlers to prepare against Indian attacks. There followed two uncalled-for European attacks on Indians; and one Shawnee chief insisted on conducting limited reprisals. Connolly took this as a general Shawnee declaration of war, and Lord Dunmore backed him. British commanders at Detroit and Niagara distanced themselves from the Virginians, and the Iroquois (encouraged by the Johnson family) persuaded the Delaware to remain neutral. Dunmore nevertheless proceeded to the Ohio with a Virginia militia, to secure Kentucky for his settlers and to stop it being claimed by Pennsylvania. Isolated and outnumbered, the Shawnees lost an initial battle and then accepted his terms, promising to return all captives and to stay north of the river, ‘thus surrendering Kentucky to the colonists’. The Ohio had now effectively become the boundary.²⁸

* * * *

For the London government, setting limits to settlement was one side of the coin, managing the lands beyond these limits the other. Both had come under consideration in 1763. All agreed that, for the present, no new settlements should be made beyond the Atlantic watershed or in the Great Lakes area, and that all traders in the Indian territory would have to be licensed. But the Southern Secretary, the Earl of Egremont, thought ‘great Inconveniences might arise, from so large a Tract of Land being left, without being Subject to the Civil Jurisdiction of some Governor’ – problems over the handling of criminals, disputes over property, and possible encroachment by other European Powers on what they might claim to be ‘derelict Lands’. So he advocated the inclusion in Canada of ‘all the [Great] Lakes … with all the Country, as far … as the Limits of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the Mississippi’ border with Spain. The ‘Lords of Trade’ generally followed Egremont’s guidance, but on this point they argued back. Inclusion in Canada might lead Indians to believe that Britain’s rights there stemmed only from the cession by France. It might advantage Canada’s Indian trade as against that of other provinces. And the great extension of Canadian rule would require a corresponding spread of Forts, garrisoned by the bulk of the British army in America. The Governor of Canada would then either become ‘virtually Commander in Chief’ or be plunged into disputes with the military commanders.²⁹ The ‘Lords of Trade’ therefore stood by their recommendation of restricted boundaries for the new province of Quebec – in the west, a line from where the 45th parallel strikes the St. Lawrence to the south end of Lake Nipissing.³⁰ Egremont died suddenly, and these boundaries were specified by the Royal Proclamation of October 1763. They were complemented next year by a ‘Plan for the future Management of Indian Affairs’.³¹

This envisaged a unified system whereby, to stop unscrupulous merchants causing trouble by cheating the Indians, trade would be conducted only under official supervision at well-equipped Forts. However these looked to be impossibly costly. So in 1768 the London government began to step back and return control over Indian trade to the Provinces. But it still wanted this to be conducted on uniform principles, and in 1770 tried in vain to get these agreed. Next year it abandoned the attempt. 1772 brought some savings through the evacuation of Forts Chartres and Pitt, but the hands-off policy ran aground on the French settlers surviving from before 1763. They had been expected to withdraw along with the French garrisons. But there were still some 1,200 in the Illinois in the later 1760s; and they were joined by coureurs de bois who bypassed the official posts to trade directly with the Indians. Officialdom viewed them as conduits for continued French influence (operating out of nominally Spanish Louisiana), or simply as forming disorderly villages beyond anybody’s real control. In 1772 Lord Hillsborough ordered the evacuation of the inhabitants of Vincennes. They replied by claiming to hold land not as squatters but by legitimate French title, protected by the 1763 Treaty of Paris, and they asked for a regular civil government. Hillsborough’s successor, Lord Dartmouth, concluded that the treaty prevented their deportation, and that of similar settlers on the Wabash. By December 1773 he was writing that ‘There is no longer any Hope of perfecting that Plan of Policy in respect to the interior Country, which was in Contemplation when the Proclamation of 1763 was issued’, and undertaking to respond to Quebec’s wishes for revision of the ‘narrow Limits’ set by that Proclamation.³²

