" A few of the habitants joined his forces; fewer
joined the invaders or sold them supplies--till they grew
suspicious of paper "Continentals." But the majority held
passively aloof. Even when France joined the warring colonies and
Admiral d'Estaing appealed to the Canadians to rise, they did not
heed; though it is difficult to say what the result would have
been if Washington had agreed to Lafayette's plan of a joint
French and American invasion in 1778.
Nova Scotia also held aloof, in spite of the fact that many of
the men who had come from New England and from Ulster were eager
to join the colonies to the south. In Nova Scotia democracy was a
less hardy plant than in Massachusetts. The town and township
institutions, which had been the nurseries of resistance in New
England, had not been allowed to take root there. The
circumstances of the founding of Halifax had given ripe to a
greater tendency, which lasted long, to lean upon the mother
country. The Maine wilderness made intercourse between Nova
Scotia and New England difficult by land, and the British fleet
was in control of the sea until near the close of the war. Nova
Scotia stood by Great Britain, and was reserved to become part of
a northern nation still in the making.
That nation was to owe its separate existence to the success of
the American Revolution.
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