Decades of foreign contact, years of close observation of the missionaries, and the rapid Westernization of their society convinced the chiefs that, until they codified their laws in a Western way, haoles would continue to act as they pleased and appeal to their own governments for protection from what, in their eyes, amounted to no more than tribal custom. On January 5, 1835, the king promulgated a penal code prescribing punishments for homicide, theft, adultery, fraud, and drunkenness. The chiefs also desired to have their rights and responsibilities to foreign nations spelled out, but no one in the islands was competent to advise them in matters of law. Through William Richards they requested the ABCFM in 1836 to send them someone to instruct and advise them in politics; that brought a quick refusal, as it clearly crossed the Board’s line against political involvement. So at the king’s request Richards himself resigned from the mission to become royal adviser, translator, and instructor in “political economy,” starting in July 1838. The king and kuhina nui—Kina‘u until her death and Kekauluohi thereafter—and the council of chiefs heard Richards’s lessons with focus and attention.
Their decrees began to take Western form: “Be it enacted by the King and Chiefs of the Sandwich Islands, in council assembled.…” And then on June 7, 1839, Kamehameha III issued the Declaration of Rights, a first and a signal turning point for the kingdom. While the document was written under Richards’s general direction, much of the work was carried out by Boaz Mahune, a graduate of the Lahainaluna Seminary. He had become recognized as one of Hawai‘i’s ablest scholars, he was appointed secretary to the king, and he refined the paper several times after consultations with king and council. Thus one important torch was passed in the Hawaiian Declaration of Rights: Hawai‘i now had its own native acolytes ready to claim and own Western political philosophy and adapt it to the islands’ culture and circumstances. The philosophy of the document was unmistakably Western, even American, even as its language was just as unmistakably Hawaiian: “God hath made of one blood all nations of men, to dwell on the face of the earth in unity and blessedness. God has also bestowed certain rights alike on all men, and all chiefs, and all people of all lands. These are some of the rights He has given alike to every man and every chief: life, limb, liberty, the labor of his hands, and productions of his mind.”
Until this document the common kanaka, while not technically a serf because he was not bound to the land, yet had no redress against a chief, except to leave and seek the patronage of some other chief. The Hawaiian Declaration of Rights opened a chasm away from the old days that could never be bridged again; there was good reason that the paper became known as Hawai‘i’s Magna Carta.
Scarcely a month after its promulgation, Captain Laplace and the frigate L’Artémise sallied into Honolulu and distracted the country with his raid in promotion of Catholicism and French wine. Once that annoyance was past, it was time to fulfill the Declaration’s promise with an actual constitution. This was brought forth on October 8, 1840, another preeminently Western document in which the king laid down his absolute power. He and the kuhina nui still shared executive authority—a uniquely Hawaiian safeguard against runaway tyranny—with lesser powers accorded four island governors: those of Hawai‘i; Maui and the leeward islands; O‘ahu; and Kaua‘i and its dependencies. The instrument also provided for a representative house, elected by the people, giving the kanakas a voice in government for the first time, and for a supreme court, comprising the king, kuhina nui, and four judges to be appointed by the lower house. The existing council of chiefs was rolled over into a house of nobles, of whom fourteen would perform a function roughly similar to any upper house of a legislature. Significantly, it included women as well as men, a continuation of the traditionally meaningful role that women played in ruling circles. Among them, in addition to the kuhina nui, were Keohokalole, the mother of the Kalakaua dynasty, and Hoapiliwahine, recently the widow of the solid Hoapili.
