Long before Taylor Swift embraced 13 as her favorite number, 13 was — and still is — an important figure in American culture.
We originally had 13 stars on the flag.
We still have 13 stripes.
These, of course, signify the original 13 states.
We could have had more, though. The Second Continental Congress that convened in Philadelphia in May 1775 — a month after the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord but more than a year before the Declaration of Independence — invited 18 Colonies to send delegates to plan resistance to the British.
We don’t talk much (or at all) about those other five Colonies and why they didn’t join the American Revolution, but recent events prompt us to revisit this obscure part of our history because some of it remains relevant today.
Two of those five “missing” Colonies were to our south: East Florida and West Florida. The American flag flies there today so it’s easy to forget their history. Three of those Colonies were to our north: Nova Scotia, Quebec and St. John’s Island. All three today are part of Canada (we know the latter Colony today as the province of Prince Edward Island), and that’s the current relevance. The United States is now in a trade war with our friendliest neighbor. President Donald Trump has revived his joke (?) about how Canada should be the 51st state. Canada is so superficially similar to us, and definitely so adjacent to us, that it’s easy to wonder why Canada is a separate country at all.
The answer to that requires a history lesson — and a reminder that our history is far more complicated than the shorthand version we got in school.
To understand the present day, we need to go back a long time, long before the founding of the United States. If we can’t understand how we got here, then it’s hard to understand why things today are the way they are.
Let’s go back all the way to the 1500s. The French were far more active than the English in trying to plant colonies in North America. They also failed a lot. Still, the French planted their first permanent settlement in North America — in modern-day Nova Scotia — in 1605, two years before the English set up around the swamps of Jamestown. From that point on, the two European rivals were also rivals in trying to colonize North America. For the sake of simplicity, I’m skipping the Spanish, who predated both France and England and were also busy colonizing the hemisphere but are only incidental to this story. I’m also going to skip a lot of other history in the interest of getting to the point; for more, see the movie “Young Washington,” which does a good job of showing how the two countries came into conflict on what was then the Virginia frontier. (Well, the British thought it was the Virginia frontier; the French thought it was the Quebec frontier. Today we all agree it’s Pittsburgh.)
What we call the French and Indian War was the North American theater of a global Seven Years’ War — the world war of its day, with multiple countries involved. The end of that war in 1763 saw a major redrawing of the map in North America. France lost its Quebec colony to the British (by then England and Scotland had united). Britain also picked up East Florida (basically, most of modern-day Florida) and West Florida (the Florida Panhandle and Gulf Coast parts of today’s Alabama and Mississippi) from Spain. Quebec, in particular, constituted a massive geographic acquisition for the British because the Quebec claim then extended into the Midwest. Britain now had everything east of the Mississippi except for one thing: There were indigenous people living in all these places who didn’t care which Europeans were trying to settle the place, they were all considered invaders. Britain also had a monstrous debt. Wars are expensive.
The British government had what seemed a fiscally responsible plan to work down that debt. It would tax the North American Colonists more since the war had been partly for their benefit — to rid them of the French threat. It also drew a line through the Appalachians and told Colonists not to settle west of there, lest they provoke the indigenous peoples. Britain was in a “no more wars” phase. What made perfectly good financial sense in the halls of government in London struck many North American Colonists as outrageous — nobody wants to pay more taxes, and the Colonists thought the acquisition of all that new land meant they could settle it. What was the war for if the king kept settlers out of the new lands by royal decree? The fuse was lit for the American Revolution.
For more on the Proclamation of 1763, see our previous story in our Cardinal 250 series.
So why did only 13 of the 18 Colonies join in? Let’s deal with the two Florida Colonies first. They were quite recent British acquisitions — just 12 years of British rule when the invitation from Philadelphia arrived. They were also lightly populated. (West Florida had about 5,000 or so non-indigenous inhabitants, East Florida only 3,000 or so. By contrast, the smallest of the 13 Colonies that eventually revolted was Delaware at about 41,400. Virginia was in the 500,000 range.) Those British inhabitants were also largely Loyalists. They were heavily dependent on British garrisons and didn’t have an economy that chafed at British regulations the way the other Colonies did. The delegates to Philadelphia barely thought about those Florida Colonies. They did, though, think about those northern Colonies.
