Sir Samuel Leonard Tilley (1818-1896) was one of the Canadian fathers of confederation and twice lieutenant governor of New Brunswick. He was a Cabinet minister and premier of New Brunswick before confederation and afterward held two major federal portfolios.

Samuel Leonard Tilley was born on May 8, 1818, at Gagetown, New Brunswick, into a family which had once farmed part of what is now Brooklyn, New York City, and as loyalists had migrated northward after the American Revolution. He was educated at local schools in Gagetown and moved at the age of 13 to Saint John, where he became an apothecary's clerk in a doctor's dispensary. In 1838 he became a partner in a mercantile firm, disposing of his share in 1855, by which time he had earned a modest fortune.

Tilley's public career began in 1837, when he undertook what was to be a lifelong espousal of temperance; thereafter he could rely on...