Thread:ML4E/@comment-874475-20140301235136/@comment-21519-20140304212514

We've never heard of a US attack on Canada between the War of Secession and the Second Mexican War, nor even the intimation of threats. The latter strikes me as a strong possibility, however, and the former is not something I'd dismiss altogether; if it were a half-assed, desultory invasion, it's conceivable it would not be mentioned by US characters in HFR. We had no Anglo-Canadian POVs in that book, and by the time McGregor and Galtier joined the cast there was a more substantial history of border violence to overshadow anything that may have happened in the mid- to late 60s.

Of course, London retained veto power over confederation, and from my reading it appears Macdonald and the others relied heavily on an alliance with a Parliamentary faction known as Little Englanders. This group felt in general that most of the colonies were no longer turning a profit and should be, to greater or lesser extents, cut loose; and more specifically, that with European crises brought on by such developments as German and Italian unification and Russian and Austrian expansionism, it was foolish to risk becoming bogged down in an American conflict. So the Fathers played not just on British fear of an American war, but on that fear combined with the unwillingness to make North America a priority for the Foreign Office. In TL-191 they'd already committed to North America by interfering in the War of Secession, so despite or perhaps because of fears of US revanchism, they might want to retain tighter control over BNA.

By the way, the Reformers appear to have been fairly pro-US by the standards of the time. I'm wondering if that might mean, in TL-191, Brown sulked in his tent rather than appealing for confederation. Could it have come about purely by Conservative efforts? Another possibility, of course, is that, in selling confederation to Conservatives, Brown took the tack of "See, you had to go and provoke the US by helping the slaveholders, and now thanks to that stupidity, they're gunning for us. We'd better circle the wagons if we're going to have any hope of surviving your bad idea."