The 1840 constitution also contained a subtle but important change of style. Without remark or explanation, the official appellation “Sandwich Islands” was quietly dropped in favor of “Hawaiian Islands,” a permanent alteration that reflected both the native preference that had always been in use, and American satisfaction to dispense with this first tie to England. The week before the constitution’s promulgation, the Polynesian’s American editor, J. J. Jarves, published his opinion that “nothing so denationalizes a people than to change their language.… the natives have ever used ‘Hawaii nei’ as applicable to these islands,” and Jarves maintained that their sense of patriotism should be “studiously encouraged.”2
The document had important practical consequences beyond structuring the government, and even beyond providing an avenue of redress for the maka‘ainana for the first time. The new constitution gave foreigners, and more to the point foreign governments, confidence in the country’s judicial system, and in fact “was a key element in keeping the sovereignty of the Hawaiian monarch intact.”3
The growing influence of foreigners and particularly Americans in the bureaucracy during the rule of Kamehameha III demonstrated, on the one hand, the king’s desire to staff his administration with the efficient and the able. On the other hand, it also made clear just how limited the reservoir of talent really was. In 1842 the king prevailed on the multiskilled Gerrit Judd to follow Richards in resigning from the mission to be his adviser, and through subsequent years others in the foreign community referred to Judd with some jaundice as “Minister of Everything,” as he held the portfolios of foreign minister (November 1843 to March 1845), interior minister (March 1845 to February 1846), and finance minister (April 1846 to September 1853). Richard Armstrong followed still later to superintend the kingdom’s school system.
Help was also welcome from abroad. One rootless American to show up in the islands in 1844 was a lawyer named John Ricord, a French-descended native of New York, who was made attorney general of Hawai‘i less than two weeks after his arrival. He had in the Republic of Texas lately served as private secretary to President Sam Houston, for whom he had undertaken sensitive confidential missions and was later appointed a district attorney. He owed his appointment as attorney general, however, more to the fact that he was at that time the only lawyer in the islands. He renounced his American citizenship to become a Hawaiian subject, and gave the country his professional effort for the next two years. While Ricord hardly came to Hawaii with professional references in his pocket, Judd brought him into the administration anyway, partly for the reason that if the only lawyer in the kingdom did not work for the government, he might well be employed against it.4 When another itinerant attorney drifted through, it was William Little Lee of New York, and he was made chief justice. Help was where the king could find it. James Jackson Jarves was only twenty-two when he materialized in the islands in 1840, on the run from marital and business failures, but he was a good writer and effective newspaper editor. His Polynesian “became the official organ of the government.”5
Indispensable help in the realm of foreign affairs arrived in the person of Dr. R. C. (Robert Crichton) Wyllie, a rail-thin yet room-filling Scot who could maneuver in any intrigue. Indeed it was later written of him that “no drama in the Pacific was complete without the fastidious, meticulous and verbose Scots busybody.”6 In January 1844, HM sloop-of-war Hazard, eighteen guns, dropped anchor at Honolulu with a new British consul on board, William Miller. That gentleman continued on to present his credentials throughout the South Pacific, leaving behind in Hawaii his physician friend, the investor and adventurer Wyllie. He was forty-five, from Ayrshire, Scotland, and fresh from disappointment in the attempt to seize California as forfeited collateral from Mexico and make it a British colony. He acted as British consul until Miller returned fourteen months later, at which time Kamehameha III relieved Judd of his portfolio as foreign minister and handed it to Wyllie. He cast a long shadow over Hawai‘i’s international relations for the next twenty years that he ran the Foreign Ministry—and not in
ways that the Americans often liked.
Captain Laplace’s humiliating sortie convinced the government that they needed to take steps to place Hawai‘i in a more dignified posture with the Western powers, and another visiting dignitary had just that idea. He was Sir George Simpson, the more circumspect and sensible cousin of Alexander Simpson the would-be empire builder, and governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. His suggestion, accepted with alacrity, was to send a deputation abroad to negotiate treaties of recognition with the powers, in furtherance of which Simpson would speak favorably for them in London. The two commissioners who sailed away on July 18, 1842, were William Richards and the king’s private secretary, also a member of the king’s Treasury Board and a recent founder of the Hawaiian Historical Society, Timothy Ha‘alilio.
