A history of Canada, 1763-1812

by Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas

As the line of division was drawn, Upper Canada, like the Transvaal at the present day, was compelled to import all sea-borne articles through territory under the administration of another government, either through Lower Canada or through the United States. The St. Lawrence being the high road of import and export, Lower Canada commanded the trade of Upper Canada. Therefore, in order to collect a customs revenue, it was necessary for the Upper Province either to establish customs houses on the frontier of Lower Canada—a measure which would probably have been ineffective and would certainly have involved much inconvenience and expense, or to come to some arrangement whereby a certain proportion of the duties levied at Quebec, which was the port of entry of Lower Canada, would be handed over to the administration of the Upper Province. The latter course was taken, and in 1795, a provisional arrangement was made, by which the proportion was fixed for the time being at one-eighth. The record of what followed is a record of perpetual friction, of commissions and temporary arrangements confirmed by provincial Acts. It was suggested that the boundaries of the provinces should be altered, and that Montreal should be included in and be made the port of entry of Upper Canada, but the suggestion was never carried into effect. As the population of Upper Canada grew, the discontent increased. In 1818 one-fifth of the duties was temporarily assigned to Upper Canada. Then a complete deadlock ensued, which ended with the Imperial Canada Trade Act of 1822. By arbitration under the terms of that Act the proportion which Upper Canada was to receive was in 1824 raised to one-fourth; and when Lord Durham reported, it was about two-fifths. In his report Lord Durham referred to the matter as ‘a source of great and increasing disputes’, which only came to an end when the two provinces were once more united under the Imperial Act of 1840.

The Canada Act took effect on the 26th of December, 1791. Dorchester was then in England, and Sir Alured Clarke, Lieutenant-Governor of the province of Quebec under the old system and Commander of the Forces in British North America, was acting for him. Under the The position in Canada when the new Act came into force. new Act Clarke was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Lower Canada, while the Lieutenant-Governorship of Upper Canada was conferred upon Colonel Simcoe, both officers being subordinate to Dorchester as Governor-in-Chief. Dorchester had left Canada on the 18th of August, 1791, and did not return till the 24th of September, 1793. His prolonged absence was unfortunate in more ways than one. Technical difficulties arose owing to the absence of the Governor-in-Chief, for, as soon as the new Act came into force, Clarke’s authority was confined by his commission to Lower Canada. The practical effect too was that Simcoe started on his new charge with a free hand and found it irksome, when Dorchester returned, to take a second place. Added to this were the complications caused by the French declaration of war against Great Britain in February, 1793, the hostilities between the United States and the Indian tribes on the border land of Canada, and the persistent and increasing bitterness in the United States against Great Britain, caused partly by sympathy with the French Revolution and the intrigues of French agents, and partly by the British retention of the frontier forts and supposed British sympathy with the Indians.

However, the political arrangements in Canada were carried into effect without any appreciable friction. Clarke, a man of judgement and discretion, did not hurry matters in Lower Canada. He divided the province into electoral districts, and summoned the Legislature for its first session at Quebec on the 17th of December, 1792, when the Act had been in force for nearly a year. The session then lasted into May. Simcoe arrived at Quebec on the 11th of November, 1791; but, as no Executive Council had yet been constituted for Upper Canada, he could not be sworn in as Lieutenant-Governor and take up his duties until the following midsummer, Upper Canada being in the meantime left without any governor or lieutenant-governor. In July, 1792, he issued a proclamation at Kingston, dividing Upper Canada into districts, and on the 17th of September the new Legislature met for the first time at Newark, on the Canadian side of the Niagara river, near where that river flows into Lake Ontario. The Lieutenant-Governor fixed his head quarters at ‘Navy Hall’, a building constructed in the late war for the use of the officers of the naval department on Lake Ontario. It stood by the water’s edge, nearly a mile higher up the river than Newark; and on the bank above, in the war of 1812, covering the buildings below, stood the historic Fort George. The session was a short one, closing on the 15th of October, but important work was done. English law and procedure, and trial by jury, were established, while proposals for taxation and the state of the marriage law gave a field for difference of opinion and debate. When the session was over, Simcoe reported that he found the members of the Assembly ‘active and zealous for particular measures, which were soon shown to be improper or futile’, and the Council ‘cautious and moderate, a valuable check upon precipitate measures’.[205]

Simcoe.

