Stephen Maher: Trump is closer to the vision of America’s founding fathers than Canadians think
Enlightened Americans will watch in horror today as Donald Trump presides over a grotesque national birthday celebration, recoiling at the president’s kingly indulgences, seeing them as affronts to the memory of the noble patriots who established their republic 250 years ago.
That is a reasonable way to see the day if you think the revolution was a glorious triumph of human freedom, resulting in the establishment of a democratic republic governed by and for the people — but there is another way of looking at it.
Canadians have been consuming American propaganda for so long that it is natural for us to think of Trump as a vile and extraordinary exception to the rule, to see his predecessors as virtuous men governing a benevolent and dynamic society, presiding over the global transmission of democracy, hamburgers and Disney cartoons.
But that is not how ancestral Canadians saw the revolutionaries. They considered them to be terrorist lunatics, given to tarring and feathering their political opponents, torturing them in the streets, and stealing land that did not belong to them.
Generations of patriotic American historians have carefully chosen story elements to create a noble national epic from the terrible events of the squalid and desperate civil war, filling libraries with reverential biographies of their founding fathers. But the facts the Americans leave out of the story show that the rebels were largely motivated not by high-minded ideas of liberty, but by a desire to steal land.
In a way, Trump exemplifies a long American tradition. He is more vulgar than his predecessors, but his warlike ways are entirely aligned with the ambitions of the founding fathers, who dreamed of conquest and subjugation.
It’s true that the Declaration of Independence — which was adopted in Philadelphia 250 years ago today — starts with stirring words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
Those fine words were written by Thomas Jefferson, who repeatedly impregnated his daughter’s enslaved servant, Sally Hemmings, first raping her (how could she consent?) when she was a teenager. Her mother and grandmother were both enslaved women impregnated by their owners, part of a class of imprisoned concubines.
We only know Hemmings’ story because of the dogged detective work of African-American historian Annette Gordon-Reed, but the hypocrisy of the revolutionaries was evident at the time. As English writer Samuel Johnson wrote: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”
Most of the founding fathers — including Benjamin Franklin and George Washington — owned people. When one of Washington’s slaves ran away, he advertised in The Philadelphia Gazette offering a $10 reward for her capture.
“Absconded from the household of the President of the United States, ONEY JUDGE, a light mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes and bushy hair. She is of middle stature, slender, and delicately formed, about 20 years of age.”
Happily, the slave hunters failed to catch Judge, and she lived the rest of her life as a free woman, as did other slaves belonging to Washington and Jefferson, who the British spirited out of the country to Nova Scotia at the end of the revolution.
When we consider this was a revolution of enslavers, it seems wise to set aside all bragging about their belief in equality and liberty, and look at what really motivated them.
A key driver of the revolution was their desire to seize Indigenous land, which they did with such ferocious determination that eventually tens of thousands were killed or subjugated, whole cultures destroyed and lost forever.
That was the dream of the revolutionaries, an important reason for their uprising.
After la Guerre de la Conquête — or the Seven Years War — when the British conquered Quebec and Montreal, they issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, forbidding colonists from invading the Indigenous land on the west side of the Appalachians.
This enraged the revolutionaries, who claimed land in the Ohio River Valley. Washington, the most successful land speculator of his generation, had, through sharp practices, accumulated title to 20,000 acres in the fertile “bottom land” of Ohio. Benjamin Franklin was backing other speculators who claimed two million acres in the same area — where the Shawnee had prosperous towns surrounded by corn fields and orchards.
Washington called the Royal Proclamation “a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians,” but in 1774, the British passed the Quebec Act — which gave language and legal rights to the recently conquered French Canadians — and gave Quebec control over the Ohio River Valley, which meant that American expansion inland was blocked.
The British wanted colonists to stay on the coast, and continue to profit from the fur trade in the interior, carried out by Indigenous trappers, rather than opening up the continent to settlers who would trap the furs themselves.
At that time, most British colonists lived in a coastal strip from Virginia to Nova Scotia. Toronto did not yet exist. Britain was massively in debt after the long war with France and wanted to stop fighting and raise revenue from taxes on the freeloading colonists.
