Hawaii - James Michener [385]
Micah's plea achieved nothing, for Louisiana and Colorado sugar interests prevented the lame-duck Senate of February, 1893, from jamming the Treaty of Annexation through, and five days after Grover Cleveland assumed the Presidency he sternly withdrew the treaty and rebuked those who had sought to foist it upon the American public. Now doleful news reached Hawaii. The Secretary of State wrote: "The United States will not accept the Hawaiian Islands on the terms under which they have been offered. It would lower our national standard to endorse a selfish and dishonorable scheme of a lot of adventurers. I oppose taking these islands by force and fraud, for there is such a thing as international morality."
President Cleveland was of a similar opinion and personally dispatched an investigator to Honolulu to inquire into America's role in the unsavory revolution, and by one of the tricks of history the investigator turned out to be a Democrat from Georgia and a member of a family that had once held slaves. When preliminary news of his appointment reached Hawaii, the Committee of Nine were apprehensive lest he report against them, but when his slave-holding status was revealed, they sighed with visible relief. "As a good Southerner he'll understand our problems," John Janders told the conspirators, and they all agreed.
But Whip Hoxworth, considering the matter carefully, judged: "We may be in for deep trouble. Since Cleveland's investigator comes from Georgia, he probably despises niggers."
"Of course he does," Janders agreed. "He'll see through these Hawaiians right away."
"I doubt it," Whip cautioned. "Granted that he hates niggers. As a sensible human being he'll try to compensate and prove that he doesn't hate other people with dark skins."
"Why would he do that?" Janders demanded.
"Don't ask me why!" Whip replied. "Just watch."
And when the investigator arrived he did exactly as Whip had predicted. Hating Negroes at home, he had to like Hawaiians abroad. It was a profound compulsion and it permitted him, a Georgia man, to understand the revolution better than any other American understood it at the time. He talked principally with Hawaiians, was bedazzled by the idea of speaking directly with a queen, became an ardent royalist, and suppressed evidence given by white men. His report to President Cleveland was a crushing rebuke to the sugar men; they had, he discovered, conspired with the American Minister to overthrow a duly constituted government; they had worked in league with the captain of an American vessel; they had deposed the queen against the will of the Hawaiian people; they had done all this for personal gain; and it was his opinion that Queen Liliuokalani, a virtuous woman, should be restored to her throne.
His report aroused such a storm in Washington that David Hale and Micah Whipple saw there was no hope of forcing the United States to accept Hawaii, and they returned to Honolulu with the glum prediction: "We will never become part of America while Grover Cleveland is President. His Secretary of State is already asking, 'Should not the great wrong done to a feeble state by an abuse of the authority of the United States be undone by restoring the legitimate government?' There's even talk of restoring the queen by force of American arms."
"What would happen to us?" members of the Committee asked.
"Since you're American subjects," a consular official explained, "you'd be arrested, hauled off to Washington, and tried for conspiring to overthrow a friendly power."
"On, no!" the conspirators protested. "We're Hawaiian subjects. Our citizenship is here."
September and October, 1893, were uneasy months in Hawaii, and Wild Whip's gang maintained power by only