“The Dignity of Being Called Americans”: American Identity and Portrayals of Canadians in the American Press, 1754-1812
Abstract
This dissertation explores the ways that Canadians were portrayed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century American press and considers how those portrayals intersected with and reinforced the development of early American identity. Building on the concepts of “othering” as identified by Edward Said and “imagined communities” as identified by Benedict Anderson, I argue that American newspapers othered Canadians as a means of reinforcing cohesion within the early American imagined community. Many historians have explored the ways that early Americans othered their French, British, Indigenous, and Black neighbours in constructing their own unified American identity, but these studies have not explored the role that the othering of Canadians also played in this process. Canadians mattered to Americans because they served as an ideal foil, or negative example, against which to define the American identity. As North American subjects of European colonial empires, Canadians were more American than Europeans, yet more European than Americans. The Canadians’ origins were also diverse, including French, English, American, and Indigenous peoples, and so provided many different national and racial foils against which to compare White Americans. Positive comparisons emphasized the shared qualities American newspapers felt were properly American, while the much more numerous negative comparisons highlighted the aspects of American identity that made it superior to its northern neighbour. Though portrayals of Canadians oscillated between positive peaks and negative valleys throughout the period between the French and Indian War and the War of 1812, the majority of depictions were negative, and remained consistently so throughout the era. This dissertation traces the origins of these negative portrayals back to the French and Indian War, and argues that the methods that American newspapers used to paint the Canadians as an enemy other pioneered many of the approaches that were later utilized during the Revolution and the War of 1812. Canada has often been an afterthought for modern Americans, but in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Canada mattered to Americans greatly. In their depictions of Canadians, early Americans often defined their emerging identity against what it was not: not British, not Indigenous, and not Canadian.