AMERICA'S CONTINENTAL RIFT

When American Patriots turned on their colonial masters in 1775, they also took aim at Britain's territories to the north. Eliga Gould traces the early history of US ambitions to incorporate Canada into the nascent nation, from the Revolutionary War to the Monroe Doctrine

- Eliga Gould

On the fourth of July 1826, at around 6 o'clock in the evening, John Adams, the second president of the United States, died at his house in Quincy, Massachusetts. According to newspaper reports, the 90-year-old's final words were: "Thomas Jefferson survives."

For the last time in his long and eventful life - though by no means the first - the former president was wrong. At the age of 83, Jefferson had died several hours earlier at Monticello, that founder's self-designed plantation house in Virginia. On the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, "the very hour of public rejoicing", as the lawyer and statesman Daniel Webster said in his eulogy to these two heroes of the American Revolution, "they took their flight together... Adams and Jefferson are no more."

Left unsaid - perhaps because it was so obvious - the United States that Adams and Jefferson had hoped to found in 1776 also no longer existed. In the Declaration of Independence, Congress promised that Americans would treat the British as they treated the rest of mankind: "Enemies in war, in peace friends." However, according to both Adams and Jefferson, the only way to live in peace and friendship with their former fellow subjects was to purge the entire continent of Britain's hostile presence.