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Canadians in the mid-19th century harboured no particular ill-will towards the United States. Then, as now, trade with the U.S. was a cornerstone of the Canadian economy. Several Fathers of Confederation had lived for extended periods in American cities.
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Records of the Confederation debates don’t contain a single denunciation of the United States, or wish for its destruction.
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“I know myself I have not a particle of prejudice against the United States; on the contrary, I am bound to declare that many things in the constitution and the people I sincerely esteem and admire,” McGee declared in 1862.
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McGee even recoiled at declarations that the United States was a failure. Such sentiments “ought to be frowned down, wherever it appears, by the Canadian public,” he said in 1861.
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Macdonald said much the same. Even when he was slamming the flaws of the U.S. Constitution, Macdonald still praised it as “one of the most skillful works which human intelligence ever created … one of the most perfect organizations that ever governed a free people.”
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But these same Canadians also had no problem articulating why they personally didn’t want to live under the Stars and Stripes.
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It’s easy for modern Americans to see themselves as the freer, more conservative alternative to Canada. But the first generation of Canadians saw it exactly the other way around.
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The United States, as they saw it, was a radical experiment in mob rule plagued by political and civic corruption.
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In 1849, after a small annexationist movement emerged in Montreal, the Montreal Gazette saw fit to issue a lengthy condemnation of the sicknesses of U.S. society.
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“The numerous defalcations both in public and private offices in the U.S. shew something very far from perfection in the morale of Society,” it read, adding that the United States was plagued by a “dreadful catalogue of crimes of every description.”
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Canada was not only safer and more virtuous, but its parliaments “shine with superior lustre and rise in proud preeminence with most of the popular legislative bodies of the separate States.”
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Canadians of the era were also known to recoil at the perceived godlessness of the U.S. political class.
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Also in 1849, a Toronto newspaper reacted with horror that then U.S. president James Polk had only been baptized on his deathbed. “How is it that the people of the United States suffered themselves to remain in this ignorance of the religious position of their Chief Magistrate? The anomaly must bring disgrace with it.”
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Canada’s founding generation was also quick to note the American penchant to speak loudly of liberty while holding millions in bondage, slavery having been phased out by the British Empire a generation prior.
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Father of Confederation George Brown had spent years as a stolid abolitionist, and he would come to believe that America’s central mistake was in becoming a republic.
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“We … are forcibly led to the conclusion that Republican Institutions are not favourable to genuine liberty,” he wrote.
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And the 1860s would become a particularly easy time to make the argument that the American system had failed, given that it had dissolved into full-blown civil war.
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Throughout the early 19th century, British North America had experienced occasional bouts of annexationist sentiment, usually from business leaders covetous of the larger U.S. market. French-Canadian nationalists were even known to flirt with the idea that their rights would be better protected under American rule.
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But these all screeched to a halt the moment American soldiers were killing each other at the rate of 500 per day.
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