On board the steamboat Globe, bound for the United States, Richards got a cold reminder of political realities there. He had now been ministering and working in Hawai‘i so long that it must have struck him as a dissonant echo from his premissionary days. Word of the incident filtered down to the Royal School, where the last of the Kamehamehas, thirteen-year-old Princess Bernice Pauahi, wrote incredulously that on board the ship, as she had heard:
Before they sat down to breakfast, Mr. Richards went to the office window to procure two tickets for breakfast. But the Captain’s secretary gave him 1½. He returned the half ticket and requested two. The man told [him] to give the half to Haalilio (his servant). Mr. Richards said to him, “He is not my servant, I am his. He is an ambassador from the king of the S. I. to the President of the United States, and has been received as such.”
“That does not make any difference,” said the man. “We do not wish any colored man to sit down at the table.”7
At their first stop, in Washington, they spent almost the entire month of December lobbying for recognition. President John Tyler and his secretary of state, Daniel Webster, were besieged by highly contentious territorial expansion questions in Texas and Oregon, in which the British were vitally interested, and they were not anxious to make a pronouncement about Hawai‘i, with its strong British ties. Eventually Richards stated that if the United States would not guarantee Hawaiian independence, he would have no choice but to allow the country to become a British protectorate. (Interestingly enough, that was the same card that the Republic of Texas played to win annexation at almost the same time.) Two days after Christmas, Richards and Ha‘alilio obtained an audience with Tyler and his cabinet, and three days after that they won not a treaty but an unequivocal statement that U.S. ties of culture and commerce to Hawai‘i gave it a greater interest there than any other country’s, and that “no power ought either to take possession of the islands as a conquest, or for the purpose of colonization, and that no power ought to seek for any undue control over the existing Government.”8 Tyler, in effect, extended the Monroe Doctrine over the islands.
With the first part of their mission accomplished, Richards and Ha‘alilio journeyed on to London, where Sir George Simpson could smooth their way with Lord Aberdeen. Sadly for their cause, Richard Charlton was also on his way there, spreading poison about how the Hawaiian government had swindled him out of his leases. They reached London on February 18, 1843; Simpson’s testimonial on behalf of the government, plus the favorable interest of such figures as Belgium’s King Leopold, who was interested in investing in Ladd & Co.’s colonization scheme, persuaded Aberdeen that official recognition was in order. The French foreign minister, François Guizot, was prepared to follow suit, but then the shocking news arrived of Lord Paulet’s seizure of the islands.
The famously unflappable Aberdeen would have realized that Admiral Thomas must not have received, and thus could not have shared with Paulet, his mild instructions to the Admiralty on how to proceed with Hawai‘i. It took until autumn to get everything in order, but on November 28, 1843, France and Great Britain jointly recognized the Hawaiian kingdom. The United States declined the invitation to join the declaration, the new secretary of state, John C. Calhoun, citing American policy against “entangling alliances.” The United States concurred; it just would rather not sign. Richards and Ha‘alilio waited for the Atlantic storm season to pass, then returned to America in the spring of 1844, and took ship for the arduous voyage to Hawai‘i in November. Ha‘alilio was probably suffering from consumption, and died off the coast of New York on December 3. His body was carried on to Honolulu, where Richards arrived in March, two years and nine months after they left.
* * *
During Richards’s absence, Gerrit Judd had advanced as the man on whom Kamehameha III most leaned for advice. As perennially good-natured, hopeful, and earnest as Laura Judd’s journal entries were, her husband veered in a different direction. As a physician he had done much good treating the natives in the attic of the big house, but since he resigned from his missionary post and entered the king’s service, the “Minister of Everything” had, in the perception of many, grown fond of power.9 Crossing him could cost an applicant any chance of success in his commercial aspirations. Under the guise of being busy he quickly sorted through who was worth his attention, and was dismissive of those who did not pass the bar. The business community and the foreign representatives all took an immense dislike to him, but he only became more powerful after the death of Richards on November 7, 1847. Richards was fifty-five, and he left his wife and children in such hard circumstances that the government granted her a house site and an annuity of eight hundred dollars per year.
There was another loss that year. The American consul, George Brown, had been persona non grata for some months when Anthony Ten Eyck arrived to replace him, and Brown finally left for home. “He sailed,” wrote Laura Judd later, “via China, and there is every reason to fear that the vessel went down in a typhoon, as nothing is yet heard of it.”10 Her fear was well founded: George Brown’s numerous letters to “Dear Wife and Children” had made it safely home; he was lost at sea.