The freeze on expansion — not the tax on tea — was the conflict at the heart of the revolution, the motive force behind the terroristic campaign that the patriots launched to throw off the king. It was a revolt, but also a war of conquest.
Indigenous nations knew a new American republic would take their land. The Cherokee, Delaware, Shawnee and the Haudenosaunee — then known as the Iroquois — were in the path of the settlers, and so they sided with the British.
In 1779, during the revolution, Washington waged a genocidal campaign against the Haudenosaunee, ordering the “total destruction and devastation of their settlements,” burning so many communities that they called him Conotocaurius — “town destroyer.”
After the revolutionaries won, Mohawk leader Joseph Brant was forced to move his people to the north side of Lake Ontario, where he founded Brantford and Six Nations, still the largest Indigenous community in Canada.
Brant was wise to move. In 1782, a revolutionary militia murdered 96 pacifist Christian Indigenous people at Gnadenhutten, Ohio, raping the women before killing them — the first of many such massacres to take place in the “Indian wars” that Washington and his heirs would launch.
Engraving of the Gnadenhutten massacre in 1782, from Henry Howe’s book “Historical Collections of the Great West”
The revolution led to a huge wave of settlers in the Midwest. A confederation of Indigenous nations resisted, and delivered a terrible defeat to the new American army at Wabash, but the Americans routed them at Fallen Timbers, near Toledo, and the Shawnee were finally forced to give up most of Ohio, setting the pattern for the terrible wars of conquest to come over the next century.
The Revolutionaries also wanted the land then occupied by French Canadians.
The virulently anti-Catholic “Patriots” openly threatened Quebec in an open letter in 1774, calling them a “small people,” and warning that if they didn’t join the revolt they would make “inveterate enemies.”
The Americans managed to take Montreal, besieged Quebec City, but French Canadians resisted the charms of Franklin, and forced the Americans back.
And everywhere, the revolutionaries went after Loyalists, those who sided with the Crown. They closed Anglican churches, tarred and feathered British officials, seized farms, stripped and tortured their political opponents in the streets.
I have ancestors — Scottish colonists near Albany — who stayed loyal to Britain and fought beside the Seneca against the revolutionaries. Their farms were confiscated and they fled to New York, the last loyalist city, until they got land grants in Nova Scotia in 1783, part of a huge wave of migration to Canada of people who called themselves United Empire Loyalists.
The revolution led to the rapid settlement of English-speaking migrants in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes. The political union that resulted — of Indigenous, French Canadians and Loyalists — was a relationship of convenience — forged through painful compromises — of peoples who had little in common but a desire not to live under the Stars and Stripes. In 1812, when the Americans invaded again, they took up arms to expel them.
The revolution the Americans are celebrating was an act of aggression against the peoples who founded our country, and in the 250 years that followed, the people north of the border have made a more peaceful society. It is not “anti-American” to remember that we rejected their entreaties, repelled their invasions, and did not have plantation slavery, large massacres of Indigenous people, mass lynchings or a civil war.
Of course, we have nothing to be smug about. Brant was a slave owner, as were many Canadians — including my Loyalist ancestors, I discovered with discomfort last week while researching this article.
But we were moving away from it. John Graves Simcoe, a Loyalist military leader, passed an anti-slavery act in Upper Canada in 1793, 70 years before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
The Canadian expansion west created terrible suffering among Indigenous people, who were forced onto reserves where many died of starvation. The government and the churches — inspired by the American example — forced children into residential schools where many were abused, neglected and allowed to die of disease.
But it was always less violent. The worst massacre of Indigenous people in Canadian history was carried out by Americans, in the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan, and the North West Mounted Police tried to bring the murderers to justice. Canada gave refuge to Sitting Bull after he defeated General Custer’s army. The social contract north of the border was less murderous and it remains so. Nobody who knows the history should be surprised that the Alberta Cree — the victims of the worst subjugation in Canadian history after the Northwest Rebellion — are the strongest opponents of Alberta secession and absorption into the United States.
Canadian society is less dynamic but also less chaotic, less cruel, less prone to political and racial violence, or launching wars of conquest.
“Geography has made us neighbours,” John F Kennedy said. “History has made us friends.”
That is true, but we are not the same, and I’m glad my ancestors fought on the losing side and came north.
Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details
