Dan Snow's History Hit - Why Isn't Canada the 51st State?

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

Dan explains how Canada has resisted many American attempts at annexation since the Revolution in 1775. From the tariff tensions of 1911 to President Trump's recent remarks about making Canada the 51st state, this episode delves deep into the various moments over the last 250 years when American leaders have eyed their northern neighbour for expansion. Dan examines the American invasions during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 and explains how Canada's resistance and unique circumstances have kept it independent.Discover the historical context behind today's headlines with this comprehensive look into U.S.-Canada relations.Written by Dan Snow, edited by Dougal PatmoreSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear from you. You can email the podcast at [e-mail].

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It was the tariffs that really enraged the Canadians. Trade between Canada and the United States would be transformed. And it certainly didn't help that American leaders were coming right out and saying that these tariff changes were simply a way to eventually annex Canada, to finally bring that northern resource powerhouse into the American republic, fulfilling the dream of so many American expansionists for generations. The response to this in Canada was immediate. Anti-Americanism flourished. The press went full patriot. Canadians talked about boycotting US goods. Absolutely determined. It became the main issue at stake

in that year's election. Obviously, friends, I'm talking about 1911, when a reduction in tariffs, a reduction, drove the Canadians to rally around their flag and reject what they saw was American expansionism through economic means. Well, I expect to this audience of news hounds that sounds familiar. Because suddenly, the issue of the US and Canada and annexation and 51st states and indeed tariffs is back. President Trump said in his Super Bowl interview, I think Canada will be much better off being the 51st state. Earlier in the month, he said Canada should become our cherished 51st state, much lower taxes and far better military protection for the people of Canada, and no tariffs. So these fresh and unexpected political crises, controversies that appear on the world

stage are, of course, all a reminder that history doesn't stop. It sometimes pauses, sometimes cuts us a little slack, but history always roars back. It always gets up on our grill. And when it does, this podcast is ready. The issue of the US and Canada, their relations, it's pure history, folks. It's pure history. And so following on from podcasts about Greenland and Panama, and thank you for your feedback on those, we are going now for the big one. We're going to talk about the history of US and Canada. Why Canada isn't the 51st state, or indeed, why it wasn't the 14th state. Why is Canada a separate independence and why is the border where it is? And I'll be talking about various moments over the last 250 years

in which the issue of Canadian annexation has been raised by American leaders. And sometimes, successfully. Come from my history of Canada in the US, stay for my hottest of hot takes, that in fact large chunks of historic Canada are already in the USA. From the birth of the American Republic, there's nearly always been a lobby within the United States, which is believed in the maximalist approach to expansion. And you can see that because not only has America vastly expanded from its initial revolutionary era borders, but there have been calls to go further in pretty much every direction. In 1847, when the US Army captured Mexico City, there was the famous all of Mexico rallying slogan, the demand that

the Americans build on their success in that Mexican war by annexing the entire country. Instead, the Americans opted just to take what is now California and the American Southwest. But there was a big debate about whether or not to take the whole thing. And actually, in recording this, I thought it wasn't that surprising that the centuries-old issue of Canada has raised its head again. So to talk you through this whole story, I'll be taking up the reins myself. I'm half Canadian. I spent summer vacations touring the many battlefields of southern Ontario where American invasion forces were put to the sword. But don't worry, I've read a bit since then.

I've done a little bit more research to balance out the old view. This is the story of the United States and Canada and why they're not the same thing. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Well, everybody, as so often with US history, we have to go back before the existence of the United States of America itself. In roughly the first half of the 18th century, give or take, North America looked very different politically to today. Various European empires had carved out imperial possessions or colonies within North America. colonies within North America. Those existed in competition with or alongside indigenous tribal homes, kingdoms, empires that stretched right the way across the continent. In terms of the European enclave, let's start right at the top. This is the forgotten one. We have a British claim to the shores of Hudson Bay. Now, the British had outsourced that particular piece

of colonial adventurism, surprise, surprise, to a commercial company, the Hudson Bay Company. And they just established trading posts to buy valuable animal furs from indigenous people to make coats and hats to sell to Europeans. This is not a colony as we understand it. This is the thinnest of territorial claims. It's a handful of British outposts, a tiny number of agents. These are not the start of big settler communities. So more importantly, let's move south and get to what we today call Canada, modern Canada. That space, much of it was claimed by the French, who'd sent their explorers up the St. Lawrence River and through the river system of Canada and covering extraordinary distances through the 17th and early 18th centuries.

