Here, over a century ago, near Fort George, stood the first Parliament House of Upper Canada. Here, seventy years before President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the first United Empire Loyalist Parliament, like the embattled farmers at Concord, "fired a shot heard round the world." For one of the first measures of the exiled patricians was to pass an act forbidding slavery. Few readers know that at Newark, now Niagara, was enacted that law by which Canada became not only the first country in the world to abolish slavery, but, as such, a safe refuge for the fugitive slaves from the Southern States.
General Simcoe, the first governor, was born in 1752 and died in 1806. A landed gentleman of England and likewise a member of the British House of Commons he voluntarily relinquished all the luxuries of his beautiful English home and estates to bury himself in the wilderness of Canada and the Niagara region. As governor-general he exemplified the extremest simplicity. His guard consisted of four soldiers who came from Fort George, close by, to Newark, every morning and returned thither in the evening. Mrs. Simcoe not only performed the duties of wife and mother, but also acted as her husband's secretary. The name of Simcoe is indelibly entered in the history of the development of the Niagara, and it is doubly appropriate that her interesting drawings should illustrate a volume dealing with this region she loved.
Here Cooper is said to have written his admirable novels of border and Indian life, novels which have been devoured by me and millions of readers; it is fair to predict that the stories will be read for another century to come.[29] Many other interesting characters have at different periods made Fort George their abode. In 1780, a handsome house within its enclosure was occupied by General Guy Johnson.
[Footnote 24: _Colonial Documents of New York_, vol. ix., p. 773; in the history of the French régime at Niagara special acknowledgment must be made to Porter's _Brief History of Old Fort Niagara_ (Niagara Falls, 1896), which is particularly rich in references to the important sources of information concerning the French along and at the mouth of the Niagara River.]