Hawaiian Kingdom to American Territory: The Sugar Interests that Toppled a Queen
Reading Time: 15 minutes The Hawaiian Kingdom was a sovereign state with a distinct culture and an independent monarchy. By the late 1800s, American sugar interests were encroaching on Hawaii, and events quickly escalated. Hawaiian Monarchy: The Sugar Story is a saga of ambition, geopolitics, and the balance of power, ultimately ending with the monarchy’s overthrow and Hawaii’s eventual annexation by the U.S.
At the center of this historical drama is Liliʻuokalani, Queen of Hawaii, whose ambition and iron will are challenged by an American sugar plantation owner and other big-business interests who want Hawaii as an American outpost. The resulting diplomatic and political intrigue, including secret backdoor dealings, results in the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy. This historical event is multi-layered and rarely told, bringing into focus the influence of sugar in America on the Hawaiian Kingdom.
The Kamehameha Dynasty’s Formation of the Hawaiian Kingdom
The Kamehameha Dynasty of Polynesian ancestry played a major role in forming the Hawaiian Kingdom, which began as a group of independent chiefdoms that were gradually unified into a sovereign state. Kamehameha I (r. 1795-1819) was a skilled military commander and diplomat who began the unification process in 1795.
After unifying all the islands, the Hawaiian Kingdom was established in 1810, and the Kamehameha Dynasty ruled until the death of Kamehameha V in 1872 and the brief reign of King Lunalilo in 1874. The Kamehameha Dynasty continued the traditions and practices of their Polynesian ancestors, who had lived in Hawaii for generations before the Kamehameha Dynasty arrived.
The Hawaiian Kingdom became a regular diplomatic power under Kamehameha III, and the United States recognized its independence on July 6, 1846. The U.S. Secretary of State John C. Calhoun, speaking on behalf of President Tyler, announced to Congress that he had officially recognized the independence of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The Kamehameha Dynasty achieved this diplomatic milestone by working hard to establish the Kingdom as a sovereign nation.
The Hawaiian Kingdom established diplomatic relations with most of the world’s leading powers and maintained over ninety legations and consulates in foreign ports and cities worldwide. The Kamehameha Dynasty established these diplomatic relations to further connect with the international community while maintaining Hawaiian sovereignty and Polynesian culture.
The Kamehameha Dynasty’s effort to maintain and preserve the Hawaiian Kingdom as a Polynesian nation with a high degree of political independence and cultural freedom was threatened by the growing power and influence of American sugar interests in Hawaii. The United States saw the Hawaiian Kingdom as an economic and strategic prize, and the sugar industry was gaining increasing influence in Hawaiian politics.
The Sweet Rise of Sugar in the Hawaiian Kingdom
The Sugar industry’s long relationship with Hawaii’s economy dates back to Captain James Cook’s arrival in 1778 and the subsequent arrival of traders, whalers, and other travelers. The first permanent sugar plantation was established on Kauai by William Hooper, who leased 980 acres of land from King Kamehameha III in 1835.
Sugar cultivation by plantations spread quickly. Within 30 years, plantations covering large tracts of land could be found on four of the main Hawaiian islands. The rise of sugar cultivation in Hawaii shifted the Hawaiian economy from a traditional agrarian system to a plantation-based economy integrated into international political and financial markets.
The industry’s growing economic importance began to directly influence the government of the Hawaiian Kingdom, especially as American-born plantation owners became the dominant force on the islands. Beyond land, these sugar growers also wanted more political representation in the kingdom’s government. The sugar growers were motivated by industry profits, but they were also backed by religious missionaries. This missionary-cum-commercial pressure on the king and the other chiefs began a series of land tenure reforms.
In 1839, King Kamehameha III and the chiefs adopted the Hawaiian Bill of Rights, which they called the 1839 Constitution of Hawaii. The constitution aimed to protect the native Hawaiian population’s land rights while establishing a free-enterprise system.
Kamehameha III, under pressure from foreign advisors and missionaries like Gerrit P. Judd, enacted the Great Māhele after George Paulet’s 1843 occupation. A redistribution of land took place. The Hawaiian Kingdom negotiated unsuccessfully in the 1850s for a reciprocity policy, which would have lowered the higher U.S. import tariffs on Hawaiian sugar to those already in place on sugar from other nations. The treaty was strongly supported by the United States House of Representatives but was stopped in the United States Senate.
