If the U.S. had listened to this congressman from Montgomery County, we’d already own part of Canada

President Donald Trump seems fixated on calling Canada “the 51st state.” 

Why he would want to absorb a country more populous than any existing state — and one where two-thirds of the voters routinely vote left-of-center — defies political logic. Politically speaking, Canada is basically a colder version of California. The only reason Canadians occasionally elect a conservative government is because the rest of the vote is split between two rival liberal parties. 

Outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, though, certainly takes Trump’s musings as a threat to his country’s sovereignty, and so do lots of other Canadians. I’ve stumbled upon internet rabbit holes where Canadians were actively discussing how they plan to resist an American invasion. (Short version: insurgency.) The British newspaper The Telegraph recently carried a bizarre report that Trump adviser Peter Navarro was pushing to redraw the U.S.-Canadian border.

Trump and Navarro are about two centuries too late. 

If Americans had listened to a visionary (but also reactionary) Virginia politician in the 1800s, we would already own at least part of Canada. Not Thomas Jefferson. He was visionary, too, but his advice to President James Madison in the War of 1812 that taking Canada would be “a mere matter of marching” proved to be disastrously wrong. Madison sent the army north. It came back whipped. We don’t talk much about the War of 1812, but Canadians sure do; to them, it was the war that guaranteed their independence from the land-grabbers to the south.

There was another Virginia politician, though, who loudly advocated seizing part of what is now Canada. He wasn’t listened to until it was too late. His name was John Floyd, then the congressman from Southwest Virginia and the fellow for whom Floyd County is named. To understand what he wanted to do, we must understand who he was. Gather around, here’s where we connect the dots of history to our own time.

* * * 

John Floyd was born on the Virginia frontier in 1783, which is another way of saying he was born in modern-day Kentucky. At the time, that was “Kentucke” with an “e” and it was part of Virginia, although Native Americans didn’t see it that way at all. Twelve days before Floyd was born, Natives killed his father during a raid on the encroaching white settlements. 

We’ll skip over the boring bits and get to the parts that matter. As a teenager, Floyd was sent east to study at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania but had to withdraw due to a lung illness. He was sent to Philadelphia to see a certain Dr. Benjamin Rush. Floyd’s diagnosis changed the course of his life and could have changed borders. Rush was no ordinary doctor; he was a doctor who was also a Founding Father. He signed the Declaration of Independence and served as a surgeon-general in the Continental Army. Floyd was so impressed by Rush’s care that he decided he, too, would become a doctor.

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis to see Rush before heading west into the newly purchased Louisiana Territory. Rush gave Lewis a crash course on medicine and outfitted Lewis with a 19th century first aid kit that included Turkish opium and 600 of “Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills,” a laxative that, by some accounts, was 50% mercury. They were known as “Rush’s Thunderbolts” for their shocking efficacy. The mercury they left behind has helped modern archaeologists trace the route of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Consider this part of the history you weren’t taught in school.

Floyd, then a medical student, had a lot of reasons to be interested in that expedition, Rush’s potentially lethal laxatives the least among them. He’d known William Clark, who lived near his home in Kentucky. And he had at least one and possibly two cousins on the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The one we know for certain was Charles Floyd, the only member who didn’t come back alive. This is what’s known as foreshadowing. Pay attention to this part. 

Floyd married well, into the politically prominent Preston family of Montgomery County whose home today is the Historic Smithfield estate in Blacksburg. He settled in Christiansburg, practicing both medicine and politics. In 1814, he was elected to the General Assembly and then, in 1816, to Congress for what was then Virginia’s 5th District and later the 20th District back when we had a lot more representatives than we do now. While in Washington, Floyd stayed at Brown’s Hotel. In 1820, that hotel also housed the future senator from the soon-to-be state of Missouri, Thomas Hart Benton, and two lobbyists, although that term wasn’t used then. Russell Farnham and Ramsay Crooks were fur traders who had been to the Pacific Northwest and were now in Washington on behalf of Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company, hoping to revise government regulations that they felt restricted their trading with Native Americans.

Farnham and Crooks loved telling stories about the glories of the wild Pacific Northwest. “Their conversation, rich in information upon a new and interesting country, was eagerly devoured by the ardent spirit of Floyd,” Benton wrote in his memoirs.

The territory that Farnham and Crooks extolled had no clear ownership. In 1818, the United States and Great Britain signed a treaty that defined what is now the U.S.-Canadian boundary as far west as the Continental Divide. The straight line that the two countries drew stopped there. West of that point lay what was known either as “the Oregon Country” to Americans or “Columbia” to the British. Both countries were starting to settle that territory, but neither wanted to go to war over it. Instead, they agreed on a “joint occupation” until they could sort things out later.

The more that Congressman Floyd heard about the Oregon Country, the more he thought, “To hell with that.” He thought the United States should take the whole thing. He became obsessed with the idea. Floyd introduced a resolution calling upon Congress to “inquire into the situation of the settlements upon the Pacific Ocean and the expediency of occupying the Columbia River.” The resolution passed, a committee was formed, Floyd was named chairman, and it reported back that the United States should occupy the region. Nothing happened. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams dismissed Floyd as “a flaunting canvasser and a politician seeking to win prestige and patronage.” Adams intimated that Floyd was looking for a territory in which to install some bankrupt relative as a government official. 