We Americans, and especially we Virginians, tell our story starting in Jamestown in 1607, overlooking the fact that by then the French settlement at Port Royal was two years old. Nova Scotia had an older history than any of the other Colonies. That history is also more complicated; at one time Nova Scotia was a Scottish colony before the Scottish and English crowns were united in 1707. The English claim dates to 1654 and there were multiple small-scale wars over who would control the peninsula and what it would be called, Arcadia (the French name) or Nova Scotia (the British name) or New Holland (the Dutch name, during a brief Dutch conquest) or Mi’kma’k (the name used by the indigenous Mi’kmaq people). Nova Scotia was the most militarily contested part of North America, but we learn none of that in our history. Ultimately, the British prevailed and the French residents were evicted to modern-day Louisiana, a mass deportation of 11,500 people — today’s Cajuns, a derivative of “Acadians.” Why was Nova Scotia considered such a prize? Geography, for one thing; it juts out into the Atlantic so was closer to Europe than other parts of the Eastern seaboard. Fishing was yet another.
The point is that by 1775 there were lots of ties between Nova Scotia and the other British colonies, particularly those in New England. After the French and Indian War, the British promoted settlement in Nova Scotia and perhaps 8,000 New Englanders moved in to replace the former Arcadians. So why didn’t they share the same enthusiasm for revolution that other New Englanders did? The answer may be largely economic. Halifax was the principal port for the Royal Navy in North America. Boston was the principal port for smuggling past those Halifax-based ships. They were economic rivals. It’s not surprising then that many Nova Scotians identified economically with the British Navy. Others may have been simply afraid of standing up to the vast military power anchored in their harbor; we in Virginia had the luxury of only a small British naval presence in Hampton Roads. Some Nova Scotians did identify with the revolutionaries in Philadelphia and did not fare well. Two prominent Nova Scotians were put on trial for sedition, something that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and lots of others also could have been had royal power in the lower Colonies been as strong as it was in Nova Scotia. Support for the revolution faded further when American privateers — basically, government-sanctioned pirates — showed up and started attacking ships sailing in and out of Nova Scotia. By war’s end, those American privateers had captured 225 ships in Nova Scotian waters — but had lost the hearts and minds (and wallets) of Nova Scotians who sided with the sailors being captured.
St. John’s Island — today’s Prince Edward Island — had a long French history and did not become British until 1763 as part of that settlement of the Seven Years’ War. Population-wise, it was even smaller than those Florida territories — maybe 1,000 to 3,000 people in 1775 when the invitation from Philadelphia came. Something else came that year: American privateers who captured a top government official on the island. Otherwise, the American Revolution was a pretty distant event to the islanders, who were more economically aligned with Nova Scotia than any of the places farther south.
Long story short, the issues that animated the American Revolution from New Hampshire to Georgia simply didn’t exist in the same way in Nova Scotia and St. John’s Island. Whatever the revolutionaries from Boston and Williamsburg were talking about just wasn’t their concern in Halifax and Charlottetown.
The wild card was Quebec. It was big, both geographically and demographically. Its 90,000 or so people made Quebec bigger than New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Georgia and Delaware, in that order. Quebeckers were also French, and Catholics who now lived under an avowedly Protestant government. The British, after 1763, didn’t know what to do with them. There were too many to evict, too many to ignore. The British eventually arrived at an uncommonly wise policy: They simply left the Quebeckers alone. The deal: The Quebeckers could keep their language and their religion as long as they didn’t cause trouble. The relieved Quebeckers, who had feared expulsion, considered that a pretty good deal.
The American Revolution offered trouble — trouble that the Quebeckers weren’t willing to risk. The Americans sent multiple entreaties for Quebeckers to join their cause. The Quebeckers decided better the devil they knew than the devil they didn’t know. Next, the Americans sent two separate armies. This was one of George Washington’s mistakes. The Americans pushed the British back to Quebec City but were eventually defeated. Just as Napoleon learned the hard way that Russia’s most feared general was “General Winter,” Americans learned that waging war in Quebec during a snowstorm was not the best idea. Most crucially, the Quebeckers didn’t rise up. They just wanted to be left alone.
For more on the doomed American invasion of Quebec, including the role of Winchester’s Daniel Morgan, see this previous story in our Cardinal 250 series.
