Coffin, William Foster

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Desmond Morton, “COFFIN, WILLIAM FOSTER,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 10, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/coffin_william_foster_10E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Soldier, author, and civil servant; b. at Bath, Eng., on 5 Nov. 1808, son of an army officer and grandson of John Coffin, a loyalist from Boston who moved to Quebec in 1775 and played a distinguished part in its defence against the Americans in 1775–76; d. at Ottawa, Ont., 28 Jan. 1878.
    • In 1813, William Foster Coffin’s family came to Quebec. His father being in the army, Coffin was aware as a child of the echoes of the War of 1812. He learned French at this time, at the home of the parish priest of Beauport. In 1815, with the war at an end, the Coffins returned to England and William spent the next nine years at Eton. Perhaps because his uncle Thomas was living at Quebec and had become a member of the Legislative Council of Lower Canada, William looked to the colony for a career..
    • To encourage Canadians to make permanent provision for their own defence, the British government decided to hand over, in 1856, most of its ordnance lands in Canada to the provincial authorities. With some misgivings, the Canadian government accepted the gift. At the suggestion of the governor general, Coffin was appointed commissioner for ordnance lands, a position he was to hold for the rest of his life. Choosing to establish himself in Ottawa, Coffin resigned his command of the Montreal battery, and received promotion to lieutenant-colonel as a final reward for his services.
    • Predictably, Coffin struggled hard to make Canadian government policy fulfil British expectations. The ordnance lands, he claimed, “represent a capital, the annual interest of which, if estimated as proposed, will exceed the present requirements of the militia of the Province.” Rent from land and buildings in Ottawa alone would yield a million dollars a year for defence purposes. Coffin’s efforts to secure the ordnance funds for Canadian defence were unavailing and his office and its revenues were soon swallowed up in the massive Crown Lands Department. For 18 more years he continued as a civil servant of first the provincial and later the dominion government.
    • Throughout his life, Coffin elaborated his claim that his grandfather had played the key role in saving Quebec in 1775 and, consequently, British power in North America. In the 1860s, with new threats of war with the United States, Coffin turned to a wider patriotic task in publishing 1812, the war and its moral.
  • Grand Son of Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory –https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=1631
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/108247347/william-foster-coffin