22 February] 1713 – 14 January 1776)[1] was a British career military officer and member of the aristocratic Cornwallis family, who reached the rank of Lieutenant General.

After Cornwallis fought in Scotland, putting down the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, he was appointed Groom of the Chamber for King George II (a position he held for the next 17 years).

[a] Later Cornwallis returned to London, where he was elected as MP for Westminster and married the niece of Robert Walpole, Great Britain's first Prime Minister.

Cornwallis responded with the extirpation proclamation of 1749, orders to bring back scalps of those he considered to be rebels.

[2] It instituted the first British law courts in Canada; established a public school for orphans; and respected religious diversity through separation of church and state.

[5] Cornwallis is commemorated in Nova Scotia in the naming of its rivers, parks, streets, towns, and buildings.

A Halifax church, junior high school, street and park all are no longer named after Cornwallis.

Their older brother, Stephen Cornwallis, the third son born, was a career officer and rose to the rank of major-general in the Army.

General Thomas Bligh, Edward Cornwallis participated in the Battle of Fontenoy during the War of the Austrian Succession.

[7] After fighting with the victorious government soldiers at the Battle of Culloden, he led a regiment of 320 men north for the pacification of the Scottish Highlands.

The Duke of Cumberland ordered him to "plunder, burn and destroy through all the west part of Invernesshire called Lochaber."

This was remarkable at a time when the lengthy transatlantic expeditions regularly lost large numbers of persons to infectious disease.

Settlement organizers in England had recommended Point Pleasant, due to its close access to the ocean and ease of defence.

His naval advisers opposed this site because it lacked shelter and had shallows preventing the docking of ocean-going ships.

[1] When Cornwallis arrived in Halifax, there had already been a decades-long history of the Mi'kmaq participating in raids on British settlements in present-day Maine, often allied with French colonists in continuing national tensions.

[18] Mi'kmaq leaders met at St. Peters with French missionary Malliard in September 1749 to respond to these British actions.

They composed a letter to Cornwallis making it clear that, while they tolerated the small garrison at Annapolis Royal, they completely opposed settlement at Halifax: "The place where you are, where you are building dwellings, where you are now building a fort, where you want, as it were, to enthrone yourself, this land of which you want to make yourself absolute master, this land belongs to me".

[citation needed] To stop the raids on the British settlements and pressure the natives into submission, Cornwallis announced an extirpation proclamation to remove the Mi'kmaq from peninsular Nova Scotia.

The Board repeatedly expressed concern to Cornwallis for overspending: over the amount of bread delivered, the cost of arming Chignecto.

Cornwallis replied that the Board had underestimated the task of establishing Halifax under such hostile conditions and that to "flatter Your Lordships with hopes of savings" would be "dissimulation of the worst kind.

[7] Admiral John Byng called a council of war, which involved Cornwallis, and advised the return of the fleet to Gibraltar leaving the garrison at Menorca to its fate.

Cornwallis testified that he had not disobeyed orders, but that it was "impracticable" to land at Menorca due to stiff French defences.

[29] Cornwallis was also one of the senior officers in the September 1757 Raid on Rochefort which saw a failed amphibious descent on the French coastline.

General Sir John Mordaunt, head of the land forces, decided the defences were too strong to attack.

Disturbed by lack of progress, in January 2018 the Assembly of Mi'kmaq Chiefs called for immediate removal of the statue.

[36] The Cornwallis statue was covered with a tarpaulin, then removed by order of Halifax Regional Council on 30 January 2018 and placed into storage.

[37] On 28 January 2019, Temma Frecker, a Nova Scotia teacher at The Booker School, was awarded the Governor General's History Award for her class's proposal to return the statue to Cornwallis Park as part of a larger commemoration of regional ethnic groups.

A short list of suggestions from submissions by the general public was gathered and a further poll was held to select a final name.

The town approved a change to Queen Street in December 2023, but is reconsidering that choice to provide for public input over a possible Mi'kmaw name.