North America's First Valentine — When The Founder Of Toronto Fell In Love With A Rebel Spy

1779. The American Revolution was at its bloody height. John Graves Simcoe had already seen plenty of action. Years before he founded the city of Toronto, Simcoe was a young officer in the British army, fighting against the American rebels. And there, in the middle of that brutal war, he was about to fall in love.

That winter, Simcoe found himself living just outside New York City. The area was controlled by the British at the time, but there were still plenty of American rebels around. So Simcoe spent his days on patrol with his men, searching for revolutionaries, fighting terrible, bloody battles. Over the course of the war, he would gain a reputation as a hero on the British side — leading his Queen's Rangers on guerrilla-style raids, their green uniforms blending in with the forests, a white crescent moon on their hats in honour of Diana, Goddess of the Hunt. Many of the American rebels, on the other hand, would come to see him as a particularly vicious foe, accused of massacres and remembered more than 200 years later as a psychopathic villain in an ahistorical Netflix show.

But at night, things were much more peaceful. Simcoe was billeted with an American family who lived in Oyster Bay, a small community on Long Island. The Townsends were slave-owning tobacco farmers: they enslaved eight people at their home and even more on their plantation. Simcoe would later earn a complicated reputation as a passionate abolitionist, but even so, he seems to have enjoyed his time living with the Townsends. In fact, it was there during those long winter nights on Long Island that he was destined to fall in love.

Sarah Townsend was 18 years old; the middle of the three Townsend girls. Sally to her friends. Simcoe was 27, but still a dashing young officer looking for a wife. They say his fellow soldiers were deeply jealous of the time he got to spend with Sally. "She was the toast of these young men," one account would later remember, "and Simcoe was regarded as a most fortunate being in basking in the daily sunshine of her charms." The two are said to have spent plenty of time flirting that winter, and by the time February 14th came around, the young Townsend had captured Simcoe's heart.

To prove the depth of his feelings, the young man turned to a relatively new English tradition. People had been sending Valentine's Day cards for centuries, but it was over the course of the 1700s that they really evolved into the popular romantic tradition we know today. And Simcoe seems to have fully embraced it — seeing it as a chance to show off his writing skills. He'd studied poetry at school and thoroughly enjoyed writing his own verse. So, to celebrate St. Valentine's Day in 1779, Simcoe penned an ode to Sally Townsend — and then gave it to her.

The poem is a fairly epic one by the standards of a Valentine — it’s thirteen stanzas long and more than 300 words — but it begins like this:

Fairest Maid where all is fair
Beauty’s pride and Nature’s care;
To you my heart I must resign
O choose me for your Valentine!

Later, it gets a bit more wordy:

Thou knows’t what powerful magick lies
Within the round of Sarah’s eyes,
Or darted thence like lightning fires,
And Heaven’s own joys around inspires;
 

And finally, it transforms into a prayer to the God of Love — a plea that there will be more to Simcoe's life than just endless war:

[God] bad'st me change the pastoral scene,
Forget my Crook; with haughty mien
To raise the iron Spear of War,
Victim of Grief and deep Despair:
Say, must I all my joys forego
And still maintain this outward show?
Say, shall this breast that's pained to feel
Be ever clad in horrid steel?
Nor swell to other joys than those
Of conquest o'er unworthy foes?
Shall no fair maid with equal fire
Awake the flames of soft desire[?]
[…]
"Fond Youth," the God of Love replies,
"Your answer take from Sarah's eyes."

But that wasn't all. Simcoe had more to offer than just his poetry. He also attached a sketch: two hearts, inscribed with both of their initials and joined together by Cupid's arrow.

Today, it's considered to be the very first Valentine in the history of North America.

You might be wondering how young Sally Townsend could resist such an historic overture. But the truth is that it didn't matter how much Simcoe felt for Townsend, how flattering his poetry, or romantic his art. The two could never be together. The founder of Toronto had fallen in love with the wrong woman. You see, Sally Townsend was a rebel spy.

Now that the British were in control of New York, the American general George Washington was desperate for information from inside the occupied city. So, he established a spy ring to feed him secrets from New York, as well as from Long Island and Connecticut. He called it The Culper Ring. Sally’s brother Robert was one of three men enlisted to run the scheme — and while the details are far from clear, many historians believe that he brought his sister on board as an informant.

