Robert Hunter (colonial administrator)
British military officer, governor of Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Jamaica
General Robert Hunter FRS (c. 1666 – 31 March 1734) was a British army officer, playwright and colonial administrator who successively served as the governors of New York, New Jersey and Jamaica.
Early life
Robert Hunter was born c. 1666 in Edinburgh, Scotland, grandson of Robert Hunter, 20th Laird of Hunterston in Ayrshire, being the son of lawyer James Hunter and his wife Margaret Spalding.
Career
He had been apprenticed to an apothecary before running away to join the Scots Army. He became an officer in 1689 who rose to become a general, and married a woman of high rank.
American colonies
He was a man of business whose first address to the New Jersey Assembly was barely 300 words long. In it, he stated, "If honesty is the best policy, plainness must be the best oratory."
He was appointed Lieutenant Governor of Virginia in 1707, but was captured by a corsair on his way to Virginia, taken to France, and in 1709 exchanged for the French Bishop of Quebec. He was then appointed Governor of New York and sailed to America with 3,000 Palatine refugees as settlers in 1710. In 1715 he advocated the local minting of copper coins, but the king refused. Governor Hunter's philosophy was that "the true Interests of the People and Government are the same, I mean A Government of Laws. No other deserves the Name, and are never Separated or Separable but in Imagination by Men of Craft."
Hunter was succeeded as Governor by Pieter Schuyler as acting governor from 1719 to 1720 and finally by William Burnet, whose post as Comptroller of Customs was given to Hunter in exchange.
“Robert Hunter (colonial administrator)” enters the record as british military officer, governor of Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Jamaica. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Robert, Hunter and colonial can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15497969. VIAF identifies the subject as 70290445. The Library of Congress control number is n82222195. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1666, 1734, 1689 and 1707.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert Hunter (colonial administrator)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.