Colin Woodard (23 page)

Concerned that the “lower orders” were getting out of hand, many of the national leaders came to believe that their safety and hold on power required a stronger union with plenty of checks on the popular will and the independence of the various states. John Adams was shocked by
Common Sense
's call for directly elected single-chamber legislatures because they were “so democratical” and so devoid of “any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter-poise [by wealthy interests] that it must produce confusion and every evil work.” Alexander Hamilton of New York City called the confederation a “shadow of a federal government” and predicted that if left in place, there would soon be a “War between the States” over territorial and economic differences. “I predict the worst consequences from a half-starved, limping government, always moving upon crutches at every step,” Washington wrote in 1786. “I do not conceive we can long exist as a nation without having lodged somewhere a power which will pervade the whole union in as energetic a manner as the authority of the state governments extends over the several states.”
⁹

After the rebellion in western Massachusetts, these and other wealthy American leaders urged Congress to call a special meeting of the states to reform the system of government. At this Constitutional Convention, held in 1789 in Philadelphia, the elite delegates from Yankeedom, Tidewater, and the Deep South gravitated around the so-called “Virginia Plan,” a scheme modeled on Tidewater and featuring a strong central government with an appointed president and senate. (Alexander Hamilton of New York City carried things even further, calling for a powerful monarch who would rule for life and keep politics out of reach of the great unwashed and local interests.) Their opponents—delegates from the Midlands and New Netherland—coalesced around the “New Jersey Plan,” which envisioned only minor reforms to the existing E.U.-like alliance. The Virginia Plan won the day, seven states to five, with Maryland's delegation evenly split between Midland and Tidewater delegates.

Thereafter, the critical debate concerned representation in the two legislative houses, with the final compromise (seats in the House based on population, those in the Senate divided evenly among the states) passed five states to four. The split, oddly enough, was not between large states and small ones, but rather between Yankees and the Deep South. New Netherland backed the Yankees. Tidewater and the Midlands were split between states with and without territorial claims in the west (as those with such claims were expected to become more populous than those that did not). As usual, Appalachia was all but closed out of the discussion, with only one representative at the convention (James Wilson of Pennsylvania); that region's exclusion from the proceedings would prove a curse to the young United States.
¹⁰

Agreeing to a new constitution was one thing, getting each of the states to ratify it was quite another. Between 1787 and 1790 every state convened its own ratification convention to vote on the measure, while propagandists for and against the Constitution churned out speeches, pamphlets, and newspaper articles, some with outrageous claims. (Opponents warned the wording of the document made it possible for the Pope to be elected president and for the capital of the country to be relocated to China.) New Netherlanders refused to vote on it at all until Congress agreed to add thirteen amendments modeled on the civil liberties enumerated in the Articles of Capitulation on the Reduction of New Netherland, which the Dutch had brokered before turning the colony over to England in 1664. The people of New Netherland had lived under the arbitrary rule of distant powers for a very long time and wanted assurances their tolerant approach to religion and freedom of inquiry would not be trampled on by a new empire. Had the Congress not agreed to these demands by passing the Bill of Rights, the United States would probably not have lived to see its tenth birthday.
¹¹

A close examination of the geographical distribution of the voting results at the various state ratifying conventions reveals a split along national lines. Delegates from Yankee areas, including those in the northern part of Pennsylvania and on eastern Long Island, generally supported the constitutional changes. They were joined by delegates representing New Netherlanders, Midlanders, Deep Southerners, and Tidewaterites. Opposing them were the people of Appalachia (whose delegates rejected the Constitution everywhere save Virginia) along with Scots-Irish enclaves in New Hampshire, the farmers whose rebellion had been crushed in western Massachusetts, and disgruntled Yankee and Scots-Irish farmers in upstate New York. The vote in New York State was a cliffhanger, prompting New Netherlanders to threaten to secede and join the new union on their own if delegates from the Yankee interior counties did not ratify the new constitution. The effects on “the islands of [Manhattan], Long Island, and Staten Island will be almost ruinous,” one editorialist warned. “If Staten Island were to associate herself with New Jersey and the islands of New York and Long Island with Connecticut, these two respectable states and the new union would be bound to defend them.” In the end the threats likely won the day. On July 26, 1788, New York accepted the new constitution by a vote of 30 delegates to 27, ensuring the practical existence of the new union.
¹²

