John Graves Simcoe

Who was John Graves Simcoe?

John Graves Simcoe was a British army officer and the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada from 1791–1796. Then frontier, this was modern-day southern Ontario and the watersheds of Georgian Bay and Lake Superior His bicameral Legislature founded York and was instrumental in introducing institutions such as the courts, trial by jury, English common law, freehold land tenure, and the abolition of slavery. They ended slavery in Upper Canada long before it was abolished in the British Empire as a whole; by 1810, there were no slaves in Upper Canada, but the Crown did not abolish slavery throughout the Empire until 1834.