The forgotten history of how Benjamin Franklin tried to annex Canada

For decades, Canada and the United States have been strategic allies and defence partners. But it wasn’t always that way.

U.S. President “Donald Trump is not the first American to say that he wanted to possess Canada,” journalist and author Madelaine Drohan told National Post.

Long before Trump launched a trade war and threatened to make Canada the 51st state, other U.S. presidents had ambitions to conquer Canada. It turns out, even Founding Father Benjamin Franklin wanted a piece of the country.

In her book, He Did Not Conquer: Benjamin Franklin’s Failure to Annex Canada, which was published in September 2025, Drohan opens a window on a forgotten chapter of North American history.

The senior fellow at the University of Ottawa and longtime journalist argues that Franklin’s desire to annex Canada came from his fears regarding national security, projected population growth and his desire to seek opportunities to spread American influence to the North.

National Post spoke to Drohan about Franklin’s motivations and how history connects to the present. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Your book describes Franklin’s decades-long effort to annex Canada. Can you walk us through what motivated him?

Well, over a period of about three decades, he pushed the idea that Canada, the area called Canada, should actually be part of the American colonies and then eventually the United States. He was born in 1706 at a time when there were British colonists in the American colonies and French colonists in the area that was called Canada, which was basically the province of Quebec at that time, well, more than that, it extended below the Great Lakes. Relations between these two peoples were hostile. I mean, they would regularly raid each other’s settlements, burn houses, murder and scalp people with their Indigenous allies and take hostages. And so, for Franklin, growing up, Canada was a threat to the security of the British American colonies, and he wasn’t the only one that would have wanted to get rid of the French in Canada and make it part of the British American colonies, mostly for security.

Later on, he sort of elaborated on that because he had this idea that he wrote about the population in the American colonies growing by leaps and bounds. In fact, he predicted it was going to double every 25 years, and they needed room to grow. So, they needed other areas to settle in. And, of course, Canada was part of that other area that he had his eye on. And when he wrote about this, the population growth and this idea that the American colonists should populate the continent, it was sort of the first time that a British American expressed this idea of Manifest Destiny, that it was their destiny to populate the continent. That was when Canada was still a French colony, but he still had his eye on it when it became a British colony, after 1760, and for those same reasons: security and room to grow.

His last motivation came when he was in Paris in the 1780s. He was negotiating the peace agreement with Britain, and he said Britain was the aggressor in the American Revolution, the Americans were the victims of British tyranny and destruction, and, as victims, they were entitled to compensation. And so the compensation that he asked for was Canada. He wanted Britain to give Canada to the newly formed country of the United States.

What prevented Franklin from annexing Canada?

Well, certainly, in that last attempt in 1782, in Paris, what stopped him was the Americans wanting other things more. They wanted secure access to the fishery off of the East Coast of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. So they wanted to make sure that was part of the peace treaty. And they also wanted Britain to say that this triangle of land underneath the Great Lakes — that both Britain and France said belong to Canada — the American negotiators wanted in the treaty that that actually belonged to the United States. So that (1782) was his last attempt.

In the mid-1770s, the Continental Army, which was made up of American colonists, invaded Canada, and they tried to take all of Canada over, and they managed to take Montreal and Trois-Rivières, but they got held up outside of Quebec City, and could not take Quebec City, but hung on. And that was when the Continental Congress, this was early 1776, asked Benjamin Franklin and two other delegates to come up to Montreal and persuade the French Canadians to throw off the British, and had the French Canadians rise up. Then, with the Americans, they would have taken all of Canada. But, in fact, Franklin failed to convince enough people to support the American cause. And when some British warships showed up on the St. Lawrence (River) shortly afterwards, this would be in May 1776, both Franklin and the Continental Army made a run for the border and gave up at least that attempt of conquering Canada.

How would you describe your process for writing this book and did your perspective change while you were researching it?

Well, this whole project, sort of the seed for this, was planted when I went and visited the Chateau Ramezay Museum in Montreal, which is a great museum of Quebec history, and it’s in an old building that was built in the beginning of the 1700s.

I’m wandering through the museum, and I come across a portrait of Benjamin Franklin. And I thought, what is Benjamin Franklin doing in this museum of Quebec history? And there was a little plaque on the wall that said he had been in that very building in 1776 when he came to Montreal to ask the French Canadians to join the American Revolution. And I knew nothing about this. I mean, the whole thing took me by surprise, and so I thought that’s really interesting, and I sort of tucked it in the back of my mind as something I might research when I had the time.

