John Graves Simcoe, 1752-1806 Read online

  Following the great Masters of the World, the Romans of old, I propose to consider the Winter Stations of these Companies as the Germs of so many well affected Colonial Cities.20

  On 1 June the ship Henneken arrived bringing Provincial Secretary Jarvis and his family. The following day another ship landed Chief Justice William Osgoode, Attorney General John White, and Receiver General Peter Russell. The latter brought his sister, Elizabeth, to be his hostess and housekeeper. With Alexander Grant, four members of Simcoe’s executive council were on the scene and he now had the quorum he needed to govern Upper Canada. He hired three bateaux to take his own party up the St. Lawrence as far as Kingston, at the foot of Lake Ontario, a booming village, which many people hoped would be the new provincial capital.

  A bateau was a flat-bottomed, oared boat with an awning to shelter passengers from the sun, and a lateen sail. It was about twenty-four feet long, rowed by a crew of eight. Supervising the bateaumen was the pilot, making in all twenty-five in the crew. One bateau was for Mrs. Simcoe, the Colonel, and his two aides. Lieutenant Thomas Talbot had been joined by Lieutenant Thomas Grey of the 7th Fusiliers. Like Talbot, Grey had left his regiment to serve Simcoe. In the second bateau were the two children, their nurses and other servants. Francis’s wet nurse had returned home, and Elizabeth had hired a new nurse for him, an American girl named Collins. The third bateau carried the baggage and some substantial furniture, but not the two canvas houses, which would be sent after them.21

  The Simcoes left Quebec City on 8 June. Each night the men slept in the boats, but the Colonel tried to make arrangements for the women and children to sleep under cover. They stayed in houses or inns, and on one occasion with the wife of a local seigneur. At Trois Rivieres Elizabeth was annoyed when a landlord overcharged them for their breakfast. Simcoe left such trivia to his wife, his mind absorbed with the task that awaited him when they passed the last seigneury. They reached Pointe aux Trembles, on the Island of Montreal, on the 13th.22

  THIRTEEN

  A VICE–REGAL PROGRESS AND A ROYAL VISIT

  In Montreal, they stayed at the Château de Ramezay, an old stone building that was the local government house. The heat and humidity were oppressive, although the château was cooler than outdoors and spacious. They were joined here by Captain Charles Stephenson, confirmed as quartermaster general, and Captain Edward Littlehales, newly appointed major of brigade for Upper Canada and Simcoe’s military secretary. Joseph Frobisher, the wealthy fur trader, entertained the Simcoes at Beaver Hall, and the Baronne de Longueuil, wife of William Grant, the Baron, who received them at their home on St. Helen’s Island.

  The governor and Mrs. Simcoe drove up Mount Royal, with its splendid view over the little city, but they found the road appallingly rough. On 17 June, Simcoe reported to Sir George Yonge that Captain-Lieutenant Shaw had reached Kingston with the first contingent of the Queen’s Rangers. The Simcoes left on the 22nd, by road, for Lachine, while the bateaux were drawn upriver through the rapids. They passed a country house belonging to Sir John Johnson, who was not in residence. He had obtained an extended leave of absence, and by that time he was nearing Trois Rivieres with his family, waiting for a ship to take them to England.1 Some of his children travelled back and forth, but Sir John did not return to Canada until the autumn of 1796.

  The Simcoes rejoined the bateaux on the 23rd, at 6.00 a.m. Elizabeth remarked on the dirty-looking water as the Ottawa River emptied into the sparkling clear St. Lawrence. The men walked to lighten the boat at the Cascades Rapids. On the 24th they rode through the tiny shallow locks on the eighteen-inch deep canal at Coteau du Lac that bypassed the Cedars Rapids. At Pointe au Baudet, Simcoe announced that they were now in Upper Canada. When they reached the main settlement in Glengarry, a boat arrived from John Macdonell, a half-pay captain from Butler’s Rangers, whose home was Glengarry House. By the time Simcoe crossed into Upper Canada, officers of Provincial Corps were permitted half-pay when their regiments were disbanded. Aboard Macdonell’s boat were kilted Highlanders come to escort the governor and his three aides ashore. Elizabeth planned to rejoin them when the bateaux reached the Macdonell house.

