John Graves Simcoe (February 25, 1752 – October 26, 1806) 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. He founded York (now Toronto) and was instrumental in introducing institutions such as the courts, trial by jury, English common law, freehold land tenure, and in abolishing slavery. He 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.
Read more about John Graves Simcoe: Early Life, Marriage and Family, Military Career, Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, Later Career, Legacy
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“How soon I may ride the whole world about;
And at the third question thou must not shrink,
But tell me here truly what I do think.””
—Unknown. King John and the Abbot of Canterbury (l. 30–32)
“Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill, lived Brister Freeman, “a handy Negro,” slave of Squire Cummings once.... Not long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying-ground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord,—where he is styled “Sippio Brister,”MScipio Africanus he had some title to be called,—”a man of color,” as if he were discolored.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)