• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 518 0

but the planters considered the Portuguese, being Europeans, to be a more “desirable for permanent settlement.”)2 Providing transportation from Portugal, however, proved to be so costly that planters began opting for Chinese and Japanese workers. As feared, these immigrants came to constitute half the population over the next fifteen years. Native Hawaiians now made up roughly 45 percent of their nation, with the white population, which controlled nearly all the wealth, constituting the remaining 5 percent.3 While political power remained in the hands of the monarch, the rapid change—and lack of change—led to racial, religious, and political friction.

By the summer of 1887, white residents had acquired influence with a sufficient number of King Kalākaua’s advisers that the king, not knowing whom among those closest to him he could trust, acceded to what became known as the “bayonet” constitution. It provided for voting representation by the people, while preserving power for the nobility in a creatively revolutionary way. To be or vote for a representative, a citizen had to be a Hawaiian or white male, thereby excluding the nation’s 25,000 or so Chinese and Japanese residents. To be or vote for a noble, however, one had to be a Hawaiian or white male with an annual income of at least $600 or $3,000 in property. Few Hawaiians had that.

Kalākaua’s heir to the throne was his sister Lili’uokalani, who opposed these changes, despite the fact that she was steeped in Western culture. Born in 1838, Lili’uokalani had been educated at elite Hawaiian boarding schools run by missionaries. She was well versed in history, literature, science, and math, and a gifted pianist and composer. Nevertheless, when she ascended the thrown in 1891, Lili’uokalani embarked on an effort to restore power to—depending on one’s point of view—Hawaii’s natives or herself:

I inquired at the opening of the cabinet meeting what was the business of the day, to which reply was made that it was necessary that I should sign without any delay their commissions, that thus they might proceed to the discharge of their duties. “But gentlemen,” said I, “I expect you to send in your resignations before I can act.” My reasoning was that, if they were new cabinet ministers, why should they appeal to me to appoint them to the places that they already filled?

Lili’uokalani’s position was legally sound, and she won the right to nominate new ministers. Since, under the “bayonet” constitution, the monarch could not dismiss a cabinet member after the nominee had been approved by the legislature, Lili’uokalani chose carefully those who would, in effect, run the country. She and her advisers also began to draft a new constitution that would extend greater voting rights to nonwhite citizens. That task was sidetracked, however, when the legislature rejected her cabinet nominees. A tug of war began, ostensibly over nominee negotiations but, as Lili’uokalani knew, really over something far more profound. Hawaii’s wealth had enriched and empowered the white population, but, as Lili’uokalani wrote, “sooner or later [it will] … also elevate the masses of the Hawaiian people into a self-governing class.”

Indeed, Lili’uokalani’s struggle roused the nation’s nonwhite residents. In response, the white residents formed a Committee on Public Safety, which approached the U.S. commissioner to Hawaii for protection. He in turn instructed the commander of the USS Boston, at anchor in Pearl Harbor, to dispatch its Marines. Lili’uokalani later recalled:

At about 2:30 PM, Tuesday [January 17, 1893], the establishment of the Provisional Government was proclaimed, and nearly fifteen minutes later Mr. J. S. Walker [president of the Legislative Assembly] came and told me “that he had come on a painful duty; that the opposition party had requested that I should abdicate.” … Since the troops of the United States had been landed to support the revolutionists by the order of the American minister, it would be impossible for us to make any resistance.

Later that day, the chairman of the Committee