  Scarcely moments later, and with awesome speed, the sky blackened, billowing clouds of a threatening grey-blue filled the heavens. Great flashes of lightning, the like of which she had never before beheld, bombarded her senses. When the wooden awning on the bateau tore, and the boat rocked fiercely, she demanded that the crew land. She spent the night in a farmhouse, and early the next morning she breakfasted with the governor and Macdonell at Glengarry House.

  Farther on they spent a night with James Gray, a half-pay major from Sir John Johnson’s regiment. From there Simcoe went to St. Regis, a Mohawk village on an island, to greet those loyal friends of Great Britain. Waiting at the foot of the spectacular Long Sault Rapids was John Munro, one of Sir John’s half-pay captains and a legislative councillor. Munro, of Augusta Township, had brought horses to carry them along the rough track that bypassed the dangerous stretch of water. Richard Duncan, now a legislative councillor, as Simcoe had promised, had loaned the horses, a generous gesture because the province was very short of livestock of all kinds. Footing for the horses was treacherous, the track was so rutted, and bridges were mere logs laid side by side where a horse might easily break a bone. They sampled fresh-caught bass, and wild strawberries tastier than those grown at Wolford Lodge.

  Off Johnstown, a tiny hamlet in the forest, a group of half-pay officers in their old uniforms met them in a boat. They took the governor to inspect Chimney Island, where the French had built Fort Lévis, and they fired off one of the old cannons. Simcoe took note of several guns, in case they should be useful to protect Kingston. As he was returning to the bateau, the officers saluted him with shouted huzzahs, to his delight. Old soldiers were special men, a breed apart. At an inn at Johnstown, Simcoe held his first levee. The officers, still in uniform, spoke to many toasts. Dr. Solomon Jones, surgeon’s mate in the Loyal Rangers, responding to a toast, recounted some of the exploits of the new governor during the late war. Elijah Bottum (or Bothum) in the green coat of a Loyal Ranger, sporting “a formidable basket-hilted claymore, then addressed them in brief, military phrase and gave one of the old war slogans.”2

  The Manor House, Cotterstock, Northamptonshire, generally accepted as the birthplace of John Graves Simcoe. Photo by Paul Dixon of Cotterstock.

  Two re-enactors at Fort York, Toronto. On Victoria Day in May, green jacketed “Queen’s Rangers” join in a military review with other period troops. Photo by M.B. Fryer.

  John Graves Simcoe (1752-1806). Painting by George T. Berthon, photo by Tom Moore. Ontario Government Art Collection.

  Elizabeth Gwillim Simcoe (1762-1850). From a miniature drawn by her friend, Mary Anne (“Mrs.”) Burges. National Archives of Canada, C 81931.

  The Simcoe Vase. John Graves Simcoe presented this silver vase to the Coleridge family. Simcoe’s sons, Francis and Henry, were pupils of the Reverend George Coleridge at The King’s School, Ottery St. Mary. Photo by Shirley Dracott, permission of Lord Coleridge.

  The Drewe Arms, Broadhembury. Photo by M.B. Fryer.

  The John Graves Simcoe Memorial on the South Choir Wall, Exeter Cathedral, by the sculptor Flaxman. Exeter was severely bombed during the Second World War and the stained-glass windows were destroyed. They have been replaced by plain glass. Photo by M.B. Fryer.

  The Simcoe Window, St. George’s Church, Sibbald Point, Lake Simcoe, Ontario. Made by the Simcoe daughters. Photo by M.B. Fryer.

  The rededication of Wolford Chapel. The Very Reverend Patrick Mitchell, KCVO, was until recently the Dean of Windsor. He is shown conducting the service. Photo by George Hutchison. Government of Ontario.

  Simcoe was pleased. He would enjoy governing such men, although he was sensing how different was reality from his thoughts before leaving England. Very few of the settlers were Anglicans, which might bode ill for establishing the Church of England. As far as possible, th
e Loyalists had been settled according to their denominations. Highlanders living closest to the last seigneury were mainly Roman Catholics. At nearby St. Regis, Simcoe had met Father Alexander. Macdonell, their Highland-born priest. West of the Highlanders were Lutherans, mainly Germans, while in the upper townships, he heard, many were New England “sectaries,” not the loyal Anglicans he had hoped to attract from Connecticut. (Reverend Samuel Peters, who had fled from Connecticut, was an Anglican, but the Congregational Church was the established one.)

  In the townships were at least as high a proportion of followers of John Wesley as could be found in his own West Country. Badly educated but bewitching saddlebag preachers from the United States regularly toured the settlements, “Thunderers at our doors!” enlisting many converts.3 (Simcoe or no Simcoe, within less than a century, Methodism would grow into the strongest Protestant denomination in Canada.)

