00:00:44.980hello and welcome to vulgar history a feminist women's history comedy podcast my name is ann0.73
00:01:01.740foster in today's special episode i'm going to be talking with author madeline drohan author of a new
00:01:07.820book that kind of ties together a bunch of things that we were talking about this season her book
00:01:12.200is called he did not conquer benjamin franklin's failure to annex canada the things that this book
00:01:18.840brings together are some of the things we've talked about in special episodes this year about
00:01:22.780canadian history about which i've been learning or reminding myself of some facts i didn't know
00:01:28.080before but also canada's colonial past but this also connects with benjamin franklin and the
00:01:32.640american revolution and benjamin franklin also went to paris and he interacted with marie antoinette
00:01:38.400So everything we've been talking about this season ties up so nicely in this book.
00:01:42.240And also in this conversation, we talk about how when Madeline started researching this is kind of a niche project.
00:01:49.680And then suddenly in this past year, there's been more conversations in the year 2025 about the possibility that some Americans might want to annex Canada.
00:02:01.240And so just a history of people trying and failing to do that.
00:02:08.160So again, the book is called He Did Not Conquer, Benjamin Franklin's Failure to Annex Canada.
00:02:13.300And Madeline Drohan, just so you know, the author who you're about to hear me talking to,
00:02:17.700she's a senior fellow at the Graduate School for Public and International Affairs at the
00:02:21.420University of Ottawa. She also spent most of her journalistic career as a foreign correspondent
00:02:26.360reporting on Europe for the Toronto-based Globe and Mail, and then on Canada for the London-based
00:02:31.280Economist. So she's coming at this book from an academic point of view and also from a journalistic
00:02:36.840point of view. It makes it incredibly readable. Anyway, enjoy this conversation with author
00:02:42.620Madeline Drohan. So I'm joined today by Madeline Drohan, author of He Did Not Conquer,
00:02:54.040Benjamin Franklin's Failure to Annex Canada. Welcome to the podcast.
00:02:59.220Thanks for having me on. I think it's a very bold title and it really explains what you're
00:03:05.940talking about. Can you explain the premise of your book, please? Well, the premise is that
00:03:11.360Benjamin Franklin had designs on Canada for decades during his life and made numerous attempts,
00:03:21.220some of them intellectual and on paper and political, and some actually involving him
00:03:27.320personally, to annex Canada to make it part of what were then the American colonies.
00:03:35.940Can you tell me what your reaction was when your book became suddenly very, the news events, I think when you started making this book would have been like, oh, this is an interesting story from long ago.
00:03:50.120And then how did you feel when suddenly it became so pertinent to what's happening now between Canada and the U.S.?
00:04:22.060But the book by that point had already been researched and almost completely written.
00:04:26.560and I signed off of it in January, and Donald Trump was just getting started.
00:04:33.140When I first came across the information about the book being published, I thought,
00:04:37.140wow, what a timely book, but of course, you didn't just write it.
00:04:42.240No, in fact, it's the product of about five years of research and writing,
00:04:48.240and I had the idea even before that, so it's been sort of percolating in my mind for a while.
00:04:55.640And so can you explain, and this is in the foreword of the book, how you first got the idea for this book, how you first learned that Benjamin Franklin had this interest in Canada?
00:05:06.740Well, the topic of the book, I stumbled on this completely accidentally.
00:05:12.200I was in Montreal, I was writing for The Economist at that time as their Canada correspondent, and I was on assignment, but I had some time to kill.
00:05:20.980So I wandered into a museum that was close to my hotel called the Chateau Ramsey, which is this lovely building that dates from the early 1700s.
00:05:33.320And I'm wandering around in there, and all of a sudden on the back wall, I see this big portrait of Benjamin Franklin.
00:05:41.160I thought it was odd that he would be in there, because this is basically about Quebec history, the museum.
00:05:47.220But there was a little plaque right beside it that said something to the effect that Benjamin Franklin was in this very building in 1776 when Montreal was occupied by American troops.
00:06:02.380And that raised two big questions in my mind right away, which basically led to the book, is what was Benjamin Franklin doing in Montreal?
00:06:12.360And why was Montreal occupied by American troops?
00:06:16.680Now, this isn't something I learned in school. I don't know about you or your listeners.
00:06:24.240Can you explain, and you do in the book, there's maps, there's numerous maps,
00:06:29.220and you explain very well what territory exactly Benjamin Franklin was intent on annexing.
00:06:37.140I love old maps, which is why I had some put in the book in a more modern form.
00:06:42.920But one of the things you learn from looking at old maps is there weren't actually agreed-upon borders for places like Canada or even the colonies.