John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, was the son of a naval officer who died when serving under Admiral Saunders in the fleet which helped to take Quebec. The son, who derived his second name from another sailor, his godfather Admiral Graves, was born in 1752. He was born in Northumberland, but after his father’s death, his mother made her home in Devonshire. He was educated at Exeter Grammar School, at Eton, and at Merton College, Oxford, and he joined the army in 1771, when he was nineteen years old. He served with much distinction in the War of Independence, in which he commanded a Loyalist Corps, known as the Queen’s Rangers. When the war ended, he held the rank of lieutenant-colonel. After his return to England in bad health he spent some years at his family home in Devonshire, he married, and in 1790 became a member of Parliament, sitting for the borough of St. Mawes in Cornwall. His Parliamentary career was very short, for in 1791, before he was yet forty years of age, Pitt appointed him to be Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada. He left Canada in 1796, and soon after he reached England he was sent out as Governor to St. Domingo. After a few months in the island, the state of his health compelled him to come home. He became a lieutenant-general, and was appointed to be Commander-in-Chief in India in succession to Lord Lake, but he never took up the appointment. Prior to going out he was sent to Lisbon in 1806 on a special mission, was taken ill, and brought home to die. He died at Exeter in October, 1806. There is a monument to him by Flaxman in Exeter Cathedral[206], and in Canada his name is borne by Lake Simcoe.

He was not only a good soldier, but a capable, vigorous, public-spirited man, well suited in many ways to be the pioneer governor of a new province. He was strong on questions of military defence and a great road maker. He made Yonge Street, the road from Toronto north to Lake Simcoe, called after Sir George Yonge then Secretary of State for War and afterwards for a short time Governor of the Cape; and he made Dundas Street, christened after the Secretary of State for the Colonies, which then started from the point on Lake Ontario where the city of Hamilton now stands and, running west, connected with the river Thames.

York or Toronto.

Toronto owed much to him, but not under its present name. The name Toronto had been borne in old times by Lake Simcoe, and on the site of the present city of Toronto the French had in 1749[207] built a fort, named Fort Rouillé. The place had come to be known as Toronto, but in 1792[208] the new name of York came into vogue, and in the autumn of the following year, 1793, Simcoe reported that that name had been officially adopted ‘with due celebrity’, in honour of the successful storming of the French camp at Famars near Valenciennes by the force under the command of the Duke of York on the 23rd of May, 1793. It was not until 1834, when the city was incorporated, that the old name of Toronto was restored. Simcoe wrote of Toronto Simcoe’s views as to the seat of government for Upper Canada. Harbour as ‘the proper naval arsenal of Lake Ontario’; but it was not here that he would have placed the seat of government. Strongly convinced of the necessity of opening communication between Lake Ontario and the upper lakes, without making the long round by the waters of Lake Erie and the Straits of Detroit, in 1793 he explored the peninsula between the three lakes of Ontario, Erie and Huron; and on a river, running westward into Lake St. Clair, known at that date as the La Tranche river and afterwards as the Thames[209], a place which was christened London and where there is now a city with 40,000 inhabitants, seemed to him to be the most suitable site for the political centre of Upper Canada. His view was that the seat of government should be inland, presumably because it would be more central in respect to the three lakes, and also because it would be further removed from the danger of raids from the neighbouring territory of the then unfriendly republic. It is interesting to note that, in a dispatch expressing an opinion to the above effect, Simcoe added that sooner or later the Canadas might be divided into three instead of two provinces and Montreal be made the centre of an intermediate government. Dorchester held, as against Simcoe, that Toronto should be the seat of government, and his view prevailed. The Legislature of Upper Canada met at Newark for the last time in May, 1796, shortly before the fort of Niagara on the opposite side of the river was handed over to the Americans,[210] and from 1797 onwards, Simcoe having left in the meanwhile, it met at Toronto.

Before Dorchester returned to take up again the duties of Governor-in-Chief, Simcoe had formed definite views Friction between Dorchester and Simcoe. as to the civil administration and the military defence of Upper Canada; and it is not surprising that the keen, active-minded soldier and administrator, who was little more than forty years of age, did not on all points see eye to eye with the veteran governor now verging on seventy; or that, when he differed, he was not inclined to subordinate his opinions to those of Dorchester. Thus we find Dorchester sending home correspondence with Simcoe with the blunt remark that the enclosures turned on the question whether he was to receive orders from Simcoe or Simcoe from him. In his long official career Dorchester had been much tried. At the time of the War of Independence, he had been badly treated by his employers in England and had felt to the full the mischief and inconvenience caused when those employers divided their confidence and communicated with one subordinate officer and another, thereby encouraging disloyalty and intrigue. The correspondence of these later years points to the conclusion that the iron had entered into his soul and that, with the weariness of age growing upon him, he had become somewhat querulous, unduly apprehensive of loss of authority, and over-sensitive to difference of opinion. There seems to have been no love lost between him and Dundas, while the latter was Secretary of State, but all through the last stage of his career the key-note was dread of divided authority.