Once the first tasks of hewing and hauling and planting were
done, the new settlers called for the organization of local
governments. They were quite as determined as their late foes to
have a voice in their own governing, even though they yielded
ultimate obedience to rulers overseas.
In the provinces by the sea a measure of self-government was at
once established. New Brunswick received, without question, a
constitution on the Nova Scotia model, with a Lieutenant
Governor, an Executive Council appointed to advise him, which
served also as the upper house of the legislature, and an
elective Assembly. Of the twenty-six members of the first
Assembly, twenty-three were Loyalists. With a population so much
at one, and with the tasks of road making and school building and
tax collecting insistent and absorbing, no party strife divided
the province for many years. In Nova Scotia, too, the Loyalists
were in the majority. There, however, the earlier settlers soon
joined with some of the newcomers to form an opposition. The
island of St. John, renamed Prince Edward Island in 1798, had
been made a separate Government and had received an Assembly in
1773. Its one absorbing question was the tenure of land. On a
single day in 1767 the British authorities had granted the whole
island by lottery to army and navy officers and country
gentlemen, on condition of the payment of small quitrents.
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