Owner Comments:
1883 O MS63
Part of My Heritage Set
Dedicated to my ancestor William Ansel Kinney born Honolulu, Hawaii October 16, 1860. His father was William Kinney was born April 15, 1832 in Chebogue, Nova Scotia. His uncle Joseph Robbins Kinney (1839–1919) was a member of the Canadian House of Commons. His father came to the Hawaiian Islands in the 1850s and married his mother Caroline Dailey (died March 25, 1897) on July 6, 1857. Kinney attended Punahou School 1874–1877 and worked as a clerk in a law office. He graduated from law school at the University of Michigan in 1883. He married Alice Vaughan McBryde on August 16, 1893 in Honolulu. In 1887 he was elected to the legislature of the Hawaiian Kingdom as a representative from Hawaii Island. During the summer of 1887, he helped draft the 1887 Constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaii, called the Bayonet Constitution because King Kalakaua was forced to sign it. In 1887 he became partners with William Owen Smith and Lorrin A. Thurston. He moved to Salt Lake City, Utah about 1891 and practiced law there. After the 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, he was met by some of his former partners, including Thurston, as they visited the United States to lobby for annexation in February. After Queen Liliuokalani was arrested in January 1895 following the failed 1895 rebellion against the Republic of Hawaii, Kinney was selected as Judge Advocate with honorary rank of Captain; to prosecute her in a military trial in her former throne room at Iolani Palace She was convicted of misprision of treason. On March 7 he traveled to San Francisco to press charges against the people accused of shipping arms to the rebels. On May 5, 1897 he was selected for another commission to lobby for annexation to the US. In August 1900 he sued a newspaper editor for libel. In May 1901 he was sentenced to prison for contempt of court, but pardoned by Sanford B. Dole. His partnership was then called Kinney, McClanahan and Cooper, including Henry Ernest Cooper who had chaired the Committee of Safety in 1893 and E. B. McClanahan. At least one of their cases, Territory of Hawaii vs. Cotton Brothers & Company of 1904 went to the United States Supreme Court. By 1906 the firm replaced Cooper with S. H. Derby. In June 1909 he represented the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association in a conflict during a strike by Japanese workers. Despite his role in her trial, on November 1909 Kinney served as an attorney for deposed Queen Liliuokalani in a United States Court of Claims case Liliuokalani vs The United States. The case claimed that the Queen was due compensation for the taking of the crown lands of the kingdom. In the decision known as 45 Ct. Cl. 418 (1910), the case was dismissed on May 16, 1910. The issue continues to be controversial, known as the ceded lands issue.