So it's claimed by the French. It's thinly held, though. There aren't big communities of French-speaking expats, French migrants all over what is today Manitoba and Saskatchewan and stuff. That's just not there yet. There are a few big towns along the St. Lawrence, like Trois-Rivières and Quebec City in Montreal, but mostly it's a series of forts which flew the French flag and acted as a safe place for

French trappers and merchants to touch base. They were there buying furs from indigenous peoples. They were there hunting, trapping those animals themselves. So that's from the mouth of St. Lawrence, what is today Labrador in the north, New Brunswick in the south, right the way through modern Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan. That's all a French empire, but this is where it gets interesting. The French also claimed a giant chunk of territory, which takes us all the way down through the US Midwest. Illinois County, Illinois. Detroit is Detroit, meaning the straight river pittsburgh used to be fort duquesne and on it went on it went covering really the mighty mississippi drainage area to

the south all the way down to louisiana named after king louis obviously louis the 14th memphis tennessee was once fort assomption and it goes all the way down to the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, named after the city in France. Out to the west, the Spanish have claimed to rule, although that was very sketchy indeed. The Spanish Empire, which had swatted aside the Inca and the Aztecs, had certainly met its match in the war like Comanche, so most of those Spanish claims were paper claims at best. The Spanish did, however, rule over Florida. Now, the sharp-eared among you will have noticed that that doesn't leave a whole bunch of real estate. So only in the very east, along the Atlantic seaboard of North America,

from what is now Maine down to Georgia, do we find the famous 13 British colonies, a strip of land that's roughly sandwiched between the Appalachians and the Atlantic. And unlike all the other territories I've been droning on about, these might not be very big, but they are settler colonies. They've got dense communities of farmers and tradesmen and city folk. They've got sophisticated, dynamic, civil and political institutions. They've got traditions. There have been British settlers in those places now for over a hundred years, and that's important. So that's our map of the Americas in the early 18th century. The first important change does come during the early 18th century. The British

chased the French out of the rather glamorous sounding Acadia. That's modern Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, basically. So those bit the maritime provinces of modern Canada right on the Atlantic, just north of Maine, on the mouth of St. Lawrence. So those were all French. It was Acadia. And after decades of trying, I mean, really a lot of times, the British secured most of this territory in the early 18th century and they made a very big and interesting decision, one usually beyond the means of an early modern state. They decided to ethnically cleanse Acadia. They expelled the French Catholic settlers and they replaced them largely with British or British colonial,

English-speaking, Protestant ones. So this area becomes Nova Scotia. Really, it's a 14th colony, another one of those Atlantic seaboard colonies, right? Just north of what is today Maine. Now, further along, you'll be thinking we do have Newfoundland, but that really just had a few fishing settlements on it. It had been absolutely wiped out several times over. It's constantly being fought over and smashed and burned. It was not a thriving colony. It was more a frontier zone. So that's under direct British crown control, not as much as it's under control at all. The next big change comes right in the middle of the 18th century, and that is the French-Indian War, the Seven Years' War of the 1750s and early

60s. And the British score the most astonishing win in military history. Well, quite unexpectedly, really. They managed to drive the French entirely out of North America. So that all the lands that I've described, all the stuff going through Canada, all the stuff down through the Midwest, into the Mississippi Basin, down to the Gulf, all that ends up as British. And in fact, for good measure, the British also took Florida too off the Spanish. That becomes British as well. We're talking Alexander the Great levels of conquest here. I mean, it's wild.

So suddenly, British North America is 13 colonies, New York, New Virginia, Carolinas and everything, plus Nova Scotia, so 14 colonies, and the whole of New France, so Canada. And you'll excuse me for saying Canada and New France. These terms are used quite interchangeably even at the time, but I'll try and make it clear what I'm talking about. That includes Louisiana and Illinois and everything. So the British control this vast empire, really the whole of the western half of North America. Just think of it like that. But this is the number that matter. This is what's extraordinary. Within 15 years of that astonishing victory,

why did the 13 colonies, and just the 13 colonies, rebel against the British Empire, break away, establish the USA, and why didn't they take all of the rest with them? That's the big question. That, in an important sense, is unresolved history. And it's what Donald Trump, I believe, is still talking about today, resolving that essential question. And let's have a go at answering it. I guess the first thing to say is that those American rebels in those 13 colonies, some of them at least, quite a lot of them, I think, well, they thought that the rest of all of those British possessions should or would break away with them. As the 13 colonies declared their independence, they sent messengers. They reached out to Nova Scotia and Canada and Florida, and they invited the people there to join the American Revolution.