In the 1870s, Hawaii’s military importance, particularly to the United States, became clearer. In 1873, a United States military commission visited Hawaii and determined that the Hawaiian Islands would be key to defending the U.S. West Coast. The commission recommended that the United States take Ford Island from the Kingdom of Hawaii in return for tax-free importation of sugar into the United States.
Major General John Schofield and Brevet Brigadier General Burton S. Alexander were ordered to Hawaii to survey Hawaii’s defensive possibilities for the U.S. and determine what U.S. military facilities it required. The first island and location of interest was Pu’uloa, Pearl Harbor. Schofield and Alexander surveyed the islands and reported back to the United States. They reported the value of a U.S. naval facility at Pearl Harbor.
Negotiations for the sale of Pearl Harbor began at the request of Charles Reed Bishop, a foreigner who had married a granddaughter of Kamehameha I and Kamehameha II, the Hawaii sugar industry, the mainland U.S., and the U.S. Navy. The current monarch at the time was William Charles Lunalilo. Bishop began negotiations with the Lunalilo administration and was preparing to make the sale at a price the Navy approved. Bishop’s wife, Bernice Pauahi Bishop, and other Hawaiians were not happy about the loss of their sacred land, but her husband overruled her and most Hawaiians.
The U.S. Navy accepted the price Bishop was asking for, but the current monarch, Lunalilo, was torn. Lunalilo was only interested in the negotiations because of the Bishop family’s influence. He later stalled the sale, and the negotiations ended due to Lunalilo’s ill health and unexpected death in 1874, without naming a successor. The legislature succeeded him as monarch by electing David Kalākaua.
For that reason, the U.S. government pressured Kalākaua to sell Pearl Harbor. Kalākaua believed selling the harbor would make the islands the next target for U.S. annexation, and he opposed the sale because of that and because of Hawaiian tradition regarding land. To buy time, Kalākaua went to the United States in 1874-1875 and, upon his return, the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875 was signed, which traded Ford Island for tax-free importation of sugar to the U.S.
In 1891, sugar production reached an all-time high of 125,000 acres, up from 12,000 acres. The treaty was renewed until 1897, but when negotiations began before the treaty ended, the U.S. Navy and the U.S. government had little interest in renewing it.
Brewing Troubles: The 1887 Rebellion and the Bayonet Constitution
The United States began its lease of Pearl Harbor on 20 January 1887. By 1887, signs of possible monarchy dissolution emerged in the Hawaiian Kingdom, after years of strain between the monarchy and the Hawaiian Legislature. On January 20, 1887, a group of mostly non-Hawaiian Hawaiian nationals formed the Hawaiian Patriotic League and organized the Rebellion of 1887 to counter the lease signing and the political trend it represented.
A new constitution was drafted on July 6, 1887. Lorrin Thurston, the Hawaiian Minister of the Interior, led the forces in the Rebellion of 1887. He used the Hawaiian militia to force King Kalākaua to sign the new constitution and dismiss his cabinet with the threat of assassination. The 1887 constitution is also known as the “Bayonet Constitution” because of the forceful political process used to ratify it.
The Bayonet Constitution effectively took much of the monarch’s political power, but it still allowed him to appoint cabinet ministers and limited his ability to remove them without legislative approval.
The Bayonet Constitution affected the voting rights and eligibility for membership in the House of Nobles. The Bayonet Constitution’s new income and property requirements effectively disenfranchised two-thirds of native Hawaiians who were eligible to vote before its passage, as well as other ethnicities.
The Bayonet Constitution’s voting requirements aimed to ensure that white, foreign plantation owners could vote and hold office in the Hawaiian Kingdom while retaining citizenship in their homelands. By contrast, the immigrants from Asian countries were barred from acquiring citizenship and thus from voting in the Kingdom.
In the final days of President Grover Cleveland‘s administration, and under Secretary of State Thomas F. Bayard, the United States kept a close watch on the Kingdom of Hawaii, concerned mainly with the welfare of American commerce and nationals in the islands. Secretary Bayard instructed American Minister George W. Merrill to recognize “the reign of law and respect for orderly government in Hawaii”.
