Wilkins, Martin Isaac

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: R. A. MacLean, “WILKINS, MARTIN ISAAC,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 11, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/wilkins_martin_isaac_11E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Lawyer and politician; b. 14 Sept. 1804 in Halifax, N. S., son of Lewis Morris Wilkins and Sarah Creighton; m., probably in 1828, Jane Mortimer, née Wallace; d. 16 Aug. 1881 in Halifax.
    • Martin Isaac Wilkins and his brother Lewis Morris were the grandsons of Isaac Wilkins, a politically active New York loyalist who had settled in Nova Scotia in 1784, and the sons of the veteran member of the assembly for Lunenburg and puisne judge of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia. Martin Isaac was educated at the Anglican King’s College in Windsor, N.S., and was graduated bafrom that institution in 1824. Admitted to the Nova Scotia bar in 1828, Wilkins became a successful lawyer in Pictou, settling there perhaps because his father owned property in the district.
    • Prior to the gaining of responsible government in Nova Scotia in 1848, many Tories considered Pictou a hotbed of radicalism. Perhaps for this reason Wilkins was defeated as a Tory candidate in Pictou during the elections of 1840 and 1843. He tried again, however, and was elected in 1851 for the township of Pictou and re-elected in 1855 to represent the county. In February 1857 he accepted the position of solicitor general in the Conservative government of James William Johnston, but he resigned in protest two years later when Robert Barry Dickey of Cumberland County was appointed to the Legislative Council to fill the vacancy left by David Creighton, a Pictonian.
    • Wilkins re-entered the assembly in 1867 after successfully running as an anti-confederate in a bitter campaign in Pictou. At the same time he published a pamphlet, Confederation examined in the light of reason and common sense, which argued that the inclusion of Nova Scotia in confederation through the British North America Act was unconstitutional because the province’s entry had not been sanctioned by provincial statute.
    • Wilkins is remembered as a rather pathetic figure in his last years; weighing over 300 pounds, his political and legal ideas discredited, and disappointed with his court posting, he spent some of his time writing a book in which he attempted to prove there was no hell. Although Joseph Howe denigrated him as “a poltroon and a braggart” who pocketed his salary for merely proposing “a string of buncombe resolutions which everybody laughed at and nobody remembers,” others described him as the “most interesting character” and the “best speaker” in the assembly, and as a “clever though eccentric” man.
  • Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=13730
  • Find A Grave: Cannot Locate.