The Narcissism of Petty Differences? Thomas Jefferson, John Graves Simcoe and the Reformation of Empire in the early United States and British–Canada

Abstract

This article compares the prescriptions for trans-continental empire articulated by two Anglo-American executives in the late eighteenth century: Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States (1801–1809), and John Graves Simcoe, Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada (1792–1798). While the political character of the republican Jefferson and the ultra-monarchist Simcoe differed, they articulated strikingly similar prescriptions for trans-continental empire. Both emphasized the importance of white settlement and commercial development in the West. The article explains this apparent paradox by arguing that Jefferson and Simcoe represent variations on a common Anglo-American theme of empire. The similarity of Jefferson's and Simcoe's prescriptions for new forms of empire reflected their common experience of imperial governance, the American Revolution and exposure to political and economic thought in the British Atlantic World, as well as the common challenges of winning over the volatile allegiance of western settlers and the opposition of native peoples in the trans-Appalachian West.

Keywords:

• Thomas Jefferson
• John Graves Simcoe
• empire
• revolution

Notes

1. For a comparative approach to early American history, see Alan Taylor, “The Late Loyalists: Northern Reflections of the Early American Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 27 (Spring 2007): 1–34; Alan Taylor, James F. Brooks, Elizabeth A. Fenn, and André Reséndez, “Continental Posessions,” Journal of the Early Republic 24 (Summer 2004): 159–188; Seymour Martin Lipset, Continental Divide: the Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (New York: Routledge, 1990).

2. The Constitutional Act of 1791, known as the Canada Act in Great Britain, divided the province of Quebec into the new provinces of Lower and Upper Canada. It appointed a lieutenant-governor to head the executive of the government of Upper Canada.

3. For the transatlantic heritage of American revolutionary thought, see Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1955). Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). For an overview of the republican paradigm in the writing of early American history, see Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History, 79 (June 1992): 11–38.

4. Peter S, Onuf, Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 67.

5. Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 30.

6. Robert W. Tucker & David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 27.

7. Onuf, Jefferson's Empire, 65.

8. Onuf, Statehood and Union, 15–16.

9. Onuf, Statehood and Union, 30; Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 4–8.

10. Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 13–47.

11. Jefferson to Monroe, July 9, 1786, in Julian Boyd et al. eds. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 10: 112 . For the persistence of the problem of Union in the early republic, see James E. Lewis, Jr., The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1783–1829 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

12. Washington to Henry Knox, December 5, 1784, in W. W. Abbott and Dorothy Twohig, eds. Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 10: 171. Onuf, Statehood and Union, xviii–xix.

13. Washington to Henry Knox, December 5, 1784, in Abbott & Dorothy Twohig, eds. Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series, 10: 171.

14. McCoy, Elusive Republic, 78; Onuf, Statehood and Union, 15–16.

15. For the efforts of the Algonquian people of the Great Lakes to maintain their cultural and political autonomy in the 1780s and 1790s, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 366–517. See also, Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104 (June 1999): 814–41. For US Indian policy during this period, see Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992).

16. Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 2006).

17. Onuf, Statehood and Union, 52–4.

18. Ordinance of 1787, July 13, 1787, in Clarence Edwin Carter et al. eds. Territorial Papers of the United States, Vol. II: The Territory Northwest of the River Ohio, 1787–1803 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Printing Office, 1934), 39–50.

19. For the mixed constitution in Anglo-American political thought, see J.G.A. Pocock, “1776: The Revolution against Parliament,” in J.G.A. Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions, 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 279–80.

20. Simcoe to Banks, January 8, 1791, in E. A. Cruickshank, ed., The Correspondence of Lieut. Governor John Graves Simcoe, with Allied Documents Relating to His Administration of the Government of Upper Canada (Toronto: The Society, 1923), 1: 17–18.

21. Simcoe to Banks, January 8, 1791, in Cruickshank, ed., Correspondence of Lieut. Governor John Graves Simcoe, 1: 17–18.

22. The Constitutional Act of 1791, in Adam Shortt and Arthur G. Doughty, eds., Documents Relating to the Constitutional History of Canada, 1759–1791 (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1907), 695–706; An ACT to repeal certain parts of an Act passed in the fourteenth year of His Majesty's Reign, intitled, “An Act for making more effectual Provision for the Government of the Province of Quebec in North American and to introduce the ENGLISH LAW as the Rule of Decision in all matters of Controversy, relative to Property and Civil Rights,” October 15, 1792, in The Provincial Statutes of Upper-Canada, Revised, Corrected, and Republished by Authority (York: R.C. Horne, 1818), 3–4.

23. Memorandum from J.G. Simcoe to Hon. Henry Dundas, June 30, 1791, in Cruickshank, ed., Correspondence of Lieut. Governor John Graves Simcoe, 1: 27.

24. Taylor, “Late Loyalists,” 6.

25. Lillian F. Gates, Land Policies of Upper Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 24–31.

26. Taylor, “Late Loyalists,” 19.

27. Gates, Land Policies of Upper Canada, 25.

28. C. R. Ritcheson, “The Earl of Shelburne and Peace with America, 1782–1783: Vision and Reality,” International History Review 5 (August 1983): 322–45.

29. Sheffield, Lord [John B. Holroyd], Observations on the Commerce of the United States, 2^nd edition (Dublin: P. Byrne, 1984), 134–35.

30. Sheffield, Observations, 188–89.

31. Sheffield, Observations, 190–91.

32. Simcoe to Dundas, June 30, 1791, in Cruickshank, ed. Correspondence of Lieut. Governor John Graves Simcoe, 1: 28.

33. Simcoe to Dundas, June 30, 1791, in Cruickshank, ed. Correspondence of Lieut. Governor John Graves Simcoe, 1: 28.

34. John Seelye, Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the Republican Plan, 1755–1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 8.

35. From James McGill to Hon. Henry Hamilton, August 1, 1785, in Douglas Brymner, ed., Report on Canadian Archives, 1890 (Ottawa: Brown, Chamberlain, 1891), 56–58.

36. Memorandum on Trade and Commerce by Robert Hamilton, Queenston, September 24, 1798, in E. A. Cruickshank and A. F. Hunter, eds. The Correspondence of the Honourable Peter Russell, with Allied Documents Relating to His Administration of the Government of Upper Canada During the Official Term of Lieut.-Governor J.G. Simcoe, while on Leave of Absence (Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1932), 2: 266.

37. Simcoe to Dundas, June 30, 1791, in Cruickshank, ed. Correspondence of Lieut. Governor John Graves Simcoe, 1: 28.

38. Peter Russell to J.G. Simcoe, August 26, 1791, quoted in, Gates, Land Policies of Upper Canada, 26.