Nova Scotia was the fourteenth colony. The following article shared under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act explains why it did not join the revolution.
MARCH 16, 2005
The story of the 14th Colony; What it was, and what became of it
Not long before the Revolution, Britain's Thirteen Colonies in America were joined to their north by a fourteenth: Nova Scotia.
Nova Scotia had been a French colony called Acadia to varying degrees beginning in 1604, but fell finally and entirely to Britain with the second capture of the Fortress of Louisbourg in 1758, not two decades before the onset of the American Revolution. (Nova Scotia included present-day New Brunswick until 1784, and until 1769 included present-day Prince Edward Island.)
By the time of the Revolution, Nova Scotia was not an established, developed commonwealth like the first thirteen, but a still-fledgling frontier colony being re-settled by British subjects, predominantly from New England. Little Nova Scotia was nonetheless base to a considerable part of the Royal Navy and later an entire regiment of the British Army meant expressly for enforcing loyalty to the Crown, so that the British government had a military influence in Nova Scotia unparalleled in the other colonies. Plus which Nova Scotia was not connected contiguously to the settled regions of those other colonies and was thus estranged from the revolutionary activity to the south.
Which is not to say Nova Scotia saw no revolutionary activity. A stack of hay bound for government forces in Boston was set afire, privateers raided the coasts with some frequency, and locals laid siege to Fort Cumberland, unsupported by the revolutionary Continental Army and thus unsuccessful. But the Nova Scotia Assembly had not dispatched a delegation to the Continental Congress, for the practical reason that a movement of that nature was made impossible by the British military presence, and absent official Nova Scotian participation in the Continental Congress, then-General George Washington declined to support revolutionary efforts in Nova Scotia. They do say that decision came to be Washington's greatest regret.
So Nova Scotia was largely left out of the Revolutionary War, and after the American victory and founding of the United States, carried on as a British colony.
Then came the 1860s, when Canada -- then referring to Ontario and Quebec -- was looking to create a counter to the United States on the North American continent, replace the unhappy union of Upper and Lower Canada with some new political construct, and generally aggrandize itself, and presumed to conscript the smaller British North American colonies into its cause. Nova Scotia wanted no part of this "Confederation", or union with Canada: In 1867, Nova Scotians elected anti-Confederation representatives to 36 of 38 seats provincially and 18 of 19 seats federally, and 31,000 -- or some 65 percent -- of all Nova Scotian voters signed a petition declaring Nova Scotia's inclusion in the Confederation scheme democratically illegitimate. But Nova Scotia was annexed to Canada by the British North America Act of 1867, against its express democratic will. As late as 1886, Nova Scotians elected a separatist provincial government with 26 of 38 seats, but to no avail.
Nova Scotia has been an Indian territory, a French colony, a colony divided between French and British, a British colony, a province of Canada as a British dominion, and a province of Canada as a fully-sovereign European-style state; unless history ceases altogether, there is no reason to suppose Nova Scotia's present iteration must be its last.
