Trump’s misguided belief that inside of every Canadian there is an American waiting to get out is a misconception that is actually older than the U.S. itself. Its history, however, offers a cautionary tale for Trump because it has been responsible for some of America’s most humiliating foreign policy failures.
In 1774—two years before Thomas Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence—the U.S. made its first move towards absorbing Canada. The Continental Congress appealed to the province of Quebec to send delegates south to join the American colonies in protesting against the British Parliament’s passage of the Coercive Acts. These laws sought to punish the people of Massachusetts for their disobedience during the Boston Tea Party by suspending civil government and trial by jury, among other things. At the time, Quebec was largely synonymous with Canada and its vast borders included most of the present-day Midwest. The Patriots appealed to their northern neighbors’ shared sense of grievance over being denied the rights of Englishmen.
Yet, this request totally misunderstood Quebec. It was a majority Francophone community, which had only come under British rule in 1760. Colonists there were more concerned with maintaining their separate culture and religion than they were with abstract Anglophone notions of political liberty. Quebec sent no delegates to Philadelphia.
Not to be deterred, the Patriots invaded Quebec the following year to free their Canadian brethren from the evil clutches of the British Empire. Americans imagined, not for the last time, that they would be welcomed as liberators. They were wrong.
Canadians may have been ambivalent about British rule, but they were certainly not interested in joining the Patriot cause. Instead, the Quebec Act, which the British Parliament passed in 1774, forged an alliance between the British Crown, Catholic priests, and wealthy landowners on the eve of the revolution. While the Quebec Act’s redrawing of colonial boundaries had enraged American colonists by denying them the ability to take Indigenous homelands west of the Appalachians, it also helped to secure the loyalty of Francophone Canadians by preserving French legal, religious, and feudal institutions from before the British conquest of New France. Many Canadians felt they had more to lose than to gain by joining with the invading New Englanders.
American forces under Generals Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold captured Montreal, but they were decisively beaten during their attack on Quebec City, which cost Montgomery his life in December 1775.
Still, the Continental Congress would not accept that Canada was not destined to become part of the fledgling U.S. When the Continental Congress drafted the Articles of Confederation in 1777, they even reserved Canada a space as the 14th state to no avail.