Legislation to remedy the confusion of Quebec’s legal system was already under consideration; and a preamble was now added declaring that the 1763 Proclamation had left ‘several … Settlements of the Subjects of France, who claimed to remain … under the … [Peace] Treaty’, with no provision ‘for the administration of Civil Government’. Quebec’s boundaries were accordingly extended to run out to the Ohio, down this to the Mississippi, and then up to the Hudson Bay Company’s territory.³³ This was not in fact needed simply to provide French settlers with civil government: that could, as Lord Hillsborough observed, have been given by ‘the power of the Crown’, with ‘jurisdiction’ so ‘limited … as to answer all the purposes of Government’ but ‘avoid the inconveniences with which a general extension or annexation will be attended’. Indeed Governor Carleton was instructed that the establishment in ‘the Illinois’ of ‘inferior Judicatures with limited [criminal and civil] Jurisdiction’ and the appointment of a Superintendent at each post was all ‘that is further necessary for their Civil concerns’.³⁴ The government’s real aim was broader, the blocking of all European settlement beyond existing limits and its concentration nearer the coast, where the colonists could more easily be controlled.³⁵ The cabinet believed, Hillsborough was told, that nothing could so effectually discourage such settlement as the extension of Quebec ‘to the Ohio and Mississippi’.³⁶ For, the civil servant William Knox explained, settlers had streamed into the wilderness next to the old colonies. This required ‘following the emigrants with government, and erecting a new province’ (the proposed Vandalia). But

‘That the mischief might not … further extend itself, and the like reasons for erecting new colonies at a still greater distance from the sea coast may not again recur, the whole of this derelict country is … put under the jurisdiction of Quebec, with the avowed purpose of excluding all further settlement therein, and for the establishment of uniform regulations for the Indian trade.’

Were the country instead divided between the neighbouring colonies, they would be unable to agree on a ‘general plan’ to prevent settlement and enforce the regulations needed to give the Indians security ‘in their dealings with our traders’ and ‘prevent the quarrels and murders which are every day happening’. Quebec was the province best placed to take things in hand, as it enjoyed the best access to the area by water; and Knox expected this to be its first action under its new legislative powers.³⁷

Extending Quebec’s borders to bar further westward settlement was bound to anger the older British colonies, and the territorial changes were also tarred by their association with the other clauses of the Quebec Act. Some legislation on Quebec was long overdue, and Lord North was now determined to settle problems over governance, law, and church policy. In 1763 the prospect had been held out of an Assembly, like that in other American colonies. But its members would have had to subscribe to the Test Act declaration against popery, while most of Quebec’s inhabitants, North told Parliament in 1774, were Roman Catholics. ‘To submit them to an Assembly composed of a few British subjects will be a great hardship’; so the ‘Assembly can’t be granted’. Instead there would be a nominated Council with limited powers. It was unclear, too, whether the law in force in Quebec was English or French-Canadian. The 1774 Act kept English criminal law (which did not permit examination by torture), but did not provide for Habeas Corpus, since before introducing this the government wished ‘to be better assured of … [the Canadians’] fidelity and attachment’. Before 1760, Canadian property rights had naturally been framed in terms of French civil law; this was now confirmed, which pleased the ex-French seigneurs but worried the immigrant merchants who now dominated Montreal’s commerce (and were the chief local advocates of an Assembly). Lastly, though freedom of Roman Catholic worship had been promised in 1760 and 1763, policy as to church governance and property was still unsettled; nor was it clear whether the obligation to pay tithes remained, and, if so, whether it extended also to Protestants. As first introduced to parliament, the Quebec bill confirmed the free exercise of Catholicism ‘subject to the King’s supremacy’, exempted Catholics from the Protestant oaths prescribed by law for state servants, and provided that Catholic clergy should (with respect to Roman Catholics) ‘enjoy … their accustomed dues’ from property and tithes. Parliamentary reaction to proposals that appeared to confer benefits only on Catholics led North to add a clause explicitly permitting the application of Protestants’ tithes to the ‘support of a protestant clergy’. The government in fact meant to facilitate the organisation of an Anglican church under the Bishop of London, and to apply rather ‘gallican’ controls to Roman Catholics. But since the Act’s wording almost entirely ignored Protestant churches, while confirming Catholic worship and church rights, it seemed to Protestant enthusiasts to be establishing Roman Catholicism.³⁸