The Wilcox Rebellions of 1888 and 1889
The events of the 1880s in Hawaii, known as the Wilcox Rebellions, were a series of uprisings that significantly affected the politics of the Hawaiian Kingdom. In the first rebellion of 1888, a group of rebels led by Robert William Wilcox planned a coup to overthrow King David Kalākaua and replace him with his sister, Princess Liliʻuokalani. This was in reaction to the Bayonet Constitution, which King Kalākaua was forced to sign, reducing his powers and disenfranchising many native Hawaiians.
Princess Liliʻuokalani had just returned from Queen Victoria‘s Golden Jubilee in the United Kingdom when she learned of her brother’s new role as constitutional monarch. She decided to take action, stating that her brother was no longer fit to be king. When the plan was discovered just days before it was to occur, the rebels were frustrated, and Wilcox was exiled for a brief time.
The second Wilcox Rebellion is known as the Wilcox Rebellion of 1889. Robert Wilcox’s second rebellion attempt in 1889 was bolder and more ambitious, and came with the knowledge of Princess Liliʻuokalani. Wilcox’s co-conspirator was his friend Robert N. Boyd. He was joined by about 80 recruits from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds. They formed an organization known as the Liberal Patriotic Association.
On July 30, 1889, Wilcox and his followers, dressed in red shirts modeled after Garibaldi’s Redshirts, took control of several important buildings in downtown Honolulu. King Kalākaua was warned of the attack in advance and remained in Honuakaha, the private residence of Queen Kapiolani. Colonel Ashford’s Honolulu Rifles were ordered to attack the insurgents, who were now entrenched in a defensive position. After a prolonged battle, the rebels were defeated, and the insurrection was quelled.
In the aftermath of the failed rebellion of 1889, Wilcox and his men had lost a number of men, and many more were wounded, including Boyd. The 2nd Battalion Hawaiian Volunteers was disbanded for taking a neutral stance in the conflict. Most of the rebels were imprisoned, and Wilcox was tried for treason and acquitted by an all-Hawaiian jury. Lieutenant Albert Loomens, a Belgian who was a member of the Liberal Patriotic Association, was shot during the conflict and was subsequently banished from the Kingdom of Hawaii. These rebellions significantly affected Hawaii’s future, as their failure allowed Liliʻuokalani to eventually take the throne of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1891.
The Tumultuous Reign of Queen Liliʻuokalani: Economic Crisis and Constitutional Struggle
Queen Liliʻuokalani inherited a kingdom in crisis when she ascended to the throne of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1891. The Hawaiian Kingdom faced a fiscal crisis after the recent passage of the McKinley Act, which eliminated tariffs on sugar from foreign countries entering the U.S. Her brother, King Kalākaua, died in San Francisco in January 1891, and his sister Liliʻuokalani succeeded him as queen.
The McKinley Act, which had gone into effect just before Liliʻuokalani’s accession, had placed Hawaii’s sugar industry and, by extension, the Hawaiian Kingdom’s finances in a very precarious position, as the Act effectively rendered the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875 a nullity. Liliʻuokalani, like her brother before her, worked on several radical revenue-generating solutions, including a lottery and a bill to license opium importers and users. Her ministers and advisors quickly shot down these ideas, likely because they better understood the cultural and political ramifications of such proposals.
Queen Liliʻuokalani wanted to restore the monarch’s power over the legislature and began planning a new constitution that would replace the Bayonet Constitution of 1887. The 1893 Constitution she proposed would expand the franchise by loosening property restrictions while removing voting rights from non-citizen European and American residents of the kingdom. The Queen knew that her actions would directly affect the interests of Hawaii’s large and influential Euro-American business community, and that they would strongly resist any attempt to do so.
She toured the islands on horseback with these ideas in the months before she was overthrown, and the response to her plan was overwhelmingly positive, with a petition from islanders supporting a new constitution that ran hundreds of pages long. Her cabinet refused to go along with her and knew full well the pushback that would come when the Queen tried to act on her plans, so they stayed quiet.
Queen Liliʻuokalani, her cabinet, and others faced significant resistance in their efforts to shore up the Kingdom’s finances, restore royal authority, and strengthen the monarchy. The non-native population, which had a great deal of wealth and political power in the kingdom, would not take kindly to any attempt by the Queen to limit their power or influence. The Queen’s attempt to move forward with a new constitution that would undo many of the power limitations imposed on the monarchy by the 1887 Bayonet Constitution was the main impetus for the 1893 Overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii.
The coup d’etat was a conspiracy of United States nationals and other foreign residents, with the publicly stated aims of deposing Liliʻuokalani and the rest of the Hawaiian monarchy and annexing the Hawaiian Kingdom to the United States of America.