In the end, the U.S. Constitution was the product of a messy compromise among the rival nations. From the gentry of Tidewater and the Deep South, we received a strong president to be selected by an “electoral college” rather than elected by ordinary people. From New Netherland we received the Bill of Rights, a set of very Dutch guarantees that individuals would have freedom of conscience, speech, religion, and assembly. To the Midlands we owe the fact that we do not have a strong unitary state under a British-style national Parliament; they insisted on state sovereignty as insurance against Southern despots and Yankee meddling. The Yankees ensured that small states would have an equal say in the Senate, with even the very populous state of Massachusetts frustrating Tidewater and the Deep South's desire for proportional representation in that chamber; Yankees also forced a compromise whereby slave lords would be able to count only three-fifths of their slave population when tabulating how many congressmen they would receive. People who aren't allowed to vote, went the very Yankee reasoning, were not really being represented, and that fact ought to be reflected in the apportionment of congressional delegates.
¹³

The uneasy alliance this new federation represented could not help but be a volatile one, and it would soon face two powerful secession movements that threatened to tear it apart, first from Appalachia, then from Yankeedom.

CHAPTER 13

I
f you're an American, have you ever really asked yourself why Canada exists? When the American Revolution came about, why did only thirteen rather than eighteen North American colonies wind up revolting? Why would the young colony of Nova Scotia be any more committed to the British Empire than the young colony of Georgia? And why would the people of New France, recently conquered by the British, not be eager to throw off their occupiers and become a sovereign state or states? As with their neighbors to the south, the answer has everything to do with the respective parties' cultures and what they thought was the best way to ensure their survival.

Some people in what we now call the Canadian Maritimes did in fact revolt, and virtually all who did so were newcomers from New England who viewed the region as an extension of Yankeedom. In 1775 half of the 23,000 European Americans living in what is now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were Yankees, who re-created the New England communities they'd left behind, with strong town governments and equitably distributed farmland. The Yankee fishermen of Cape Sable, at the far western end of Nova Scotia, were completely oriented toward Boston across the Gulf of Maine and barely acknowledged the jurisdiction of British authorities based in the new village of Halifax. In the words of Nova Scotia historian John Bartlet Brebner, the Yankees “laid the abiding foundations of Nova Scotian life,” by influencing “the Loyalists and other subsequent immigrants to produce an amalgam far more similar to New Hampshire and Maine than to the other Loyalist refuge,” Ontario. When the revolution broke out, Yankee settlers refused to fight their brethren and successfully petitioned the Nova Scotia Assembly to be excused from militia service. The settlers of eastern Passamaquoddy Bay (in today's New Brunswick) asked the Continental Congress to admit them into the revolutionary alliance, while those in the St. John Valley petitioned Massachusetts to annex and protect them. The representatives of Yankee settlements on the Nova Scotia peninsula stopped showing up at meetings of their provincial legislature, while British officers warned their superiors that much of the populace would support a rebel invasion. Yankees in both Maine and the Maritimes petitioned George Washington to endorse a 1775 invasion plan, but the general declined to divert scant resources from his siege of Boston. Any hope of an uprising ended with the arrival of massive British reinforcements in Halifax in April 1776. But, as we will see, the dominant culture of the Maritimes has remained Yankee to the present.
¹

New France presented a surprisingly similar picture. The province of Acadia couldn't participate in any rebellion because the British had wiped it clean off the map and cleansed most of its Francophone population at the start of the Seven Years' War. (Thousands of these displaced people wound up in the swamps of southern Louisiana, which was still controlled by France at the time; to this day, these Cajuns retain key cultural characteristics of New France.) Québec, however, was simply too populous for ethnic cleansing, and at a 1763 peace conference, Britain guaranteed its 70,000 people the freedom to speak French and practice Catholicism. Thus the core of New France survived the British takeover—and, indeed, the centuries since—with its culture essentially intact. As the American Revolution got under way, nobody was entirely certain where Québécois loyalties would lie.
²

