The Kingdom of Hawaii loses its Independence

The Kingdom of Hawaii, from 1848 to the 1870s

In 1848 the ownership of Hawaiian lands was individualized, seen by Hawaiian leaders as advantageous for Hawaiians as well as enabling foreigners to buy land. It was called the "Great Mahele" (land division). The old feudal relationship of land possession from the king to his subordinate chiefs to commoner was at an end. Traditional communal rights to land were abolished. Now the common Hawaiian might claim ownership of a piece of land and sell it if he wished.

Plantations were still few and small, but they were developing. Some Hawaiian men were eagerly going to sea as sailors -- viewed as good sailors by ship commanders -- but Hawaiians were not willing to labor on plantations. Slavery was not to be in Hawaii, as it still was in the U.S., and in 1850 Hawaii's legislature approved the recruitment of foreigners. The plantations were to be worked by Asians seeking to avoid starvation.

By 1850 the number of whites in the Hawaiian Islands had increased to around 2,000. The Hawaiians had dwindled from about 142,000 in 1823, and 100,000 in 1839, to about 84,000. An epidemic in 1848, said to be of flu, measles and whooping cough, took the lives of around 10,000. There was concern among the missionaries about Hawaiians "backsliding" from Christianity. A medical missionary, James William Smith, complained of "Balls and dinner parties, wine drinking and card playing [being] tolerated in what is called the fashionable circle."

In February 1853, smallpox arrived at Honolulu from the Pacific Coast. Ships were quarantined. Vaccination and food centers were established by Protestant ministers, and many people clamored for vaccination. June 15 was declared a day of humiliation, fasting and prayer. Catholic priests tended to the dying, and Mormon elders tried expelling the disease by the laying on of hands and anointment. For some of the Hawaiians the vaccinations did not take. Many others refused modern medicine and went instead to a traditional (kahuna) doctor. The rural areas were hit hard by the disease. In the cities the dead were carted away in wagons. The disease ran its course and began dying out. At the end of January, 1854, no new cases were recorded. A total of 6,405 cases had been reported and 2,485 deaths. The man in charge of the census, Richard Armstrong, believed that many cases had gone unreported and that the figures should have been two or three times that amount. [note]

Meanwhile, in December, 1854, King Kamehameha III had died -- at the age of 41. Alexander Liholiho, the grandson of Kamehameha I, became Kamehameha IV. He bitterly opposed any talk of United States annexing the islands. He and his brother Lot had had unpleasant experiences in the United States, and Britain had impressed them more than the United States by its having outlawed slavery. Kamehameha IV supported the established religion of Great Britain, the Episcopal Church, and had little time for Americans. He subscribed to the London Times, read other journals from Britain and avoided U.S. journals.

Kamehameha IV established a hospital in Honolulu for sick and destitute Hawaiians. Depressed by the death of his own son at the age of four, he drank more, ate less and suffered increasingly from asthma, until he could hardly breathe, and he died in 1863 at the age of 29, and his bother Lot became Kamehameha V.

Kamehameha V defeated a proposal to repeal the law against selling strong liquor to Hawaiians, saying: "I will never sign the death warrant of my people." He was offended by islanders congregating during the day around hula dancers, and to prevent idleness he restricted hula dancing. He urged the replacement of the Constitution of 1852, rewrote the constitution, signed it into law in 1864 and took an oath to maintain it. The new constitution strengthened the king's powers and limited the right to cast votes in elections of legislators. Those who could vote had to be male; if born since 1840 they had to be able to read and write; and they had to own real estate worth at least $150 or have an annual income of at least $70.

In the mid-1860s, the first plantation workers arrived from abroad. Eighty-five percent of them were from China -- 470 males and 52 females. In 1866, 148 Japanese laborers arrived. Two thousand, men, women and children were to arrive by 1872. The disease of leprosy provided a new scare in the islands -- a disease that was said to have arrived from China. In the islands it was called the Chinese disease. Moves were made, supported by Kamehameha V, to isolate the afflicted, and there was resistance.

During the U.S. Civil War, sugar exports to California soared, and by 1870 Hawaii's sugar exports were 9,400 short tons, up from 700 short tons in 1860. Steamships provided faster transport and communications between Honolulu and San Francisco. There was a monthly mail service. And steamship service from Australia and New Zealand to San Francisco, stopped in Honolulu. A small number of tourists began arriving in the islands. Honolulu had but one hotel, but people stayed with families in the outlying areas and could get around on rough pathways by horseback. At Hilo they could see the world's only surf boarding.

Relations between the United States and Kamehameha V remained cool but cordial. Fears of U.S. power remained, while Kamehameha grew in weight until he had difficulty moving about or riding a horse. He abandoned physical activity and soon was confined to his bed. He grew steadily weaker and died on December 11, 1872 at the age of 42. Figures for 1866 had the number of native Hawaiians at 57,000 -- to hit its low at 39,656 in 1900.

