How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [136]
But the United States declined. Secretary of State Daniel Webster told Kamehameha that while “the government of the United States was the first to acknowledge the national existence of the Hawaiian government … acknowledging the independence of the Islands, and of the government established over them, it was not seeking to promote any peculiar object of its own … or to exercise any sinister influence itself over the counsels of Hawaii.”1 Even as Webster wrote those words, Americans 3,000 miles from his desk were developing a coastal region the nation had only recently acquired: California. Its highly populated port city of San Francisco constituted both a market for, and a direct connection with, Hawaii. While American missionaries had lived in Hawaii since 1820, a new motive sent a second wave of Americans and, to a lesser extent, Europeans. Hawaii’s climate and soil were perfect for growing sugarcane. Big money could be made.
Queen Lili’uokalani (1838-1917) (photo credit 39.2)
Sanford Dole (1844-1926) (photo credit 39.1)
Because it benefited everyone, sugar production quickly grew to the point that, in 1855, a free-trade agreement was negotiated by President Franklin Pierce and Hawaii. But sugar producers in the United States successfully lobbied the Senate to reject the treaty. In 1867 California sugar refiners lobbied the Senate to ratify a more limited free-trade treaty. That same year the purchase of Alaska reflected the fact that the nation’s attitudes about boundaries were expanding beyond the continental United States. President Andrew Johnson expressed the new view in his statement to Congress on the proposed trade agreement with Hawaii:
I am aware that upon the question of further extending our possessions it is apprehended by some that our political system cannot successfully be applied to an area more extended than our continent; but the conviction is rapidly gaining ground in the American mind that, with increased facilities for intercommunication between all portions of the earth, the principles of free government … would prove of sufficient strength and breadth to comprehend within their sphere and influence the civilized nations of the world.
Though attitudes were changing, they were not completely changed. The Senate again rejected the treaty.
An additional reason for the Senate’s reluctance to ratify either treaty can be inferred from its third time at bat. In 1873 the Senate did ratify a trade agreement with Hawaii … and Britain immediately protested. Quite likely, until this time, the Senate had not thought it wise to risk military conflict in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with the world’s preeminent empire.
Once the United States and Hawaii had established this free-trade agreement, the islands’ sugar industry expanded exponentially. Not everyone in Hawaii was thrilled, however. “Some foresaw that this treaty with the United States might become the entering wedge for the loss of our independence,” Queen Lili’uokalani later reflected in her memoirs. “What would be the consequences should the Islands acquire too great a commercial attraction, too large a foreign population and interests?”
The fear of too large a foreign population soon took on an additional dimension. The sugar plantations could produce far more sugar than Hawaii had natives to provide the labor. Workers would have to be imported. The white plantation owners were as cognizant of the risk they were taking by importing foreign workers as Hawaii’s king had been in entering into the free-trade treaty. Initially the plantation owners paid for immigrants from Portugal, which had a surplus labor supply. (China and Japan, too, had a surplus of workers,