And there was some interest. Canada in particular, if you look at the Articles of Confederation, so one of the sort of founding documents of this revolutionary republic, Canada was pre-approved for joining. Any other applicants would have to go through a process. Canada could just join. Boom, rubber stamped. I wonder if that means that Trump wouldn't even have to have congressional approval. Possibly not, because those articles have been superseded by the Constitution. But anyway, I digress. There was some interest in joining, particularly in Nova Scotia, but ultimately, the areas that make up Canada today opted not to rebel. And that's a big moment. Why? Why did so much of British North America opt to stay within the British Empire? Okay, well, let's deal with Nova Scotia first, because I think that's the most

interesting. That could have gone the other way. Nova Scotia was a bit different to the other 13 colonies. In those colonies, you had settlers who'd been there for generations. They had cherished traditions of local representative government. They had an aversion to being taxed by London. There was a powerful and distinct political culture in those colonies that set them apart ultimately from London. But in Nova Scotia, well, it's a majority of people who just recently arrived from Britain. They didn't really mind, therefore, London rule. They were kind of used to it. They were cool with it. Also, Nova Scotia had only just been prized from the grip of its French owners. The British settlers

there probably quite liked having British red coats to keep the peace, to make sure both the French couldn't come back and indigenous people were controlled. It all felt a bit too real, a bit too raw to start yelling about Thomas Paine and coffee shops, I think. Also, it was more difficult to get to. It wasn't connected by road to the other 13. To get there from the colonies meant a sea voyage, which meant it was vulnerable to British naval interception. So George Washington was never, during the war, going to pack his entire army into ships and run the British naval gauntlet, only to liberate the people of Nova Scotia. That's why Nova Scotia ultimately said no to join the revolution, and also why the revolutionaries didn't try and spread the revolution by force to Nova

Scotia. But what about Canada proper, effectively modern Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, etc? Well, that was full of French people. They were Catholics. They'd only been conquered by the British Empire 15 or so years ago. And believe it or not, folks, this is, I'm going to write this one down, the British had done something fairly enlightened and civilized. The British realized they couldn't do another big ethnic cleanse across a whole massive sort of continental sized region. And so they decided to live and let live. Their new French subjects, they could keep their own law. They keep their religion. They keep their language. They keep their customs. All they have to do is swear

allegiance to King George and they could go about their business. So when these American emissaries come knocking with all sorts of revolutionary ideas about separation of church and state and constitutions and whatnot, the Canadians, they're not sure about this. The Continental Congress actually sends a letter in French to the French speakers of Quebec. It was sent in late 1734. And it reads a little condescendingly, to be honest. The Quebecers, these people living in Canada, were told that since they were now British, they needed to know that British people were blessed with inalienable rights. And the Americans listed, they enumerated these rights. It was representative government,

the right to trial by jury, habeas corpus, land ownership, and the freedom of the press. So in this letter, they gave these French settlers a kind of crash course in Anglo-Saxon representative government. And the French residents were sort of well not entirely convinced really they faced a bit of a choice they swapped distant sort of pretty relaxed british rule for the americans next door trying out lots of newfangled things americans who were known to be insanely land hungry americans who were known to be more Protestant than Martin Luther on a bad day. Did these French Canadians feel kinship for a load of English-speaking Puritans from Massachusetts Bay? No, they did not. The American invitations fell pretty much on deaf ears, and the Americans tried again a few times. They sent further letters. They wrote in the summer of 1775, after the first battle of the revolution, Lexican and Concord,

you and your wives and your children are made slaves. And they said, how could you be sure the British will respect your religious choice? How can you be sure that the Catholic church will be protected? Because all that depends on a legislature in which you have no share, over which you have no control, which is a fair point. Parliament could revoke their offer to the French Canadians at any time they want. They can do whatever they like. Parliament is sovereign. They could make all French Canadians wear red hats on a Tuesday if they want. And there would be nothing the French Canadians could do about it. Still, however, the French remained largely unconvinced, although some obviously were. There was a request for volunteers, the revolution that was answered, and I think it was about two battalions, so over a thousand men would go to fight in Canadian units in the US Continental

Army as they battled the British. But Canada opted to remain alongside Nova Scotia. Newfoundland and Flory, which we'll quickly talk about, they didn't join the revolution for similar reasons. They were too sparsely populated. There was no real culture of local politics by a well-established kind of independent-minded local elite. I think they sort of lacked the political and civic mechanisms really to declare independence and join with these 13 colonies. So the 13 would go it alone. And to find out how that went, stay tuned. You listen to Dan Snow's history and we've got more coming up after this. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga.