00:06:55.000Whoever drew the map, you know, drew on local intelligence and decided where Canada was and where the colonies were and where they ended.
00:07:04.360So there was a lot of disagreement about that.
00:07:07.600But in terms of what Benjamin Franklin wanted, in some ways, it's very simple. He wanted it all. Because at the time, he and other British American colonists, I'll call them that, thought that really, they should have the whole continent, that there shouldn't be a separate sort of political entity above them. So yeah, he wanted it all.
00:07:35.600And so I read a copy of your book, and it seems like there's kind of three main attempts that Benjamin Franklin took. Is that correct?
00:07:45.240Well, it depends how you want to parse them. I actually noted about 14 times that he tried.
00:07:52.220But some of them were more serious than others, because the early attempts were what I'd call sort of intellectual exercises.
00:08:01.040He was a writer and a publisher, so he had a big audience for his writing in the colonies and increasingly in Europe later on.
00:08:12.020And so I dated his earliest sort of suggestion that that the Americans should be all over the continent was something he wrote in 1751, where he was it was talking about population increase.
00:08:28.800And he was just projecting that the American population would explode and they would basically settle the entire continent.
00:09:35.400It made a lot of money for whichever imperial power owned it.
00:09:40.940And so Franklin, he wrote a lot about this, actually.
00:09:45.920He wrote a big pamphlet called the Canada Pamphlet, where he made this very strong argument that Britain should keep Canada and join it to the American colony.
00:09:57.120So there is another attempt to make it all one.
00:10:00.760But he also wrote sort of satirical newspaper articles and that.
00:10:05.140I mean, it was a real campaign on his part during that period.
00:10:09.620It was really, I just wanted to point out, and this comes across so strongly in your book,
00:10:14.660he never stopped thinking about this. This was just a real, I don't want to say obsession
00:10:20.700necessarily, but certainly an interest of his for decades.
00:10:24.360Yeah, that's right. And yeah, I don't want to overstate it because at times other things took
00:10:30.240priority for him, but he never lost sight of this idea and he kept it going. So we'll get to the
00:10:37.880second attempt that I think you're thinking about, and that's the one that sort of immortalized in
00:10:43.540the shadow of Ramsey, in that in 1776, he actually came to Canada. Now, the American colonists had
00:10:53.320invaded in 1775, actually 250 years ago today. They were starting to invade Canada. And that
00:11:04.740invasion went on. They captured Montreal. They captured Trois-Rivières. And all that was left
00:11:11.240for them to conquer, what was then known as Canada, was Quebec City. And they got stopped
00:11:20.060there and laid siege to the city, were not able to capture it. And around about that time,
00:11:27.180the Continental Congress decided, we need to salvage this invasion. And they sent Benjamin
00:11:33.600Franklin with two other delegates up to Montreal. They were supposed to turn the whole thing around
00:11:39.200and basically conquer Canada. They failed. I want to ask Benjamin Franklin himself. I don't know a
00:11:47.760lot about American history, but to me, he's much more known for his writing than for being any sort
00:11:54.240of military man of action. Why did they send him? A number of reasons, but let me just talk to your
00:12:01.780first point, because it is true that that's how we know Benjamin Franklin through his writings
00:12:08.620and his scientific experiments. You know, that image of him with the kite and the key,
00:12:14.000that's probably stuck in most people's minds. But actually, he was quite active earlier on
00:12:21.260in doing things like forming a militia in Pennsylvania, which is his home colony. He was
00:12:29.280actually a leader of a militia unit. He went out and sort of supervised building forts. This was
00:12:39.760when the contest was between the British American colonists and the French and French Canadians up
00:12:47.200in Canada. So he had a taste of military life. He wasn't completely someone who just sat at his desk.
00:12:54.740And he was also involved during that period in trying to buy weapons for the Americans, and he was always thinking of ways of constructing, you know, defenses and where the best place would be to place cannons.
00:13:12.400So he did have this side of him. It's just not the side that's being immortalized for people.
00:13:18.920Okay, so we're getting into why there's this commemoration that you saw in Quebec. So the actual invasion, can you explain how that all came to be?
00:13:31.880Well, the invasion took place when the American colonies had joined together to form what they called the Continental Congress.
00:13:45.440And just in the name itself, you can see the ambition, right, of what they actually wanted to represent.
00:13:51.940the relations with Britain were becoming very strained. And one of the things that the Congress
00:13:59.560wanted to do was sort of give Britain a bit of a poke in the eye by attacking them,
00:14:06.720the British forces that were in Canada. Because by this point, and we're talking about 1775,
00:14:13.380Canada was a British colony that they called the province of Quebec or Canada.
