America's designs for creating Canada have a long history and records of political failures

Donald Trump has repeated the ghost, Canada has repeatedly recovered since his inauguration as President at a second term.

The President's rhetoric of making Canada “the 51st state” seems to project the trust, a vision of the obvious fate of the 21st century, a belief in the law and the United States' obligation.

Trump is not the first American leader to dream of the expansion of the north. For me, a historian of early US Canadian relationships, do not indicate power, but weakness and boiling departments in the United States.

The desire of the early Americans to Canada

Before independence, social conflicts contributed to turning American eyes north. In the course of the 18th century, the English colonial population in North America doubled every 25 years. Sing and indigenous people had to compete for resources, arable land and trade with indigenous people on the east coast.

These unfortunate, land -hungry colonists shone after expansion and donated a number of wars against the French and Spanish Empire to control the northeastern half of the continent, which culminated in French and Indian war from 1754 to 1763.

While these colonists were encouraged by their expansion thirst, they had otherwise united them. Many Americans are familiar with the printed cartoon Ben Franklin today, which contains a segmented snake with each section that represents one of the colonies. However, only a few recognize that it was not processed during the revolution to unite colonists against Great Britain, but in 1754 to gather British colonists in their war against France.

Great Britain ended Canada in 1763, but the empire never fully supported the colonial expansion to the north. In the 1750s and 1760s, British troops removed French colonists from Acadia in Nova Scotia and recruited thousands of colonists from neighboring New England to move north. These settlers had long imagined that the region was rich in fishing and wood as a country of opportunities. But disillusioned by the financial costs for maintaining their settlements, many of these colonists returned to Neuengland in the early 1770s.

The attempts to regulate other lands assigned by France were not more successful. The fear that colonists could provoke an expensive war with indigenous people issued the Parliament to protect the proclamation of 1763, the attempted to protect local land by discouraging colonial expansion to the west. Many colonists turned to Great Britain in response, especially those like George Washington who had speculated in the country west of Appalachian Mountains.

The failed invasion of Canada

In the earliest months of the revolution, the continental congress approved an American invasion in the British Quebec. In a letter to “friends and brothers” of Canada, Washington herself the Canadians herself to join the Canadians. “The matter of America and freedom is the cause of every virtuous American citizen,” he wrote. “Then visit generous citizens under the standard of general freedom.”

But at home, colonists were far from united at their rebellion. Historians estimate that around 20% of the white colonial population, more than 500,000 people, remained loyal to Great Britain and hoped to remain neutral.

Many soldiers have thrown the difficult realities of the conquest against the invasion of Canada. At the end of October 1775, almost a quarter of the under -fed and revised troops gave up their tedious journey through the interior of Maine to Canada under the command of the early turn coat Benedict Arnold. The soldiers who operated these deserters “could also die or meet with a catastrophe that corresponds to the cowardly, cowardly and unfriendly spirit, which they discovered without any commands.”

The more resistant troops that Quebec reached were emphatically defeated by British armed forces in December what Washington attacks future efforts to attack Canada, skeptically too skeptically.

Departments of the 19th century

After the American independence, tens of thousands of loyal colonists sailed north to Canada and determined to build British colonies, which become what one of these refugees described as the “envy of the American states”. Her presence on the competitive northern border was a worrying memory of the new American nation of the power of Great Britain, which was still exercised on the continent.

Conflict with Great Britain about land and trade in the early 1800s reopened the old divisions among the Americans. Congressman John Randolph in Virginia expressed his frustrations with renewed demands for a northern invasion. “We only have a word, like the whip coaries, but an eternal monstrous tone,” noticed an angry Randolph: “Canada! Canada! Canada!”

The debate about Canada was one of many topics that the nation share, and as President James Madison would later explain, he hoped that the war would help combine a polarized nation. His gambling paid off, but only after opponents from Neuengland flirted with the idea of ​​the secession to negotiate their own end with conflicts.

When the popular editor and columnist John O'Sullivan asked Texas and war with Mexico in 1845, he also suggested that the annexion of Canada would of course follow. The anti-expansionist reaction combined pacifists, abolitionists and a variety of religious and literary personalities who help to deepen the divisions that would lead to the civil war.

Annexion discussion in the 20th century

Trump's attitude contributed to combining Canadians and reviving Canadian nationalism. In the United States, most people seem to understand the practical hurdles to add a new state or reject the idea as a whole.

However, an example of the annexation talks from the 20th century could serve as a warning to Trump and show how aggressive rhetoric led to political defeat towards Canada. In 1911, a draft law said goodbye that created the free trade with Canada despite the objections of protections in both parties with the support of President William Taffel.

In an attempt to avert the Agreement defeated in the Canadian Parliament, US opponents tried to increase the mood of the populations against the USA in Canada from both sides of the Ganges. Champ Clark, the democratic spokesman for the house and in 1912 as the leader for the nomination of the president, seized at that moment.

“I hope to see the day on which the American flag will float about every square foot of the British North American possession that is clear to the North Pole,” said Champ on the house floor. William Stiles Bennet, a Republican, proposed a decision that would authorize the president of starting negotiations on annexation.

Her approach to the defeat of the trade agreement worked at least in Canada. In the general elections of September 1911, concerned Canadian voters the liberal party that supported free trade and the new conservative majority rejected the agreement.

At home, however, the plan fell backwards. Woodrow Wilson, not Clark, secured democratic nomination in 1912 and defeated both the incumbent taffeta and the former president Theodore Roosevelt. The unrest did not lead to success and victory, but to loss and defeat.