Francis Legge
British colonial governor
Francis Legge (c. 1719 – 15 May 1783) was a British military officer and colonial official in Nova Scotia during the 18th century. He served as governor of Nova Scotia from 1772 to 1776. During the American Revolution, Legge raised the Royal Nova Scotia Volunteer Regiment.
Legge had served in the territory during the Seven Years' War "without distinction or promotion". However, Legge happened to be a relative of the Earl of Dartmouth.
Major Legge was appointed vice-roy of Nova Scotia by Colonial Secretary William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth in 1773. He arrived in Halifax on the Adamant on 6 October 1773 with orders to determine what were the financial difficulties in Nova Scotia and cure them. He proceeded to cut unnecessary expenses and tried to keep the province loyal to Britain. According to one account:
"[He] began to expose every scandalous detail of the spoils system which permeated Halifax and extended across the province. Even granting that he was an officer and a gentleman dealing with civilians whom he deemed socially his inferiors, he showed an alarming lack of imagination about how men behave when they are cornered and revealed almost none of the art of making himself agreeable to those whom he sought to influence or to work with.
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This entry incorporates text from “Francis Legge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.