Donald Trump hasn’t even been officially elected yet — technically that won’t happen until the Electoral College does its thing on Dec. 17 — but he’s already upending relationships with our nearest neighbors.
He wants to impose tariffs on goods imported from Canada and Mexico, presumably to use that as leverage for border security issues (otherwise, he’s simply raising prices on American consumers, the same consumers who were unhappy with Joe Biden for rising prices).
None of this would have been necessary if American history had taken a different turn.
Thomas Jefferson wanted to invade Canada and simply absorb our neighbor to the north.
Another Charlottesville-area politician, Nicholas Trist, ignored President James Polk and negotiated a treaty with Mexico that didn’t take as much of the country as Polk wanted.
To understand why Canada and Mexico still exist, we need to understand three moments in American history that don’t get much attention in our history books, two of which involve Virginians in key roles.
American Colonists wanted to annex Canada from the beginning
We’ve all grown up hearing about the original 13 Colonies. Actually, there were 18. The other five were East Florida, West Florida, Nova Scotia, Quebec and Saint John’s Island, the latter being what we know today as Prince Edward Island. The first Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774 invited representatives from all of them, but those five passed.
For more on this, see our history project on the events leading up to the Declaration of Independence, which turns 250 in 2026. You can sign up for our monthly Cardinal 250 newsletter right now so you won’t miss our next installment coming out later this month. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
OK, moving on. None of these other five colonies showed much interest in the tea-dumping American revolutionaries. Generally speaking, they were too far away or had other complicating factors. French-speaking Quebec had been traumatized when France lost what we know as the French and Indian War and had to surrender that colony to the British. About 60 years before, the British had seized the French colony of Acadia (today’s Nova Scotia) and deported between 10,000 and 18,000 Acadians (about 3,000 went to French-owned Louisiana, where Acadian was translated into “Cajun”). Quebeckers feared the same thing. Britain, though, feared there were too many Quebeckers to deport — about 70,000 — and the British wanted to minimize trouble (and expense) in North America. The British offered Quebec a deal: Quebec could keep its French language and Catholic faith as long as Quebec didn’t cause trouble. When hot-headed Americans started offering Quebec a chance to join their revolution, Quebeckers were in no mood to take a risk. Better the devil they knew than the one they didn’t know, so to speak. Meanwhile, Halifax was a major British port, so Nova Scotia’s political class saw that as an economic development boon.
That didn’t stop Americans from coveting those Colonies. In the winter of 1775, an American force marched on Quebec City — and was utterly defeated. The American commander, Richard Montgomery, was killed, but he did get Montgomery County, Virginia, named after him.
After the war, many enslaved laborers who had fled to the British lines moved to Nova Scotia, and other Loyalists moved into what today we know as Ontario. (We wrote about the Virginians who went to Nova Scotia in one of our Cardinal 250 stories.) We often forget that Canadians are the original anti-Americans. In Hamilton, Ontario, one of the major statues depicts Loyalist refugees coming to their new (and much colder) homes. Americans, though, still looked north and thought all that territory should belong to them.
Jefferson wanted to invade Canada. Madison did and lost.
The War of 1812 offered Americans another opportunity to seize Canada. In retirement at Monticello, former President Thomas Jefferson told a Philadelphia newspaper editor: “The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching; & will give us experience for the attack of Halifax the next, & the final expulsion of England from the American continent.”
That’s the famous part of the quote, but Jefferson went on to contemplate waging a guerilla war in Great Britain itself: “Halifax once taken, every cockboat of hers must return to England for repairs. Their fleet will annihilate our public force on the water, but our privateers will eat out the vitals of their commerce. Perhaps they may burn New York or Boston. If they do, we must burn the city of London, not by expensive fleets or Congreve rockets, but by employing a hundred or two Jack the painters, whom nakedness, famine, desperation & hardened vice will abundantly furnish from among themselves.”
Jefferson was brilliant at many things but being an armchair general was not one of them. Americans did, indeed, march on Canada. Americans burned the city of York (today’s Toronto) but, strangely, the inhabitants did not regard that as an act of liberation. The result was the same as it had been during the American Revolution: The Americans got whipped (and the British burned Washington in retaliation for us torching York). While Jefferson envisioned a glorious military victory, his fellow Virginian, James Madison, presided over an inconclusive war that dulled his reputation.
