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Originally Posted by MonctonRad
The Webster-Ashburton Treaty gave all of northern Maine to the Americans. If this had not been the case, the Maritimes would not have been nearly as geographically isolated from central Canada. It's interesting to speculate how this might have changed the economy of the Maritimes in general (and NB in particular).  |
The British-controlled area also should have extended to the Penobscot river, where Bangor is today. The border was very nearly a much more sensible straight-ish line extending east from the southern tip of Quebec.
The situation in Maine fit the age-old theme of colonials fighting tooth and nail over regionally important gains which were then used as bargaining chips in a wider imperial strategy. This is part of what precipitated the American Revolution in the first place; New Englanders fought hard to take over Louisbourg and Cape Breton and then Britain turned around and traded it back to France in exchange for colonies on the other side of the planet.
These trades also had the effect of making colonial warfare more destructive because there was an incentive to make sure there was nothing left to trade back.
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Alternatively, a little known chapter of the Revolutionary War is the Eddy Rebellion. Jonathan Eddy was a planter with revolutionary sympathies who obtained a letter of support from George Washington to try and sway Nova Scotia to the separatist cause. In 1776, he and a group of sympathizers launched an attack on Fort Cumberland (formerly Fort Beausejour) near Sackville NB. They very nearly took the fort, which would have allowed them to control land access to peninsular NS, and have given them a base of operations to continue to harry British forces in the Maritimes. If they had ultimately been successful, NS (and NB) might now belong to the USA.
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Maybe it would have had an effect in the "butterfly flapping its wings" sense but back in those days the ithsmus was not very important because land travel was so challenging. It took people months to get from Massachusetts to peninsular Nova Scotia by land, and there were only a few small roads. The British had naval control of the area so running an effective rebellion would have been hard.
Eddy had about 400 rebels at Fort Cumberland but they were dispersed by a single ship. In that same year there were more than 10,000 soldiers in Halifax and there would have been dozens of British ships. Once key areas like New York were clearly lost the British forces assembled in Halifax and completely swamped the local population. George Washington wrote a number of letters about how he would have liked to invade Nova Scotia (and wipe Halifax off the map completely), but did not find it strategically possible.
One interesting aspect of the rebellion in the Maritimes which I didn't realize was that participation didn't fall down along clear Old World vs. colonial lines. There was limited interest among the Planters who originally came from New England, but many of the rebels were Irish immigrants (including one of Nova Scotia's future attorney generals, Richard John Uniacke). In a lot of cases it may have had more to do with how individuals did under British colonial rule. If they were well-connected they tended to support the old order, and if they were not or saw an opportunity for more wealth and power without the British around then they tended to support the revolution. Somewhat similar today, but a lot more extreme.