00:14:19.340And now for a quick advertising break.
00:14:21.940Sorry, investing, trading, that isn't a personality.
00:17:00.940So the Congress, keep in mind that there were, you know, a number of people there that thought the continent should be theirs anyhow.
00:17:07.640But they had got intelligence from various people, spies in Canada and sympathizers in Canada that, of course, the French Canadians would welcome them with open arms.
00:17:22.020You know, all they had to do was walk in and Canada would be theirs.
00:17:28.180I mean, they were listening to, you know, people that confirmed their biases, because the French Canadians, who made up something like 99% of the population at that point, there were very few English Canadians, they weren't, they were sort of sympathetic, some of them, to the American views, but mostly I think a lot of them just wanted a quiet life.
00:17:55.040You know, Britain had just passed legislation that allowed them to keep their Catholic religion and to keep their laws and to allow the clergy and the seniors to keep their systems and collecting money from the peasants.
00:18:11.160So there wasn't a lot of unhappiness in Canada at the time, but this didn't seem to get through to the Congress.
00:18:20.820And so they approved an invasion of Canada, gave it to George Washington, commander in chief, was supposed to make it happen.
00:18:28.800And he decided on sort of a two-pronged approach where he had one general lead troops up Lake Champlain to Montreal.
00:18:41.600That's what they were supposed to capture.
00:18:43.080And he had another general, Benedict Arnold, who later deserted from the American cause.
00:18:51.100But he led another group up the Kennebec River and through the wilderness, basically, to Quebec City.0.54
00:18:57.040So it was going to be this pincer movement where they would claim all the major population centers in Canada, and then Canada would be theirs.
00:20:07.560The French Canadians would sell them, you know, cattle and things like that for hard currency.
00:20:12.800And then they ran out of hard currency and they tried to get the French Canadians to accept this paper money, the Continental paper money, and they just said no.
00:20:24.060And the Continental Army started seizing what they wanted.
00:20:28.680So all of a sudden, this sort of neutral to support of French Canadians turned hostile against them.
00:20:37.780And there's so many reasons why it went wrong.
00:20:40.680But one of the last things is that they weren't clothed properly for the Canadian winter.
00:20:46.760You know, the invasion started at the beginning of September.
00:20:50.900It ended up with these American troops camped outside the walls of Quebec City in December, poorly clothed.
00:21:02.860I mean, you know, and also they didn't have enough food.
00:21:12.640There was a great conspiracy theory that went among them that the British governor who was in Quebec City had intentionally sent an infected prostitute out so that they could make as many Americans sick as possible.
00:21:30.120But, well, I don't know that it's not true, but it sounded like a conspiracy theory to me.
00:21:36.760But so all of these things just piled up, and the invasion was really faltering. Benjamin Franklin gets to Montreal, sort of takes one look at what's going on, and realizes that he can't turn this thing around.
00:21:53.520And he only spent, he arrived there April 29th, he left on May 11th, and along he was sort of joining this, you know, the troops were running for home at the same time, because the British ships had appeared in the St. Lawrence, so they knew it was all over, they ran for home, and tried to forget about this invasion of Canada.
00:22:19.360That's what I was going to say, and kind of never really talked about it.
00:22:23.520No, no. Even it's funny because in those days, people wrote letters all the time. Like, you know, they dash off four or five or six letters in an evening. That's how they communicated. And I noticed that there's this very strange gap in Benjamin Franklin's personal letters that basically starts when he gets to Montreal and ends when he leaves it and he picks up his personal correspondence then.
00:22:52.780Now, maybe he was too busy. I don't know. But he was busier in other times and still managed to write letters. So I think it was something that they decided that the least said about it, the better.
00:23:05.520Because this is also during the American Revolution, it was so important to them to present themselves as a strong, capable group of people. They didn't want word to spread that they had failed in such a major way, I would imagine.
00:23:18.180I think that that's true. That's certainly one reason to be quiet. It was the very beginning
00:23:23.240of the revolution and they didn't want it to affect morale.
00:23:28.040But, you know, that this happened midway through your book, Benjamin Franklin did not
00:23:32.380give up hope that this could happen somehow. What's another, what was one of the other ways
00:23:38.540that he tried after that to try and make this happen?
