Elisha Hunt Allen

Elisha Hunt Allen (January 28, 1804 – January 1, 1883) was an American congressman, lawyer, and diplomat who later became a leading jurist and diplomat for the Kingdom of Hawaii. He was born in New Salem, Franklin County, Massachusetts, on January 28, 1804, the son of Samuel Clesson Allen (1772–1842), a Massachusetts minister, lawyer, and Federalist and later Adams-Clay Republican and Anti-Masonic politician, and Mary (née Hunt) Allen (1774–1833). Raised in a New England family active in public life, Allen attended New Salem Academy and then Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, from which he graduated in 1823.

After reading law, Allen was admitted to the bar in 1825 and commenced legal practice in Brattleboro, Vermont. In 1830 he moved to Bangor, in the then-developing interior of Maine, where he entered into partnership with John Appleton, who would later become chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court and who married Allen’s sister Sarah in 1834. In Bangor, Allen quickly became involved in local affairs, serving on the city’s first City Council from 1834. He was elected to the Maine House of Representatives, representing Bangor, and served from 1835 to 1840, acting as Speaker of the House in 1838. His early legislative career in Maine established him as a prominent Whig in the state and provided the foundation for his subsequent national political service.

Allen was elected as a Whig to the Twenty-seventh Congress and served in the U.S. House of Representatives from March 4, 1841, to March 3, 1843, representing Maine’s 8th congressional district. As a member of the Whig Party representing Maine, he contributed to the legislative process during his single term in office, participating in the democratic process and representing the interests of his constituents during a significant period in American history marked by debates over economic policy and territorial expansion. Following the 1840 census, Maine’s congressional districts were reapportioned and his district was eliminated. Allen sought reelection in 1842 in a different district but was defeated by Democrat Hannibal Hamlin, who would later become vice president of the United States under Abraham Lincoln. After this defeat, Allen returned to state politics, winning another term in the Maine Legislature, and then, in 1847, he moved from Bangor to Boston, Massachusetts. There he resumed legal practice and was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, serving in 1849.

In 1850, President Millard Fillmore appointed Allen United States consul in Honolulu, in the Hawaiian Islands, a post he held from 1850 to 1853. During his consular service he recognized the potential for Hawaii to supply agricultural products, especially sugar, to the burgeoning markets created by the California Gold Rush, and he attempted, unsuccessfully at that time, to negotiate a reciprocity or trade treaty between the United States and the Kingdom of Hawaii. When Democrat Franklin Pierce became president, Allen was replaced in August 1853 by a new appointee. Rather than return permanently to the mainland, he chose to remain in Honolulu, noting the severe shortage of trained legal professionals in the islands. He became a naturalized citizen of the Kingdom of Hawaii and, within weeks, was appointed Minister of Finance by King Kamehameha III, succeeding Gerrit P. Judd. Allen served as Minister of Finance and as a member of the House of Nobles from 1854 to 1856. In these roles he openly advocated closer ties and eventual annexation of the islands by the United States and opposed the growing influence of France and Great Britain in Hawaiian affairs. His annexationist program stalled, however, when Kamehameha IV, regarded as more sympathetic to British interests, ascended the throne in 1855. Allen’s personal relationship with the royal family was close enough that, during the wedding of Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma in 1856, he famously offered his own wedding band to the king so that the ceremony could proceed.

In June 1856, Allen sailed back to New England, and on March 11, 1857, in Philadelphia, he married Mary Harrod Hobbs (sometimes spelled Hobbes), born in 1808, the daughter of former Maine legislator Frederick Hobbs. The couple soon returned to Honolulu, where Allen continued his service to the Hawaiian government. From June 1857 through February 1877 he served as chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Kingdom of Hawaii, succeeding William Little Lee and later being succeeded by Charles Coffin Harris, who would become his son-in-law. As chief justice, Allen presided over a period of legal and constitutional development in the kingdom, helping to shape a hybrid legal system influenced by Anglo-American jurisprudence and Hawaiian customary law. The Allens’ first-born son, Frederick Hobbes Allen, was born in 1858, ten days after the birth of Prince Albert Edward Kauikeaouli Kaleiopapa, the only child of Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma, and the two boys became childhood playmates until the prince’s death at the age of four.