Floyd persisted. All through the 1820s, Floyd introduced one bill or another calling upon the United States to take action in the Pacific Northwest. He specifically urged the U.S. to establish a military base in the region, which would have been a violation of that Treaty of 1818. Sometimes Floyd talked about the great wealth that lay in the Northwest, which he assured his fellow congressmen was “of more profit to this country than the mines of Potosí.” Other times he darkly warned that Russia might not be content with owning Alaska, that it might want more of the West Coast. Throughout, Floyd and Adams knocked heads. Floyd suggested that Adams was ignoring the region; Adams thought Floyd was a gadfly. He told President James Monroe that one of Floyd’s bills was “a tissue of errors in facts and abortive reasoning” and that “there was nothing that could purify it but the fire.” Adams would have been great on Twitter.

Floyd eventually gave up his campaign for the United States to colonize Oregon. He strongly backed Andrew Jackson for president in 1828 and felt he deserved a cabinet position. He was so confident of getting a post that he didn’t seek reelection to Congress. Floyd was to be disappointed. He later wrote bitterly to a friend: “Jackson has thrown me overboard; he is not only unwilling to give me employment, as he promised after I declined a reelection to Congress but has in every single instance refused office to my friends, and even respectful consideration to my letters of recommendation to others.” Jackson just wasn’t that into him. Floyd had to settle for a consolation prize: the governorship of Virginia, although he complained that Jackson was conspiring to undermine him there, too. 

Now, here’s where all this ties into the future Canada. Floyd talked a lot about settling the Columbia River. That river, which today constitutes part of the Oregon-Washington border, actually arises in modern-day British Columbia, on the Canadian side of the border. There was no border then, however, so what Floyd really wanted was part of what later became Canada. It’s unclear just how much of the Pacific Northwest Floyd wanted, but we know how much some Northwest advocates later wanted: They wanted the whole thing up to the Russian, um, Alaskan border. Russian America, as it was known then, stopped at parallel 54-40. 

Floyd died in 1837, at a relatively young 54, his dream of American ownership of the Northwest not realized. Settlers were flooding into the region, but its political status remained unsettled. Seven years after his death, everything came to a head: The British were pushing for a border along the Columbia River, meaning modern-day Washington state would be theirs (and someday Canada’s). American hardliners were pushing for “Fifty Four Forty or Fight!”

Those American hardliners were in the ascendance, too. The 1844 presidential election — one of the most consequential in our history — saw James Polk run on an expansionist platform that claimed everything up to 54-40 should be American. Polk won and might well have gone to war with Britain over the Northwest except for one thing: He also went to war with Mexico over Texas. Not wanting to fight a two-front war, Polk settled for extending the Treaty of 1818 border westward — the border we now have.

What would have happened if history had turned out differently and the United States had listened to Floyd — and taken the whole region? Canada would have been locked out of access to the Pacific Ocean. Vancouver would have been ours, which means the National Hockey League team there today would not have been known as the Vancouver Canucks. Chinese immigration into the United States in the 1800s might have been reduced. Even after the U.S. banned Chinese immigration in 1882, many Chinese immigrants simply sailed into Vancouver and snuck over the border. President Benjamin Harrison lamented a porous border in one of his State of the Union addresses; the border crisis then was in the Northwest, not the Southwest. Without a national border separating them, the metro areas of Seattle and Vancouver, just two hours’ drive apart, might have evolved into a bigger high-tech region than the two cities are separately.

The award-winning Canadian band 54-40 might still have formed, but their name might have had a different meaning. Pamela Anderson, Nelly Furtado, Grimes, Carly Rae Jepsen, Diana Krall, Ryan Reynolds and Seth Rogan might all have been Americans instead of Canadians. All were born in British Columbia. That province would have become an American state and, based on its current politics, would consistently send two liberal senators and a mostly liberal House delegation to Washington. Trump might still be president, but he’d have a Democratic U.S. House, not a Republican one. All this is what Floyd could have set in motion. Instead, we’ve got what we’ve got. You can decide whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing based on your politics, or what you think of Ryan Reynolds in “Deadpool.” 

Floyd got a county named after him — while he was in office, too. While he might have been a visionary about the Pacific Northwest, he wasn’t so visionary about other things. He drifted into the camp of the nullifiers who threatened disunion. In 1832, he ran for president as an “independent Democrat” and carried South Carolina. If you know your history, you know what that means. South Carolina was the most stubborn of Southern states, and that’s putting it mildly. Like many white Southerners, Floyd was conflicted about slavery: He thought slavery was bad and should be abolished — someday, just not that day. He personally owned slaves. 

Today, Floyd is a figure largely lost to history. In 2020, the website MyNorthwest wrote about the “bicentennial you’ve never heard of” — 200 years since Floyd became the first politician to propose the United States officially annex the region. The site asked Virginia Tech historian Peter Wallenstein what we should make of Floyd today. “First, you should put up a statue, because he really ought to be recognized for his very significant role in Oregon history,” Wallenstein said. “And then you should take down his statue for these other related parts of his life.”