John F. Colburn
| John F. Colburn | |
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Kingdom of Hawaii Minister of the Interior |
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In office January 13, 1893 – January 17, 1893 |
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| Monarch | Liliuokalani |
| Preceded by | George Norton Wilcox |
| Succeeded by | James A. King |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
September 30, 1859 Honolulu, Kingdom of Hawaii |
| Died | March 16, 1920 (aged 60) Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii |
| Resting place | Oahu Cemetery |
| Nationality |
Kingdom of Hawaii United States |
John Francis Colburn (September 30, 1859 – March 16, 1920) was a businessman and politician of the Kingdom of Hawaii. He served as the last Minister of the Interior of Queen Liliuokalani. Even though he was part Hawaiian ancestry on his maternal side, Colburn was a key figure in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and was a proponent of annexation to the United States. Colburn was the treasurer of the estate of Queen Kapiolani.
He was born in Honolulu, the youngest of three children of auctioneer and local fire warden John F. Colburn and Elizabeth Maughan, descended from Don Francisco de Paula Marín and one of his Hawaiian wives. The elder Colburn was a naturalized citizen of Hawaii who could trace his family back to the Siege of Boston at the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill; when he died in 1861, the younger Colburn was only two years old. Elizabeth Maughan died May 22, 1889.
Early in 1892, Colburn ran for a position on the Road Board, and came in ninth in a field of thirteen candidates. Soon afterwards, however, Queen Liliuokalani appointed him to the Board of Health. On January 13, 1893, she appointed him to the Ministry of the Interior to the final Parker Cabinet with Samuel Parker, William H. Cornwell and Arthur P. Peterson, after her previous cabinet was voted out by the legislature of the kingdom. She had chosen these men specifically to support her plan of promulgating a new constitution while the legislature was not in session.
Publisher and philanthropist Thurston Twigg-Smith, the grandson of annexation leader Lorrin A. Thurston, made the case that Colburn was part of a royal inner cabal of the queen's own cabinet ministers who worked to oust the monarchy. She attempted to promulgate a new constitution, but Colburn and the rest of the cabinet were either opposed to or reluctant to sign the new constitution. Their opposition was one of the causes which ultimately led to her overthrow.
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