The Quebec Act was a classic product of a ‘governmental’ approach, correcting ambiguities and anomalies had been left for far too long. Even in these terms, it could be criticised. But its real failures were political. In Quebec, it pleased only the Catholic clergy and the seigneurs. In England, it passed Parliament comfortably and attracted little concern in the 1774 general election. But it did arouse religious feeling - when the King went to give the bill his assent, he was greeted with the ‘universal cry’ of ‘No Popery! No French laws!’. In Parliament, the oppositions developed these sentiments at greater length, portraying the law as ‘an experiment for setting up an arbitrary government in one [American] colony, which may be more patient of it than the rest, in order to extend by degrees that mode of ruling to all the others’.³⁹ In America, conspiracy theory grew to paranoia. Since the Quebec Act followed the ‘Intolerable Acts’ against Massachusetts, it was seen as part of the same system - in John Adams’ words, ‘port bill, charter bill, murder bill, Quebec Bill’. And the influential cleric Ezra Styles described it as extending Quebec ‘to the Ohio and Mississippi … comprehending nearly Two Thirds of the Territory of English America, and establish[ing] the Romish Church & IDOLATRY all over that space’. He drew it on a map, surrounding and threatening the seaboard colonies, coloured it red, and entitled it ‘The Bloody Church’.⁴⁰

The Act’s full text was first published in America on 29 August 1774. On 6 September, Suffolk County (Massachusetts) included in its general condemnation of British policy the claim that ‘the late Act … for establishing the Roman Catholic religion and the French laws in that extensive country now called Canada, is dangerous to the Protestant religion, and to the civil rights and liberties of all Americans’. These Resolves were promptly endorsed by the First Continental Congress, which further explained next month, in the ‘Address to the People of Great Britain’ (drafted by John Jay), that Canada was being extended and remodelled so that its ‘numbers daily swelling with Catholic emigrants from Europe’ might be

‘fit instruments in the hands of power, to reduce the ancient free Protestant colonies to the same state of slavery with themselves.

‘This was evidently the object of the Act … [Furthermore] we cannot help deploring the unhappy condition to which it has reduced the many English settlers, who, encouraged by the Royal Proclamation … purchased estates in that country. They are now the subjects of an arbitrary government, deprived of trial by jury, and when imprisoned cannot claim the benefit of the habeas corpus Act, that great … palladium of English liberty:- Nor can we suppress our astonishment, that a British parliament should ever consent to establish in that country a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, persecution, murder and rebellion through every part of the world.’

Lastly, should ‘the Ministry, by the powers of Britain, and the aid of our Roman Catholic neighbours … carry the point of taxation, and reduce us to a state of perfect humiliation and slavery’, it would then ‘with the same armies inslave you’. Unsurprisingly, the Congress included the Quebec Act among those whose repeal was necessary for the restoration of British-American harmony.⁴¹

The Act was, of course, only one among many grievances, and the War of Independence broke out in Massachusetts, not in the west. But the prevailing image of Canada was exploited by Congress to whip up support in the South.⁴² It also contributed to the decision to launch an invasion of Quebec but not of Nova Scotia. Contingency plans had been made in March 1775 for the seizure of Fort Ticonderoga (on Lake Champlain) ‘should hostilities be committed by the King’s Troops… This will effectually curb that Province [Quebec], and all the troops that may be sent here’ from it.⁴³ Shots were fired at Lexington on 17 April, and the Lake Champlain forts were taken on 10-12 May by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold. For a month-and-a-half the Continental Congress wavered, but an invasion of Quebec was finally authorised on 27 June, under the pretext that Governor Carleton was ‘making preparations to invade these colonies and … instigating the Indian Nations to take up the Hatchet against them’.⁴⁴

Both Allen and Arnold had written to Congress advocating invasion. They stressed that Carleton had very few regular troops and had failed to mobilise either Indian or French-Canadian auxiliaries; Canada was accordingly ‘in a weak, and almost helpless condition’. They also urged the political advantages that would flow from its occupation. Allen felt that ‘By gaining the sovereignty of Canada, [invasion] would intercept the design of the Quebeck Bill’, Arnold that

‘The American Colonies … are equally in danger from Canada, whether it remain in the hands of Britain, under the present form of its Government, or should be restored to the French, which many suspect is intended by the Ministry in England. But should Canada be placed under a free Government, agreeable to the English Constitution, like the other Colonies, we should forever after be secure from any danger that way…’

