During the negotiation of Jay's Treaty in Simcoe devoted much of his time to retaining the alliance with the western tribes while stopping short of openly supporting the resistance to American authority.
In Simcoe returned to England on leave but his command was changed from Upper Canada to Santa Domingo where he was expected to restore order by coping with a French invasion and slave revolt. He spent only eight months on the island and returned to England in In he was promoted to the rank of Major-General in command of the garrison at Plymouth and his rank was increased again two years later to Lieutenant-General in command of coastal defence in Devonshire.
Most of his time in this period was spent organizing and planning defensive measures against the expected invasion from France. In Simcoe was appointed to the command of British forces in India , but during a diplomatic mission to Portugal he became seriously ill and died shortly after returning to England. Under the Constitutional Act, , the western portion of the Province of Quebec was established as a separate entity with its own Lieutenant-Governor and Assembly.
As the first incumbent in the office, Simcoe established the basis of government that was to endure in the province for the next fifty years. He stamped it with his view of a strong executive, composed of the Lieutenant-Governor and an appointed Executive Council, which would establish policies with an Assembly largely confined to the approval of money bills to meet these policies.
He was slower to deal with gaps between plans and practice. He began with great faith in granting whole townships to individual applicants, who were to act as organizers of settlement and in turn to be accepted as a sort of local gentry. Twenty-six such grants were made in his first year. Ineffective though the system proved to be, he did not abandon it. The number and size of large grants in fact grew annually, in some part as he and other officials took advantage of their generous land allowances.
More than two-thirds of his grants in the new Home District were of over acres, and the best locations generally went to officers of government. He himself seems to have taken only the 5, acres due to his military rank, although he was careful to locate more than 1, acres in each of the areas — York Township and the Western District — where his government did most to encourage settlement. Impatient with the district land boards, set up in to ensure orderly and loyal settlement, Simcoe often ordered large grants himself.
Some of his grants, meant to attract settlement and direct it to particular locations, were of lands to which the title was not clear.
His grant to William Berczy is the notorious but by no means the only case. After he secured the abolition of the land boards in , there was really no machinery left to screen applicants for land. In the short run, the regulations designed to check speculation did not work; in the long run they contributed to confusion and delay in issuing legal titles. In practice, his policy amounted to little more than the acceptance of settlement as it came. The plan he had laid in England was more ambitious, to control not only the location but also the nature of new settlements.
The winter quarters of Ranger detachments were to mark the sites of new towns, settlers being attracted by the clearing and road building that the troops would do, as well as by the markets and protection they would afford. The twelve companies that Simcoe proposed, including a cavalry detachment and artificers, were reduced to two infantry companies. Until they were disbanded in , the Rangers continued to be important to Upper Canada chiefly as road builders.
More generally, Simcoe was unable to persuade the imperial administration that his province should be treated like a special foundation, not a normal colony. His practice of requisitioning military supplies for civil works, and even for rations to settlers in the hard winter of —96, was stopped. The Treasury relented in its slow pursuit of his improperly authorized expenditures only after his death. The proposals he endorsed for imperial assistance to capture for Upper Canada the trade of the American west were rejected or ignored.
He had to discontinue appointing lieutenants of counties. He was not allowed to introduce municipal corporations, although he argued for them both as instruments of economic progress and as anti-democratic institutions. Neither the imperial government nor the provincial legislature shared his sense of urgency for the public support of education. The legislature, although it repeated his request for imperial assistance in the year after his departure, did not undertake to assist grammar schools until After four years of almost unrelieved disappointments, his original sense of mission became very like a sense of grievance.
Within the province, his most fundamental task was to provide a framework of civil government, the details of which were not often of special interest to pioneer settlers. He was disappointed in the social status and education of the members of the legislative assembly when he first met them, but in five sessions their objects seldom conflicted with his.
Most of the legislation put before them, especially in their first session, was altogether uncontroversial: the adoption of English civil law and of jury trials, of standard English weights and measures and of tavern licensing, and the provision of jails and courthouses in each of the four administrative districts. During his whole term of office, the assembly rejected only two measures that he was anxious for — a land tax and an education bill.
In May it obliged him to settle for the gradual rather than the immediate abolition of slavery in the province. The assembly also faced him with two unwelcome initiatives of its own. He had to concede the legalization of marriages performed by magistrates. He insisted on a qualification: if there were five Anglican clergymen in the district, one of them within eighteen miles, the bill did not apply. He effectively defeated attempts to introduce elective town meetings on the New England model.
A bill of put the election of township officers under the control of justices of the peace, who were appointed by the lieutenant governor and remained the real power of local government. On the whole, he had reason for his annual expressions of satisfaction with the assembly.
He had rather more difficulty with the Legislative Council. His general distrust of merchants and speculators applied with uncomfortable directness to some of its members. There were fewer than ten councillors, never all assembled; and in so small a body his pompously defensive reaction to criticism was a disadvantage. There, also, the developing rivalry of sectional interests found clearer expression.
His original idea of the council gave some weight to the independent judgement of its members, but in practice he expected it to act as an adjunct to his administration. Still, he managed after three sessions to find common ground with both of his occasionally outspoken critics on the council: with Robert Hamilton of the Niagara area on the encouragement of western commerce and with Richard Cartwright of Kingston on the need for municipal councils.
Watchful though he was of his status and perquisites, he was a warm and sympathetic man, with an intense loyalty to his subordinates. Always ambitious, while he was in Upper Canada he identified its progress with his own. Simcoe initiated a land grant program enticing loyalist Americans to settle in Upper Canada to increase its population and productivity, although he remained distrustful of the emigrants. Realizing the tension between the United States and Great Britain would only grow, Simcoe began preparations for war as early as Poor health sent Simcoe back to England in , and resulted in his resignation as Lieutenant governor in After a few minor commissions, Simcoe was appointed commander-in-chief of India in , the most prestigious foreign posting at the time, but Simcoe died before setting sail for his new position.
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