Québec, unlike Nova Scotia, was considered strategically vital by General Washington's staff. After the British abandoned Boston, Yankee-dominated units of the Continental Army invaded the sprawling colony from two fronts in the winter of 1775–1776. The New French made no effort to defend the British-controlled colony and thousands greeted the New Englanders as liberators. “Our yoke is broke,” a group of Montrealers proclaimed as American forces entered the city. “A glorious liberty, long wished for, has now arrived and which we will now enjoy, assuring our sister colonies . . . of our real and unfeigned satisfaction at our happy union.” Hundreds of Québécois joined the rebel army, forming two Canadian regiments, one of which fought through the entire war, even in campaigns far to the south. A foundry at Trois Rivières churned out mortars and ordnance to help the invading army lay siege to Québec City. Unfortunately, perhaps, for the Québécois, the siege did not succeed, and in May 1776 Yankee forces beat a retreat in the face of British reinforcements. They made few friends along the way, stealing supplies from
habitants
at bayonet point or paying for them in near-worthless paper currency. By the time the last New Englanders left Québec, few were sad to see them go.

Two centuries would pass before New France would again have independence within its grasp.
³

 

From the time of Canada's creation and right up into the 1970s, generations of Canadians were brought up on the “Loyalist Myth,” the assertion that their country's identity sprang from the politics, attitudes, and values of the 28,000 refugees who fled there at the end of the American Revolution. The loyalists were cast as heroic and honorable British subjects who'd been driven from their homes by violent, uncouth American mobs simply because they'd refused to commit treason against king and country. Arriving after much suffering, they founded a more civilized society on the firm foundations of hierarchy, order, and deference to authority. Proud of their Britishness and their place in the empire, the loyalists built the North America that should have been, a pleasant and law-abiding land, whose people were committed to a higher communal purpose than simply letting the most rugged individual take all. The Loyalist Myth defined Canada and Canadians as fundamentally British and proudly un-American. The first assertion was almost entirely false and the second not entirely true.

The truth is that the loyalist refugees did not succeed in laying down the cultural DNA of English-speaking Canada and completely failed to displace that of New France. Their efforts to create a British imperial utopia in the Canadian Maritimes failed to supplant the Yankee and New French precedents in the region, particularly as the area continued to be profoundly influenced by neighboring New England and Québec. Their project in Ontario faltered on account of the fact that the vast majority of “loyalists” who migrated there weren't British at all but rather Germans, Quakers, and Dutch from the Midlands, and New Netherland. While imperial officials kept a firm hand on Anglo-Canada's political development, its dominant cultural inheritance was Yankee to the east of Québec, and Midlander to the west.

The loyalist effort came closest to succeeding in the Maritimes, where an entirely new colony was carved out of Nova Scotia as a haven for the massive wave of civilian refugees and vanquished militia forces fleeing the rebel colonies. New Brunswick, named in honor of King George III (of the House of Brunswick), came into being precisely because refugee leaders regarded Nova Scotia as being under Yankee and republican influences. “They have experienced every possible injury from the old inhabitants of Nova Scotia, who are even more disaffected towards the British Government than any of the new States ever were,” Baron Thomas Dundas reported to his superiors from Saint John in 1786, adding that the “old inhabitants” of the new territory were “a despicable race.” The loyalists had reason to hope they would overwhelm the Yankees by force of numbers; in 1783, 13,500 emigrated to what is now Nova Scotia, almost doubling the population there, while 14,500 moved to what would become New Brunswick, where they outnumbered the despicable old settlers five to one. But the Yankees had something the loyalists did not: a unified and cohesive culture buttressed by easy access to Maine and Massachusetts just across the St. Croix River and the Gulf of Maine. The same could be said of the 1,600 or so remnant French Acadians in the north and east of New Brunswick who benefited from immediate access to Québec.
⁴