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This WI is inspired by a lecture of the American Revolution that I heard from an Anglophone-Canadian historian.

In the lecture, he remarked that for the strategic goals the Continental forces advancing to Quebec were trying to achieve, the denial of North American campaigning bases to the British forces, Nova Scotia was a more decisive objective than Quebec.

However, what was its operational feasibility in 1775? Was Nova Scotia considered as a objective but dropped as impractical?

From what I recall being told about the sentiments of the local population (not in the lecture, but elsewhere), the Continentals should have had an easier time coopting Protestant, Anglophone Nova Scotians than they did with the Catholic, French-speaking Quebecois.

Although during and after the war, Nova Scotia (and New Brunswick) were bulwarks of loyalism, I got the impression that this was the consequence of military developments and refugee movements, not the state of pre-war opinion in Nova Scotia. On the one hand, I have heard the Anglo population of rural Halifax was similar to that of the New England states in culture, values and political sympathies. On the other hand, I had heard that there was a general tendency for older colonies to be more pro-independence, while colonies founded later, including Georgia, Nova Scotia and the Middle Colonies, had larger Loyalist constituencies.

Assuming no big grassroots political impediment Continental Army operations towards Nova Scotia, there is the fact that Britain had a naval base at Halifax, and that geographically, the territory is an island connected to the mainland only by a narrow isthmus, much to the advantage of the navally superior Britain.

However, under the circumstances of 1775, does this render a Continental campaign and/or victory there impossible. Regarding Halifax as a naval base, was it a more substantial base for the British than Boston or New York were? Or did it only become so after Boston was lost?

And although the intolerable acts closed the port of Boston, and the British increase maritime controls in New England, did they really have the area under thorough blockade in 1775? Were they reliably stopping coastwise traffic along the Maine and Maritimes coasts? How large a garrison did the British have in Halifax?
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