Nor were they alone. For in September and October, George Washington anticipated the occupation of Montreal and Quebec, adding, ‘If so, what a pretty hand the ministry have made of their Canada bill, and the diabolical scheme which was constructed upon it.’⁴⁵

Clearly there were other arguments for an invasion of Canada besides an emotional response to the Quebec Act. It would at least force the British to divert thither troops who would otherwise be deployed in New England; and Washington saw Canada as decisive ‘in the scale of American affairs … to whomsoever It belongs, in there (sic) favour, probably, will the Ballance turn.’⁴⁶ But it is not obvious why Canada should have appeared so important. For the Revolutionary forces were strong enough to mount only one major offensive action, and Canada should, therefore, have been evaluated against the most obvious alternative, Nova Scotia.

There is no evidence that this was done. In military terms, a Canada in British hands gave access to the Hudson River, which Washington saw as important since ‘it seperates the Northern and Southern Colonies Armies’.⁴⁷ The British shared this vision, but their attempts to implement it proved disastrous in 1777. Perhaps they should have done better, but attacks on America via the Lake Champlain-Hudson route were at best indirect. From Halifax, British forces could have access to the whole of the eastern seaboard; and it was to Halifax that the army in Boston withdrew in March 1776 to refit before descending on New York in June. That exercise would have been more difficult had Halifax been in Revolutionary hands.

Halifax’s garrison had been sent to Boston, leaving, in the summer of 1775, only 36 Regulars and two small warships, whose commander therefore believed it to be indefensible. And though, left to itself, Nova Scotia would not have joined the other 13 colonies, its population was only about 12,000; there were some open American partisans; and even if, with Washington, one discounts the February 1776 report that eight out of ten people would join American forces if assured of protection, much of the province was clearly sitting on the fence.⁴⁸ However in August 1775 Washington resisted a proposal to send to Halifax a force of 1000 that would look to attract further recruits on the way:

‘I apprehend such an Enterprize inconsistent with the general Principle upon which the united Colonies have proceeded. It is true … [that Nova Scotia] has not acceded to the Measures of Congress … But they have not commenced Hostilities … nor are any to be apprehended: to attack them, therefore, is a Step of Conquest, rather than Defence…’

Washington went on to state the military arguments against an attack on Halifax. Many of these applied also to the invasion of Canada.⁴⁹ Yet his thoughts, he told General Schuyler shortly thereafter, were ‘engrossed’ by the plan to send Benedict Arnold and over a thousand men up the Kennebec to Quebec.⁵⁰ And it is hard not to conclude that the real difference lay in the fears and prejudices stoked up by the Quebec Act, and the way in which this barred aspirations towards westwards expansion.

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¹ G.K. Chesterton, The Flying Inn (London, 1910) chap. 21

² Lawrence Shaw Mayo, ‘The Forty-fifth Parallel: a detail of the Unguarded Boundary’, Geographical Review 13:2 (1923) pp. 256-9

³ Ibid. pp. 260-1

⁴ Governor Moore to the Lords of Trade, 12 Aug. and 7 Nov. 1766, and to the Earl of Shelburne, 8 Nov.; ‘Report of the Lords of Trade on the French Seignories on Lake Champlain’, 25 May 1775 (E.B. O’Callaghan, Documents relative to the Colonial History of New York vii (Albany, 1856) pp. 850-1, 874-6, viii pp. 577-9); Lt.-Governor Hector Cramahé to the Earl of Dartmouth, 1 Oct. 1773 (CO 42/32 fos. 59-65)

⁵ Dartmouth to Cramahé, 1 Dec. 1773 (Adam Shortt and Arthur G. Doughty eds., Documents relating to the Constitutional History of Canada 1759-1791 i (Ottawa, 1907) p. 339)

⁶ Statistics Canada, ‘Censuses of Canada 1665 to 1871. Aboriginal Peoples’ (accessed 10/8/15) reproduces, from an 1876 book, a ‘Table [and comment] made up from the Memoirs of 1736 and 1763’; Richard White, The Middle Ground. Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, England, 1991) p. 470n.

