William Ansel Kinney (October 16, 1860 – c. 1930) was a lawyer and politician in the Kingdom of Hawaii, through the Republic of Hawaii and into the Territory of Hawaii.
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Family
William Ansel Kinney was born October 16, 1860, in Honolulu, Hawaii.
His father was William Kinney, who was born April 15, 1832, in Chebogue, Nova Scotia.
His uncle Joseph Robbins Kinney (1839–1919) was a member of the House of Commons of Canada.
His father came to the Hawaiian Islands in the 1850s and married his mother Caroline Dailey (died March 25, 1897) on July 6, 1857.
His father then married up to three different native Hawaiian women, having many other children by them.
For example, half-brother William Kihapiʻilani Kinney (1868–1953) married Mary Francesca Vierra, and their son Ernest Kaipoleimanu Kinney (1906–1987) married Esther Kauikeaulani Kaʻulili and had daughter Rubellite Kawena Kinney Johnson, who became a Hawaiian historian.
The youngest half-sibling was Ray Kinney, born in Hilo September 26, 1900, who became a popular musician and composer. His father managed the sugarcane plantation at Honomu, Hawaii and died June 3, 1915.
Law career
Kinney attended Royal School and later 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.
His first law partner was Arthur P. Peterson. In 1887 he became partners with William Owen Smith and Lorrin A. Thurston.
In 1887 he was elected to the legislature of the Hawaiian Kingdom as a representative from Hawaiʻi island.
During the summer of 1887, he helped draft the 1887 Constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaii, called the "Bayonet Constitution" because King Kalākaua was forced to sign it. The government headed by Walter M. Gibson was forced to resign and was replaced by one including Thurston in the cabinet.
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 Liliʻuokalani 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 ʻIolani 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 United States. He traveled to Washington, DC, and in reply to the Queen's protest was quoted with a comment that might sound racist by modern standards regarding native Hawaiians and Chinese and Japanese interests:Their future is one of two things, to pass under Asiatic or Anglo-Saxon control. If Asiatics dominate, the native must become a coolie, for certainly he cannot expect to be better off than the rank and file of the dominant race....It is a choice between the status of a white American laborer and that of an Asiatic coolie laborer. The white race, if Asiatics absorb Hawaii, can get out to their own country.