The Battle for the Fourteenth Colony: America's War of Liberation in Canada, 1774–1776Mark R.Anderson. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2013.

Abstract

The Battle for the Fourteenth Colony: America's War of Liberation in Canada, 1774-1776 Mark R. Anderson. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2013.Mark R. Anderson is an independent scholar who served as a military planner for the United States Air Force during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He brings insight from this experience into his analysis of an earlier war of liberation. The American campaign in Canada has received comparatively little attention from American and Canadian historians. For Americans, the military operations in Canada during the first year of the Revolution proved to be a strategic deadend. Boldly conceived, the American assault on British interests along the St. Lawrence River ended in a fiasco, with demoralized Continental troops being chased out of the country by a large army that soon threatened to invade the United States. For Canadians, the American incursion did not provoke the nationmaking resistance seen during the War of 1812. Offering little for either side to celebrate, historians have treated this episode as an abortive sideshow and moved on to greener pastures. Anderson makes a convincing case that the American war of revolution in Canada deserves to be rescued from its obscurity.Acquired by force of arms during the French and Indian War, Canada was different from the thirteen British colonies immediately to the south. The overwhelming majority of its population was French and Roman Catholic. A royal governor ruled the province, assisted by an appointive council; there was no elected legislature. As relations deteriorated with its American colonists, the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act in 1774. In many ways an admirable attempt to reconcile the Canadian French to their status as British subjects, the Quebec Act opened up opportunities for them to hold office, permitted French civil law, and recognized the preeminent position of the Catholic Church. The Quebec Act outraged the American colonists because of the favor shown Catholicism and because the boundary of Quebec was extended to include the Ohio Valley, seemingly cutting off the colonies from westward expansion. Many Anglophone Canadians were also outraged by the Quebec Act because it did not make provision for a legislature, in their eyes depriving them of their rights as Englishmen. As war broke out between the British government and the Americans, some of these Canadians were agitating against the Quebec Act. …