The Culper Ring proved to be a huge success. It was in operation for five years and tipped Washington off to surprise attacks, a British counterfeiting scheme, and maybe even a plot on the general’s own life. It’s been called “the spy ring that saved America.”

But with his head firmly over his heels, Simcoe had no clue the young woman he’d fallen in love with was actually a secret rebel. Some historians suggest that while he was busy wooing the lovely young Townsend, she may have been spying on him the whole time.

One story in particular raises eyebrows. The British army’s Adjutant-General, John Andre, frequently met with Simcoe at the Townsend house. And since it was The Culper Ring who tipped Washington off to Andre’s plot with the rebel traitor Benedict Arnold — to hand the American fort at West Point over to the British — some believe that Sally must have overheard Andre telling Simcoe about the plan and then relayed that information to her brother. (Although the story wasn’t told until a century later, and it seems like the dates don’t quite match up.)

In any case, looking back on Simcoe's lovelorn winter on Long Island, it seems that Sally's interest in him may have been nothing more than a rebel ruse. As the daughter of a revolutionary family, she did have plenty of reason to hate the British officer who was making himself at home in her house. And it can't have helped that he chopped down her family's beloved apple orchard so he could use the wood to build defences for a nearby fort. In the end, as you might expect, Sally Townsend rejected Simcoe’s plea to take him as her Valentine. In fact, she would never marry — she died as a single woman at the ripe old age of eighty.

Simcoe wouldn't have to live with that rejection for long: his days with the Townsends were numbered. Later that same year, he was captured in an ambush and spent six months in a rebel prison. There in his dank cell, his health began to fail him. He was eventually released in a prisoner exchange so he could head home to England and recover. It was there, as he convalesced at this godfather's country home, that he met a new love interest.

His godfather's niece Elizabeth was young and smart and pretty and curious, a strong writer and a wonderful artist. The two fell in love as she nursed him back to health and as they enjoyed long walks and romantic horseback rides through the rolling green hills of Devon. By the time Simcoe was chosen to serve as the first governor of Upper Canada, they were married. They headed off to the frontier together, where they would found the city we call Toronto.

But there is still one physical trace of Simcoe's lost love affair that survives to this day. You'll find it on Long Island, in the old Townsend house in Oyster Bay — their home is now open to the public as the Raynham Hall Museum. There, in the house where Simcoe once fell in love with his rebel spy, they've preserved a pane of glass from her bedroom window. There's a wistful message scratched into its surface — a few longing words of love thought to have been inscribed by the besotted British officer John Graves Simcoe: to "the adorable Miss Sally Sarah Townsend."

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If you're interested in stories about love and the history of Toronto, then you might be interest to know that my new book, The Toronto Book of Love, has been published by Dundurn Press. You can get it now from all the usual places — including the Dundurn site!

The Jarvis Family: 60 Years Fighting Revolutionaires And Radicals — And How It All Backfired

UK TOUR DAY THIRTEEN (LONDON): I returned to London for the last few days of the Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour. And on my first day back, I headed to this spot on The Strand. It's in the middle of the city, on the edge of the financial district, just a few blocks from Trafalgar Square, right around the bend of the Thames from the Westminster. I came here because in the very late 1700s and very early 1800s, this place was home to the Crown & Anchor tavern, a hotbed for radical politics with a special connection to one of the most conservative families from the early history of Toronto.

The story of William Jarvis starts on the other side of the Atlantic — in Connecticut. This was back in the days when being an American meant you were British, too. And Jarvis liked it that way. He was deeply loyal to the Crown. When the American Revolution broke out in the 1770s, he was convinced the rebels were wrong. So even though he was just a teenager, he joined the British army. He spent the next few years fighting against the Patriot rebels as a member of the Queen's Rangers.

But Jarvis, of course, had picked the losing side. And he paid a heavy price. At the end of the war, he tried to return to his home in Connecticut. But he wasn't welcome there anymore. One day, while he and his family were on their way to a picnic, they were attacked by a mob of angry Patriots. That kind of thing was happening to Loyalists all over the brand new United States. Just a few years earlier, pro-British opinions had been accepted as conventional wisdom; now, they were treason. Jarvis' own sister was attacked over and over again in the wake of the Revolution, her home invaded, her children threatened with bayonets, her husband eventually driven to suicide. While she and tens of thousands of others escaped north to the British colonies in Canada, William Jarvis fled across the Atlantic to England. He spent the next nine years living here in London — in exile.

