O Canada, O Canada

There is a great line in the movie Paint Your Wagons where Ben Rumson is discussing ethics with his partner, Clint Eastwood.  “I’ve coveted my neighbor’s wife whenever I had a neighbor and whenever he had a wife.”

This pretty much encapsulates America’s view on territorial expansion.  Far more often than is comfortable to recount, America has desired a little elbow room.  Call it empire building or manifest destiny, or whatever you like, but at one time or another America has seriously considered annexing all of North America and even parts further south.  

President Polk wanted to try Nicholas Trist—our negotiator to peacefully settle the Mexican-American War—for only acquiring California, Texas, and the rest of the Southwest to end an unjust war we started.  Polk thought such a puny settlement was treason, as he had wanted all of Mexico, at the very least.

Congress has at various times discussed annexing Cuba and the Dominican Republic, as well as making a state out of Puerto Rico.  One senator even took to the floor to make an impassioned speech that once the US flag had started “it’s march southward, it was inevitable that it would reach the southernmost tip of Argentina”.  And we have indeed invaded southward more often than most Americans realize.  The U.S. has invaded Mexico so many that times I’m kind of surprised our neighbors to the south aren’t the ones insisting on a wall.  We even invaded Mexico once with a streetcar.  

America has occasionally glanced northward with a little envy, too.  Everyone remembers the War of 1812, but that wasn’t the only time we tried to wrest Canada away from Great Britain.  

During the Civil War, both the North and the South tried to curry the favor of Great Britain.  The South desperately needed the English to continue to buy its cotton, to officially recognize the Confederate States of America, and perhaps most of all, to use the powerful British navy to keep Southern ports open for trade.  When the war started, the pitiful US Navy was more of a threat to itself than to any potential enemy.

The North, on the other hand, desperately wanted the English to stay neutral and not recognize the South.  As long as the Brits didn’t formally recognize the Confederacy, the merchants of England were forbidden by international treaty from selling military goods to the South.  Since establishing a naval blockade of Confederate ports was a major part of the North’s strategy, if the South could continue to export its cotton and import necessary military supplies, the chances of the South being successful in the war improved enormously.

If the South had really wanted to win, say if it were really focused on issues like state’s rights….All it had to do to gain British recognition was to abolish slavery.  Great Britain had fought the slave trade around the world and was never going to recognize the South until it emancipated its slaves.  And freed slaves could have been enticed to enlist and help relieve the manpower shortage hindering the Southern Army.  You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d almost think the South was just fighting to preserve slavery…

The Confederates couldn’t buy war goods from England, but they could buy non-military supplies.  Of course, there was the small problem of getting anything past that the growing number of Yankee ships guarding every port, making blockade running possible only if you had a sea captain with the skills of a Rhett Butler.  

Still, the South could purchase goods that weren’t going to be sent home...Say, a large, fast ship that had no cannons, but had empty gun ports, could be sailed to a different country where Confederate gold might buy black market cannons that could turn a peaceful ship into a powerful and fast warship.  Technically, the British merchants weren’t breaking any laws, just bending the crap out of them.  

Great Britain did everything it could to help the Confederacy without technically violating its neutrality.  It didn’t take a genius to see that the United States was growing more powerful with every passing year, and the prospect of splitting America into two nations would help assuage England’s growing fear of an enfant terrible just across the Atlantic Ocean.

So, the Confederacy bought ships in England, sailed them to the Azores and refitted them with cannons, turning fast merchant ships into warships.  These auxiliary cruisers or commerce raiders, like the CSS Alabama (right), were very successful in attacking unarmed Northern merchant ships.  In its first 21 months after being launched in England, the Alabama cruised 75K miles and took 64 Northern ships worth more than $6.5 million.  All this happened without its ever once getting within 100 miles of the South, much less the state of Alabama.  The Alabama was the most successful commerce raider among the small fleet the South developed using this same method.  The  US Navy was thus forced to divert ships from the blockade to patrol shipping lanes around the world.

After the end of the Civil War, the United States was a little angry with a few nations.  It was angry with France for violating the Monroe Doctrine and seizing Mexico while we were a little busy killing each other.  President Johnson sent 50,000 troops to the Southern border and suddenly Napoleon III decided to pull his troops out of Mexico.

Besides France, America was also a little peeved at Great Britain, for having sold the Confederacy ships that any fool would have known the South would convert to warships.  In the case of the Alabama, the American ambassador to England, Charles Francis Adams, son and grandson of American presidents—had explicitly warned Prime Minister Lord Palmerston not to allow the ship to be was Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  Sumner demanded that Britain not only pay for the loss of the ships and cargo, but pay punitive damages for extending the Civil War and increasing the number of Americans who died.  For this, Sumner demanded that Great Britain pay $2 billion! 

Today, Washington throws money around in large denominations—a billion here, a trillion there—but in 1869, this was not only more money that Great Britain would pay, it was more than she could pay.  Senator Sumner understood this and had a simple solution—the United States would accept Canada in lieu of a cash payment.  

This was not quite as insane as it sounds.  Remember, just twenty years earlier, we had accepted California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and a chunk of Oregon in payment of a debt that Mexico didn’t really owe us.  And though a decade earlier, we could not have militarily enforced such a measure, after the Civil War, we momentarily had the largest navy and the most powerful army on Earth.  True, our navy was mostly a coastal defense force, but Canada was just up the coast.

The idea was popular with a number of politicians, even drawing the support of Secretary of State William H. Seward, who had just finished purchasing Alaska from Russia, and when it came to northern territories, Seward obviously wanted to collect the whole set.

The situation might have resulted in a war, but several things occurred that cooled down the situation.  First, the United States rapidly de-militarized, mothballing ships and disbanding army units.  By the middle of the 1870’s, the US Army was down to 17,500 men, making it slightly smaller than the Bulgarian army (or to put this in more modern terms, roughly equal to the number of servicemen that today are stationed in Anchorage, Alaska).  After the horrors of the Civil War, the American people were in no mood to fight a country in Europe.

In 1871, the United States and Great Britain signed the Washington Treaty, in which England paid $15 million to settle claims.  This is generally recognized as the beginning the “special relationship” between the two countries.  Since then, the United States has abandoned any plans to annex our northern neighbor.

For now.