Queen Liliʻuokalani — a kingdom taken from its people at gunpoint

Liliʻuokalani, the last reigning monarch of the independent Hawaiian Kingdom, was overthrown in Honolulu on 17 January 1893 by a small committee of mostly American and European businessmen, acting with the connivance of the United States minister and under the protection of armed US sailors and Marines landed from the warship USS Boston. The Kanaka Maoli — the Native Hawaiian people — lost the sovereign government of their islands not to a popular uprising or a foreign war, but to a coup mounted by a settler oligarchy and made possible by the guns of a foreign navy. The United States Congress formally apologized for it a century later.

The wrong is best named plainly. Hawaii in 1893 was a recognized independent kingdom with treaties, embassies, and a century of statehood, ruled by a dynasty descended from the chiefs who had united the islands under Kamehameha I. Its monarch, Queen Liliʻuokalani, sought to restore to the crown and to her people the authority stripped away in 1887, when foreign businessmen had forced her brother King Kalākaua at gunpoint to sign the so-called Bayonet Constitution — a document that disenfranchised most Native Hawaiians and handed power to a wealthy, largely American settler class.

When the queen moved in January 1893 to promulgate a new constitution restoring the franchise and the powers of the throne, that settler class — its fortunes built on sugar, its eyes on annexation and the tariff-free American market — formed a “Committee of Safety” and declared the monarchy abolished. The decisive act was not theirs alone. US Minister John L. Stevens, openly sympathetic to annexation, ordered 162 sailors and Marines ashore from the USS Boston. They fired no shots, but their presence — positioned to overawe the queen’s small guard — made armed resistance hopeless.

Liliʻuokalani yielded under protest, surrendering not to the conspirators but, as she carefully stated, “to the superior force of the United States of America,” and appealing to that government to undo the wrong and restore her. It would not. President Cleveland’s own investigator found the overthrow illegal and unjust, but Congress recognized the settler regime, which became the Republic of Hawaii in 1894 and procured US annexation in 1898. The queen lived until 1917, her kingdom gone. The land, the government, and the sovereignty of the Hawaiian people were taken from them, and — as the 1993 Apology Resolution conceded — never lawfully given up.