If there is one thing that Donald Trump and the Founders would agree on, it’s the need to grab Canada. Trump spent weeks during the interregnum publicly indulging in neocolonial fantasies for his second term. The President repeatedly voiced his interest in acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal, and incorporating Canada as the “51st State.”
While Trump would not rule out using military force against Greenland and Panama, he doesn’t believe this will be necessary for Canada because he is convinced that Canadians will willingly cast off the yoke of socialized healthcare and embrace American freedom.
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.
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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.
Why wouldn’t American politicians take the hint that Canada was just not that into them? Ideological fervor certainly played a role. The American revolutionaries were convinced that their new republican form of government unlocked the potential of human freedom on a global scale. They believed that America was the future, and it was just a matter of time before other oppressed peoples of the world would embrace the principles of their revolution.
Yet, realpolitik also played its part. Quebec belonged to the British Empire, and, as such, having it on the American border meant that it posed an enduring national security risk. U.S. politicians could easily envision the province serving as the base for counterrevolutionary activities that might threaten the survival of their fledgling republic.
The sense that Canadians were fellow travelers in the American revolutionaries’ struggle against British colonialism explains why the Founders’ northern fantasies did not end with the Revolutionary War. If anything, they grew more vivid. Thousands of Loyalists—Americans who maintained their allegiance to the British Crown—migrated northwards to colonize Canada, including the new Anglophone province of Upper Canada (present-day Ontario) in the 1780s and 1790s. Many Americans and Canadians were literally kin, and it seemed only natural to the Founders that Canada would eventually follow in the 13 colonies’ footsteps by joining the Union.
Into the 1790s and 1800s, the U.S. government continued to see Canada as a natural target for expansion—even as British colonial officials harbored their own ambitions for imperial reconciliation. John Graves Simcoe, the inaugural lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, intended to create a model colony, one that would lure Americans back to British rule. Simcoe was not completely delusional. Thousands of “late loyalists” migrated from the U.S. to Upper Canada, largely to take advantage of cheap land and lower taxes north of the border.
The War of 1812, however, made clear once and for all that there would be no tearful family reunion between the U.S. and Canada. The U.S. declared war on Great Britain in June 1812 to protect its national security. In particular, the U.S. government protested British interference with its foreign trade and the Royal Navy’s practice of impressment, which meant forcing American sailors to serve aboard British warships. U.S. officials also blamed Canadian fur traders for encouraging Indigenous resistance to American colonization in the present-day Midwest.
The conflict’s origins may be complex, but President James Madison’s wartime strategy was straightforward: invade Canada. Jefferson, who was Madison’s mentor, infamously predicted that liberating Canada from the British “will be a mere matter of marching.”
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Jefferson couldn’t have been more wrong. To Canadians, the ill-disciplined American soldiers who invaded their homeland looked like plunderers, not liberators. They soon rallied to fight alongside British soldiers, and Indigenous allies. The U.S. invasion was a military disaster. The devastating waves of invasion and counter-invasion that followed along the Canada-U.S. border in the next few years only served to entrench a sense of difference between Canadians and Americans.
After 1815, American and Canadian politicians grudgingly accepted that they would have to live with one another. Territorial disputes between the U.S. and Canada punctuated the later 19th century. But, even when President James K. Polk threatened to go to war with Canada over the Oregon Country during the 1840s, not even the most zealous advocates of America’s “Manifest Destiny” to rule the continent imagined that the U.S. would annex their northern neighbor.
During the 20th century, Canada and the U.S. became close allies, with their soldiers fighting alongside each other in conflicts from World War I through the War on Terror. U.S. presidents looked on Canada as a trusted friend, not as a potential rival to be absorbed.
Until Trump. While he and the Founders share the same misconception that Canadians secretly want to be Americans, it seems unlikely that the U.S. is going to invade our northern neighbors any time soon. So, what does it matter if the incoming president fantasizes about Canada joining the Union?
If Trump’s musings are really aimed at bullying the Canadian government into trade concessions, then his bellicose bluster is self-defeating. As the American push in the late 18th and early 19th centuries exposed, his provocative comments are only going to produce hard feelings toward the U.S. and a surge of Canadian nationalism. While this time the hostilities won’t play out militarily, such animosity will shape the Canadian parliamentary elections that must be held by October.
If Trump doesn’t tamp down his aggressive rhetoric, he runs the risk of helping to elect politicians who will vote down any new trade deal between Ottawa and Washington, D.C. It may even make Canadians more willing to endure economic hardship in the event of a tariff war, rather than bowing to Trump’s domineering tactics.
Though a growing number of Canadians oppose Justin Trudeau on most things, it is telling that the outgoing prime minister likely speaks for the nation when he says there isn’t “a snowball’s chance in hell” that Canada will become the 51st state.
Lawrence B.A. Hatter is associate professor in the department of history at Washington State University. He is also a columnist with The Inlander.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