Richards’s death was not the only shakeup in the cabinet. John Ricord, the attorney general from Texas, wished to return home but he found himself a man without a country when Ten Eyck told him that he could not simply renounce his renunciation of American citizenship and get it back, and therefore the consul could not protect Ricord from his creditors, who were after him for nearly two thousand dollars. The rest of the cabinet thought well enough of him to float him a loan, albeit on strict terms and with a resolution that it wasn’t to become a habit. Ricord then did a very unlawyerly thing: He absconded to San Francisco. (In later years he tendered his services to the king of Siam, and while en route to Liberia in 1861 died in Paris in the home of his uncle, who was physician to Napoleon III.11)
On February 1, 1848, a new French consul arrived in Honolulu, Guillaume Patrice Dillon. France had already healed some of the previous damage to relations between the two countries by repaying the twenty thousand dollars that Laplace had impounded, and now Dillon bore a gift, a gigantic portrait of his king, Louis-Philippe. Two weeks later a parade left the French consulate for the wooden pavilion of the ‘Iolani Palace: brass band, color bearers, a dozen sailors bearing the huge painting, Monsignor Maigret and other clergy from the Catholic mission, and most of the French residents of Honolulu. In the palace Kamehameha III “took Mr. Dillon’s hand with much emotion.” Dillon’s instructions from the Foreign Ministry at last began to resemble Lord Aberdeen’s British policy of many years: “Avoid in your conduct any show of pugnaciousness. It is fitting that moderation … consolidate the fruits of firmness.” None in the company knew that Louis-Philippe was at that moment in the middle of being deposed and exiled, but the transition to the Second Republic was not expected to cause any wrinkle in the new friendship.
Several months’ experience of R. C. Wyllie at the Hawaiian Foreign Ministry and Judd at Finance changed Dillon’s attitude. “Two thirds of the time,” he wrote, “my inclination is only to laugh at the fuss that is made about this Lilliputian kingdom [with its] negro King whose life is mostly waste
d in orgies with stable-grooms.”12 No fewer than seven times did Dillon ask for a French warship to call at Honolulu and vindicate him.
Finally, in August 1849, the frigate Poursuivante, fifty-two guns, under command of Rear Adm. Louis-François-Marie-Nicolas Legoarant de Tromelin, sixty-three years old with nearly fifty in the navy, commander in chief of the French forces in the Pacific, entered Hawaiian waters. Accompanying him was the corvette steamer Gassendi, mounting seven shell guns, which he had just fortuitously encountered. Having been apprised of Dillon’s many complaints, Tromelin called at the Big Island, met the king and Dillon’s special enemy, Gerrit Judd. “Nothing in their reception,” the admiral wrote, “could lead me to suppose that anything more existed than a difference of opinion.” He arrived at Honolulu on August 12, traded cannon salutes with the fort, and traded cordial visits with Governor Kekuanaoa and Foreign Minister Wyllie. But when Dillon came aboard and delivered a fusillade of particulars, he convinced Legoarant de Tromelin that the honor of France was at stake.
On August 19 the king returned from Waihea aboard his yacht Kamehameha and walked into a hornet’s nest. Two days later the sixteen-guns sloop-of-war USS Preble entered the harbor, two and a half months out of Hong Kong and crippled by the loss of twenty-one crewmen from dysentery. Kekuanaoa quickly got the remaining sick on shore and into a makeshift hospital at the armory, next to the fort.
“The King and Government of the Hawaiian Islands,” wrote Wyllie to Tromelin two days later in response to a list of French demands, “are not aware that there are matters pending between them and the Republic of France.… If, however, Admiral Tromelin and M. Dillon are of the opinion that there are any matters … it would please His Majesty if they would specify them.” The French declared this an insult. “The time for deliberation is past.… In case justice is not done, [we] will employ the means at [our] disposal to obtain complete redress.”
Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii Page 18