John Adams once estimated that one-third of the American colonists were Loyalists. After the American Revolution, perhaps 50,000 of them fled north, settling in Nova Scotia and what today we know as Ontario. So did thousands of former slaves, including many from Virginia who had taken up royal governor Lord Dunmore on his offer of emancipation if they fought for the British.
See our previous stories on Lord Dunmore’s Emancipation Proclamation and the former Virginia slaves who settled in Nova Scotia or listen to our podcast about the Black Loyalist Heritage Centre.
This is where we tie all this history to the present day. Nova Scotia is home today to a Black Loyalist Heritage Centre (not center; they stick with the British spelling). A prominent statue in Hamilton, Ontario, depicts the arrival of the Loyalists, who are shown as fearful and destitute. This is Canada’s version of our Statue of Liberty and “give me your tired, your poor.” A whimsical statue in Toronto shows one toy soldier standing over another; it’s meant to depict the British defeating the invading Americans in the War of 1812. Americans don’t learn any of this; Canadians do.
Trump is not the first American leader to misjudge the people to our north. He’s actually in pretty good company. So did Benjamin Franklin, who was at the forefront of trying to persuade Quebec to join the revolution. So did Thomas Jefferson, who assured then-President James Madison during the War of 1812 that taking Canada would be a “mere matter of marching.” Madison had the army marched; it skedaddled back, quite whipped. Our army burned Toronto (which then had a different name). This was not seen by the locals as an act of liberation, but the British army — then defending those northern territories — decided the proper response was to march on Washington and burn the White House.
Here’s the point: The Canadians are the original anti-Americans. Our founding story is about people seeking liberty. Their founding story is how they’re not Americans. This may come across as flip because I’m trying to write all this in an easy-to-read way, but I’m quite serious: Canadian history plays up resistance to the behemoth to the south. Our histories hardly mention Canada at all.
We may think Canadians are similar to us and in many ways they are, but in many ways they’re not. We’re now in the process of finding out some of those ways. I have a bunch of Canadian friends. They’re all lovely people. They are also all very glad they were born on that side of the border and regard Americans as loud, uncouth, not especially bright — and maybe a little scary, especially our love of guns. To us, guns are a constitutional right. To Canadians, they’re simply a tool, one that most of them never need.
We must remember that our national stories are completely different: We revolted against the crown; they never did. We fought a bloody civil war over slavery; slavery never really took hold there in the way it did here and was phased out legally starting in 1793. Canada is constitutionally and proudly bilingual; we still have Americans aghast at hearing a foreign language spoken. Canada has always had higher rates of immigration than the United States has; we insist on assimilation into “the melting pot.” Canadians see that as an affront to a society that embraces multiculturalism. We can argue about who’s right and who’s wrong, but the fact is that there are clear differences. We are like two twins who were separated at birth and raised in very different ways. We may look alike but we see the world differently based on our different upbringings.
Of all the things Trump has done, perhaps the most difficult to comprehend is his fixation on calling Canada “the 51st state.” I can understand Trump’s grandiose desire to expand American borders. However, the practical consequences of absorbing Canada — should that ever happen — would be quite detrimental to Trump’s party. Canada’s political culture is well to the left of ours; this is a country with what we’d call socialized medicine. Democrats ought to be the ones calling to annex Canada; that would produce a lot more Democratic voters, Democratic representatives, Democratic senators. Think of Canada as a colder version of California, except for one thing: Many of Canada’s conservative politicians would be considered “RINOs” by the standards of some American Republicans. The premier of Ontario (the equivalent of a governor) has called for higher tariffs on products for U.S. states that voted Republican and threatened to cut off electricity imports to the United States. Premier Doug Ford is also one of Canada’s most prominent conservatives.
The ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu (famous for “The Art of War”) wrote that “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
Others can decide how well we know ourselves, but it’s quite clear that in this trade war we do not know our enemy. That’s why it just became harder for Virginians to keep selling $9.2 billion worth of stuff each year in Canada — and why the gas we pump and the food we eat here at home will eventually become more expensive, as well. If only more Americans understand why we had 13 original states and not 14 or 15 or 16 or 17 or 18, we’d all be better off.
Want to know more about Virginia’s role in American independence? Then check out our Cardinal 250 series and sign up for our monthly Cardinal 250 newsletter. Want more about modern-day politics? Then sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that goes out on Friday afternoons.
