Montreal, Quebec.
Montreal (from Mount Royal, the highest peak on the Island of Montreal) is the largest city in the Associated Confederation of Quebec. It was founded by France in 1642 under the name Ville Marie (City of Mary) to serve as a mission to the local Indians. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the original name had been superseded by Montreal.
By the time of the Seven Years' War, Montreal's population had grown to 8,000, equal to Quebec City, the capital. In 1760, during the war, Montreal was captured by three British armies, which marked the end of France's colonial empire in North America. France formally ceded Canada to the British in the 1763 Treaty of Paris which ended the Seven Years' War.
During the North American Rebellion, Montreal was captured again by a rebel army led by General Richard Montgomery in November 1775. The city was administered by the rebels until it was retaken by the British in June 1776. A year later, Montreal served as the launch point for General John Burgoyne's Hudson campaign, which led to the capture of Albany, New York in October 1777.
Under the Britannic Design, the confederations of Indiana and Manitoba were split off from Quebec, although the new Confederation of Quebec retained almost all of the former province's population, including Montreal. During the Era of Harmonious Relations in the early nineteenth century, Montreal became the center of opposition to the dominant Liberal Party, which was based in Quebec City. A group of farmers, urban workers, and business owners based in Montreal formed the Farmers Congress in 1812, which was renamed the Conservative Party the following year. Along with the Liberals and Conservatives, Quebec was also home to the Free Quebec Party, a radical group which sought greater autonomy for Quebec, up to and including independence from the Confederation of North America.
During the recession in the late 1830s caused by the Panic of 1836, a pro-independence movement called the Patriotes was founded in Montreal by Louis Papineau. Papineau led an uprising in 1839 that attempted to seize Quebec City, but the uprising was put down by Governor Henry Scott and Papineau was killed. Leadership of the Patriotes fell to Charles de Frontenac, who gave up armed resistance in favor of terror attacks on Quebec's Anglophone minority. De Frontenac stepped up his terror attacks after the outbreak of the Rocky Mountain War in 1845, and over the next twenty years the Patriotes killed some 3,000 Anglophones in Quebec. The Anglophones created their own terrorist group called the Anti-Papists which retaliated by killing Francophones and burning Catholic churches. The de facto civil war in Quebec caused a steady exodus of members of both religions, and between 1855 and 1870 the confederation's population fell from 5.9 million to 4.8 million. The terror attacks continued until 1889, when Quebec voted for devolution to associated status in the C.N.A.