He wasn't alone. Thousands of American Loyalists headed for the British Isles, including a young woman by the name of Hannah Owen Peters. She was the daughter of the Reverend Samuel Peters, a slave-owning Anglican preacher so famously reviled that more than 200 years later, he got his own chapter in a book called Jerks in Connecticut History. He, too, had been driven out of his home by violent Patriot mobs. And he, too, came to London. Hannah followed him here.

So it was in England that William probably met Hannah for the first time (although they were both from important Connecticut families, so it could have been earlier). And it was here that they got married. The ceremony was held at a church just a few blocks from Buckingham Palace: St. George's Hanover Square (the exact same spot where, a century later, Sir John A. Macdonald would marry his second wife while he was in town negotiating Confederation).

St. George's Hanover Square

Soon, the new couple would become one of the founding families of Toronto. While they were living in London with Hannah's dad, Jarvis was still in close contact with his commanding officer from his days in the Queen's Rangers: John Graves Simcoe. And when Simcoe was chosen as the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada — a brand new province specifically created to be a home for Loyalist refugees — he picked Jarvis to be part of the government.

But that wasn't the only new job Jarvis was going to have in the new province. And that's where the Crown & Anchor tavern comes in.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, the Crown & Anchor was one of the most important taverns in all of England. Some of the biggest names in Britain came here to drink and to argue, to hold meetings and give lectures: people like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel Johnson, William Godwin, Thomas Hardy and William Hazlitt. The tavern was especially famous as a hotbed for left-wing politics. It became an icon of its time, synonymous with the Radicals and Reformers who were fighting to make England more democratic. Many of them were being thrown into prison for their ideas, some charged with treason and locked away in the Tower of London. At the Crown & Anchor, hundreds and sometimes even thousands of them gathered in the elegant and spacious rooms, listening to speakers, holding meetings, or throwing a party when someone was finally released from jail. They used the tavern to print pamphlets and radical texts like Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, a defense of the French Revolution. They were also ardent supporters of the American Revolution. In other words, they were the ideological opposites of William Jarvis.

But there was lots of space at the Crown & Anchor. Not everyone who held a meeting there was a radical. Far from it. And in the very late 1700s, the tavern was home to a series of meetings by the most famous secret organization in the world: The Freemasons.

A new province in Canada meant a new Grand Lodge. And the Freemasons in London just happened to have a brand new member who was going to be living there. William Jarvis had been inducted into the organization just a month earlier. So, at one of their meetings at the Crown & Anchor, they chose him to be the very first Provincial Grand Master of the Provincial Grand Lodge of Upper Canada.

Of course, the famous Masonic secrecy means that we can't be entirely sure what kind of a Grand Master Jarvis was. But he also played a much more public role as a prominent member of another anti-democratic, conservative-minded group trying to concentrate power in the hands of a few well-connected members: The Family Compact. Over the course of Toronto's first few decades, just a few Loyalist Tory families — the Jarvises among them — managed to keep most of the power in the new province to themselves, cracking down on anyone who argued in favour of democratic reform.

William Jarvis & Samuel Jarvis, ROM

And when you read about Jarvis and his role in that early Toronto government, the same kind of adjectives keep popping up: "inefficient and careless", "incompetent and corrupt", "incompetent, lazy, selfish and dishonest". Even worse than that, the Jarvis family was one of the very few families in the history of Toronto to own slaves. And when Simcoe wanted to outlaw the practice, the pro-slavery members of his government — including, presumably, Jarvis — forced a compromise that saw it gradually phased out instead.

The Jarvis family doesn't seem to have gotten along very well with Toronto's other founders, either. William once tried to challenge four men to a duel all at the same time; Hannah called the rest of the city's ruling class "a lot of Pimps, Sycophants and Lyars." When one of their slaves escaped, the man wrote a letter to Jarvis explaining why: "your wife vexed me to so high a degree that it was far beyond the power of man to support it..."

One of their sons, Samuel Jarvis, would end up inheriting their confrontational attitude. As a young man, he infamously killed a teenager in a duel under suspicious circumstances — probably over gambling debts. And as a member of the Family Compact, he became one of the arch-enemies of William Lyon Mackenzie. The rebel mayor's politics had been deeply influenced by the American Revolution and those same Crown & Anchor reformers; he'd even met at least one of them during a trip to England and used his own Torontonian newspaper to print the writings of Thomas Paine, just like they'd done in London. He drove the Jarvis family nuts. In fact, it was Mackenzie who came up with the "Family Compact" nickname.

