CHARBONNEAU – We are Americans who reject the Revolution

“HISTORICALLY, a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution,” Canadian literary critic and scholar Northrop Frye once said.

With what the USA has become, run by a fossilized kleptomaniac, Canadian Americans made the right choice.

Before there was Canada and before there was the United States, all British Colonialists were Americans.

Some Americans, a minority, planned an armed revolt against the British. It set the stage for the bloody birth of a nation. Some sane Americans remained loyal to Britain. These United Empire Loyalists fled north to what became Canada.

On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, virtually all Americans (those living in the USA) believe the revolution was the best thing that ever happened to their country, and perhaps to the whole world.

I have to wonder what flaw in the grand dream of a republic led to the election of the mad king? Were the seeds of populism there from the start? Professor David A. Wilson of the Department of History at the University of Toronto thinks so:

“The Revolution rested upon a conspiratorial version of politics that has remained a potent force in American history; it was driven not only by British policies but also by the belief of the patriot leaders that they were facing a conspiracy of power against liberty.

“More recently, the MAGA movement, like the Tea Party before it, has equated the Revolution with the politics of America First, along with hostility to the ‘tyranny’ of globalization, big government and the ‘woke politics’ of the ‘far left.’ And when supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump proclaim him as a modern-day George Washington, they mean exactly what they say.”

Like Trump, Washington’s focus was that of a nation that looked inward.

Washington never spoke out against slavery during his presidency.  No wonder. He had hundreds of slaved Blacks to maintain his plantation. During his residency in Pennsylvania, he used legal loopholes to rotate enslaved workers out of the state every six months, circumventing local abolition laws.

The Revolution did not bring an end to slavery, it entrenched it. By 1860, slavery had become deeply embedded in the Southern economy. Nearly 4 million enslaved Blacks lived in the South. Cotton was the South’s largest export, and plantation agriculture depended on enslaved labor. Many Southern leaders believed ending slavery would destroy their economy and social order.

The North, being more industrialized, could afford to act morally superior regarding slavery. Although racism existed there as well, slavery had largely disappeared, and opposition to its expansion was growing.

The differences between the North and South led to the Civil War in which 750,000 died.

The United States could have achieved independence the way Canada did through a policy of gradualism rather than violent conflict. Canada peacefully achieved independence from the British during the 1840s.

“The history of how this was achieved is commonly greeted by yawns and dismissed as quintessentially boring,” says Wilson. “But that is the very point. In its very dullness it was actually momentous – nothing less than the first example in history of peaceful decolonization. Canada would be followed by Australia and New Zealand.”

David Charbonneau is a retired TRU electronics instructor who hosts a blog at http://www.eyeviewkamloops.wordpress.com.