Concurrently with his judicial duties, Allen became the Kingdom of Hawaii’s principal diplomatic representative to the United States. From 1856 until his death in 1883 he served as Minister Plenipotentiary from the Kingdom of Hawaii to the United States, residing for long periods in Washington, D.C., and acting as the key negotiator on commercial and political questions between the two countries. In August 1864 he served as Chancellor at the coronation of King Kamehameha V under the new 1864 Constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaii. During the American Civil War, when sugar shipments from the American South were disrupted, Allen renewed his efforts to secure a reciprocity treaty, recognizing the strategic opportunity for Hawaiian sugar to enter the U.S. market. In 1867 he purchased a sugarcane plantation on Kauai in an area he named Princeville, in honor of Prince Albert, who had been reared in close association with his son. Allen left management of the plantation to his son William Fessenden Allen from his first marriage while he concentrated on diplomatic work in Washington. His persistent negotiations culminated in the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, which removed U.S. tariffs on certain Hawaiian products, notably sugar, in exchange for granting the United States the use of Pearl Harbor. The harbor concession was controversial among many Native Hawaiians, who viewed it as an infringement on Hawaiian sovereignty.

By the mid-1870s Allen’s responsibilities and family circumstances drew him increasingly to the United States. He returned briefly to Hawaii after the conclusion of the reciprocity agreement, but his two younger children by his second marriage were being educated and raised on the mainland. In February 1877 he resigned as chief justice of the Hawaiian Supreme Court and took up more permanent residence in Washington, D.C., continuing to serve as Hawaiian minister. Meanwhile, the Princeville plantation did not initially meet his expectations; by 1879 it was losing money, encumbered by debt and in need of new management, leading Allen to wonder whether it was “doomed” to a fate akin to that of the prince for whom it was named. The enterprise eventually stabilized and began paying dividends in 1882, shortly before his death.

Allen married twice and had children who themselves played notable roles in Hawaiian and American public life. His first marriage, in 1828, was to Sarah Elizabeth Fessenden, daughter of William Fessenden and niece of author Thomas Green Fessenden. They had four children before her death in 1845: Ellen Fessenden Allen (1831–1881), who married George Tiffany and, after his death, Henry Adams Patterson, and later Charles Coffin Harris (1822–1881), Allen’s successor as chief justice and chancellor; William Fessenden Allen (1831–1906), who married Cordelia Church Bishop (1837–1912), a cousin of banker Charles Reed Bishop, and who served as Collector-General of the port of Honolulu; Elisha Hunt Allen Jr. (1836–1906), who became Hawaiian consul in New York and married Julia Anne Herrick (1839–1913); and Sarah Fessenden Allen (1837–1901), who married Dr. William Palmer Wesselhoeft (1835–1909), one of the founders of the Massachusetts Homeopathic Hospital. By his second marriage to Mary Harrod Hobbs, Allen had two children, including Frederick Hobbes Allen (1858–1937), who served as his father’s secretary, graduated from Harvard Law School in 1883, and became a law partner in the New York firm Adams & Allen, and a daughter, Mary Allen.

Elisha Hunt Allen died in office as Hawaiian minister to the United States on January 1, 1883, after suffering a heart attack while attending the White House New Year’s Reception for the Washington Diplomatic Corps hosted by President Chester A. Arthur. He collapsed at the event and became one of only ten people known to have died inside the White House. Allen was interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His career, spanning state and national politics in the United States and high judicial and diplomatic office in the Kingdom of Hawaii, placed him at the center of nineteenth-century developments in U.S.–Hawaiian relations and the broader currents of American expansion in the Pacific.