Province of Quebec

The Province of Quebec was the British colony created from the heart of conquered New France, governed from Quebec City between 1763 and 1791. Home to a large French-speaking Catholic population under a Protestant crown, it became a testing ground for how Britain would rule people of a different language, law and faith, and it was later split into Upper and Lower Canada.

British forces took Quebec in 1759, and after Montreal capitulated in 1760 the St Lawrence valley was placed under military rule. In the Treaty of Paris of 1763 France gave up its claim to Canada, preferring to keep the lucrative sugar island of Guadeloupe. The Royal Proclamation of 7 October 1763 then renamed the colony the Province of Quebec. At first it was a fairly small territory around Quebec City and Montreal, stopping short of the Great Lakes and of the Hudson's Bay Company's Rupert's Land. Civil government began in 1764.

Quebec had no elected assembly. It was run by a governor, advised by a council of appointed members first set up in 1764. James Murray governed from 1760 to 1766, followed by Guy Carleton from 1766 to 1778, Frederick Haldimand from 1778 to 1786, and Carleton again, by then Lord Dorchester, from 1786. Lieutenant governors acted as their deputies. For the courts the province was divided into the districts of Quebec and Montreal; a third, Trois-Rivières, was added in 1790, and four new districts were carved out of the western part of Montreal District in 1788.

The Quebec Act, passed by the British Parliament on 22 June 1774, was a turning point. It allowed French civil law, the Custom of Paris, to be used in private matters alongside English common law, and it let the Catholic Church collect tithes. The old seigneurial system of landholding also survived. The act greatly enlarged the province, pushing its borders south and west to the Ohio River and the Mississippi, taking in the Ohio Country and some of the Illinois Country, and north to the edge of Rupert's Land.

The Treaty of Paris of 1783, which ended the American Revolution, handed the lands south of the Great Lakes to the United States. In practice Britain kept garrisons at posts such as Detroit, Fort Niagara and Michilimackinac, and used them to supply its Indigenous allies in the Western Confederacy, until the Jay Treaty led to their handover in 1796. Meanwhile Loyalist refugees from the former colonies arrived in numbers and settled in the Eastern Townships, around Montreal and in the upper country west of the Ottawa River, bringing a sizeable English-speaking Protestant population into the province for the first time.

The changed population led to a new constitution. The Constitutional Act of 1791 split the province at the Ottawa River. West of it, Upper Canada would have English law and an English-speaking majority; the older settled lands to the east became Lower Canada. An elected legislative assembly was introduced, ending rule by governor and council alone. The two later formed the core of Canada, and in 1867 the former Lower Canada entered the new Dominion as the French-speaking province of Quebec.

Our 1783 map shows the Province of Quebec, successor to New France, north of the newly independent United States. The 1800 map still labels the region Quebec, although the province was divided into Upper and Lower Canada in 1791.