American Domination

Stephen Kinzer writes that "Hawaii was in the midst of an epic confontation between tradition and modernity."

See Kinzer's book Overthrow, the first chapter, "Hell of a Time Up at the Palace." Kinzer writes that Hawaii's "tribal-based agriculture was collapsing under pressure from the relentlessly expanding sugar industry." The chapter describes the overthrow of Hawaii's monarchy.

Into the 1880s many Hawaiians were unhappy about the power and influence of members of the missionary families and other foreigners. Native Hawaiians had become became increasingly hostile to white business owners, whom they characterized as arrogant and uncharitable opportunists. There were calls for a white-free legislature, and there were complaints that most land was held by foreigners. "Hawaii for Hawaiians" had became a slogan.

A German-born financier from California, Claus Spreckles, dominated the purchase of sugarcane from the growers. He was a poker-playing companion of the king, Kalakaua, and won political favors from the king in return for personal loans. A rumor had spread that he was the power behind the throne. Then, in 1886, he returned to California.

The well-established U.S. citizens in the islands had been there long enough to consider themselves Hawaiian. They believed that they deserved the influence they could exercise, and they were disturbed by what they thought was hostility from non-whites and bad government by King Kalakaua. Common among whites during these times was the belief that non-whites were incapable of good government. Whatever the beliefs of influential whites in Hawaii, among them were at least a few who believed that the king had too much power, ruling as he did through his ministers rather than being the kind of monarch that had less power than the legislature -- as with monarchies in Western Europe. They blamed the king for the government's growing debt and accused him of spending too much money. A few of the more adamant critics of the king formed a secret society called the Hawaiian League. These were businessmen and lawyers, led by Lorrin Thurston, son of a missionary from the United States, a lawyer and publisher of a newspaper, the Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser. Thurston wanted a new constitution that gave more power to the legislature and voting restrictions that protected men like himself from the opinions of hostile non-whites.

The conspirators took power the old fashioned way. In July 1887, they confronted King Kalakaua with weapons, and the king, without an adequate guard or military counterforce, responded by signing a constitution that Thurston and his group had devised -- to be known as the "Bayonet Constitution." The king, according to his sister Liliuokalani, signed the constitution "under absolute compulsion."

The new constitution gave Europeans and Americans full voting rights without need of Hawaiian citizenship. It restricted voting to those who made at least $600 annually (a substantial sum in the 1880s) or those who owned at least $3,000 worth of property. The new constitution in effect deprived native Hawaiians and immigrant Asians from voting. Only those persons selected by the whites would be able to serve in Hawaii's influential House of Nobles. The new constitution placed executive power in the hands of the king's cabinet, and members of the cabinet could be dismissed only by the legislature. The new constitution was, in short, a takeover, by U.S. citizens.

King Kalakaua died in 1891 of kidney disease, and his sister Liliuokalani took the oath as reigning monarch, including swearing to uphold the new constitution that she despised. With the support of Hawaii's citizens she drafted a constitution to replace the Bayonet Constitution. In January 1893, those in power defended their power by resorting to another coup. Their Committee of Safety sent militia that took over government buildings and offices. The administration of the U.S. President Benjamin Harrison, had encouraged the move, and he favored annexation. The coup was supported by the commanding officer of the U.S.S. Boston, which landed marines and sailors to keep order in Honolulu. The Queen's guards surrendered their arms at the palace barracks. Queen Liliuokalani was retired to her private residence. She wanted no bloodshed and urged people not to riot. In March a new Democratic administration would be coming into power in Washington, the presidency of Grover Cleveland, elected in November. She believed that the decency of the American people would set things aright, and she planned to write an appeal to President Cleveland.

On February 1, the Harrison administration recognized the government of the coup leaders, and Hawaii was proclaimed a U.S. protectorate. A treaty of annexation was sent to the Senate, but after learning that most Hawaiians opposed annexation, Democrats opposed it and the treaty of annexation failed to pass. Grover Cleveland spoke of dishonorable conduct toward Hawaiians, and after his inauguration in March he sent a new U.S. minister to Hawaii to restore Queen Liliuokalani to power. Liliuokalani also had the support of the sugar magnate, Claus Spreckles, but his power was not what it had been rumored to be.The government in Honolulu refused to step down, and there was not the will by the new administration, or the U.S. public, to use force against their fellow citizens in Hawaii.

Republicans took back the presidency on March 4, 1897, and in June 1898, during the Spanish American War, annexation of the Hawaiian Islands was debated in Congress, with the claim made that "we must have Hawaii to help us get our share of China." In July, President William McKinley signed the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands into law. In 1900 the islands were made a territory, with the leader of the coup against Liliuokalani, Samuel Dole, the territory's first governor.