McKinnon, William

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: R. J. Morgan, “McKINNON, WILLIAM,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 5, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/mckinnon_william_5E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Office holder and politician; b. in Scotland; m. with at least one son; d. 13 April 1811 in Sydney, Cape Breton Island. His grandson William Charles McKinnon was a Sydney newspaperman and novelist who later became a Methodist preacher.
    • William McKinnon emigrated to the New World a considerable time before the American revolution, residing in the Carolinas, Georgia, and finally West Florida. During the War of American Independence he served as a captain in the provincial troops of West Florida. He claimed to have lost £7,900 in property and possessions during the revolution, but since parliament had made no provision for the indemnification of loyalists residing in West Florida, he awaited an appointment in one of the remaining colonies. McKinnon was finally named secretary and registrar of deeds as well as clerk and member of the Executive Council of Cape Breton; he arrived in Sydney in December 1792 and was sworn in on the 15th, replacing Abraham Cornelius Cuyler, who had left the previous year after disagreeing with Lieutenant Governor William Macarmick’s policies. The appointment plunged McKinnon into the political warfare of the colony. 
    • The next year Mathews continued his attack on McKinnon. It was probably at his behest that a woman appeared in the spring and alleged that she had purchased in West Florida half of McKinnon’s military pay for two years but that McKinnon had never given her the money. Mathews imprisoned McKinnon, who in vengeance took all the council and land records to jail with him and refused to surrender them.
    • This vindication did not free McKinnon from the charge of an unpaid debt, for which he was still in prison. Since it was a civil case, he required a lawyer to defend him, but Mathews was the colony’s only lawyer who was not also a judge and, not surprisingly, he refused to act. Ogilvie could not obtain a suitable person from Halifax to serve as solicitor general, but McKinnon was saved from further imprisonment by switching his political support to Mathews in return for Mathews’s dropping the charges. 
    • William McKinnon, like other early political figures in Cape Breton, can be accused of being an opportunist. However, in the light of the colony’s poverty and incomplete constitution, which made no provision for a house of assembly, power struggles in the council were almost guaranteed. In this context, McKinnon’s political career was effective, since he steered an eventually successful course through the rocks of factionalism which were characteristic of the first years of Cape Breton’s existence as a colony.
  • United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=13020
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/122910885/william-mckinnon