Sir Guy Carleton, the First Baron Dorchester, served as the Governor of Quebec between 1768 and 1778. Born in County Tyrone in 1724, this long-serving Anglo-Irish soldier became a lieutenant-colonel in 1757.
A friend of James Wolfe, Carleton was as a quartermaster in the Quebec campaign. Later he became the Lieutenant Governor of Quebec and in 1768, the Governor. During his tenure, he used his political influence to conciliate the French seigneurs and the clergy as outlined in the Quebec Act of 1774. In 1775-6, he helped repel the U.S. invasion of Canada that took place during the Revolutionary War. His term as Governor General of British North America (1785 and 1795) saw the passage of the Constitution Act.
Following the American Revolution, Loyalists flooded into the colony from south of the border. To make governing the expanding and culturally diverse province manageable, the old Quebec was divided into two new provinces: Upper and Lower Canada. The former (eventually Ontario) would follow the British Common Law and remain under the Protestant church, and the latter (later Quebec) would live under French Civil Law and the Roman Catholic Church.
The Constitution Act (1791) also provided for representative assemblies in both colonies. Even so, the governor and executive council retained the power. Yet although the institutions created by Carleton's administration did not provide true representative government, they did provide its early outlines for history to later fill in during the next century. It was the lack of true representation that led to the colonial rebellions of 1837 and 1838. Lord Durham was dispatched from England to look into the situation, but representative government had to wait three more decades, until Confederation in 1867.
Sir Guy Carleton was married and had nine children. After governing British North America, he retired to England where he lived near Basingstoke in Hampshire and later at Maidenhead in Berkshire. He died in 1808 at the age of 84.
Carleton University in Ottawa is named after him, and so are many other educational institutions including an elementary school in Vancouver and a high school in Nepean, Ontario.
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