I have several times been importuned to furnish a sketch of my life for
books of biography of public men, published both in Canada and the
United States; but I have uniformly declined, assigning as a reason a
wish to have nothing of the kind published during my lifetime. Finding,
however, that some circumstances connected with my early history have
been misapprehended and misrepresented by adversaries, and that my
friends are anxious that I should furnish some information on the
subject, and being now in the seventieth year of my age, I sit down in
this my Long Point Island Cottage, retired from the busy world, to give
some account of my early life, on this blessed Sabbath day, indebted to
the God of the Sabbath for all that I am,--morally, intellectually, and
as a public man, as well as for all my hopes of a future life.

I was born on the 24th of March, 1803, in the Township of
Charlotteville, near the Village of Vittoria, in the then London
District, now the County of Norfolk. My Father had been an officer in
the British Army during the American Revolution, being a volunteer in
the Prince of Wales' Regiment of New Jersey, of which place he was a
native. His forefathers were from Holland, and his more remote ancestors
were from Denmark.

At the close of the American Revolutionary War, he, with many others of
the same class, went to New Brunswick, where he married my Mother, whose
maiden name was Stickney, a descendant of one of the early Massachusetts
Puritan settlers.

Near the close of the last century my Father, with his family, followed
an elder brother to Canada,[1] where he drew some 2,500 acres of land
from the Government, for his services in the army, besides his pension.
My Father settled on 600 acres of land lying about half-way between the
present Village of Vittoria and Port Ryerse, where my uncle Samuel
settled, and where he built the first mill in the County of Norfolk.

On the organization of the London District in 1800, for legal purposes,
my uncle was the Lieutenant of the County, issuing commissions in his
own name to militia officers; he was also Chairman of the Quarter
Sessions. My Father was appointed High Sheriff in 1800, but held the
office only six years, when he resigned it in behalf of the late Colonel
John Bostwick (then a surveyor), who subsequently married my eldest
sister, and who owned what is now Port Stanley, and was at one time a
Member of Parliament for the County of Middlesex.