It is rare for Canadian politics to spill over so concretely into the United States, just as U.S. politics typically has little impact in Canada. But American and Canadian politics used to be far more intertwined.
In the 19th century, political trends in the United States often made their way northward as American groups worked to influence political movements in Canada. These situations usually resulted in violence and fueled Canadian fears of annexation before, and even after, the 1867 Confederation, when Canada achieved self-government within the framework of the British Commonwealth. The intermingling died down as the establishment of the Confederation installed at the root of Canadian politics a philosophy of improving upon the flaws Canadians saw in the early U.S. republic — one antithetical to some American ideals of liberty.
On a cold December day in 1837, on Navy Island in the Niagara River — which separates the United States from Canada — a group of revolutionaries proclaimed the Republic of Canada. In a symbolic gesture, their leader, politician and journalist William Lyon Mackenzie, raised the flag of the new country, independent from Britain. It was a blue flag with two stars, one for Lower Canada (present-day Quebec), the other for Upper Canada (present-day Ontario).
During the following months these revolutionaries shook Canada with guerrilla attacks, particularly in the south. Canadians organized these strikes with the support of American enthusiasts. Together with Canadian sympathizers, the Americans brought supplies to the rebels in an American-owned ship, the Caroline.
British forces crossed into U.S. territory to pursue them, set fire to the ship and hurled it, all ablaze, over Niagara Falls. Several people on both sides of the skirmish were injured and one died.
The entire incident occurred on American soil and caused a decade-long diplomatic embarrassment for both countries. The leaders of the rebellion, including Mackenzie himself, fled to the United States. In January 1838, President Martin Van Buren took steps to ensure the United States’ official neutrality in the Canadian rebellions and avoid a war with Britain.
But the protests simmered on. Groups of American supporters of Canadian independence organized in a secret network known as the Hunters’ Lodges, headquartered in Cleveland. The organization swelled over the following year, with estimates ranging from 15,000 to 200,000 members. They were popular especially in Northern border areas, from Maine to Wisconsin. But the groups organized as far south as Kentucky, and they also grew in British North America. The lodges launched two more failed attacks into Canada, in November and December 1838, when hundreds of Americans crossed into Canada only to be pushed out again by local militias with the help of a few regular troops.
The Canadian rebellions and the border conflicts that followed them were a local manifestation of larger continental and transatlantic upheavals. Jacksonian democracy had swept the United States. Broader economic shocks, including the Panic of 1837, caused anxiety and hardship in both the United States and Canada. Borders were in flux. Texas had seceded from Mexico in 1836 and stood poised to join the United States, and the unsettled Maine-Canada border created territorial tensions to the north.
To Mackenzie’s American supporters, the conflict in Canada was simply a movement for self-government and a conflict between autocracy and liberty. They saw their involvement as a natural continuation of the anti-colonial struggle that had birthed the American republic in 1776.
But, republican enthusiasms in Canada had a very different root. Those advocating for change usually expressed frustrations with Britain’s colonial policies rather than admiration of American models. Canada’s imperial and monarchical allegiances actually remained strong. The chaos of American politics in the 1830s and 1840s, punctuated by street riots and recurrent violence, tarnished the appeal of republicanism and American-style federalism. To most Canadian colonists, the American experiment in democracy was a cautionary tale of weak central government and mob rule, and pointed clearly to the value of remaining part of the British Empire.
American style-republicanism also struggled to catch on in Canada, because Canadians had fundamentally different visions of community, law and freedom. Historian Michel Ducharme explains that an understanding of liberty that located government legitimacy solely in the popular will guided American political institutions. By contrast, similar to the British, colonial Canadians favored an understanding of liberty as the sum of individual rights that a state had the duty to guarantee to all its citizens. This interpretation did not assume direct political participation for everyone, nor did it legitimize revolution and rebellion whenever the government lost popular support.
Ideological debates over monarchy and republicanism suffused colonial Canadian culture, from journalism to literature. But Canadians came to a very different conclusion than their neighbors to the south. While by the 1840s most Canadians believed that they should have a say in their government, they favored gradual reform within the parameters of the constitutional monarchy and the British Empire rather than a radical break and American-style republicanism.
Because it lacked the expected popular support from within, Canadian and British forces defeated Mackenzie’s revolutionary movement. Even though political conversations about republicanism and annexation to the United States continued on and off for another 100 years, as historian David Smith argues, republicanism never acquired widespread traction across the provinces, and the monarchy never faced another serious challenge in Canada again.
In 1867, one of the founding fathers of the Canadian Confederation, Georges-Etienne Cartier, summed up the American influence on the formation of Canadian parliamentary democracy. Canadians had 80 years to “contemplate republicanism in action” in the United States. Seeing its defects convinced them “that purely democratic institutions could not be conducive to the peace and prosperity of nations.”
The Canadian experiment instead intended to avoid the mistakes of the United States. The British North America Act that marked the creation of the Confederation of Canada as a parliamentary liberal democracy under the British Crown included the phrase “Peace, order and good government” to describe the lawmaking powers of the Parliament. Over the years, the phrase has become the Canadian counterpart to the American “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
This fundamental difference explains why it’s so rare for political movements to cross the northern border of the United States in the 21st century. Though they are in some ways similar and exist as neighbors, American and Canadian politics have fundamentally different philosophies at their root.
