How the Thirteen Colonies Tried—and Failed—to Convince Canada to Side With Them During the American Revolution

After peaceful attempts at alliance-building stalled, the Continental Army launched an ill-fated invasion of Quebec in June 1775

Eli Wizevich - History Correspondent

May 12, 2025

Get our newsletter!

Get our newsletter!

The first governing document of the United States of America offered Canada a deal. Adopted by the Continental Congress in 1777, the Articles of Confederation stated that Canada—then a British colony—“shall be admitted into, and entitled to all the advantages of this union,” at any time, no questions asked. All other colonies that wished to join the nascent nation would have to get approval from 9 of the U.S.’s 13 states.

Canada, of course, never took the U.S. up on its offer. Still, the proposal was no whim of statecraft. Instead, it was part of a prolonged effort during and after the Revolutionary War to convince Canadians to buy into a future free from British dominion.

In 1775, two years before the Articles of Confederation offered Canada statehood, American persuasion took a more aggressive shape. After months of failing to peaceably convince Canadians to join the rebellion against the British, the Continental Army began the supposedly friendly invasion of Quebec. The goal, wrote the army’s commander, George Washington, in his “Address to the Inhabitants of Canada,” was “not to plunder, but to protect you.”

Early successes for the Continental Army faltered in the face of a dramatic defeat at Quebec City’s heavily fortified citadel on New Year’s Eve, effectively ending the first foreign invasion by the Thirteen Colonies just months after it began.

In subsequent centuries, the failed Quebec campaign became little more than a strange—and largely forgotten—episode from the shaky first year of the war. As historian Mark R. Anderson writes in The Battle for the Fourteenth Colony: America’s War of Liberation in Canada, 1774-1776, scholars have tended to relegate it to the footnotes because it does “not fit comfortably in either country’s national narrative.”

But the invasion of Quebec is anything but irrelevant to the creation of the U.S. and the formation of modern Canadian identity. As the 250th anniversary of the military campaign approaches, it’s worth pulling the history back out of the footnotes.

Why the patriots wanted Quebec to join their revolution

After Great Britain emerged victorious in the French and Indian War, a clash with France over territory in North America, in 1763, it faced a difficult task: managing Quebec, a sprawling former French colony where the Catholic majority had little in common with their new Protestant rulers. To heal the wounds of the war and streamline governance, the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act in 1774. The legislation’s compromises were significant. The criminal law code became British, while civil and property law in the province continued to follow the French model. The act largely preserved Quebec’s feudal land distribution system, and it allowed residents the right to freely practice “the religion of the Church of Rome,” so long as they stayed loyal foremost to Britain’s king, George III.

The act’s most controversial reform, however, was expanding the official boundary of Quebec to the Ohio River Valley, which conflicted with prominent American colonists’ property interests and their hopes of expanding on the Western frontier. Many residents of the lower Thirteen Colonies took the Quebec Act as yet another instance of “ministerial tyranny” akin to the Coercive Acts, which were passed that same year to punish Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party and other incidents of unrest in the city, as Anderson tells Smithsonian magazine.

This line of thinking goes some way in explaining why the delegates of the First Continental Congress wholeheartedly condemned the Quebec Act—and Quebec itself—in September 1774 as “dangerous in an extreme degree to the Protestant religion and to the civil rights and liberties of all America.”

But just a month later, in what Holly A. Mayer, an emeritus historian at Duquesne University, calls a “tremendous flip,” the delegates started trying to court French Canadians to join their anti-British crusade instead.

In a letter, the delegates impelled their “friends and fellow subjects” to join them in demanding self-government and other rights from their British rulers. Quebec, they wrote, was “the only link wanting to complete the bright and strong chain of union.” Where religious differences once threatened enmity, the delegates were now convinced that both sides were “above all such low-minded infirmities.” If Switzerland had Catholic and Protestant communities living in “the utmost concord and peace,” the letter’s authors mused, so could the United Colonies, as the not-yet-independent proto-state was then called.