  Also worrying was the presence of Moravian missionaries on the River La Tranche, who had come with refugees of the Delaware nation after the Revolution. He feared they, too, might be spreading their nonconformist notions in what he hoped would be the heartland of the province. He must ask for Anglican missionaries from home to counter such influences.

  At Gananoque they met militia Colonel Joel Stone, who had built a mill on the river of the same name. Elizabeth sketched the mill, and the governor added a dog in the water below it, and some notes (now too faded to be read) which amused her. The bateaux were now in the heart of what the French had named Les Milles Iles, the Thousand Islands. The natives, more poetic, had called the area “The Garden of the Great Spirit,” pretty lumps of black-streaked pink granite with patches of broad-leafed or coniferous trees. Again, Elizabeth was busy with sketch book and pencil. They followed the bateau channel westwards, more protected than the wider channel near the south shore of the St. Lawrence. There, sailing vessels tacked back and forth against the strong east-flowing current.

  By the morning of 1 July they were off Kingston harbour, before which were a number of large, flatter islands. As the bateaux moved towards the mouth of the Cataraqui River, they could feel the strength of the wind that whipped up whitecaps on the crests of the waves on Lake Ontario. Kingston was the naval base, but Simcoe resolved to find a better site because this harbour offered so little shelter against the prevailing southwest wind. Carleton Island had a superior harbour, but the international boundary might run north of it necessitating its evacuation. On the island, Fort Haldimand, so busy during the late war, now had only a small caretaker garrison.

  A warm welcome awaited them ashore. Again half-pay officers were in their old uniforms. Cannons boomed, joined by musket volleys fired by Mohawks who had come from their village of Deseronto, a few miles west in Tyendinaga Township. Drawn up in their ranks were the Queen’s Rangers, whose rows of small white tents were visible in the background. Here lay the military, naval and commercial heartland of the province, yet it consisted of about fifty wooden houses, interspersed with stumps and muddy tracks. Close to the water lay the old French Fort Frontenac, recently rebuilt, and alongside were merchants’ storehouses. Simcoe’s practised eye noted that a gun placed on some heights across the Cataraqui River could easily destroy the low-lying old fort and most of the town. At the very least, a blockhouse must be erected there. Elizabeth was delighted to find, on a knoll, a small but cool and airy house that had been prepared for them.

  The honeymoon was soon over, as far as the Kingstonians were concerned. As the foremost community in Upper Canada, they assumed that Simcoe would choose Kingston as his capital, especially since Lord Dorchester had more or less promised them. They were dismayed when, at the outset, Simcoe announced that he would be moving on to Niagara, which was more central although in the long term no safer from attack. For the present, Niagara suited Simcoe, and it was defensible as long as Fort Niagara, across the narrow Niagara river, was in British hands. Although the land was legally part of New York State, it had been garrisoned by regular troops. The 5th (Northumberland) Regiment had been rotated there from Detroit only in June. Simcoe assumed that Britain had no intention of withdrawing the troops as long as the Loyalists and native peoples needed protection.

  Especially indignant was Kingston’s leading merchant, Richard Cartwright, a Loyalist who had served at Fort Niagara during the Revolution. Cartwright’s house, visible from the water, was the only one of stone in the settlement. The logical place for the capital was here, where, incidentally, Cartwright owned many of the mills and whose bateaux had almost a monopoly over the carrying trade.

  Elizabeth joined the governor on many of his tours of inspection. At other times she was accompanied by Lieutenant Thomas Talbot. She, who had always loved nature, was disillusioned with how untidy it was in this near-wilderness, so untamed by the hand of man.

  A mosquito had bitten her so severely through a leather glove that she felt faint. Her “Musquito” was more likely a hornet or a ground wasp. A boat was more satisfactory than trying to go anywhere by land. The exception was an evening when the woods caught fire, and the smoke drove the mosquitos away. Besides, the woods were so “picturesque” as flames illuminated the dark trees. “Perhaps you have no idea of the pleasure of walking in a burning wood, but I found it so great that I think I shall have some woods set on fire for my evening walks,” she wrote Mary Anne Burges.

