Richard Cartwright

Richard Cartwright, businessman, officeholder, judge, militia officer, author (b at Albany, NY 2 Feb 1759; d at Montréal, 27 July 1815). A committed Loyalist, Cartwright was expelled from New York in October 1777. After serving until 1780 as secretary for John Butler's Rangers based at Niagara, he became a merchant involved in the provisioning trade. By 1785 Cartwright had moved to the Kingston area, where he soon became an influential commercial, legal, political and religious leader. Cartwright was, because of his influence on John Strachan, a critically important link in the ideological chain that connects the American Loyalist thought of the 1770s with the English-speaking, Upper Canadian Tory conceptual framework of the post-War of 1812 period. Though Cartwright vigorously opposed, in the early 1790s, many of Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe's anglophile policies, he had become by 1800 an ardent supporter of the Upper Canadian Conservative status quo.