00:23:41.560Well, this I think was probably his most serious attempt was when he was in Paris. Now he was
00:23:48.000sent to Paris after the failed invasion in Canada. He came back. And very quickly afterwards,
00:23:55.620I think it was the summer of 1776, they decided to send him to France. Now, the reason that he
00:24:04.080initially he was going to France was to try to get support from the French for the revolution. So
00:24:10.140He wanted money, men, weapons, and they thought he, the Continental Congress decided he'd be the best person to send over there.
00:24:20.880He went with a couple of others, but he was the lead.
00:24:24.240And then he stayed on and became the chief negotiator when it looked like a peace settlement was possible with Britain.
00:24:32.860So he was the one that started the negotiations with Britain over, you know, the peace that would end the American Revolution.
00:24:43.380Now, he wrote out a list early on in those negotiations of something like eight items that he thought would have to be included in those negotiations.
00:24:54.420Some he called necessary, some he called advisable.
00:24:58.380And among the advisable was Britain should give Canada to the United States.
00:25:09.080In fact, the British negotiator said something in his notes about these negotiations about Dr. Franklin brought up Canada as he is wont to do.
00:25:21.000on these. And he kept it up right almost to the very end of the negotiations. He fell ill
00:25:30.380just before they were concluded and his fellow negotiators had other priorities. Canada wasn't
00:25:38.860their priority as much as it was Franklin's. So in the end, they dropped it because what they
00:25:46.700really wanted more was the land to the east, to the west of the Appalachian Mountains, to the
00:25:53.200Mississippi River. They really wanted that. That used to be part of Canada, New France. So they
00:26:00.140decided they wanted secure access to that. And also they wanted secure access to the fisheries
00:26:07.060off of the east coast of Canada. So those were sort of the two big ones that shouldered out of
00:26:15.000the way, the idea that they would actually get all of Canada as it was at that time.
00:26:22.680And I also, I mentioned to you earlier, I've been doing a series of episodes about the French
00:26:28.140Revolution and about Marie Antoinette. And I was excited to read the part of your book about
00:26:32.720Benjamin Franklin in Paris and his fashion, because I've spoken a lot of my other episodes
00:26:38.980about there's so much happening, his hat. What can you tell us about his famous hat?
00:26:43.620Yes, that was a fur hat. And you can still see a few portraits and medallions of Franklin wearing it. He got it on his trip to Canada. No one knows exactly where he got it, but he got it just basically to keep his head warm. And on the voyage over to France, he wore it again to keep his head warm. You know, he's going bald and that.
00:27:09.260But when he saw that actually the French were paying attention to it, he decided to wear it all the time.
00:27:18.920And this became sort of his trademark, along with his sort of sober way of dressing.
00:27:27.960I mean, you'll know from all of your work on Marie Antoinette, this was a time where men and women really, you know, dressed up and it was colorful and lacy and over the top.
00:27:39.260And Franklin, who really had, you know, like a PR guy's perspective on these things, on his image, decided he would dress very soberly in sober colors and wear his fur hat.
00:27:56.320And he basically set off this sort of, you know, fashion revolution for a while in Paris, most notably, where people would style their hair and call it à la Franklin.
00:28:12.280I haven't seen any pictures of what that looks like, but somehow it must look like a fur hat.
00:28:21.780People would have, you know, an engraving on their mantelpiece.
00:28:25.340They had it on mugs and on clocks. I mean, he really took the fashion side, the culture side of Paris by storm when he arrived. And that worked perfectly for him because he wanted to build up his image so that he had a stronger position for these negotiations going forward.
00:28:44.420I think that it was just so interesting to be reading, especially that part of your book, as I've been doing this research and to know, I think it was very canny of him to realize like, oh, the hats, the fashion is so important here. And people are just hungry for a new trend to be able to use that to make himself stand out.
00:29:05.720And the people there were trying to stand out by having the most ostentatious clothes.
00:29:10.780And he just, like you said, a PR sort of way of thinking, well, what if I wear the least ostentatious clothes?
00:29:16.680And then I'll stand out in this other way.
00:29:19.320Well, yeah. And it also backed up another image he was trying to create of America being this egalitarian society where no matter how far you rose in life,
00:29:31.560The distinctions weren't as big between people, between classes as they were in Europe.
00:29:39.120And that went over very well with, you know, the philosophers over in France who were big supporters of him.
00:29:46.780So, you know, with everything he did, he always had a reason.
00:29:51.240With everything he wrote, there was something else going on in the background that he wanted to get across.
00:29:59.500And that particular one about Americans being, you know, egalitarian and all for personal liberty and that, that met with, you know, a good reception in France because although their revolution was still a little bit in the future, there were already stirrings about that, about personal liberty and freedom and, you know, freedom from having, you know, an overbearing government.
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