DBWI: New England joins the USA instead of Canada

As a resident of New York City living about an hour's drive from the Canadian New England border, I wonder how the New England region could have been part of the USA instead of joining Canada in 1780. It might be ASB because the majority of New Englanders sided with the British.

Also, would there still be Irish, Dutch and Potugese immigration to an American New England in the mid-19th century?

And could a Roman Catholic still be elected President of the United States in 1944? Of course, a Catholic became Prime Minister of Canada in 1943.
 
The alternate north-eastern US border would certainly look strange, especially with Upper Massachusetts protruding into alternate-Canada.


OOC - is Canadian New England a single Province, or is it divided into its constituent parts as in OTL's USA?
 
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Pangur

Donor
As a resident of New York City living about an hour's drive from the Canadian New England border, I wonder how the New England region could have been part of the USA instead of joining Canada in 1780. It might be ASB because the majority of New Englanders sided with the British.

Also, would there still be Irish, Dutch and Potugese immigration to an American New England in the mid-19th century?

And could a Roman Catholic still be elected President of the United States in 1944? Of course, a Catholic became Prime Minister of Canada in 1943.

Please excuse my ignorance of US history however in regards to this being ASB, would it have been possible that because of NE having so many British they would not have stayed with the other colonies post independence and instead opt to be part of Canada and in doing so retain the connection to the British crown?
 
New England resident chiming in here. :)

To say we joined Canada in 1780 isn't really accurate, to be pedantic, as the Federated Kingdom of Canada didn't exist for us to join for another fifty some years. And there was a lot of pro-rebel sentiment in New England, especially as many of the formative events of the revolution happened there, and there was the sectarian dynamic between Anglicans who were generally supportive of the crown and nonconformists who were more inclined towards the rebels, and the middle and southern colonies were more Anglican than puritan New England was. The Philadelphia College historian Newton Gingrich who has written extensively on the American Rebellion talks about this in For King Or For Country, looking at the conflict as an extension of the English Civil War and the Restoration after a century-long armistice, pointing out that it fell upon similar lines (republicans against royalists, nonconformists against Anglicans) and estimating that there were more loyalists in the middle colonies than there were in New England. In fact, while the rebels were a minority, a large chunk of the population in New England were ambivalent or just wanted to keep their heads down and didn't actively support either side, which was true in most of the colonies actually.

I imagine the real reason New England didn't fall was that it's elites realized that the Francophilic and republican impulses of the rebels and the potential of bad relations with Britain even if independence was won would've economically crippled the region which was dependent on maritime pursuits. Plus, New England juts out hundreds of miles into the North Atlantic and was close to the provinces of Quebec and Nova Scotia which the British held despite the rebel sympathies of some there and so could easily be recaptured. And even still, you had people like Daniel Shays and Ira Allen in what was then the frontier agitating against the British for years afterward and it was only after the Second Anglo-American War and the Federation that the Americans accepted that regaining New England was no longer realistic.

OOC - is Canadian New England a single Province, or is it divided into its constituent parts as in OTL's USA?

OOC: I say divided into a few provinces; they would've joined whatever federation is set up as is and likely wouldn't have merged. Of course, Massachusetts evidently retains Maine and Vermont if in British hands probably remains part of New Hampshire; IIRC the people there wanted to remain in New Hampshire but the government of the state had already agreed that the land belonged to New York which was the impetus for succession.
 
As a resident of Vancouver Province* I'm interested as to the repercussions out west. IIRC from my high school history class there was a fair amount of american settlement out here but the US government was too preoccupied with the NE border to care about the other side of the continent.

* think Washington state
 
OOC: Is there some POD for this? Because frankly, this makes no lick of fucking sense. Not only was New England THE center of Anti-British sentiment all the way up to the War of 1812, and even then they were mostly anti-Washington and not Pro-London, but Canada didn't exist until the 1880s! At the time of 1780, the War of Independence was still in full swing, and New England was already considered a part of British North America. So joining it would make even less sense.

And if you meant 1880, well, thats just bull. Not only was New England an integral part of the United States, there would have been absolutely no way the US would have let a portion of American soil leave US hands less then 30 years after the Civil War.

Or am I the only one who demands a realistic scenario for DBWI's?
 
OOC: Is there some POD for this? Because frankly, this makes no lick of fucking sense. Not only was New England THE center of Anti-British sentiment all the way up to the War of 1812, and even then they were mostly anti-Washington and not Pro-London, but Canada didn't exist until the 1880s! At the time of 1780, the War of Independence was still in full swing, and New England was already considered a part of British North America. So joining it would make even less sense.

And if you meant 1880, well, thats just bull. Not only was New England an integral part of the United States, there would have been absolutely no way the US would have let a portion of American soil leave US hands less then 30 years after the Civil War.

Or am I the only one who demands a realistic scenario for DBWI's?

OOC: 1860s, actually. But yeah, this isn't a very likely event and it took a bit of twisting to get even a halfway decent scenario for this.
 
As a resident of New York City living about an hour's drive from the Canadian New England border, I wonder how the New England region could have been part of the USA instead of joining Canada in 1780. It might be ASB because the majority of New Englanders sided with the British.

Also, would there still be Irish, Dutch and Potugese immigration to an American New England in the mid-19th century?

And could a Roman Catholic still be elected President of the United States in 1944? Of course, a Catholic became Prime Minister of Canada in 1943.
Nah... New England strikes me as pretty liberal, and I don't think they'd be too happy in Jesusland.

Immigrant mix IMO would be pretty much the same, as there was a lot of cross-border sloshing going on during the Great Wave, and a lot of Irish came to the USA through Canada.

A Catholic president? Maybe, but I'd give it a few more decades, and even then, it's a tall order. In 1944, anti-Catholic sentiment was still quite strong among Protestants. Canada, after all, has all those French Catholics, which the USA doesn't have.
 
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