Americans today don’t think much about the War of 1812, other than it gave us two great songs: “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Francis Scott Key and “The Battle of New Orleans” by Johnny Horton. Canadians, though, regard the war as their war of independence because it guaranteed that those pesky Americans would stay south of the border. The Canadians even have a famous statue of a British Redcoat standing over a fallen American soldier. I’d expect to see that kind of thing in Tehran, not Toronto, but there it is. Trump has joked about how maybe Canada ought to be our 51st state. For Canadians, that’s not a joking matter.
Some Americans wanted to seize all of Mexico during the Mexican War
Virginians had key roles all through the Mexican War. The key Texans were originally Virginians — Stephen Austin was born in Wythe County, Sam Houston was born in Rockbridge County. A president from Virginia, John Tyler, signed the annexation treaty with Texas that set the Mexican War in motion. Many Virginians served in key military roles, Zachary Taylor, Winfield Scott and Robert E. Lee among them.
The action that concerns us, though, came after the war: What should a settlement with Mexico look like?
Some Americans pushed an “All of Mexico” plan to seize the entire country. Some lusted after Mexico’s silver mines. Railroad boosters thought going through Mexico offered a better route to the West Coast than trying to lay track through the Rockies. Abolitionists believed the best way to eliminate slavery was to outnumber the slave states. Others were troubled by Mexico’s Catholicism and weak support for democracy. For Sen. John Calhoun of South Carolina, an ardent pro-slavery advocate, race was the problem: “[We] have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race, the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.”
President Polk mostly wanted California but was open to getting as much of Mexico as possible, as long as he didn’t have to pay much for it and didn’t have to get a lot of Mexicans as part of the deal.
To negotiate with Mexico, Polk tapped Nicholas Trist, a relatively minor official in the State Department (he was chief clerk) with a controversial background but lots of connections. Trist had grown up in Charlottesville and married Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughter. He served eight years as consul to Cuba, where he helped forge documents to cover up the sale of Africans into slavery. He angered New England maritime interests who felt he was more interested in promoting slavery, and his own interests, than in promoting their interests before the Cuban government. This sparked a congressional inquiry and Trist’s recall. He did not seem a likely candidate for such an important mission, but he spoke fluent Spanish. So off to Mexico he went.
When he got there, he quarreled with General Scott, although they later patched things up and became allies. Negotiations with the Mexicans did not go well, though, even after Trist offered $10,000 to the Mexican leader Santa Anna — essentially a bribe. When Polk learned about this, he was outraged and considered recalling Trist. He didn’t then, but when negotiations dragged on, he did. Trist’s response? He ignored the president and sent a 65-page letter explaining why he was going to stay and negotiate.
In an era of slow communication, there wasn’t much Polk could do. Trist ended up negotiating the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that allowed the U.S. to buy California and much of the Rockies for $15 million. Polk was furious again; he had hoped to also get Baja California and, by some accounts, all of Mexico south to the port of Tampico, 306 miles south of the Rio Grande. However, he had few options. It was one thing for the American military to defeat the Mexican army; it was quite another to hang around as an army of occupation. That was not going particularly well. Polk decided to take the deal and get the army out of Mexico — although when Trist got back home, Polk promptly fired him. Some blamed Trist for not insisting on Baja California and other parts of what today is northern Mexico.
Polk also refused to pay for any of the expenses Trist incurred after he was recalled; it took until 1871 for Trist to finally get that money. President Ulysses Grant returned Trist to government service, naming him as postmaster in Alexandria, a position he didn’t hold long. Trist died in 1874.
We can only speculate what would have happened if Americans had subjugated Canada in the War of 1812, if the “All of Mexico” movement had succeeded or if the U.S. had taken more Mexican territory than it did. To some extent, though, Virginians are responsible for both of our neighboring countries existing today: To the extent that President Madison was responsible for the conduct of the war, the inability to conquer Canada falls under him. And it’s more directly thanks to a Virginian, the controversial Trist, that the U.S.-Mexico border is where it is now. If either war and the subsequent negotiations had turned out differently, there wouldn’t be any need for tariffs today because the U.S. would stretch from Ellesmere Island in the Arctic to the borders of Guatemala and Belize.
Griffith attends UN climate change conference
Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, was part of a congressional delegation to the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. That might seem an odd place for a congressman who represents a coal- and natural gas-producing district, but he was there to push carbon capture technology developed by companies in Southwest Virginia and talk up Virginia Tech’s potential to do more research. I’ll have more to say about that in this week’s edition of West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that goes out Friday afternoons.
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