The reason for this remarkable switch in attitude was the delegates’ realization that having a heavyweight colony like Quebec on their side would amplify the American Colonies’ protests against British tyranny. It would also mean that British troops couldn’t crush the rebellion from the north. “Exigency sparked enlightenment,” Mayer tells Smithsonian.

John Brown's Letter From Montreal - March 29, 1775 - REAL TIME REVOLUTION™

Watch on

The letter ended with an invitation for Quebec to send delegates to the next Continental Congress, which was slated to be held in May 1775. But the request was untenable. In late March, John Brown, a diplomat dispatched to Montreal, reported in a letter to two prominent Bostonians, Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren, that there was “no prospect” of Canada sending delegates. Caught between their British rulers and the excitable rebels, Quebec’s residents, also known as Quebecois, “chose rather to stand neuter.”

That position of neutrality largely reflected how effective the Quebec Act was in placing “important guardrails” up against dissidence in the province, says Anderson. The act successfully placated the leaders of Quebec’s religious, legal and economic institutions, while also indicating to ordinary French Canadians that their rights and privileges could be best expanded under the slow but steady progress of British ministerial reform—not by joining the patriots’ fledgling revolt.

The capture of Fort Ticonderoga and the road to war

The patriots, on the other hand, had lost faith in reform or a peaceful resolution to their differences with the British. In April 1775, the Battles of Lexington and Concord officially started the American Revolution, resulting, dramatically, in the patriots’ siege of Boston. While rebel militiamen pinned British troops in innermost Boston, their artillery couldn’t pierce the city’s British strongholds.

In his letter, Brown had already advised that Fort Ticonderoga, a British stronghold located on the shores of Lake Champlain in northern New York, “must be seized as soon as possible” to defend against British incursions from the north.

Despite being “a critical juncture point in the waterways” between the American Colonies and Canada, the fort was often garrisoned with as few as 15 British regulars (a common synonym for redcoat at the time), Matthew Keagle, the curator who oversees programming at the Fort Ticonderoga historic site, tells Smithsonian. Because its long-range artillery was believed to be crucial for the liberation of Boston, the fort became exceedingly tempting to raid.

Acting on Brown’s intelligence, men led by Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen, including members of the Green Mountain Boys militia, “just roar[ed] into the fort” on May 10 and routed the British with no bloodshed, Keagle says.

To justify the siege of Ticonderoga, as well as several impulsive raids conducted by the patriots across the border in Quebec, without inciting outright war, the Continental Congress framed the events as “dictated by the great law of self-preservation” in yet another blustery letter to the “oppressed inhabitants of Canada.”

“We presume you will not, by doing us injury, reduce us to the disagreeable necessity of treating you as enemies,” the delegates warned the Canadians. At the same time, Quebec’s governor, Guy Carleton, amassed British troops at the nearby Fort St.-Jean and tried—without much success—to draw Native American tribes and rank-and-file French Canadians onto the British side, should an invasion occur.

After the British victory at Bunker Hill in June, the conflict between the rebels and the redcoats rapidly expanded. Later that month, Congress authorized Major General Philip John Schuyler to establish a northern army division and investigate the possibility of invading Canada, especially “if it can be done in a manner agreeable to the Canadians,” a leading Virginia statesman wrote in a letter to Washington. The patriots remained ever hopeful that Quebec would become a 14th rebellious colony.

An invasion “not to plunder, but to protect”

Not long after giving Schuyler an army, Congress went into recess until mid-September. Skirmishes along the border ratcheted up the pressure to act against Canada, but Schuyler held steady, slowly gathering men, supplies and intelligence at Ticonderoga for an invasion that now only he could initiate.

In late August, Schuyler belatedly learned that Washington was preparing a second prong of attack, which would depart from Massachusetts and make its way north through the wilds of Maine and Quebec under Arnold’s command.