⁷ Robert S. Allan, His Majesty’s Indian Allies. British Indian Policy in the Defence of Canada, 1774-1815 (Toronto, 1992) pp. 121-2 and Appendix D, with corrections of the list’s mistaken additions. Overall Indian numbers will have been higher, as the list is of those ‘ammicable to the [British] cause’ and excludes the St. Regis warriors, at least half of whom ‘were with the Enemy’

⁸ For an overview of the period 1675-1815, see Daniel K. Richter, ‘Native Peoples of North America and the Eighteenth Century British Empire’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P.J. Marshall and Alaine Low, (Oxford, 1998) chap. 16

⁹ Richard Middleton, Pontiac’s War. Its Causes, Course and Consequences (New York, 2007) pp. 43, 194, 197; ed. David Curtis Skaggs and Larry Nelson, The Sixty Years War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814 (East Lansing, Michigan, 2001) pp. 6, 10

¹⁰ Middleton, Pontiac’s War pp. 11, 39-40, 45

¹¹ There were, though, cultural differences in understandings of the Father’s role, the British seeing it as conveying a degree of authority, while Indians looked rather to the Father’s unconditional duty to pity and care for them

¹² Middleton, Pontiac’s War pp. 58, 66-7. In 1765 the British Deputy Indian Superintendent George Croghan wrote that most Indians still preferred the French who had ‘always adopted the Indian customs … and treated them civilly and supplied their necessaries generously’ (ibid. p. 198)

¹³ Ibid. p. 5

¹⁴ Ibid. pp. 20, 65-6

¹⁵ Matthew Ward, ‘The Microbes of War: the British Army and Epidemic Disease among the Ohio Indians, 1758-1765’, The Sixty Years War pp. 63-78. Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival. A Population History since 1492 (Norman, Oklahoma, 1987) p.78 notes, ‘One small-pox epidemic after another … in the literature of the last half of the [18th] century’ – for the century as a whole (on one calculation) an epidemic among some of the Indians every seven years

¹⁶ Middleton, Pontiac’s War pp. 28-9, 55-7

¹⁷ Ibid. pp. 61-4, 66-7. Though one of Neolin’s adherents had ‘a Book containing his new religion’, nothing of the kind has survived. We therefore depend on what people told Europeans at the time, and on the later accounts of European prisoners adopted into Indian families

¹⁸ Middleton, Pontiac’s War pp. 29, 66-70, 219n.

¹⁹ Relations between these nations and the Cherokees further south were often hostile. So, despite a basic similarity of situation and some attempts to bridge the gap, there was little cooperation, and the history of dealings between the southern colonies/states and their Indian neighbours was distinct, though equally conflicted. Even within the North West, the main thesis of Timothy D. Willig’s Restoring the Chain of Friendship: British Policy and the Indians of the Great Lakes, 1783-1815 (Lincoln, Neb., 2008) is that relations with the British (and over time the Americans) developed very differently as between the three main Indian groups, those in northern New York, Pennsylvania, and Upper Canada, the ‘Maumee and Wabash tribes’ of the southern Great Lakes, and the more distant ones between Mackinaw and the Upper Mississippi; and even in the last area, the Ojibwa and the Dakota periodically fought each other, though both were close to their resident British traders and warmly supportive of their ‘English father’

²⁰ Croghan to the Lords of Trade, Jan. 1764 - O’Callaghan, Documents relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York vii pp. 602-7. Middleton puts the number of soldiers killed at 300, of settlers killed and captured at ‘several hundred’ – with thousands fleeing the frontiers, which were ‘in many places’ driven back 50 miles (Pontiac’s War p. 201)

²¹ Middleton, Pontiac’s War pp. 145, 181-2, 196-7, 202

²² The Treaty contributed to the abandonment of the French force at Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh) by its Indian auxiliaries, and the place’s consequent relinquishment to the British

²³ In a simultaneous treaty, the Delaware agreed ‘to abide by whatever Limits shall be agreed between the English and the Six Nations’ and to grant lands by way of restitution to the traders they had plundered during the 1763 rising (O’Callaghan, Documents relative to the Colonial History of New York vii pp. 725-6, 728-9, 738-41)

²⁴ Lords of Trade to Lord Shelburne, 23 Dec. 1767 (ibid. pp. 1004-5)