Once, when Mackenzie called Samuel Jarvis a murderer for killing the man in the duel, the young Jarvis struck back. In a bizarre echo of the Patriot attacks that had terrorized his own family in the United States, he organized an angry mob, dressed them up in a parody of First Nations clothing, and attacked Mackenzie's home and business while he was out of town. His family was there, though; they hid in fear while the rioters destroyed Mackenzie's printing press and threw the type into Lake Ontario. We call it The Type Riot.

It backfired. Mackenzie sued and got a big settlement, enough to expand his newspaper business. Now, his radical politics had an even bigger voice: within a few short years, he'd become the first mayor of Toronto and led a rebellion against British rule. On the day he marched his army down Yonge Street, the Jarvis family were there again, taking up arms just like they'd done in the United States 60 years earlier. In fact, it was a ragtag force led by their cousin — Sheriff William Botsford Jarvis — who turned Mackenzie's rebels away.

But the days of the Family Compact were numbered. True democracy was going to come to Canada anyway. And despite having to spend years in exile, Mackenzie would be a leading voice in Canadian politics for decades to come. In a weird twist, thanks to the Type Riot, it was the conservative Jarvis family who had helped to make it happen.

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A dream for Samuel Jarvis at St. George's Hanover Square

Crown & Anchor, right, an empty construction lot now

The Crown & Anchor

Crown & Anchor, right, in a famous political cartoon

Another political cartoon, inside the Crown & Anchor

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A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

Read more posts about The Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour and the connections between the history of Toronto and the United Kingdom here.

I wrote a full posts about Samuel Jarvis' duel for Spacing here. You can learn more about Henry Lewis, the slave who escaped from Jarvis, thanks to the Archives of Ontario here. The Toronto Museum Project has William Jarvis' Queen's Rangers coat on display online here, along with some words about the Toronto Purchase from former mayor David Crombie. You can learn more about William Jarvis' sister, Polly, whose husband was driven to suicide by the American Patriots in this PDF. His cousin shares his own account of the war — and the Patriot attack on the Jarvis family — here and more about it here. Jarvis' entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is here. And there's more about him in Eleven Exiles: Accounts of Loyalists of the American Revolution, which is on Google Books here. Plus, you can learn more about the Crown & Anchor tavern here and here.

You can still see the gravestone of John Ridout — the teenager Samuel Jarvis killed in the duel — in the doorway of St. James Cathedral on King Street East. 

This post is related to dream 09 The Ghost of John Ridout Samuel Jarvis, 1826

How The Simcoes Fell In Love — And The Magical Hills Where It Happened

UK TOUR DAY TWELVE (THE BLACKDOWN HILLS): These are the Blackdown Hills. They're one of England's official "Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty," all rolling green hillsides and yellow fields and ancient trees lining roads so old they've worn deep groves into the ground. It's a land of magic and of myth: of pixies and fairies, of warrior ghosts and witchcraft, of Druids and Romans, of poachers and smugglers, of Iron Age hill forts, Bronze Age burial mounds and Stone Age earthworks. And this is where the founders of Toronto fell in love.

The story of the Simcoes starts with a man named Samuel Graves. He was an Admiral in the British navy; he spent much of the 1700s fighting. He was the Captain of a ship during the Seven Years' War and he was the head of the whole North American fleet during the early days of the American Revolution. That bit didn't go very well: he was ordered to control the entire east coast of the United States with only a couple dozen ships. Those orders have gone down in history as one of the most impossible tasks ever asked of a naval officer. Graves was doomed to fail. Eventually, he was replaced and he headed home to his country estate, where he'd live out the rest of his days in relative peace and quiet.

His house — Hembury Fort House — was in the Blackdown Hills. In fact, it still is; it's a retirement home now. And while Admiral Graves didn't have any children of his own to take care of, he did have a niece. Her name was Elizabeth Posthuma Gwillim.

She was an orphan from the very beginning. Her father had been a military man, just like Graves. Thomas Gwillim had fought in Canada during the Seven Years' War, as Aide-de-Camp to the legendary General James Wolfe. He was there at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, one of the most famous moments in all of Canadian history. And unlike Wolfe, he survived. But the Seven Years' War had been raging on battlefields all over the world — it was the first truly global war; one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history. So after Canada, Thomas Gwillim was sent to Germany. And it was there, for a reason that has been lost to history, that he died.