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Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Right, it's the American Revolution. The Canadians have said they do not wish to join in. They wish to remain part of the British Empire. That attempt to incorporate Canada within the US at the very moment of its birth, that attempt has failed. There would be a second opportunity for Canada. I'm not sure opportunity is the right word. It wasn't long

coming. And this, it was less a friendly invitation to join them in a bout of joyful civic republicanism. And it was more more a sort of robust suggestion at the tip of a bayonet. Because in those early months of the war, as the New Englanders had been slapping the British military around outside Boston, a force of patriots, of rebels, had also pulled off a remarkable coup. They'd taken the supposedly impregnable, certainly very powerful fortress of Ticonderoga. And Ticonderoga is a gatekeeper. It sits athwart the traditional north-south invasion route from New England into Canada. So from Quebec and Montreal down towards Albany, the capital of New York state. Over the centuries,

that is where armies had marched north and south. French, indigenous, British armies, you name it. Now they had Ticonderoga. What better way to strike at the British Empire than attack overland into Canada? The mighty Royal Navy couldn't really stop them, and the attack would put pressure on the British. They might agree to a negotiated peace. It might even convince the Canadians of the opportunities of joining the revolution. even convince the Canadians of the opportunities of joining the revolution. It could be the 14th state. There were very few British troops in Canada. It was thinly protected. It would be easy. So really, the first great offensive military operation in the history of the American Republic, in the history of the US military, is an invasion of Canada. And there'd be two thrusts. The main one would go straight north from Ticonderoga, right up that old invasion highway, Lake Champlain to Montreal and beyond.

And there'd be another strike, now this is quite a hardcore one, across wilderness from Boston up into what is now Maine, and then have traveling up a series of lakes and rivers to make their way to Quebec. And that involves savage portages, wild rapids, mountains, mosquito-infested swamps, untracked, deeply hostile terrain. A good proportion of the men deserted, you'll be surprised to hear. And as I'm saying all these things, I'm wondering why I've signed up to take part in a reconstruction of that march this autumn, this fall for the 250th. Still, I'm sure it'll be a great experience. Looking forward to that. Watch this space. The main thrust was quite successful. It captured Montreal,

demonstrated that this largely French-speaking militia, these farmers and townspeople that were turned out to protect the land in times of emergency, the militia, well, they weren't going to die for the British king. They made themselves scarce. The British commander had to escape from Montreal, dressed as a common folk person. He went to Quebec, the walled city, and there he rallied forces for what was to be a small, but really an extraordinarily consequential clash. A thousand ragtag men here and there on either side fighting basically for Canada. Not that they knew, but a Canada that's now the second largest country on earth, rich in raw materials, all that stuff. That's what was at stake in this campaign

with such small numbers of men on either side. Remarkably, given what usually happened in 18th century warfare, these two American thrusts met up outside Quebec, and they did launch an assault, and famously it took place on New Year's Eve, in a blizzard, a massive snowstorm. The Americans were utterly knackered, they were exhausted, diseased, malnourished, they lacked any specialist siege equipment, they didn't have the sort of technical skills required for a siege on a city like Quebec. And they just threw themselves at the fortifications. They had little paper banners. They put little signs on their hats and they'd written liberty or death.

