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But that was a long way off. June-July 1776 was the beginning of a great experiment, not the finished product. Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Harvard University Press, 1962, chapter 4. The British-Americans: The Virginia Loyalists
Why I refer to this broad fact, which distinguishes the populations of all the four seaward Provinces, as much as it does Lower Canada herself, is, to show the fixity and stability of that population; to show that they are by birth British-Americans; that they can nearly all, of every origin, use that proud phrase when they look daily from their doors, 'This is my own, my native land. Let but that population and ours come together for a generation or two such are the elements that compose, such the conditions that surround it and their mutual descendants will hear with wonder, when the history of these present transactions is written, that this plan of union could ever have been seriously opposed by statesmen in Canada or elsewhere.
The second Congress was filled with moderate minded men who would not believe the time had come when that decision had to be made men who were bound to sign themselves British-Americans till the last possible moment, many of whom could not now have told whether in the end they would sign themselves Britons or Americans. Surely, they said, we need not make the decision yet.
Ignoring the request that the refugees be turned from Canada as undesirables, the white people of that country protected and assisted them. Canadians later underwent some change in their attitude toward their newcomers, but these British-Americans never exhibited such militant opposition to the Negroes as sometimes developed in the Northern States.
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