He never knew that his wife was pregnant. It was a surprise: she was 38; they'd never had any other children. And soon, she would follow her husband to the grave. The strain of giving birth was too much for her. She lived just long enough to see her baby daughter before she passed away. That's how the infant Elizabeth got her middle name — Posthuma — because both her parents were dead.

Growing up as an orphan, young Elizabeth spent her childhood living with relatives. Some were in Northamptonshire — in the middle of England, "the county of spires and squires" — where she was born. Some were in the verdant Wye Valley, on the border with Wales. But it seems that most of her time was spent with her uncle, Admiral Graves, in the Blackdown Hills. She became the daughter he never had.

"Elizabeth fell in love with the beautiful Devon landscape," her biographer, Mary Beacock Fryer, writes, "which she grew to regard as her spiritual home. She roamed the rolling countryside, and the moor rising above the green fields with their underlayer of red sandy soil." She went for long rides and walks through the hills, sketching the countryside and collecting plants. At home, she turned those sketches into watercolours and stayed up late reading or chatting with her best friend. Those same skills would eventually earn her an important place in Torontonian history — her diary, drawings and paintings provide a remarkable record of the founding of the city.

But Elizabeth wasn't the only young person who shared the affections of the old Admiral. During his days in the Royal Navy, Graves had become friends with the captain of another ship: Captain John Simcoe. He, too, fought in Canada during the Seven Years' War. But he never came home. He caught pneumonia just a few months before the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and was buried at sea near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. He left a wife and two sons behind. The eldest was named after his father and got his middle name from his godfather, Admiral Graves. He was called John Graves Simcoe.

Simcoe followed in the footsteps of his father and his godfather, fighting for the British in North America. This time, it was during the American Revolution, where he quickly made a name for himself as one of the Redcoats' most successful commanders. He adopted guerrilla tactics, never lost  a battle, survived serious wounds and months in an American prison. But while he was gone, his mother died. Simcoe was still in his 20s — now he was an orphan, too.

After the war was over, he returned home to England to nurse his wounds. And since he didn't have any immediate family left to stay with, he headed to his godfather's house in the Blackdown Hills.

There's a chance he might have already met Elizabeth by then. But even if he had, she would make a whole new impression now. She was 19 years old, pretty and slight, just about 5 feet tall. She could paint and draw and do needlework, was well-read and spoke three languages. And for his part, Simcoe was a dashing young officer in his late 20s, a hero of the war against the American rebels with political ambitions and a passionate interest in the distant Canadian colonies.

Simcoe, too, fell in love with the Blackdown Hills. He was fascinated by the history of the place — those stories of fairies and ghosts and smugglers. As soon as his wounds had healed enough, he started to join Elizabeth on her long walks through the countryside, up and down those big green hills. They would both make sketches of the picturesque landscape and turn them into full paintings when they returned home to Hembury Fort House. And while at first, they were accompanied by the Admiral's wife — who was skeptical of the young relationship — soon, she let them go out on their own. They would stride down those ancient, sunken roads, with Elizabeth having to run every few steps in order to keep up with the tall soldier.

"From walks the couple graduated to long rides each morning before breakfast," Fryer writes in her biography. "To Mrs. Graves’ chagrin, she found herself looking on, helpless, as the two were obviously falling in love. Admiral Graves was delighted with the train of events, and sought to give the couple every encouragement."

It worked. Just a few months after Simcoe arrived in the Blackdown Hills, the two were engaged. It was the summer of 1782. That December, they made the short trip down the hill from Hembury Fort House to a nearby church in the tiny village of Buckerell. There, they were married in front of their friends and their surviving family members. With Elizabeth's inheritance, they bought a beautiful estate of their own, just across the fields from Hembury, where they would raise their family. They spent the rest of their lives in the very same hills where they'd first fallen in love.

Except, of course, for one long trip to Canada, founding a new city in a new province in another land they loved.

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Dreams for the Simcoes outside Hembury Fort House

The fields of the Blackdown Hills

The view from the Simcoes' estate

Road through the Simcoes' estate

The cows of the Blackdown Hills

The ancient, sunken roads

The road down the Hembury Fort hill

The village where the Simcoes got married

St Mary & St Giles, where the Simcoes got married

A dream for John Graves Simcoe

A dream for Elizabeth Simcoe

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Read more posts about The Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour and the connections between the history of Toronto and the United Kingdom here.  