²⁵ Gage to Johnson, 9 Nov. 1767 (The Papers of Sir William Johnson xii (Albany, 1957) pp. 376-7); Washington to William Crawford, 17 Sept. 1767 (Library of Congress, Founders Online)

²⁶ Jack M. Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness: the Middle West in British colonial policy, 1760-1775 (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1961) chaps. 6, 8; Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: the Upper Ohio Valley and its peoples, 1724-1774 (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1992) p. 253

²⁷ McConnell, A Country Between pp. 260, 276; White, The Middle Ground p. 356

²⁸ White, Middle Ground pp. 356-65; McConnell, A Country Between pp. 274-80

²⁹ Egremont to the Lords of Trade, 14 July 1763, and Lords of Trade to Egremont (for the King), 5 Aug. (Shortt and Doughty, Documents pp. 108, 110-11)

³⁰ This would stop people settling ‘in remote places’ where they would be neither conveniently ‘ameanable to the Jurisdiction of any Colony’ nor ‘made subservient’ to Britain’s trade interests ‘by an easy communication with … the great River St. Lawrence’ - Lords of Trade to Egremont (for the King), 8 June 1763 (Shortt and Doughty, Documents p. 103)

³¹ Sent to Indian Agents for comment – Lords of Trade to Sir William Johnson, 10 July 1764 (Documents relative to the Colonial History of New York vii pp. 634-6, ‘Plan’ (pp. 637-41)

³² Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness chap.9; Sosin, ‘The French Settlements in British Policy for the North American Interior 1760-1774’, Canadian Historical Review 39 (1958) esp. pp. 203-6; Marjorie Reid, ‘The Quebec Fur Traders and Western Policy, 1763-1774’, ibid. 6:1 (1925)) esp. pp. 20, 27-32; Dartmouth to Cramahé, 1 Dec. 1773 (Shortt and Doughty, Documents p. 339)

³³ Third draft of the Quebec Bill (Shortt and Doughty, Documents p. 382)

³⁴ Ibid. pp. 388, 428

³⁵ S. Max Edelson argues that from 1763 to 1775 there was a relatively consistent British policy aimed at: ‘settlement’ across the North American ‘coastal plain and in the islands; command over coastal and Caribbean navigation; and a limit to colonization in the … interior… to better secure [British America’s] … dependency’ - The New Map of Empire. How Britain imagined America before Independence (Cambridge, Mass., 2017) p. 1

³⁶ Dartmouth to Hillsborough, 1 May 1774, reassuring him that the bill was meant to limit settlement, not encourage it (Shortt and Doughty, Documents p. 390)

³⁷ Anon (William Knox), The Justice and Policy of the late Act of Parliament for Making more Effectual Provision for the Government of the Province of Quebec (London, 1774) pp. 41-5

³⁸ The Quebec Act is discussed in P.D.G. Thomas, Tea Party to Independence: the third phase of the American Revolution, 1773-1776 (Oxford, 1991) chap. 6, and Hilda Neatby, Quebec. The Revolutionary Age 1760-1791 (London, 1966) pp. 138-41; see also R.C. Simmons and Peter D.G. Thomas (eds.), Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1754-1783, iv (New York, 1985) p. 447, and Knox, The Justice and Policy of the late Act for Quebec

³⁹ The Annual Register for the Year 1774, pp. 75-7 (arguments for and against the bill)

⁴⁰ Edelson, New Map of Empire p. 314, and MapScholar (online) map 234. The Act’s reception is analysed in Charles H. Metzger, The Quebec Act. A Primary Cause of the American Revolution (New York, 1936); see also John C. Miller, Origins of the American Revolution (Stanford, 1965 edn.) pp. 372-6. Hostility to Quebec’s expansion into the interior was particularly strong in New York (R. B. Morris, The American Revolution. A Short History (Princeton, N.J., 1955) pp. 38-9)

⁴¹ W.C. Ford (ed.), Journals of the Continental Congress 1774-1789 i (Washington, 1904), esp. pp. 34, 39, 87-8

⁴² Metzger, Quebec Act p. 164n.