And they held themselves into battle. And I think this was the moment when Trump's dream of Canadian statehood probably came as close as it's ever been. The Americans were inside Quebec, the lower town in particular. They were meters away from the walls, the most significant British stronghold in Canada, the loss of which would see the other little forts and garrisons cut off from British support across the Atlantic and forced to surrender. This was the battle for Canada. But as we all know in history, a miss of a few meters or millimeters can be fatal. It can be determinative. And so it was for the brave

Americans. They pushed their hopeless attack. Their commander, Richard Montgomery, was smashed at close range by grapeshot, killed instantly, dozens of small balls busted out of a cannon as he was leading an assault, sword in hand, having personally hacked through a defensive stockade. Another leader, Bennett Donald, attacking from a different direction, was wounded by a musket ball in the leg. Daniel Morgan took over. He climbed a scaling ladder up onto a barricade. He was set upon by British defenders, had to roll under a cannon to protect himself. He would end up being captured though, and that American force was utterly defeated, about half killed or captured. This tiny force now attempted to besiege Quebec. The British apparently sent out sex workers who they knew had smallpox. They sent them to the American camp, and so that beleaguered force

then endured a smallpox epidemic. Through that tough winter and their hardship, well relations broke down with them and the Canadians as you can imagine because unsurprisingly the language of self-determination and the rights of free-born Britons began to sound a bit hollow, began to pale to the French Canadians when this American invading army, desperate, starving, it was forced to take food and equipment even to raise emergency taxes which basically meant just taking money from people so some french settlers would talk them saying where's your taxation without representation now and they'd shout that at american troops as they came to commandeer food and fodder as often we see through history an occupying army is not a

terrific diplomatic tool of persuasion. The Americans eventually gave up. They withdrew as British reinforcements flooded in the spring of the following year. But I always think that that battle, what a moment in world history. Imagine a United States of America that stretches from the Gulf of America slash Mexico, all the way up to Hudson's Bay, all the way up to the Arctic Circle, Baffin Island and beyond. And that's Trump's dream today. And that almost came to be that New Year's Eve of 1775. During the American Revolution, there were more plans to invade North into Canada. I think it came with those particular plans. And at the end of the war, famously, those 13 colonies did win their independence. The USA came into being. But, and this is the

hot take, don't forget about this bit, guys. They did get a chunk of Canada. Because, remember, Canada stretched down from Quebec and Ontario, that we know, down all the way through the Midwest to the Gulf. And at the peace treaty in Paris, the British Prime Minister, Lord Shelburne, he coughed up not only the 13 colonies, but a massive chunk of the Midwest, basically all the land west of Mississippi. He just gave it all to the USA. It really is an extraordinary thing. In fact, the deal that the British ended up offering the Americans was far, far more generous than the deal that the French, who were the Americans' allies, had been trying to get for the Americans.

It was wild. But Shelburne, and the British possibly rightly, they decided that actually a rich and large United States would make a valuable trading partner for the Brits. They'd much rather have the Americans in charge of that territory than the French or the Spanish. They spoke English, same religion, lots of kinship, same values. So actually, the young United States of America was far bigger than anyone had really expected on the outbreak of the revolution, and with big chunks of what had been Canada now as part of the USA. So there's Prestons here, folks. There's Prestons. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, bits of Minnesota, they were now transferred from Canada to the US. Another thing happened in the aftermath of that war is around 70,000 loyalists, people who

regretted the revolution, they left the United States of America and they emigrated to Canada. So that's a fresh bit of population for whom joining the US is now obviously against everything they believe in. They've just left behind their lives in the USA to remain part of the British Empire. So they're unlikely in the future to prove very enthusiastic about joining the USA. The next and probably last serious attempt to bring Canada as a whole into the loving arms of the American Republic came during the War of 1812. And the year is important because Britain was really up against in 1812. It was distracted, it was busy, it's facing its greatest threat in Europe for centuries, Napoleon's France. It was all hands to the pumps. It had little time or resource for

North America, which made it all the more strange that Britain behaved like an arrogant bully with nothing to fear, because Britain would routinely stop American ships on the high seas. They were forcibly recruited as sailors for the Royal Navy. They were dragged off their own ships, simply enrolled in the muster books of British naval vessels. The British were also causing a bit of trouble. They were helping indigenous tribes on the western frontier of the United States. They were giving them arms and advice about to hold back the tide of American settlers who were moving west over the Appalachians. So the Americans were angry about all these things. And in 1812, Britain was at a low ebb in the war against Napoleon.

