Forgotten Partnership Redux: Canada-U.S. Relations in the 21st C ...

a nation that is culturally similar and that has largely the same political and societal values. Early American statesmen grasped the point when President Washington warned against undue affection for foreign powers (Britain or France) and secretary of state John Quincy Adams urged his colleagues in the American government not to allow their country “to come in as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war” (Adams, 1823).¹ Affection or preference, as Adams saw, could breed dependence.

Such was the Canadian case. Canada was by definition a dependent part of the empire, and in law remained so until the 1920s or 1930s. British law finally recognized Canada as a sovereign country in 1931, but in theory and practice it remained very uncertain whether Canada could remain neutral if Great Britain were to go to war. That question was finally resolved only by discrete declarations of war in 1939—separated by seven days. In return, the British Empire protected Canada, not least from the United States. The War of 1812 demonstrated British power, and it nearly became a lesson in bankruptcy for the American government. This was hard power at work (Taylor, 2010; Collins, 2010, p. 342).² There were other lessons, too. As an exercise in conquest or the political absorption of Canada by the United States, the war was a notable failure. Many Americans came to see it as an attack on a kindred people—a strategic and military failure, but also a moral one (Craig, 1955, p. 33; Doran, 1984, pp. 41–42).³

Prudent American diplomacy during the Canadian rebellions of 1837–1838, in the Aroostook war of 1838–1839, and in the Oregon dispute in the 1840s, may have reflected recognition of British power grounded in recent experience, as well as respect for international law and a preoccupation with the growing political crisis between North and South (Howe, 2007, pp. 517–519, 715–719). The pacific settlement of the potentially incendiary Fenian raids of the 1860s was reached in large part because of the existing tradition of sane and prudent management of Anglo-American relations: The resemblances between Secretary of State Seward’s diplomacy in 1866 and his earlier conduct as governor of New York in 1837 are marked (Vronsky, 2010).⁴