I've already written posts about: the ancient red soil beneath the Blackdown Hills; the ancient church where the Simcoes got married; the ancient River Otter, which flows along the southern edge of the Simcoes' estate; the deaths of John Graves Simcoe, his mother and his brother. I'll be writing more about the Blackdown Hills, too, including the nearby chapel which is officially part of the province of Ontario and the prehistoric fort that gave Hembury Fort House its name.

You can buy Mary Beacock Fryer's biography of Elizabeth Simcoe here, or buy it here. You can do the same for her biography of John Graves Simcoe — co-written with Cristopher Dracott — here and here. And Elizabeth Simcoe's own diary here and here.

You can read about "The battle of the fairies and the pixies" in the Blackdown Hills on Landscape Tales, the blog of Dr. Lucy Ryder of the University of Chester. She also tells the story of some of the ghosts of the Blackdown Hills: Part One and Part Two.

This post is related to dream 01 Metropolitan York John Graves Simcoe, 1793

This post is related to dream 34 The Upper Canadian Ball Elizabeth Simcoe, 1793

Simcoe's Vision for Toronto: A City So Awesome It Would Undo the American Revolution

1791. Just ten years earlier, John Graves Simcoe had been fighting on the British side of the American Revolution. He made a name for himself in that bloody war: the unit he commanded never lost a battle, he survived months in an American prison, and he even had a chance to kill George Washington, but ordered his men to stand down rather than shoot the future President as he fled. He had his dark moments too — he was an ardent supporter of the death penalty for desertion and he once ordered the massacre of American rebels in their sleep — but it seems he had a reputation for being "brave, humane and honest." By the time the war was over, Simcoe had established himself as one of the rising stars of the British military.

So when the British decided to create a new province in Canada, they chose John Graves Simcoe to be the first Lieutenant Governor. 

The province of Upper Canada was created in what we now call southern Ontario. While Québec and the Martime provinces were already well-established colonies, the British saw the land to the west as an untamed wilderness. Dismissing the First Nations who already lived here, they figured it would make a perfect new home for those who stayed loyal to the Empire during the war. Many of the Loyalists had been driven from their homes by the American revolutionaries, their lives threatened, their property burned to the ground, forced to flee north to safety. Some of them had been born in the States to families who had lived there for generations. Some had arrived from Europe more recently — about 40% of the earliest Upper Canadians were German. Some were former slaves, promised their freedom in return for fighting against the American rebels. Others were still slaves when they got here.

As Governor, Simcoe would have tremendous power over this new province. He could veto laws, dissolve parliament and hand-pick public servants and an Executive Council. He had ambitious plans to use that power. He didn't just want Upper Canada to be a successful new colony with a thriving new capital: he wanted Upper Canada to undo the American Revolution by the sheer force of its own awesomeness.

He got to work on his plan as soon as he was named Lieutenant Governor in 1791, while he was still back home in England. One of the very first things he did was to write a letter addressed to one of the most famous men in Britain: Sir Joseph Banks.

Banks was a scientist: a renowned and respected naturalist. Twenty years earlier, he had explored the South Pacific with the legendary Captain James Cook, becoming one of the very first Europeans to see Australia and New Zealand. It was Banks who first told Europe about kangaroos, and eucalyptus and acacia trees, along with thousands of other species of plants and animals. After that, he was named President of the Royal Society — a post once held by Sir Isaac Newton — and he was hailed as a national hero.

Simcoe (whose own father had also served with Cook) wanted to bounce his ideas off Banks before setting sail for Canada. So, in his letter, he laid out his vision for the new province and the new city he would build as its capital.

He called this hypothetical future metropolis "Georgina" — in honour of King George III (who had recently recovered from his first bout of mental illness). The city would be built, he hoped, on the banks of the La Tranche River (Simcoe later renamed it the Thames) on the spot where London is now. But that's not what happened. Instead, the new capital would end up being built here, on the northern shore of Lake Ontario. In the end, Simcoe didn't name the city "Georgina" after the King, but "York" after the King's son, the Duke of York. Decades later, it would be renamed according to an old Indigenous name for this place: Toronto.