The Americans timed it quite well. They realised that now was a good time to strike. And the obvious place to strike was Canada, because again, the British Navy, dominant, couldn't get in the way. Some Americans thought they would invade Canada to put a bit of pressure on the British, but a considerable number of Americans were still chasing that old dream, annexation. Canada could become the 19th state at that point. On July the 12th, 1812, William Hull crossed the Detroit River at the head of an American army, and he was full of confidence. And he arrived in Windsor, Ontario, and he issued a proclamation ordering all British subjects to surrender. The proclamation said that he'd arrived to free them from the tyranny of Great Britain, and they would have liberty, security, and wealth

that his own country enjoyed. And if not, they would end up with war, slavery, and they would have liberty, security, and wealth that his own country enjoyed. And if not, they would end up with war, slavery, and destruction. So again, robust language use, try and woo Canadians, try and bring them into the Republic's fold. Just after a month later, however, he hopped back across the river, having lost his nerve. The British counterattack, they crossed the river in turn, and they captured Chicago, they captured Detroit. Another American force invaded in October that year, this time a little bit further east. They crossed at Niagara. They were beaten at the Battle of Queenstown Heights, where I took my children earlier this year to their great interest and excitement. The following year, 1813, things looked quite different. Successes in 1812 were not at first repeated.

Things that they could unravel completely for the British, in fact, in roughly what is now Ontario. The Americans built a very impressive fleet on Lake Ontario, freshwater navy, and they dominated the lake, which was embarrassing for Britannia. They sacked York, which is now Toronto. And I think, please email me about this, but I think that was the last British colonial capital to fall to the enemy. It's legislature desecrated, royal standard captured, all that sort of stuff. The last one until the collapse of Britain's empire in Southeast Asia in 1942. Anyway, the Americans also, as well as that raid, they pushed up through Niagara.

And only a rather daring and surprised British night attack on one American force turned the tide. And then that helped persuade the all-important indigenous peoples, really, whose troops the British depended on. The British didn't have enough regular forces in the areas. They needed the indigenous peoples to come to their help. Well, the indigenous people quite rightly waited to see who would win and then join in on the winning side, so they didn't suffer the reprisals. And with this victory, they started helping the British again. And that allowed the Brits to stay in the fight. That same year, 1813, the Americans launched two assaults on Quebec. Both of them were repelled. One of them, 4,000 strong. They were defeated by a force of French-Canadian militia, interestingly,

and Mohawk indigenous allies. There were just 400 of them. And this American force of 4,000 were repelled by the 400 in a very, very strong defensive position, to be fair to them. The fighting did rumble on. The area around Niagara Falls saw yet more bloody, often quite inconclusive action. And those battlefields today are naturally the true reason The area around Niagara Falls saw yet more bloody, often quite inconclusive action.

And those battlefields today are naturally the true reason for a tourist trip to that area, much more exciting than the falls themselves. But each side sort of cancelled out the other's advantages, and the war ended with the border really, in essence, where it had been at the beginning. And that was the end of another attempt to add Canada to the United States of America. The states of the Americas would remain disunited. That's also the last formal military annexation attempt. But there have been plenty of political efforts since then.

And you can find out more about them after this. To be continued... from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. so the war of 1812 brings an end to american military efforts to conquer canada to annex canada but there have been plenty of interesting moments since in, 1838, you get these odd uprisings. You've got Canadian rebels

who rise up against the conservative power structures, the oligarchies that control the colonies of Canada. They demanded democracy. They wanted a kind of US-style democratic system. And they didn't receive support from the US government, but they received support from US citizens who were living south of the border. And there was something called the Patriot War that saw these Canadians and Americans band together and conduct border raids. The British authorities in Canada defeated them. And the American government was quite careful to signal they didn't support these actions.

And in fact, they eventually worked with the British government to suppress these groups. So I thought I'd mention that one in passing. On the way to February 1839, when there was more trouble, there was talk of war. There was trouble between Maine and Canada. Maine was now a US state, it had broken away from Massachusetts, so it's its own state. And the border between Maine and Canada had never been settled. It's wild, tangled, inhospitable bit of landscape. So there hadn't been a particular need to work out exactly where the border ran. But as more people moved in there, populations arrived, people want to exploit economic resources, it became important because

government officials on both sides of the border would give licenses out for logging and other activities and then they would clash and people would ask, well, by whose authority are you here? The militias on both sides were assembled, but the Americans and British both blinked, they decided to negotiate and agreed the border between Maine and Canada as it is today. It must have stirred things up though, because a few years later in the 1844 US presidential election, annexations of bits of Canada, or indeed what the British claimed was Canada, became an election issue. So you've got James Polk. He's a follower of President Jackson, that most muscular of presidents, the man who had remade the government by putting in

