The Lower Canadian Rebels Issue an American Style Declaration of Independence

 The first shots of the Lower Canada rebellion were fired in November 1837, when Sir John Colborne, now commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, sent six companies of British regulars under Colonel Charles Gore to attack the Patriotes at St-Denis on the Richelieu River. Colborne's action was triggered by communal fighting in Montreal between partisans of the Canadiens and English Loyalists, and a series of large public meetings, culminating in a gathering of five to six thousand at St-Charles, a few miles upriver from St-Denis, which produced "a declaration of independence drawn directly from the American Declaration." The battle of St-Denis on 23 November was the Patriotes' one and only victory.

--Peter H. Russell, Canada's Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 102-103.