Cartwright, Sir Richard

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Cecilia Morgan and Robert Craig Brown, “CARTWRIGHT, Sir RICHARD JOHN,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 14, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–.See full biography at: https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/cartwright_richard_john_14E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Businessman, politician, and author; b. 4 Dec. 1835 in Kingston, Upper Canada, second son of the Reverend Robert David Cartwright and Harriet Dobbs; m. August 1859 Frances Jane Lawe of Cork (Republic of Ireland), and they had seven sons and three daughters; d. 24 Sept. 1912 in Kingston.
    • Richard Cartwright came from an Upper Canadian loyalist and conservative family, the Cartwrights of Kingston. His grandfather Richard Cartwright had been a prominent merchant, landowner, legislative councillor, and judge. His uncle John Solomon Cartwright sat in the provincial assembly as a conservative who, in the 1840s, opposed the reform policies of Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine.
    • Most of the male Cartwrights who lived into adulthood – the family suffered heavily from tuberculosis – went into politics, business, and law, but Richard’s father attended Oxford and became an Anglican clergyman. His death from tuberculosis in 1843 left Richard, the eldest of the family’s three surviving sons, fatherless at the age of seven. With his brother Conway Edward, he attended a private school in the Niagara District and then, in 1851, the two brothers went to Trinity College, Dublin. He did not graduate. On his return to Canada in 1856, he read law for some time in Kingston.
    • The acquisition, renting, and mortgaging of land in the Kingston and Napanee areas, long a family tradition, became Cartwright’s main occupation and source of income outside the political career he began in the 1860s. He also emerged as an important figure in Kingston’s financial institutions; he was president of the Commercial Bank of Canada from 1864, and a founding director in 1863 and later, for many years until his death, president of the Frontenac Loan and Investment Society. He believed that banks should serve more than the interests of the wealthy; they might, in fact, benefit all in society. 
    • In 1867 Cartwright was elected for Lennox to the House of Commons of the new dominion. His support of John A. Macdonald and the federal Conservatives came to an end two years later. The Pacific Scandal of 1873 prompted Cartwright’s final break. He had been voting more and more with the Liberals and supporting their positions.
    • Cartwright found himself finance minister in a government plagued with economic problems. He took some steps to reform the control of government finance – the creation, for instance, of the auditor general’s post in 1878  – but the difficulty went beyond internal control. The depression of the 1870s was depleting public revenue and there was widespread dissatisfaction with the government’s apparent inability to devise concrete solutions to the country’s woes.
    • Cartwright missed few opportunities to act as the Liberal party’s guardian of political morality and, using an acid tongue and an unerring command of historical and literary imagery, to castigate the Conservatives. For Cartwright, dispensing patronage at the constituency level to reward the deserving was one thing; the use of parliamentary connections and knowledge by an elected official for private gain was quite another matter.
  • Grandson of Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory –https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=1334
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/160805693/sir_richard-john-cartwright