The constitution of 1784 provided for an assembly of twenty-six members who were elected in 1785, and met for the first time on the 3rd of January, 1786, at the Mallard House, a plain two-storey building on the north side of King Street. The city of St. John ceased to be the seat of government in 1787, when the present capital, Fredericton, first known as St. Anne's, was chosen. Of the twenty-six members elected to this assembly, twenty-three were Loyalists, and the same class necessarily continued for many years to predominate in the legislature. The first speaker was Amos Botsford, the pioneer of the Loyalist migration to New Brunswick, whose grandson occupied the same position for a short time in the senate of the Dominion of Canada.
Coming to the province of Lower Canada we find it contained at this time a population of about a hundred thousand souls, of whom six thousand lived in Quebec and Montreal respectively. Only two thousand English-speaking persons resided in the province, almost entirely in the towns. Small as was the British minority, it continued that agitation for an assembly which had been commenced long before the passage of the Quebec act. A nominated council did not satisfy the political ambition of this class, who obtained little support from the French Canadian people. The objections of the latter arose from the working of the act itself. Difficulties had grown up in the administration of the law, chiefly in consequence of its being entrusted exclusively to men acquainted only with English jurisprudence, and not disposed to comply with the letter and intention of the imperial statute. As a matter of practice, French law was only followed as equity suggested; and the consequence was great legal confusion in the province. A question had also arisen as to the legality of the issue of writs of _habeas corpus_, and it was eventually necessary to pass an ordinance to remove all doubts on this important point.
The Loyalist settlers on the St. Lawrence and Niagara Rivers sent a petition in 1785 to the home government, praying for the establishment of a new district west of the River Beaudette "with the blessings of British laws and British government, and of exemption from French tenure of property." While such matters were under the consideration of the imperial authorities, Sir Guy Carleton, once more governor-general of Canada, and lately raised to the peerage as Lord Dorchester, established, in 1788, five new districts for the express object of providing for the temporary government of the territory where the Loyalists had settled. These districts were known as Luneburg, Mecklenburg, Nassau and Hesse, in the western country, and Gaspé in the extreme east of the province of Quebec, where a small number of the same class of people had also found new homes. Townships, ranging from eighty to forty thousand acres each, were also surveyed within these districts and parcelled out with great liberality among the Loyalists. Magistrates wore appointed to administer justice with the simplest possible machinery at a time when men trained in the law were not available.