  John Scadding, she put in her diary for the girls at Wolford Lodge, had found a small green grass snake that he showed her. He kept it a few hours then let it escape. He had come, at the request of Simcoe, who needed his expertise to evaluate agricultural land. Scadding had left Wolford and the other Devon lands in the hands of his capable brother, Thomas.4

  For Sunday 8 July, Simcoe prepared to take his oath of office, surrounded by every bit of pomp and pageantry the tiny community of Kingston would allow. With his officers in dress uniform, Simcoe in the red of a colonel in the army, they set off in solemn procession, the drummer marking the beat, bound for St. George’s Church (now the Anglican cathedral). Government was about to commence. Present were Receiver General Peter Russell and Jacques Duperon Baby of Detroit, newly appointed to the Executive Council. (The other two members of the council were Alexander Grant and William Robertson, neither of whom was present.) Standing by in knee breeches and silk stockings were Richard Cartwright of Kingston and Robert Hamilton, who had come from Niagara. Chief Justice William Osgoode administered the oath, and Russell and Baby signed as witnesses. Afterwards, Elizabeth joined the governor for the swearing-in ceremony, where Reverend John Stuart gave the blessing. Stuart had been the Anglican missionary to the Mohawks at Fort Hunter, in New York’s Mohawk Valley, before the Revolution. He had been held under house arrest until permitted to leave for British territory. He was the first clergyman in Upper Canada, after serving as chaplain to the 2nd Battalion King’s Royal Regiment of New York.

  Simcoe met on the 9th, with the Executive Council, the date of the members’ appointments. With them he discussed the composition of the Legislative Council or upper house, of which the executive was a sort of cabinet. In addition to Osgoode, Russell, Grant, Robertson and Baby, Simcoe approved Richard Cartwright, Richard Duncan from Augusta Township, Robert Hamilton from Niagara, and John Munro of Matilda Township, who had brought Duncan’s horses to the Simcoes. The Legislative Council thus had nine members, including the members of the Executive Council. Chosen as speaker was Chief Justice Osgoode.

  One man who was not appointed must have felt affronted. Captain Justus Sherwood of the Loyal Rangers, now resident in Augusta, had been of great value to Dorchester’s predecessor General Frederick Haldimand. Sherwood had been head of Haldimand’s secret service, a commissioner of prisoners and refugees, and negotiator with Governor Chittenden and the Allens and Fays, for Vermont to reunite with Great Britain. Reunion failed, but Sherwood had kept Vermont neutral from July 1781 until after the Treaty of Separation, no mean achievement. Sherwood, a justice of the peace, had been appointed to the Legislative Council
in May 1784, to represent the District of Montreal.5 Since such appointments were for life, Sherwood had the right to expect that transfer to the Legislative Council of Upper Canada would be automatic. Later, Simcoe wrote Dorchester that he knew that Sherwood had been employed by Haldimand in “intercourse he held with the inhabitants of Vermont,” but he gave no opinion on the man’s merits.6 Sherwood appeared to be just the sort of man Simcoe needed. Something had gone wrong. Perhaps General Clarke had warned Simcoe that Sherwood was outspoken, and a democratic Connecticut Yankee who was a potential troublemaker.

  While Simcoe was busy with his council and certain proclamations, Elizabeth was making friends with the young wife of the surgeon to the garrison, James Macaulay. They had named their newborn son John Simcoe Macaulay. To Elizabeth’s delight, they would soon be following the Simcoes to Niagara. The government ship, H.M.S. Onondaga, an armed 80-ton topsail schooner, was standing by. Simcoe wanted to go to Niagara by small boat, to evaluate harbours and townsites, but he decided to go on the schooner and get his family settled first. On 23 July they boarded the Onondaga. Two days later Lieutenant Talbot pointed out the spray rising above the great Falls of Niagara, forty miles in the distance. Elizabeth could hardly wait to sketch them.

  Niagara, which Simcoe renamed Newark (to dispose of an uncivilised word) had scarcely a dozen houses — really mere cabins. Butler’s Rangers, a very active Provincial Corps, had operated out of Fort Niagara. The fort, dating from the French regime, stood across the river where heavy guns and the British garrison could protect the settlement. Disbanded Rangers who had received grants of land along the west bank of the river had been establishing farms for the past ten years. Their commanding officer, Colonel John Butler, the man Simcoe had once thought of joining, was one of the leading settlers, and a deputy superintendent in the Indian Department.7 (In fact, many disbanded Rangers had named their settlement Butlersburg, in honour of their colonel, and were hardly pleased with Simcoe’s choice of Newark.)