And so, when COVID hit, I decided to stop writing for The Economist, get a Master of Arts in History, and focus on what Franklin was doing in Montreal, and why don’t we remember it? So, I wrote my Master’s paper on that, but as I was doing the research for that particular paper, I realized that 1776 wasn’t the only time that Franklin had expressed an interest in possessing Canada. And so that led to the book project.

Now, in terms of researching, fortunately, almost everything that Franklin ever wrote has already been digitized and is available online at numerous sites, including a site run by the U.S. government. And also a lot of letters that were written at that time had been either digitized by other people, letters by other people, or they appeared in books, and the original documents were mostly available on the Internet Archive. Once I went looking for things, they were relatively easy to find. I did have to work in the Canadian archives, as well, for some of this, but mostly, because it’s history, it’s already happened. I didn’t have to interview people. It was a deep dive into the archives for most of this.

Can you explain the political climate that influenced Canadians to stay loyal to British colonial rule in the response of the American invasion?

The British conquest of what was called Canada then, or New France, took place in 1760. And then Britain finally agreed, yes, they were going to keep Canada, not giving it back to France, in 1763, so after that, Britain was stuck with this colony that had a rough estimate of maybe 100,000 French Canadians. And the original British plan was to make them into English-speaking Protestants. But Britain realized pretty early on that this was going to be a very long-term project, and at the moment, the colony was ungovernable, really. So Sir Guy Carleton, who was the governor, went to London in 1770, and sort of worked out this plan. A lot of it was his ideas of, how are you going to govern these 100,000 French-speaking Catholics? And the idea was that, at least for the time being, that they would be able to practice Catholicism. Religion was a huge deal in those days, nothing like it is today. So, the Quebec Act of 1774 allowed the French Canadians to continue being Catholic and also to keep their civil law. They would have to use British criminal law, but they could keep their civil law. And both the seigneurs(lords) and the clergy were allowed to collect the fees that they had been collecting before. It also drew the borders of what was now called Canada, or the province of Quebec, to match pretty much what they were when it was Canada or New France. All those things in the Quebec Act pleased the important people in Canada, or province of Quebec, at least. It pleased the elite. No one really knows what the ordinary French Canadians thought of this, because there was no one really to speak for them. The clergy and the seigneurs were all on side with the British. They thought this was a good idea, and so they went along with it. So when the Americans invaded in 1775, about 250 years ago, they were already running into opposition from the French Canadian elites. And they did get some support from ordinary French Canadians, but not enough to turn the tide in that invasion.

Your book highlights Franklin’s strong anti-Catholic views and plans for French Canadians, including eviction and assimilation. How did his personal bias and financial interests influence his strategy towards Canada?

I’d have to say that towards the end of his life, he actually sort of moderated that, but he was a child of Puritans, he grew up in the Puritan colonies, or the Protestant colonies, so they did see, traditionally, the French Canadian Catholics as the enemies. But I think Franklin was fairly pragmatic, so it was more the security threat that weighed on him, rather than Catholicism. All the same when he wrote something called the Canada pamphlet in 1760 during a debate in Britain about whether Britain should keep Canada or Guadeloupe when they were negotiating the terms of peace with France, he wrote a very strong argument that Britain should definitely keep Canada because it would remove the security threat. It would be good for trade. It would give the American colonists room to expand all these things. These are all themes that he embraced early on. But the big thing, the big problem there with his plans was, again, he envisaged Canada being an English-speaking Protestant place, and there were all these French Canadians there. And so he dealt with them by saying that they would be encouraged to leave and/or they would be assimilated. So he did not plan for a French-speaking Catholic population to remain in what they called Canada, or the province of Quebec at that point. But just one more thing about his religion, I mean, ultimately, he called himself a deist, and they believed in God, but they didn’t follow any particular organized religion because they disagreed with some of the practices of all the various Christian religions.

How does this history relate to enduring tensions in Canada–U.S. relations?

I think one thing that is a big message to take from my book is that Donald Trump is not the first American to say that he wanted to possess Canada. I mean, at the very birth of the United States, Benjamin Franklin was pushing the same agenda, and he wasn’t alone. There were others as well that thought Canada should be American. This idea, which was present at the beginning of the United States, has reemerged from time to time. There were other times that the whole idea that the West coast of Canada should be American was present in the 1840s. They talked about Manifest Destiny then. I think in the minds of some Americans, not all Americans, they truly believe that Canada should be part of the United States. When I was making a presentation of my book in Victoria, one of the people there mentioned, and I’m going to steal it. He said, “We’re living through a Manifest Destiny zombie movie.” I think that sort of sums it up, that this is an idea that is sort of firmly implanted in the minds of some Americans. It will come up again and again and has come up again and again over the period of our relationship.

Why do you think Franklin’s invasion is forgotten in the history of both Canada and the United States?

