Quote:
Originally Posted by suburbanite
I'm not sure on the exact numbers, but I've read that fewer than 10,000 British regulars were ever sent to North America, and the vast majority of those would've been after key defensive victories like Queenston Heights, Chateauguay, and Chrysler's Farm.
|
I am not so sure about this. Queenston Heights was 1,300 British soldiers according to Wikipedia. New Orleans was 8,000. If we go back in time, the 1758 siege of Louisbourg was 26,000 British soldiers (some would have been North American but that's true for all of these battles); 1812 had a smaller scale. Canadian historians tend to focus on Ontario and Quebec in 1812 because most of them are from that area and that was the more successful part of the war as far as Britain was concerned.
It seems really hard to imagine how Quebec could have remained independent without protection from Britain (which included a large buffer since the Maritimes were British too and the ocean route would have been the easiest way to move troops around back then). Newfoundland was never independent from a defence perspective, and it is much less relevant to the US.