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CHAPTER V

UPPER CANADA TO THE WAR OF 1812

WHEN the great bulk of the American loyalists were going The Settlement of to Nova Scotia, Haldimand caused new townships to be Upper surveyed at Cataraqui (Kingston), and along the bay of Canada. Quinté on Lake Ontario, at which were established disbanded troops and their families. The haste to get the land surveyed led to grave mistakes in the execution of the work. The loyalists and soldiers that settled in Western Canada in the years 1783-5 were estimated to be some ten thousand. From these beginnings arose the future province of Upper Canada. The land was virgin soil, having no French population except a few on the Canadian side of the Detroit river. It was at first almost a wilderness covered by thick woods; but as time went on the forest became more and more interspersed with detached settlements formed by the American loyalists. Under an Order in Council of November, 1789, the children of loyalists received each a grant of two hundred acres of land; the sons on reaching twenty-one, the daughters on their marriage. All American loyalists who had joined their fortunes to Great Britain before the Treaty of 1783, and their children, were to be distinguished by the letters U. E. (United Empire). This distinction, greatly cherished, formed its holders into a kind of informal aristocracy.

Constitu

At first the French system of land-tenure and the absence Success of of any kind of popular government deterred Americans, tional Act. accustomed to a vigorous political life, from making Western Canada their home. It was, as we have seen, to remedy this that the Constitutional Act of 1791 was

System of roads.

Toronto.

passed. Whatever its merits in other respects, that Act was at least successful in promoting emigration to Upper Canada. The Act may not have established', in Simcoe's words in opening the Legislature on September 17, 1792, 'the British Constitution and all the forms which secure and maintain it'; but it contained within it that power of development which is the peculiar merit of English institutions.

Reference has already been made to Simcoe's work as a road-maker. The communication between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron was improved by making a road thirty miles long from York to Lake Simcoe. A grand military road from one end of the province to the other was surveyed and named Dundas Street, and a small portion of it was constructed. Some pioneers even settled along the proposed road, but, when the guiding hand of Simcoe was removed, the project was allowed to lapse. We have seen that Simcoe was a thorn in the side to Dorchester, and that, in his zeal for his own particular province, he was unable to take just views of the interests of Canada as a whole. Even when Upper Canada was alone concerned, his artificial scheme of military settlements was probably unwise. Still, whatever his failings, Upper Canada has reason to remember kindly the active Lieutenant-Governor, whose worst faults were due to his zeal for her interests.

At first Newark, by the river Niagara on Lake Ontario, had been the chief town of the district, but when Upper Canada was constituted a separate province, the old French trading post of Toronto, which was christened York by Simcoe, became (in 1794) the capital. The position of Toronto was stronger than that of Newark. It was flanked by the Don and the Humber, had a good harbour, and was further removed than was Newark from the American border. At the time there was not a little grumbling over the choice. The town, wrote the Chief Justice in 1797, was nearly forty miles beyond the most remote of the

settlements at the head of the lake, and the road to it lay through a tract of country in the possession of Indians. The accommodation was so poor that the greater part of those whose business or destiny called them thither must either remain in the open air or be herded together in huts or tents. A lady described it in 1798 as a 'dreary, dismal place, not even possessing the characteristics of a village'. There was no church, no school-house, nor any of the ordinary signs of civilization. For years York remained a very small place, and as late as 1804 there was a complete absence of public offices. The Executive Council itself met in a small room in the clerk's private house, where (proh pudor!) their private discussions might be overheard.

and

tion.

It might be expected that a province peopled by the American most faithful of loyalists would not prove difficult material Scottish for their English governors; but, side by side with the immigraimmigration of loyalists, there followed, on the granting of the Constitution, a considerable influx of Americans, who came, as Americans are coming to-day into the western provinces, simply with the purpose of bettering their fortunes. These men were by no means of necessity disaffected to the British Government, but they found themselves in natural opposition to the high Tories in office. Further, from 1798 onwards, a stream of emigrants began to flow from the British Isles, for the most part from the Scottish Highlands. The circumstances of the country were such as in any case to level social distinctions. Simcoe reported, before any Americans had arrived in the province who were not loyalists, that the general spirit of the country was against the election to the Assembly of half-pay officers, and in favour of men who dined in common with their servants. 'Improper or futile' measures were already, according to the Lieutenant-Governor, freely advocated.

Almost the first act of the Upper Canadian Legislature Upper

Canadian

had naturally been to abrogate the old French law and legislation.

Government of Upper Canada.

Constitu

tional

disputes.

establish the English system. But the English law was by no means always well suited to the needs of a province in its making. Thus the English law as to marriage was difficult to put in force, where clergymen of the Church of England were very few and scattered. The Assembly sought to recognize as legal irregular marriages which had been caused by the difficulties in the way of legal marriage, a rough and ready method of going to work, which shocked the English notions of the time.

But little is known of the history of Upper Canada in the years which immediately followed Simcoe's resignation. Until the arrival of a new Lieutenant-Governor the senior member of the Executive Council, Peter Russell, acted as administrator, and there was a widespread opinion that he knew how to feather his own nest in the matter of land grants. When the Lieutenant-Governor, General Hunter, arrived in 1799, he found that Russell would have granted lands to the devil and all his friends (as good loyalists), provided they could have paid the fees. Upper Canada, having no seaboard, could only receive goods from Great Britain which had passed through Lower Canada. It was therefore essential that an arrangement should be arrived at with regard to the proceeds of the duties imposed by the Lower Province. At first the proportion assigned to Upper Canada from the amount raised by duties upon goods thus imported was oneeighth. There was besides a small revenue from local taxes and duties. Although the total expenditure of the province was more than could be met from the local revenues, the Assembly possessed the right to appropriate the revenue raised by taxation or received from Lower Canada. In 1803 and 1804, however, Hunter, without consulting the Legislature, charged certain disbursements against this revenue. Notice of this was not taken till after Hunter's death in 1805, when the administrator of the government, who had neither temporary the tact to conciliate nor the strength to overawe the

Assembly, was the recipient of an indignant protest, which ushered in the contests of a later time. The guiding hand in the agitation seems to have been that of an Irish adventurer, Thomas Thorpe, who had been appointed to a judgeship in Upper Canada, and from his arrival in 1806 threw himself eagerly into the game of politics. Thorpe had private friends amongst the London officials, and his character may be gauged from his correspondence with these. He accused Hunter of having nearly ruined the Conduct of Thorpe. province. There were no roads, bad water communication, no ports, no religion, no morals, no education, no trade, no agriculture. Thorpe emphasized his own capacities for making smooth the path of government, the condition being hinted that he should be made Chief Justice. He secured his own political position by making his charges to the grand jury party manifestoes. His next step was to become a member of the Assembly; but his professions of radicalism were in that body before their time. The new Lieutenant-Governor, Francis Gore, who arrived in 1806, was a narrow-minded official of the old school, and saw in Thorpe a dangerous firebrand. On his complaint Thorpe was suspended from office, and a successor appointed. He received an appointment in Sierra Leone, so that his game of blackmail had hardly proved profitable.

American

In fairness to the provincial authorities it must be remem- Danger bered that during these years events were moving in the from direction of war. It was a disquieting thought that large immiportions of the province were occupied by men who might grants. be enemies in the event of that war breaking out. The United Empire loyalists held the ground from Kingston to Lower Canada and about Niagara and Long Point, but, except the Glengarry Scottish Highland immigrants, who were loyal to the Crown, the rest of the population came for the most part from the United States. Before the war itinerant preachers, enthusiastic in political as well as religious

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