Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy6
True, like all the peripheral colonies (Quebec, Bermuda, Georgia) Nova Scotia was not really on the radar screen of the revolutionary hotheads and, as a less economically mature colony, didn't really have an established hierarchy of men of independent wealth and independent minds who might have been inclined to spearhead a political rebellion. There was also the massive British military presence at Halifax to disincentivize any revolutionaries. On top of that, because the Great Awakening had a very powerful hold on Nova Scotia at the time, religious fervour (rather than the revolutionary kind) consumed the minds of many of its residents, who readily fell under the spell of the great evangelist Henry Alline and his New Light movement.
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The US colonies were also a lot more homogenous. Massachusetts had an old established settler population and a few British newcomers. Nova Scotia was roughly equal parts British newcomers, foreign Protestants, New England Planters, Acadians, and natives. All of the wealthy and powerful would have been connected to the British colonial system and navy. Almost everybody lived in a seaside town that would have been easy for British ships to attack.
There was an attempt at getting the revolution started in Nova Scotia; Jonathan Eddy attacked Fort Cumberland near the present-day NS/NB border with around 400 militiamen. They dispersed when a British ship arrived. Later on in the war a lot of the military activity decamped from New York to Halifax and at that point there was no way that Nova Scotia could have participated. It was probably 25% British soldiers in total at times.
I think it is easy to get carried away hand waving about how the character of different groups shaped culture hundreds of years later but I do think it made a difference that Canada was so cosmopolitan early on. In 1800, there would have been more demographic variety in Halifax or Quebec City than Boston.