Canada must remember its defeat of the Americans in 1775

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Madelaine Drohan is the author of He Did Not Conquer: Benjamin Franklin’s Failure to Annex Canada, and a senior fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School for Public and International Affairs.

Canada would not exist today if American invaders had captured and held Quebec City on Dec. 31, 1775.

The newly formed Continental Army had already taken Montreal and Trois-Rivières, the other main population centres in the British colony known as Canada or the province of Quebec. All that stood between the 1,200 attackers and the conquest of Canada was a defence force of 1,800 British soldiers, sailors and artillery men, and French-Canadian and English militia.

The decisive defeat of the Americans that night broke the back of an invasion that started the previous September. Their general, Richard Montgomery, was felled by a blast of grapeshot. His second-in-command, Benedict Arnold, was wounded. About 400 Continental soldiers surrendered, some still sporting “Liberty or Death” badges on their hats. The siege limped on until early May, when the sight of British warships sailing up the St. Lawrence River sent the remnants of the Continental Army fleeing for home.

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That battle on New Year’s Eve was a foundational moment for Canada. The Americans intended to make Canada the 14th colony. Keeping it in British hands allowed for the eventual formation of not one but two countries in the top part of North America.

Yet there is no nationwide commemoration of it in Canada. It forms no part of the story we tell ourselves of who we are and how we came to be. Such collective amnesia has left us surprised and ill-equipped to deal with Donald Trump’s musings about making Canada the 51st state and a new national security strategy that asserts American pre-eminence in our hemisphere.

History is full of momentous events that somehow slide into oblivion. For an affair to become part of a country’s collective memory, it must be embraced by a group with enough heft to popularize it for some present purpose. For example, former prime minister Stephen Harper highlighted the War of 1812 at a time when his government was emphasizing Canada’s ties with Britain.

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The battle at Quebec City ran into difficulties on this front from the start because the groups involved did not want to talk about it, a reluctance that continues to this day. Each group had its own reasons for forgetting one of the most consequential events in Canadian history and prioritizing their own, selective version of the past.

It was a painful and divisive memory for the French Canadians, who numbered between 65,000 and 100,000. Some fought for the British and some for the Americans, while most stayed neutral. No matter who won the war, the Catholic French Canadians would still be governed by English-speaking Protestants. The event that continues to loom large in their collective imagination is the British conquest of Canada or New France 16 years before.

The estimated 100,000 Indigenous peoples in the immediate area had many of the same reasons. They fought on both sides, even though most wanted to stay out of what they saw as a fight between brothers. The event that changed their world was the arrival of European settlers in North America more than two centuries before. Nothing that happened at Quebec City would change that.

There were barely any English speakers in the colony. Yet even they were divided between invaders and defenders. Some of those with roots in the 13 colonies actively supported the Americans, circulating propaganda, lending money and even raising regiments. Others stuck with the British out of loyalty or to preserve their trade links with Britain. The great waves of English-speaking loyalists came later, in time for the War of 1812, which is better remembered in English Canada.

In the aftermath of the failed attack, Americans briefly made Montgomery a martyr: the subject of poems, a romanticized painting, and a marble monument at Trinity Church in New York. But the failed invasion he headed was an awkward fit with the origin myth already being crafted by the Continental Congress, which held that the Americans were peaceful victims of British tyranny and had only become aggressive to defend their liberty. They preferred to commemorate happier events, such as the Declaration of Independence.

This is far from the only gap in the story we tell ourselves about Canada. But at a time when relations are souring, it is worth remembering that possessing Canada is not an idea Mr. Trump invented; it has been a strand of American thought since the birth of the U.S., periodically re-emerging over the last 250 years. If more Canadians were better informed about the bloody battle at Quebec City, we might not have been caught so off-guard.