Sorry, but I was using social system as "socioeconomic system". A society of yeomen farmers with a fantastic standard of living, at least in terms of diet, does not seem analogous to Latin America in most ways.
Well, Catholic; pyramidal social structure; very low literacy; economy based on agriculture and extraction, with few artisans and no industry; attempt to create a republic despite no tradition of democracy or self-rule.
ISTM I'm saying purple is sort of bluish, and you're saying "purple is not blue".
I am still waiting, BTW, for which one of the founding fathers leads the "The Quebecers are Catholic!" charge.
...um. It's not actually a short list.
John Jay: opposed letting Catholic priests back into New York (they'd been banned since 1691) or allowing Mass to be said publicly. Tried to add a clause to New York State's Constitution prohibiting Catholics from serving the state in any capacity unless they first swore an oath rejecting the authority of the Pope. When this failed, he introduced a watered-down version:
"XLII. And this convention doth further, in the name and by the authority of the good people of this State, ordain, determine, and declare that it shall be in the discretion of the legislature to naturalize all such persons, and in such manner, as they shall think proper: Provided, All such of the persons so to be by them naturalized, as being born in parts beyond sea, and out of the United States of America, shall come to settle in and become subjects of this State, shall take an oath of allegiance to this State, and abjure and renounce all allegiance and subjection to all and every foreign king, prince, potentate, and State in all matters, ecclesiastical as well as civil."
Note well those last four words; they were Jay's, and quite deliberately targetted at Catholics.
Alexander Hamilton: wrote several ferocious anti-Catholic screeds in 1774-5 in the wake of the Quebec Act, claiming the King was trying to force Popery (or, at least tolerance of it) on the colonies. "Does not your blood run cold to think that an English Parliament should pass an Act for the establishment of arbitrary power and Popery in such an extensive country? [...] Your loves, your property, your religion are all at stake."
In fairness to Hamilton, this seems to have been political opportunism rather than bigotry -- by the middle Revolutionary years he had abandoned his anti-Catholic positions, and AFAIK he never went back to them. Still, it's an ugly and suggestive episode.
Roger Sherman: repeatedly stated that Catholics could not be loyal to the Patriot cause, tried to have them banned from serving in the Continental Army, wouldn't allow them in his house. (N.B., Sherman was a Gospel theologian, and one of the older Founders.)
Or the whole first Continental Congress. Check out its Message to the People of Great Britain, protesting the Quebec Act:
"That we think the Legislature of Great-Britain is not authorized by the constitution to establish a religion, fraught with sanguinary and impious tenets, or, to erect an arbitrary form of government, in any quarter of the globe. These rights, we, as well as you, deem sacred. And yet sacred as they are, they have, with many others been repeatedly and flagrantly violated.
[...]
"[T]he dominion of Canada is to be so extended, modelled, and governed, as that by being disunited from us, detached from our interests, by civil as well as religious prejudices, that by their numbers daily swelling with Catholic emigrants from Europe, and by their devotion to Administration, so friendly to their religion, they might become formidable to us, and on occasion, be fit instruments in the hands of power, to reduce the ancient free Protestant Colonies to the same state of slavery with themselves.
"Nor can we suppress our astonishment, that a British Parliament should ever consent to establish in that country a religion [Catholicism] that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion through every part of the world."
-- Authors John Jay, Richard Henry Lee, and William Livingston.
Now, the anti-Catholicism of the early Revolution got considerably moderated by (1) the need to woo American Catholics, (2) the failed attempt to get Quebec on side, and (3) the alliance with France.
But that doesn't mean it magically disappeared after 1778. And if there'd been a serious prospect of Quebec joining the union, I think it's reasonable to assume it would have flared up again, at least to some extent.
Doug M.