Upper Canada

In 1763, the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years War and what had been New France became the British colony of Quebec.  It covered all of the territory from Labrador in the east to the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in the west.  That territory today roughly includes Labrador, southern Quebec, Southern Ontario, all the Great Lakes, Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, IllinoisIowa and Minnesota.

After the American Revolution successfully separated the thirteen southern colonies from the British Empire, the 1783 Treaty of Paris surrendered the lands south of the Great Lakes to the new United States.  Ontario (and Labrador) remained part of Quebec under the Governor General at Quebec City.

British subjects, now living in the United States, who didn’t want to, or weren’t welcome to, remain in the new country moved north to Quebec or to the maritime colonies of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.  In Quebec the land provided to them was in the western part of the colony.  These refugees called themselves Loyalists.  (The Americans called them Tories.). Some years later, the term morphed into United Empire Loyalists.  They were not all Europeans.  A large number of Mohawks fought for the crown against the rebels and were also part of this refugee movement north.  These were the people who settled the towns that would become Ontario.

Picture courtesy of ontariohistory.org - https://www.ontariohistory.org

The French population of Quebec was not unhappy under British rule and were hostile to entreaties to join the rebel colonies even when presented by such august emissaries as Benjamin Franklin.  This was in part due to Governor Sir Guy Carleton’s brilliance in ensuring that the Habitants were able to keep their rights under French civil law and the Catholic Church, which was much freer in Quebec than it was in England itself.

The Loyalists coming north wanted to remain under what they saw as proper British laws and institutions.  So it was that Quebec was divided into Upper (Ontario) and Lower (Quebec) Canada.  Upper Canada, so called because it was upstream of the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes waterway, operated under the same laws that had prevailed in North America before the thirteen colonies revolted.

You can learn more about this period in a myriad of books and websites.  Wikipedia is a good starting point for synopses and references to reliable sources.