Peace and Justice is a theme I’ve been passionate about my entire life, but particularly since September 2001. I began this blog in 2009. The intended focus of this site is Peace, Justice, Environment, Sustainability, Global Cooperation and related issues.
The intent of this site is to publish positive pieces with thoughts about building a better future for our world and everyone in it.
I believe in the value of dialogue. A lifelong mid-westerner, with deep roots in rural North Dakota, I have spent most of my adult life in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. dickDOTbernarddt1878ATicloudDOTcom
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French Canada and the American Revolution
/1 Comment/in Uncategorized /by dickbernardPlease see note at end of post.
Today, July 1, is Dominion Day in Canada. The link is to the Canadian Government descriptor of the day.
My father’s ancestry is 100% French-Canadian (mom was 100% German).
Remi Roy, one of my numerous French-Canadian cousins, and valued friend, recently provided a very interesting summary of the Quebec Act of 1774 which relates to the near-miss of Quebec becoming the 14th colony of the infant United States. The map below, as well as the text of Remi’s summary of the history, follow.
Following Remi’s summary is another provided by my long-time friend Dr. Virgil Benoit, in November, 2010.
I have known both Remi and Virgil for many years, and they are very well informed. I’m privileged to know them. Remi lives in Montreal and Virgil in Red Lake Falls MN area. They are both retired professors.
Quebec and the to-be United States in 1774
Remi Roy’s summary:
Under the Quebec Act of 1774, the boundaries of the Province of Quebec were massively expanded—stretching south to the Ohio River and west all the way to the Mississippi River.
For a brief nine-year window until the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Quebec encompassed the entire “Old Northwest,” including modern-day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and eastern Minnesota.
The Demographic Reality
If you had travelled through this newly expanded wilderness in 1774 and crossed paths with a non-Indigenous person, you could confidently assume they spoke French.
While the British map claimed this territory on paper, the ground reality was entirely different:
Why Britain Kept it French
The British Parliament enacted this massive expansion out of pure pragmatism. They knew a few hundred British redcoats couldn’t possibly control millions of acres of wilderness if the local populations revolted.
By passing the Quebec Act, Britain achieved two major strategic goals:
This move absolutely infuriated the American colonists out east—who labeled it one of the “Intolerable Acts”—and helped spark the American Revolution just a year later.
The Modern Footprint
Because the western border of Quebec was anchored to the upper Mississippi River, the expansion traveled right through the modern St. Paul-Minneapolis metropolitan area, cutting off at St. Anthony Falls.
If you live in the Twin Cities metro today, this means that everything east of the Mississippi River was briefly part of Quebec. If you are standing in any of these modern counties, you are standing on what was technically French-administered, British-owned Canadian soil in 1774:
Here is Virgil Benoit’s summary written November, 2010, and used in my family French-Canadian family history in 2010: Quebec Act of 1774 per Virgil Benoit 2010 (2)
Remi added some additional commentary on June 30 2026 after I sent him Virgils commentary: “as you know, some of our ancestors in Bellechase [QC] were sympathetic to the American English colonists and even participated in the Revolutionary War against the British. Attached is something that I previously wrote about this.”
THE ROLE OF FRENCH CANADIANS IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Most Canadiens remained neutral during the American Revolution. They saw it as a fratricidal fight between two English camps. In general, they wished for a pox on both houses of the English factions. Most saw the English colonists as liars. However, some Canadiens sided with the revolutionaries and participated in the Revolutionary War.
Recruited initially in Québec and later among Canadien refugees in the northern New York colony, the Second Canadian Regiment (also known as “Congress’s Own”) fought alongside English-speaking Americans against the British. Organized on a French-style four-battalion structure, these soldiers earned a reputation for exceptional discipline and combat performance at Staten Island, Brandywine, and Germantown. They called themselves les patriotes, sharing a deep-seated grievance against the British Crown with their English-speaking American allies. The patriotes hoped that, with French intervention, a revolutionary victory might eventually lead to France returning to govern Canada.
Most significantly, the Canadian Regiment played a vital role in the Siege of Yorktown. On September 24, 1781, Colonel Moses Hazen was given command of the Second Brigade in the Marquis de Lafayette’s Light Division—placing his Canadien soldiers directly under Lafayette’s command. They took part in the critical siege operations that ultimately forced the British surrender.
At Yorktown, where French forces outnumbered the revolutionaries, a fascinating linguistic dynamic existed. While the regular French Army arriving from Europe was composed of men from various provinces who spoke distinct regional dialects, the Canadien soldiers spoke a remarkably unified colonial French. Generationally removed from Europe, the Canadiens had developed a standardized speech that stood out even alongside their metropolitan French allies.
Because they had taken up arms against the British Crown, these men and their families became the United States’ earliest refugees, forced to flee French Canada during the Continental Army’s retreat from Canada in 1776. Unable to return home after the war, many eventually settled in the Refugee Tract of upstate New York, which was officially organized as Clinton County, with the Town of Champlain among its first settlements. It became the first “Little Canada” in the United States and served as a starting point for early French-Canadian migration into the American Midwest.
In the decades that followed, most French Canadians—who considered themselves American simply by virtue of the continent they shared, just as American as the residents of the United States—viewed the Americans of the young republic with a mix of wariness and admiration. This admiration for the republican values and democracy of their southern neighbours ran deep. In 1837, it even culminated in an armed rebellion in Lower Canada, where patriotes fought to overthrow British colonial rule and establish an independent, French-speaking republic explicitly modelled on the United States.
Conversely, they often looked down upon English Canadians—many of whom were descendants of the tens of thousands of United States Loyalists who had fled north—viewing them as Américains manqués: failed, second-class Americans who preferred the monarchy to democracy. In fact, by 1800, roughly 80% of English speakers in Canada were loyalist refugees from the new American Republic. This massive influx explains why the standard English-Canadian accent developed in ways virtually identical to that of many in the United States.
The language of the French Canadians was Canadian, American, and profoundly North American. It was the lingua franca of the Great Plains for 200 years. Although their ancestral roots lay on different shores, first the French and later the English-speaking pioneers were bound together by the shared physical reality of the wilderness. They endured the same climates, navigated the same landscapes, and experienced the same natural world. This lived experience forged a shared North American worldview and a sense of belonging that transcended linguistic divides. The demands of the frontier shaped both North American English and North American French, distancing them from their European origins. In this way, these two languages became more similar to one another in feeling and spirit than to the dialects of the Old World.
POSTNOTE: July 3 I’ll have some observations as an ordinary person about the first 250 years of our country. I will be including a half dozen or so other comments from others. I will likely post in early morning.
COMMENTS
from Fred: I always enjoy looking at maps showing the spurious/dubious French claims re their “Province of Quebec.” Those “lands” were under control of Jolly King George III and his loyal minions in the nearly-created US of A. As you will recall, Colonials invaded the so-called Canada several times and made legal claims to the land. Then the aptly named French and Indian War (we were fighting both the French and Indians, of course) and cleared things up.
response from Dick: The English settlement of what became the U.S. far exceeded the number of French who came to what is now Quebec. These two, along with Spain, “sliced and diced” North America over the years. We live with the results – even with all the present day chaos, North American generally is quite the place.
US History maps NatGeo