His plan, in short, was to make our city and our province so undeniably amazing that Americans couldn't help but realize how terrible America was by comparison. They would voluntarily give up their silly notions of independence and beg to be let back into the Empire.

"I would die by more than Indian torture to restore my King and his family to their just inheritance," Simcoe wrote to Banks. "Though a soldier, it is not by arms that I hope for this result... the method I propose is by establishing a free, honourable British Government, and a pure administration of its laws, which shall hold out to the solitary emigrant, and to the several states, advantages that the present form of Government doth not and cannot permit them to enjoy."

As far as Simcoe was concerned, modern democracy was a dangerous idea. He had already personally witnessed the horrors of the American Revolution committed in its name, and now those ideas had spread to France, where an even bloodier and more horrifying revolution was underway. The U.S. seemed destined for more chaos and war. "I mean to prepare for whatever convulsions may happen in the United States," he told Banks. He might be able to lure them back into the fold, or at the very least provide an attractive destination for those Americans who became disillusioned with their own government. The key would be building a peaceful Canadian province with a glorious new capital home to an enviable culture of arts, science, learning and good government.

"[T]his colony," he continued, "(which I mean to show forth with all the advantages of British protection as a better Government than the United States can possibly obtain) should in its very foundations provide for every assistance that can possibly be procured for the arts and sciences, and for every embellishment that hereafter may decorate and attract notice, and may point it out to the neighbouring States as a superior, more happy, and more polished form of Government. I would not in its infancy have a hut, nor in its maturity, a palace built without this design."

He already had some concrete ideas about how to establish this British utopia. His letter to Banks mentions a publicly-funded library "to be composed of such books as might be useful to the colony." Extracts from encyclopedias could be published in newspapers to further public education. The school-system would be an important institution and "a college of a higher class would be eminently useful." There would be an emphasis on scientific learning, too: "I should be glad," he wrote, "to lay the foundation stone of some society that I trust might hereafter conduce to the extension of science."

But he also wanted to restrict what he once called "tyrannical democracy" in favour of a powerful, British aristocracy. "There are inherent defects in the congressional form of Government, the absolute prohibition of any order of nobility is a glaring one," he wrote. "I hope to have a hereditary council with some mark of nobility." There would also be an official state church: the Church of England.

Those, unsurprisingly, would prove to be among the most problematic parts of Simcoe's vision. Our province was supposed to be a British province, our city a British city. And while Simcoe never did establish an official nobility, he did leave behind the Family Compact: a ruling class of Tory Protestants determined to uphold his ideal of a monolithic Anglican state. Those from other cultures who helped to build the colony faced discrimination, intimidation and violence. So did advocates for real democracy. During our city's first 40 years, Anglican priests were the only priests legally allowed to perform marriage ceremonies. Anti-Catholic riots would eventually become a familiar sight on our streets. The Anglican Orange Order would dominate Toronto for more than a century, well into the 1900s.

Still, many of the positive institutions Simcoe imagined in his letter to Banks have played a vital role in the building of our city. The Toronto Public Library has the highest per-capita use of any public library system in the world. King's College was founded in 1827 and later became the University of Toronto. We do have an enviable culture of arts and science. And in the few years he was here, Simcoe laid the foundation for our court system and established trail-by-jury. We still travel along roads he first imagined.

Simcoe never did manage to undo the American Revolution. But even that dream wasn't a complete failure. Upper Canada did attract many American settlers with the promise of a better life. And Toronto has long provided a new home for immigrants from south of the border — whether they're looking for a clean, peaceful city, a stronger social safety net, or the chance to avoid fighting in American wars.

Simcoe's greatest legacy, however, is something he didn't mention in his letter to Banks. One of the first laws he passed in Upper Canada was legislation he championed himself: the abolition of slavery. He wanted to ban it entirely; slave-owners in the Legislative Assembly forced a compromise that saw it phased out instead. Even so, it was the first law to abolish slavery anywhere in the British Empire. Simcoe's new capital would eventually become a terminal on the Underground Railroad, welcoming former slaves to freedom. He might not have been able to convince every American to rejoin the British Empire, but Simcoe did ensure his new province would be a safe haven for the Americans who needed it most.

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Image: Oil painting of the foot of Bathurst Street ca. 1796 by Elizabeth Simcoe (via the Toronto Public Library) and a portrait of John Graves Simcoe by John Wycliffe Lowes Forster (via Library and Archives Canada).