measure which was in the minds of the
signers was the Quebec Act of 1774; and the feature to which they
especially objected was the extension of this peculiarly governed
Canadian province to include the whole of the territory north of the
Ohio and east of the Mississippi.

The Quebec Act was passed primarily to remedy a curious mistake made by
King George's ministers eleven years earlier. The Proclamation of 1763
had been intended to apply to the new French speaking possessions
in only a general way, leaving matters of government and law to be
regulated at a later date. But through oversight it ordained the
establishment of English law, and even of a representative assembly,
precisely as in the other new provinces. The English governors were
thus put in an awkward position. They were required to introduce English
political forms and legal practices. Yet the inexperience and suspicion
of the people made it unwise, if not impossible, to do so. When, for
example, jury trial was broached, the peasants professed to be quite
unable to understand why the English should prefer to have matters of
law decided by tailors and shoemakers rather than by a judge; and as for
a legislature, they frankly confessed that assemblies "had drawn upon
other colonies so much distress, and had occasioned so much riot and
bloodshed, that they had hoped never to have one."

The Act of 1774 relieved the situation by restoring French law in civil
affairs, abolishing jury trial except in criminal cases, rescinding the
grant of representative government, and confirming the Catholic clergy
in the rights and privileges which they hard enjoyed under the old
regime. This would have aroused no great amount of feeling among New
Englanders and Virginians if the new arrangements had been confined to
the bounds of the original province. But they were not so restricted.
On the contrary, the new province was made to include the great region
between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, southward to the Ohio; and
it was freely charged that a principal object of the English Government
was to sever the West from the shore colonies and permanently link it
with the St. Lawrence Valley rather than with the Atlantic slope.

At all events, the Quebec Act marked the beginning of civil government
in the great Northwest. On November 9, 1775, Henry Hamilton appeared as
Lieutenant-Governor at the new capital, Detroit. Already the "shot
heard round the world" had been fired