250 years ago, the Americans attacked Canada — and lost
National Post, 31 December 2025
Quebec almost became the 14th state, but chose to stay loyal to the British Crown
On New Year’s Eve 250 years ago, Brig.-Gen. Richard Montgomery of the Continental Army, headquartered here in Montreal at the Château Ramezay, ordered a multi-pronged attack on Quebec City. The future existence of Canada hung in the balance; Quebec may have become the 14th state at the conclusion of the American Revolution.
The events of 1775 were decisive for the future of Canada, an important factor in the Revolutionary War and a significant step in the history of religious liberty. While the 250th anniversary of the Continental Army was observed with a Soviet-style military parade in Washington, D.C., last summer, Canadians have neglected to recall our own role in the “semiquincentennial” — the official term, unlikely to catch on — events.
By the early 1770s, the British colonies in North America were growing restless. The American colonies were agitating for more local control and, perhaps, independence.
The territories of New France, conquered by the British in 1759 at the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City, had been incorporated into the British Crown by the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which sought the assimilation of the French-Canadian majority into British ways — British laws, the English language and the denial of civil rights to Catholics.
The assimilation project was not going well, and the resources required to suppress the French language, customs and Catholic faith were too great, especially when the threat from the Americans was growing. The British gave up trying; on June 22, 1774, King George III gave royal assent to the Quebec Act, with it coming into effect on May 1, 1775.
“Based on recommendations from governors James Murray and Guy Carleton, the act guaranteed the freedom of worship and restored French property rights,” records the Canadian Encyclopedia.
It was truly remarkable. In an age when the religion of the Crown was forcefully imposed on the people, in Quebec, religious liberty was permitted by law. In 1775, a Catholic in Quebec enjoyed freedom of worship and civil rights that were denied to Catholics in Britain and Ireland.
The anti-Catholic “penal laws” of the British Crown were characterized by Edmund Burke as “a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.”
In 1775, Catholics in Quebec were exempted from such perverted ingenuity. And the Americans did not like that one bit.
“The act had dire consequences for Britain’s North American empire. Considered one of the five ‘intolerable acts’ by the 13 American colonies, the Quebec Act was one of the direct causes of the American Revolutionary War (1775–83),” the Canadian Encyclopedia continues.
While American high school students are taught that the “intolerable acts” of the British Parliament included “taxation without representation,” the control of harbours and restrictions on trade, the anti-Catholic part is usually left out.
The First Continental Congress in 1774 wrote to French-Canadians, asking them to join the coming revolution on the American side — an invitation that at least some French-Canadians welcomed as an opportunity to reverse the loss of 1759.
Yet the duplicity of the Continental Congress was quickly discovered, for it had issued an “Address to the People of Great Britain” in October 1774. It characterized Catholicism as “fraught with sanguinary and impious tenets,” denouncing that the British Parliament would permit in Quebec “a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion through every part of the world.”
Learning that their religious liberty was an “intolerable” outrage, French-Canadians opted out of joining the Americans.
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