The 1893 Coup d’État and Overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy
The Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom was a coup d’état that took place in 1893 against Hawaii’s monarchy. The group responsible for the overthrow mainly consisted of local politicians of American and European descent, along with the business community in Hawaii. Lorrin Thurston, a newspaper publisher of Hawaiian and European descent and former Minister of the Interior of the Hawaiian Kingdom, organized it, and Henry E. Cooper, an American lawyer and elected member of the Kingdom’s House of Representatives, formally led it, along with the Committee of Safety.
These prominent politicians and business leaders, and the members of the Committee of Safety, citizens of the United States and European subjects of the Hawaiian Kingdom, together enjoyed the political and financial support to execute such radical plans of government change, for they were already economically and politically influential and disenchanted with the 1887 Bayonet Constitution, along with the threats made by Queen Liliʻuokalani, who at the time was seeking to restore the power of the monarchy over the islands.
On January 17, 1893, the Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom was announced, sparked by a clash between the Committee of Safety and non-native men with rifles and the Kingdom of Hawaii. It began on January 16, 1893, when Charles B. Wilson, the Marshal of the Kingdom, acting on intelligence about the attempted overthrow, requested warrants from a judge to arrest the Committee members. The warrants were declined by the judge in part due to the political connections of the Committee and its members, namely their close connections with U.S. Government Minister John L. Stevens, and fear of further inflaming the already escalating situation.
Stevens sent U.S. military troops to Hawaii. He claimed they were there to “protect American lives and property.” The troops were positioned in a way that did not protect American property; instead, they were there to directly influence the Hawaiian government and palace. On 17th of January, Henry E. Cooper took a position at ʻIolani Palace, the seat of government of Hawaii. He read a manifesto deposing Queen Liliʻuokalani and proclaiming the end of the monarchy and the creation of a Provisional Government of Hawaii, headed by Sanford B. Dole; soon afterward, the United States of America sent a military force to protect it.
President Grover Cleveland opposed the United States’ action and questioned the use of the U.S. military to overthrow the Hawaiian Kingdom. He disapproved of the de facto Provisional Government of Hawaii after the Overthrow, which was a coup. The troops were not sent in to protect American property, but rather to directly control the Hawaiian government and palace.
After the United States military troops arrived on the islands and the Queen was under house arrest in the ʻIolani Palace, she surrendered, realizing that resistance would do more harm to her people than good. She thought of her subjects’ safety rather than her own. In 1894, the same people who formed the provisional government formed and proclaimed the Republic of Hawaii, with Sanford Dole as President; the United States of America eventually annexed it.
The Road to American Statehood: The Aftermath of Hawaii’s 1893 Coup
The 1893 coup d’état in Hawaii overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani, eventually leading to Hawaii’s transition from an independent monarchy to the state it is today. The coup d’état was marked by the establishment of a provisional government, backed by the Honolulu Rifles, an armed militia formed to protect the revolutionaries. Queen Liliʻuokalani’s January 17, 1893, statemet details her abdication at the insistence of the United States, represented by Minister Stevens, making the Hawaiian kingdom a protectorate of the United States. This led to the events that caused the United States to annex Hawaii.
Globally, many countries reacted little to the coup and quickly recognized the new Provisional Government. The U.S. Government ordered an investigation into what had happened in Hawaii, and the Blount Report, released by the Committee on Foreign Relations of the U.S. Senate, found that the U.S. had staged the coup.
President Grover Cleveland tried to restore the Hawaiian Monarchy, but the pro-annexationist Congress stopped him. The Native Hawaiian Study Commission’s final report stated that the United States did not have to make reparations for its role in overthrowing the Hawaiian Monarchy. However, the apology to Native Hawaiians did not come until 1993 under Bill Clinton, 100 years later. In Hawaii, the 1895 Wilcox Rebellion was a Native Hawaiian resistance movement aimed at reinstating the monarchy.
The annexation process was completed under President William McKinley. In 1898, a flag-lowering ceremony took place, and onlookers protested by shouting, weeping, and wailing as the Hawaiian flag was lowered. Hawaii became an official American territory in 1900, and Sanford Dole was elected Hawaii’s first governor. The Kingdom of Hawaii became part of the American Union.
On August 21, 1959, the State of Hawaii became the 50th state of the United States.
