A bit of good news. Because of our Iran war, we have not been hearing how we are going to conquer or invade or annex Canada. I am glad for the absence of this Trumpian bluster even though I can see advantages should our northern neighbors join the United States. As I summarized in my post of January 10, 2025, “We Stand on Guard for Thee”:

“Canadians, if they used their power wisely, could control the House of Representatives. If their ten provinces could come in as ten states, Canada could probably control the Senate. And their influence in the electoral college would be immense. In other words, Canadians could control the North American continent from Key West to Hudson Bay (and perhaps Greenland, too.)”

This might produce better policies on gun control, healthcare, climate change, renewable energy, and much more. I pleaded: “Please, Canada, don’t close the door to U.S. statehood. You have the potential to remake the United States into a better place. Please stand on guard for me.”

And Trump, with his sometime Canadian obsession, is not the outlier he may seem. The United States has lusted after that country before, although I doubt that our current president is aware of the history. As revolutionary fever was taking hold in the 1770s United States, American forces tried to seize Quebec in hopes of wresting it from Great Britain. The goal was to have the French-speaking residents join us in seeking independence. After some initial success, the American forces were disastrously defeated. Our Revolution largely ignored Canada after that, but many Americans remained obsessed with Canadian territory.

I vaguely knew this Revolutionary history. I knew even less about how the desire for Canadian land fueled the War of 1812. I was under the impression that a primary cause of those hostilities was the British impressment of American sailors into the foreign navy. I also knew that the British brutes burned the White House, which was later rebuilt, unfortunately, without a Big Beautiful Ballroom containing many expensive security features.

A Canadian author, Adam Shoalts, in A History of Canada in Ten Maps: Epic Stories of Charting a Mysterious Land (2017), has given me a different perspective. He writes that President James Madison accompanied the declaration of war on June 18, 1812, with “brief remarks blaming his decision to launch the war on maritime shipping rights and the intolerable outrage that Canadian fur trappers were friendly with ‘Indians’ the United States wanted exterminated. But the real reasons behind the war were clear to everyone—the American desire for Canadian real estate.” This was a propitious time for the land grab Americans thought because the British, the colonial masters of Canada, “were pinned down in Europe fighting Napoleon’s armies [and] would scarcely be able to offer any help to its distant North American colonies.”

Conquest should be easy, the Americans thought. After all, they outnumbered the Canadians by twenty to one. In the first two years of the war, American forces did occupy some lands of the British colony and torched some of their towns. (The British burned Washington including the White House, the Brits said, as retaliation for those American actions.)

The major move by the United States forces, however, came as the third year of the war began. “On the night of July 3, 1814, under cover of darkness, a five thousand-strong American invasion force dipped their oars into the swift waters of the Niagara River opposite Buffalo, New York. They’d spent the winter and spring relentlessly drilling with a single purpose in mind: the final conquest of Canada.” The Americans captured a fort on the Canadian side of the river that was supposed to be the springboard for the taking of Canada.

Combined Canadian and British forces fought back, but their direct assaults bloodily failed—in one attack, they suffered a thousand casualties to one hundred for the Americans. A siege ensued. This war of attrition produced more and more casualties, and both sides were badly weakened. The news spread that Washington had been captured by British forces and that Napoleon had been defeated allowing Britain to send more troops to North America. “With the American army pinned down and demoralized at Fort Erie—a mere border fort in what was supposed to be a victorious campaign across Upper Canada—it was clear that any thought of conquering territory now had to be definitively abandoned.” The Americans retreated over the river but only after blowing up the fort.

Within two months, the U.S. and Great Britain signed a peace treaty ending the war, and even though the British controlled large swaths of American territory including a large part of Maine, the two sides agreed to the antebellum boundaries between Canada and the United States. The Canadian author Adam Shoalts concludes, “This map of the bitter battle waged here—the bloodiest of the War of 1812 and one of the bloodiest in Canadian history—is a solemn reminder that Canada’s borders were forged at a terrible cost.”

It is also a reminder that some Americans have long coveted Canadian territory, a covetousness that has not be successful.

I hope Trump doesn’t read my blog; it might whet his appetite for a Canada that was the big fish that got away. I don’t think I need worry.