political appointments into his administration. He had not let any legal niceties get in the way of him invading and annexing Florida. Yeah, that President Jackson. The president whose portrait hung in the Oval Office in Trump's first term. But anyway, Polk wanted to emulate his hero, and he campaigned on taking the Oregon Territory, despite British claims to the same piece of land, which the Brits called the Columbia Territory. Now, the Oregon or Columbia Territory was a stretch of land really all the way from Northern California up to the border with Alaska. So roughly speaking, Oregon, Washington States, and then British Columbia today. So Polk campaigned hard and he used the language of destiny. He said Americans were destined to rule this continent. He revved up the base with dreams of a USA spreading ever wider, increasing

its territorial reach. There's a column from slightly after the election, but it's captured the spirit of the time in the New York Morning News, and it argues that the United States should have all of Oregon by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which providence has given us. And that term, manifest destiny, you'll have heard, that entered widespread use immediately. It came to sum up the attitude among many Americans that Providence had indeed ordained that the whole of the continent would one day be part of the United States. While we're at it, Polk, his other great passion, tariffs, interestingly, reducing them though.

In his inaugural address, he talked about that territory, talked about getting that territory. He talked about Texas, which was then independent, but he wanted to annex Texas. And he also at the time was talking about getting California of Mexico too. So that is what you call imperial presidency. He spent every day at his desk, Polk did, workaholic, didn't like leaving a thing to his subordinates, famous for it. Polk talked tough with the British Empire. He threatened war, but it was part of a negotiating strategy because he was also keen to talk. Britain had previously claimed that territory all the way down through the Puget Sound where Seattle is, even all the territory north of where the Columbia River comes out into

the Pacific. But Polk pushed them to accept the 49th parallel. He made military preparations. The British sent five Royal Naval vessels to the Pacific Northwest, but in the end, the British agreed, and the border, sure enough, remains on the 49th parallel. Polk's muscular negotiating strategy seems to have paid off. The British half of what they called the Columbia Territory became British Columbia. I think the next big moment comes about a generation later. The Civil War that tore the United States apart. Well, that fuelled, interestingly, another bout of gazing north. Because during the war, Britain and its North American territories had been neutral, but there was a sense in which they'd been quite friendly to the Confederacy,

that the southern states, and certainly individual businesses and people, they'd traded with the Confederacy, they'd supplied the Confederacy, they'd run the blockade. The US government was pretty angry at the war's end. They said the Brits had provided assistance to the enemies of the United States. And one man was particularly furious. That was Senator Charles Sumner. And he was important because he was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And he asked for reparations. He wanted Britain to pay. They could pay if they wanted $2 billion, or they could just cede the whole of Canada to the United States.

And this all gets caught up with another purchase that's going on at the time. The Americans are trying to buy Alaska from Russia. And the Secretary of State, Seward, is doing the negotiating. And he really wanted Alaska because he regarded it as a first step in a comprehensive plan to gain control over the entire Pacific coast of North America. He was a firm believer in manifest destiny. He said, our population is destined to roll its restless wave to the icy barriers of the North. Well, that wasn't great news for Canada. And furthermore, in the great tradition of field

agents providing intelligence that their superiors will like, the US consul in Victoria and British Columbia reported enthusiastically, the people of Vancouver Island and of British Columbia are almost unanimous in their desire for annexation to the United States. And Sue had actually visited Victoria, which is, for those who don't know, a city on Vancouver Island, just north of that Canadian border with the US. And while he was there, he reported that British Columbians were generating petitions in favour of annexation. And in the end, it seems that there were only two petitions, there are 104 signatures in total. So that particular spate of enthusiasm for annexation sort of ran its course. And at the same time, the British government agreed that it would submit international arbitration in the issue of reparations, in the issue of whether or not it helped the Confederacy. And the British end up making an offer of $15 million

and making an apology. And the Americans in the end decided to do the easy thing, take the cash, rather than keep on pushing for massive annexations of some or all of Canada. During those tumultuous late 1860s, it was all happening then. It's also important to state that Canada, as we understand it today, took a big step to coming into being. 1867, there was confederation. So Canada was established as a dominion. And that was a stepping stone on a path to being the effectively fully independent country that it is today. Scoot forward now to 1911. There was a big spike of anti-Americanism in Canada, all about tariffs and their removal. Honestly, there's the Canadians complaining about tariffs one minute, the next minute, the lack of them. The Liberal government in Canada negotiated lower tariffs with the United States. It was good for trade, lower tariffs. But big business in Canada

