Newfoundland, Reeveland: Chief Justice John Reeves as a conservative reformer, 1791-1793

This thesis argues that John Reeves’s political conservatism is essential to understanding how his job as Law Clerk to the British Privy Council’s Committee for Trade and Foreign Plantations influenced his simultaneous appointment as Chief Justice of Newfoundland. Historians of Newfoundland have only recently begun to rediscover Reeves as a leading Tory theorist of the 1790s, but largely continue to regard his politics as separate from his colonial career. However, a closer examination of Reeves’s time as Chief Justice from 1791 to 1793 reveals his agenda of justifying constitutional reforms according to a Tory Administration’s policy of discouraging colonial settlement. This explains his sense of the Supreme Court’s role in enforcing that policy, his efforts to imbue the new Supreme Court with a legislative function, and his efforts as a propagandist as the author of the deceptively populist and violently royalist History of the Government of the Island of Newfoundland