Queen Liliʻuokalani — a kingdom taken from its people at gunpoint
Summary
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.
Timeline
A recognized kingdom and a settler oligarchy
By the late nineteenth century the Hawaiian Kingdom was a sovereign state of standing. Unified under Kamehameha I by 1810, it had adopted a written constitution in 1840 and was recognized as independent by the great powers, with which it exchanged treaties and ministers. But beneath the diplomatic equality, the islands had been transformed. Disease introduced after contact had cut the Native Hawaiian population catastrophically — from perhaps several hundred thousand at Captain Cook's arrival in 1778 to a small fraction of that by the 1890s — while American missionaries and their descendants, and other foreign settlers, had acquired enormous economic power, above all in sugar.
That sugar economy was bound to the United States by a reciprocity treaty that let Hawaiian sugar enter the American market duty-free, making the planters rich and tying their interests ever more tightly to annexation. In 1887 a group of these men, organized in an armed militia, compelled King Kalākaua under threat of force to accept a new constitution — the Bayonet Constitution — that gutted the monarchy's powers, handed authority to a cabinet they could control, and imposed property and income qualifications that stripped the franchise from most Native Hawaiians and nearly all Asian residents while extending it to foreign men. Power in Hawaii had been wrenched away from its people before Liliʻuokalani ever took the throne. She inherited a crown already hollowed out, and a people already disenfranchised in their own land.
The coup of January 1893
Liliʻuokalani became queen in January 1891. She was no figurehead: educated, politically astute, a gifted musician who composed the song "Aloha ʻOe," she came to the throne determined to restore to the monarchy and to the Hawaiian people the rights the Bayonet Constitution had taken. Native Hawaiian subjects petitioned for exactly such a restoration. In January 1893 the queen prepared to promulgate a new constitution that would lower the property bars, restore the vote to her dispossessed people, and return real authority to the crown.
To the settler faction this was the pretext they had awaited. A group of thirteen men — predominantly American and European businessmen and lawyers — formed a "Committee of Safety" and resolved to depose the queen and seek annexation to the United States. They had a crucial ally in the American minister, John L. Stevens, an open advocate of annexation. On 16 January 1893, on the stated pretext of protecting American lives and property that were never in real danger, Stevens ordered 162 sailors and Marines ashore from the USS Boston, then anchored at Honolulu. The troops fired no shot; they did not need to. Positioned by the government buildings and the palace, they made plain that any move by the queen's small household guard, or by her people, to resist the conspirators would mean confronting the armed forces of the United States.
On 17 January the Committee read a proclamation from the steps of the government building, ʻAliʻiōlani Hale, declaring the monarchy abolished and establishing a Provisional Government under Sanford B. Dole, a judge and missionary descendant. Liliʻuokalani, facing US guns and unwilling to see her people killed, surrendered under formal protest. Her words have echoed since: she yielded not to the Provisional Government but "to the superior force of the United States of America," and did so "until such time as the Government of the United States shall... undo the action of its representatives and reinstate me." She placed the wrong squarely where it belonged — on the United States — and entrusted her cause to the very government whose minister had helped overthrow her.
Reinstatement refused, and a kingdom annexed
For a moment it seemed the wrong might be undone. The incoming US president, Grover Cleveland, withdrew the annexation treaty his predecessor had rushed to the Senate and sent a special commissioner, James H. Blount, to investigate. Blount's report was unsparing: the US minister and the landing of the Boston's troops had been decisive, the overthrow carried out against the will of the Hawaiian people, and US agents had abused their authority. Cleveland told Congress that a "substantial wrong" had been done through "an act of war" and called for the queen's restoration. But the Provisional Government simply refused to step down, and Cleveland — unwilling to use force against the very regime US forces had helped install — let the matter pass to Congress, which declined to restore the monarchy.
The settler regime entrenched itself. On 4 July 1894 it proclaimed the Republic of Hawaii, again with Dole as president — a state designed to hold power until the United States would take the islands. In January 1895 an attempted royalist counter-revolution, associated with Robert Wilcox, was defeated; a cache of arms was found buried at Liliʻuokalani's residence. The former queen, who denied foreknowledge, was arrested, tried before a military tribunal, and imprisoned in an upstairs room of ʻIolani Palace — her own former throne. To win clemency for supporters facing execution, she signed, under duress, a formal abdication on 24 January 1895. She was released and later travelled to Washington to plead her people's case directly, to no avail.
The end came with empire and war. In 1898, with the Spanish-American War making the islands attractive as a Pacific naval station, the United States annexed Hawaii by a joint congressional resolution — the Newlands Resolution — that required no treaty and no vote by the Hawaiian people, tens of thousands of whom had signed petitions against it. The ceremony was held at ʻIolani Palace on 12 August 1898; the Hawaiian flag was lowered and the American flag raised over the palace of the kings. Liliʻuokalani is said to have refused to attend and to have remained in mourning. She lived on in Honolulu, writing her memoir Hawaiʻi's Story by Hawaiʻi's Queen, until her death on 11 November 1917, aged 79. The kingdom did not survive her by restoration; it had been absorbed.
The Five Factors
Aftermath
Hawaii became a US territory in 1900 and the fiftieth state in 1959. The Native Hawaiian people, dispossessed of their government in 1893, were subjected over the following decades to the suppression of their language and the erosion of their land base, and the long consequences — in landlessness, displacement, and the struggle to sustain Hawaiian language and culture — endure. The overthrow was never a closed episode for them; it remained a living grievance and the root of a sovereignty movement that has never accepted that the kingdom was lawfully ended.
That movement won a remarkable acknowledgment in 1993. On the hundredth anniversary of the overthrow, the United States Congress passed and President Clinton signed Public Law 103-150, the Apology Resolution. It conceded, in the federal government's own voice, that the overthrow had been carried out "with the active participation of agents and citizens of the United States" and the armed support of US forces; that it had been done without the consent of and against the will of the Native Hawaiian people; and — crucially — that "the indigenous Hawaiian people never directly relinquished their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people over their national lands to the United States." The Apology settled no land claim and conferred no restoration; its legal force is debated. But it placed on the permanent record what the Blount Report had found a century before: that a sovereign people had a kingdom taken from them by wrong, and that the wrong was America's. Liliʻuokalani is remembered today not as a monarch who failed but as the dignified last sovereign of a nation that was stolen, and as a symbol of a sovereignty her people maintain was never surrendered.
Lessons
- When a narrow class captures a nation's economy and looks abroad for its allegiance, the nation's sovereignty becomes, to that class, an obstacle they will eventually move to remove.
- A constitution imposed by force corrodes legitimacy in advance: a lawful attempt to undo it can be twisted into the pretext for the coup that finishes the job.
- The intervention of a great power's military is decisive even when it fires no shot — the mere presence of foreign troops can make lawful resistance impossible and a coup irreversible.
- Do not entrust the undoing of a wrong to the power that committed it; an appeal to the conscience of the perpetrator will lose to the perpetrator's interest.
- A sovereignty taken by wrong is not extinguished by the taking — a dispossessed people can carry the claim across generations until the wrong is, at the least, named.
References
- Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom WIKIPEDIA
- Public Law 103-150 — the 1993 Apology Resolution US GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
- Liliʻuokalani ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA
- Americans overthrow Hawaiian monarchy, January 17, 1893 HISTORY
- Jan. 17, 1893: Queen Liliʻuokalani of Hawaiʻi is Overthrown ZINN EDUCATION PROJECT