rather liked the idea of being protected against American industry. And they used their political entity, the Conservative Party, to rail against this drop in tariffs. Big Canadian businesses argued that the US would now flood the market thanks to their industrial muscle and their scale. And the election was really fought on the subject of these tariffs. And the Americans didn't help. They didn't help at all because the Speaker of the US House of Representatives was called Champ Clark. And he declared on the floor of the House, I look forward to the time when the American flag will fly over every square foot of British North America up to the North Pole.

The people of Canada are of our blood and language. Again, that makes Trump look rather moderate. Clark went on to suggest suggesting this speech that the agreement on tariffs are actually the first step towards the end of canada and we hear from the congressional record that the speech was greeted with prolonged applause so pretty mainstream the austin post said in editorial it's clear the reason this tariff reduction is so popular is because democratic politicians believe that it will improve the prospect of annexation. To make matters even worse, a Republican representative in the House, a member of the House

Foreign Relations Committee, he introduced a resolution that asked the administration to begin talks with Britain on how the United States might best annex Canada. It didn't get many votes. In fact, it only got one vote in committee, his own vote, but the Canadians were paying attention. And the Conservatives fought that election, saying that Canada would be impoverished by the tariffs, and it could even be in that weakened state, it would be annexed by the US. And it was a real thing. Rudyard Kipling got involved. He wrote an appeal to Canadians. It is our own soul that Canada risks today. Once that soul is pawned for any consideration, Canada must inevitably conform to the commercial, legal, financial, social and

ethical standards which will be imposed on her by the sheer admitted weight of the United States. It was a landslide. The Conservatives were swept into office. More tariffs, please. It's hard to think about the next election when we're going to see the Liberals trying to batter the Canadian Conservatives with those same tariffs in order to win the election. I love these bizarre twists in history. There is one more strange sort of outburst of annexation energy, and that came after the Second World War, oddly. Newfoundland, not the whole of Canada, but Newfoundland, it was not part of Canada. It had always been a separate colony. And American money and men had poured in there during the war. And there were some

in Newfoundland who felt actually their future might lie with America, not with Canada, not a bad partner to hook up with. Canada got a little bit nervous about this after a while. It pushed for a referendum in Newfoundland on integration with Canada. And that referendum took place in 1948. Given the choice between self-government and union with Canada, the Canadian option won by 52-48. That familiar infernal split, of course. Some Americans grumbled that people had not been allowed a join the USA option on the referendum. I think that brings us pretty much up to today. And yet again, as with Panama and Greenland, what I really got from this podcast is that Trump's rhetoric that sounds so unusual to us, that's only because we've forgotten our deeper history. When the world was locked in the Cold

War, ancient rivalries between Britain and America and Canada, for example, that were very much subsumed, they're forgotten as Western democracies circled the wagons and engaged collectively in what they saw as an existential fight for their survival. And most of us alive today, I think, are shaped by that period and the assumptions from that time. And yet Trump has repeatedly showed that he seems to be connected to a set of older, perhaps deeper strategic assumptions and priorities. His embrace of tariffs, his opposition to what he would call big government, the type of government that stems from Roosevelt's revolution in American life, his distrust of the global institution set

up after the Second World War, his interest in manifest destiny, in territorial expansion. In many ways, these are traditionally American values, but they're just very different traditional American values to the ones that we've highlighted more recently, which is being a liberal guardian of the post-World War II settlement. And we've lazily assumed that that set of values, the ones that we've come to recognize, are innate. But no values are innate. Values and culture are contested. They're invented and reinvented. Our national characteristics and ambitions and strategies are not set in stone. They're not resolved sometime in the past. But we make them anew, locked in contests with our political opponents. And Trump is

certainly throwing himself into that contest. The American values, priorities that he is outlining feel strange, perhaps scary to us, but they have a long historic tradition. Well, folks, that brings us to the end of this podcast. Thank you very much for listening. Always great if you want to go and click follow in your podcast player or mean that you get new episodes of this podcast automatically, and we're going to be giving historical context for all the breaking news as it happens over the next four years, and I expect there'll be plenty of it. See you next time. Thank you. you