⁴³ J. Brown to the Boston Committee of Correspondence, 29 March 1775 (Peter Force (ed.), American Archives: a Collection of Authentic Records, State Papers, Debates, and Letters, 4rth Series ii (Washington, 1839) p. 244)

⁴⁴ Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (Boston, 1934) chap.11 and p. 377; Journals of the Continental Congress ii (Washington, 1905) pp. 109-10. Carleton had in fact that month rejected an Indian offer to raid the rebellious colonies with 1500 men (Neatby, Quebec. The Revolutionary Age p. 147)

⁴⁵ Ethan Allen, 9, and Benedict Arnold, 13, June 1775 (Force, American Archives ii pp. 939, 976-7); George to John Augustine Washington, 13 Oct. 1775 (Founders Online)

⁴⁶ Washington to Benedict Arnold, 27 Jan. 1776 (Founders Online)

⁴⁷ To John Augustine Washington, 31 March 1776 (Founders Online)

⁴⁸ George A. Rawlyk, ‘The American Revolution and Nova Scotia Reconsidered’, Dalhousie Review 43:3 (1963) pp. 380-3; W. S. Macnutt, The Atlantic Provinces. The Emergence of Colonial Society 1712-1857 (London, 1965) pp. 81-2

⁴⁹ The chief difference between the position of the two provinces was that British sea-power could be applied to Nova Scotia all the year round (a regiment was landed in Halifax in January 1776), in Canada only after the St. Lawrence unfroze. But reinforcements did then arrive, leading Washington to fear ‘the Destruction of a large Party if not the Whole of our Army’ (Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series v pp. 88, 159)

⁵⁰ Washington to the Massachusetts General Court, 12, and to General Schuyler, 20, Aug. 1775 (Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series i pp. 297-8, 322)

CHAPTER 2

Peace-making, 1781-3

One can invent scenarios leading to British victory in the American War of Independence. But independence was a reality, with government almost everywhere in Revolutionary hands and the British reduced to footholds in a few ports; so after, at latest, the French alliance of 1778, it is hard to imagine the Americans accepting less. And when France pressed Congress to define its peace terms, independence was given pride of place: in 1779 British agreement ‘to treat with the United States as sovereign, free, and independent’ was to be ‘a preliminary article’, while in 1781 no peace treaty should be accepted that did not ‘effectually secure the independence and sovereignty of the thirteen states’.¹ But for King George and most British politicians, conceding independence was ‘a measure that … would annihilate the rank in which this Empire stands among European States’: ‘no consideration’, George wrote as late as January 1782, would ever make him its ‘Instrument’.² For most of the war, neither side was under overwhelming pressure to settle. The American States enjoyed de facto independence. But the British still had grounds for hope: in 1779 Georgia seemed largely recovered; in May 1780 Charleston was taken, and in September Benedict Arnold returned to his allegiance, leading Lord George Germain to conclude that the rebellion was ‘evidently declining fast’.³ Clearly some considerable shock would be needed to change things.

It is, though, worth looking at Congress’s Instructions to its Peace Commissioners, since in the event most of their desiderata were obtained. There was, in 1779, a genuflection towards securing the cession of Canada and Nova Scotia. But that this would not be achieved was assumed by the Instructions’ longest article, that defining the ‘boundaries of these States’. This book is chiefly concerned with those on the north-east, north, and west. On the north-east, the Instructions sought a line ‘along the middle of St. John’s River’. But this was east of what had since 1763 been appointed the boundary of Nova Scotia; and the Instructions provided that, if it could not be obtained, the Massachusetts-Nova Scotia border might be left to be settled later ‘agreeably to their respective rights’. Beyond the St. John, the US border should first follow the watershed between the St. Lawrence and the rivers falling into ‘the Atlantic Ocean’, then run down the Connecticut ‘from its northwesternmost head’ to the 45th parallel, and follow this west to the St. Lawrence. This section followed the border appointed for Quebec by the 1763 Proclamation, though with minor verbal changes that were to prove important. From the St. Lawrence (at 45° N.) the line should run ‘straight to the south end’ of Lake Nipissim – again following the Proclamation border and repudiating Quebec’s subsequent extension by the hated 1774 Act – ‘and thence straight to the source of the river Mississippi’. But if that line could not be had without prolonging the war, another might be substituted, provided it did not at any point cross the 45th parallel. To the west, the Mississippi had been the British limit under the 1763 peace treaty; and as states like