Quote:
Originally Posted by benp
The Seaway wasn't fully open to ocean ships until around 1959, 134 years after the opening of the Erie Canal. Even if the larger St. Lawrence locks had been constructed earlier, the Erie Canal would have preceded it as it was funded by NY State at a time prior to significant federal government involvement in large projects, and still would have accelerated NYC growth. NY still had a preferable harbor and location compared to Halifax, or even Montreal, for goods distribution, all-season access, and protection. Once the railroads were constructed, goods from Europe would still preferably be shipped to harbors more centralized to population, like NY, Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. In 1800, even prior to the canal, NYC population was 60k, while the combined population of Toronto and Montreal was less than 20k.
I really don't see that much would have changed in how US and Canadian cities would have developed and grown, as geography was the driver for growth in much of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
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The seaway would likely have been built much earlier if Canada were a part of the US - but I agree that New York likely would have remained a major city. New York was the economic capital of the US long before the revolution and even if Upper Canada had joined the revolution in 1776, Ontario was nothing more than woodlands with a handful of very small settlements and Montreal was only a small town. Toronto wasn't even founded as a permanent settlement until 1793. New York had already asserted economic dominance at that point.
A lot of what drove major settlement in Ontario post-revolution was fleeing loyalists as well. It was entirely unsettled other than Kingston and Queenston at the time, both of which were nothing more than small villages. If it had been part of the revolution it would have grown at a much slower pace and likely not been largely settled until the mid-1800's and would probably have looked a lot like Michigan in it's settlement pattern, and would have had a lot less people. I imagine Toronto would have been a mid-sized city similar to Milwaukee or Toledo and Montreal would have remained fairly prominent, if not smaller than it is today.
It's all for moot anyway as Quebec, basically the only settled part of central Canada at the time, would never have joined in the US revolution owing to it's french past as the extremely different politics involved in that.