Around that same time, Schuyler was called down to Albany to help negotiate a treaty with a group of Native Americans, leaving Brigadier General Richard Montgomery in charge of his forces. Feeling pressured by Arnold’s army, Montgomery launched the invasion in response to British ship activity near Lake Champlain. Without Congress to provide centralized planning, “forethought or follow-through,” Anderson says, the invasion began on the basis of its own weighty anticipation and seemingly unstoppable momentum.

That momentum carried Montgomery’s troops up the Richelieu Valley and deposited them at the British Fort St.-Jean. Starting on September 17, the grinding siege of the fort lasted until early November—far longer than anyone expected. When it finally broke, the invaders had a clear path to Montreal, but winter was closing in, smallpox was spreading, and supplies were dwindling. The Northern Army was still on its own.

Arnold’s troops slogged through the mud, snow and dense forests of Maine, making as little as four or five miles of progress on some days. “Marched through hideous woods and mountains for the most part, but sometimes on the banks of the river, which is very rapid,” James Melvin, a private on the expedition, wrote in his journal on October 21. Supplies were perennially low. The men resorted to eating birds, squirrels and even their own dogs.

As they emerged from the unsettled woodlands, the troops found salvation on the French farms of southern Quebec. “This evening, to our great joy,” Melvin wrote on November 2, “we arrived at the first French house where was provision ready for us.” Friendly Quebecois furnished the soldiers with lodging and oxen, though whether this hospitality was the result of opportunism, genuine support for the invasion or fear of the armed men is unclear.

Not all locals were eager to join Washington’s “trueborn sons of America,” as the founding father referred to the patriots in his “Address to the Inhabitants of Canada.” The invasion had quickly reframed Quebec’s social divide. No longer was it “new subjects versus old subjects,” Mayer says. Instead, it shifted to fit the wartime paradigm of loyalists and patriots. Some Quebecois housed troops or joined pro-patriot militias; others joined the British in firing muskets and artillery at the men invading their homeland and plundering their homesteads.

With or without Quebecois support, the British continually failed to muster effective resistance against the Continental Army. In attack after attack, the British were caught on the back foot, unable to “mount a cohesive defense,” says James Taub, a curator at the Museum of the American Revolution. As Montgomery’s troops menaced Montreal, Carleton abandoned his seat of governance at the Chateau Ramezay and gave up the city without a fight.

This retreat, says André Delisle, director of the historic site and museum at the chateau, was a strategic decision for Carleton and the British, who regrouped to make a final stand in the capital of Quebec City. Montgomery kept on their trail, soon leaving Montreal in the hands of General David Wooster and marching up the St. Lawrence River to meet Arnold.

Wooster struggled to govern Montreal’s divided citizens and often erred on the side of tyranny. A widely cited story suggests he ordered all Catholic churches closed on Christmas Eve on the grounds that they were loyalist breeding grounds, but the evidence supporting this claim is scant.

The easy takeover of the city cheered Continental troops into thinking that Quebec City, the last bastion of British control in the province, was but the final victory in an inevitable chain of conquests. Those early successes, however, concealed deep flaws in the invading armies’ strategy.

The delayed launch of the initial invasion, coupled with the slow conquest of Fort St.-Jean and Arnold’s slog through Maine, pushed the campaign deeper into the winter than intended, eating into supplies, morale and time before the St. Lawrence thawed and allowed British reinforcements to enter Quebec. “The Northern Army was a hollow shell, weak in numbers, decimated by smallpox, with troops yearning to depart the moment their enlistments were complete,” Anderson writes in his book. With troop enlistments ending on New Year’s Day in 1776, Montgomery and Arnold opted to force an assault on Quebec City as soon as possible, rather than wait out the winter.

How the invasion of Canada backfired on the patriots

Congress, for its part, was all but absent in orchestrating the war effort in faraway Canada. Instead, the governing body focused on major battles in Virginia, South Carolina and Boston, which was still under siege. Lacking a grand strategy for taking Quebec City, the siege scheduled for the early hours of New Year’s Eve in 1775 fluidly morphed into what Mayer describes as a “total and complete wreck.”