Well, there’s a lot of reasons for that, but broadly speaking, we don’t talk about it, and I’m saying “we,” and I’m going to say Canadians and Americans, but we’ll start even just with Franklin. Franklin didn’t talk about it because it was a failure, and he didn’t write any personal letters that have survived from Montreal. So there’s a big blank there. When historians want to write about this period, there’s no primary material for them to write about. You know, what Franklin did, what he thought, how he failed. That leaves a gap, and historians can’t write about that in particular, and then it doesn’t filter down into popular culture. In movies or songs or documentaries, the Americans, more broadly, don’t talk about it because it doesn’t fit with their founding myth. I mean, the founding myth of the United States is that they rose up as one, as victims of British tyranny, and threw the British out. But invading the neighbouring colony at the same time doesn’t fit with this whole image of victims and, you know, going for justice. So they don’t, they don’t talk about it much. Then here, in Canada, we don’t talk about it much for a number of reasons. The French Canadians, for them, the big event of that era was not the American invasion. It was the British conquest of 1760 because that changed their world completely, and with the invasion, no matter who won, whether it was the British or the American colonists, the French Canadians were still going to be ruled by English-speaking Protestant foreigners. So for them, in their histories, the conquest, it looms much larger than the invasion, and English Canadians don’t talk about it, because most of them weren’t here yet. There were about 2,000 English speakers in Canada, or the province of Quebec, when the invasion took place. So that wave of loyalists from the American colonies, from the United States, that happened after this invasion had not taken place. So when you mention the American invasion to someone educated in English Canadian history, they immediately say, “Oh yeah, the War of 1812,” because their ancestors were around to play a part in that, but not so much in this earlier invasion. But the two invasions involved the same attempt by the Americans to take over what was then considered Canada.

The final thing would be, our politicians have always been a bit hesitant to sort of poke the Americans by reminding them that in 1775, despite their best efforts, they could not conquer Canada. So it doesn’t become something that people wave the flag and say, “Oh yeah. You know, this was a great moment for Canada,” at least not to an American audience. And for events in the past to actually take hold of our collective memory, somebody actually has to champion them, like (then) prime minister (Stephen) Harper did with the War of 1812. The people do this because they have a use for it. At the time, prime minister Harper was trying to accentuate Canada’s British connection, and so he talked about the War of 1812 because, in fact, the British military played a big part, if not the biggest part, in repelling the Americans, and he commissioned a statue on Parliament Hill. He had events, and it’s that kind of thing that you need for an event to firmly take hold in the story that Canadians start telling themselves about who we are and how we came to be here and why we’re not American.

Does this history teach us anything about the current secessionist movement in Alberta?

There were about 2,000 English speakers in Canada, or the province of Quebec, at the time of the invasion, and many of them were American colonists who had moved to Canada when they thought that Canada would be a British colony just like theirs. In other words, they have the same laws, you know, English speaking and that. And they were quite disappointed by the Quebec Act, because, you know, that sort of solidified Catholicism and French laws. And so, when the American colonists invaded, a lot of these English-speaking merchants supported the invaders because they shared the same views. You know, in fact, they had been Americans not too long ago. So now I’ll translate that over to Alberta. Alberta was settled by a lot of people from the United States. So there is a certain group there that sympathizes with the American way of life and the American viewpoint. So I could see it as being quite natural that they think it wouldn’t be a big deal for Alberta to actually become part of the United States, because they think that it would be much similar to what their ancestors had, and that whereas the eastern part of Canada was not settled mostly, it was settled by loyalists in Ontario, but also from France, so they don’t have that same outlook.

Is there anything else you’d like to mention?

There’s one big thing, and that is, right now, Canadians are upset, quite rightfully so, about the aggressive turn that the American government has taken against Canada. And people keep going back and saying, you know, we’ve had 70 years of friendship, which is true, 70 years of working together. But if you sort of step back a little further and take a look at the longer sweep of history, you’ll see that relations between the people who lived in Canada and the people who lived in what’s now the United States, were hostile for several centuries. You know, they were at war from the beginning of European settlement in the early 1500s, the two sides were at war, and really, relations didn’t warm up, they became wary in the early 1900s and both sides had invasion plans still for the other right up to the start of the Second World War. So my point is that this peaceful period that started from the Second World War on, everybody thinks that’s the norm for Canada-U.S. relations. But in fact, if you look at it in the longer term, it’s actually an aberration, and the norm was hostile relations. So we have to ask ourselves right now, is the aggressive rhetoric coming from Donald Trump, is that a departure from the norm, or is that a return to what the norm used to be? And I think that’s a really important point that people have to think about when we’re thinking here in Canada, how we are going to react?

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