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Richard Cartwright, Loyalist, businessman, officeholder, judge, militia officer, author (born 2 February 1759 in Albany, New York; died 27 July 1815 in Montreal).
A committed Loyalist, Richard 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.
In the early 1790s, Cartwright vigorously opposed many of Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe's anglophile policies. By 1800, though, he had become an ardent supporter of the Upper Canadian Conservative status quo. 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.
Cartwright was married to Magdalen Secord, sister-in-law of Laura Ingersoll Secord. His grandson, Sir Richard John Cartwright, was a prominent cabinet member in prime minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s government.