Melvin, the private in Arnold’s contingent, recorded the logistical debacle in his journal. “About four in the morning, [we] were mustered, in order to storm the town; it snowed and stormed, and was very dark,” he wrote. “Our company had not timely notice of the attack, which occasioned us to be too late, for when the firing began, we had a mile and a half to march.”

Almost as soon as the Continental Army charged Quebec City’s ramparts, a British cannon blast killed Montgomery, his aide-de-camp and about a dozen other men. Then Arnold’s forces rushed in, and, once again, a shot from the fortress walls cut down their commander, who staggered away with an injured leg. “Don’t give up! Go on, boys! Go on, boys!” Arnold reportedly shouted as his blood stained the snow. But his men were doomed anyway. Of the roughly 500 soldiers in his contingent, 35 were killed, 33 were wounded and 372, including Melvin, were captured in the failed assault.

Beyond these critical losses of manpower and life, it is difficult to overstate the immense strategic disappointment represented by the battle for Quebec City. If the Continental Army had been successful, Keagle says, “there was little more to hold onto for the British.” Instead, the patriots had allowed Britain to regain a foothold in the province. The empire’s forces just had to wait out the winter as the patriots slinked back south.

Congress sent high-profile figures like Benjamin Franklin up to Chateau Ramezay to make further appeals to the Canadians, but these efforts were unsuccessful. The Continental Army retreated from Montreal and its environs in June 1776, after British reinforcements from the north began recapturing the province.

Why didn't Canada join the American Revolution? (Short Animated Documentary)

Watch on

Congress officially blamed the defeat on enlistment difficulties, a general lack of funds and widespread smallpox—three “politically palatable” reasons that obfuscated real strategic failures and ideological missteps, says Anderson. Other duties, like fighting ongoing battles and declaring independence, were at least in part to blame for Congress’ unwillingness to investigate deeper causes of the defeat at the time. But for some delegates, the reasons were obvious.

In a private letter, John Adams enumerated eight “causes of our misfortunes and miscarriages in Canada,” though he complained that the reasons were “so numerous [and] of so long standing and … so incessantly increasing that it would take a long letter to develop them.” At the top of Adams’ list was “the diversity of sentiments in Congress,” a general disunity about the aims and means of the invasion. While he acknowledged the role of smallpox, he also cited intelligence failures and poor planning for a gargantuan war effort.

Still, Adams failed to outright ask the most important questions: Were Canadians ever willing to join the rebellious Thirteen Colonies? Would an invasion have ever convinced them?

In the immediate aftermath of the Quebec misadventure, the answers should have been obvious. But even after the American Colonies secured their own independence with the Revolutionary War’s end in 1783, they weren’t dissuaded from trying to pull Canada into the Union. Thirty-eight years after the first failed invasion, in the second year of the War of 1812, American troops marched into Canada and burned down the Legislative Assembly in York (now Toronto). The attempt to seize British-held territory was, once again, “pretty much a disaster from the beginning to the end,” wrote historian Gordon S. Wood in the New York Review of Books in 2012.

With the lessons of Quebec never truly learned, America’s mistakes compounded. As Anderson argues in his book, “American liberators sought to bring their own concepts of freedom to a foreign culture: to a people with a starkly contrasting worldview and to a society inextricably welded to a seemingly antagonistic religion and lacking a tradition of popular rule.”

Whether Canadians ever would have joined the American Revolution en masse is doubtful. But invading Quebec as a persuasive tactic ultimately backfired on the patriots. Defending Quebec forced French Canadians, British soldiers and other loyalists to fight alongside one another. “It’s one of these early stages of what becomes modern Canadian identity,” Taub explains. “The American invasion seems to unify divided Canadians.” After 250 years, that resolve appears to be unshaken.

Eli Wizevich | | Read More

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.