Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

by James L. Haley

  Against this sea of troubles Lili‘u took up arms, and she was a quick study in how to use what little remained of royal power. Before the Bayonet Constitution, her brother had usually managed to milk what he needed from the legislature by appointing and dismissing cabinets. That avenue was now closed; cabinets could not be dismissed without a no-confidence vote, and in fact the first government to fall in the 1892 legislature was her own preferred one, composed of members of her National Reform Party, brought down by a freakish alliance of the American-dominated Reform Party and the largely native Liberal Party. Soon, however, with the Reform Party unpopular and riddled with dissension, the queen discovered that by exercising a little trouble she could engineer no-confidence votes, bring a government down, and get a new cabinet just the same. To the fourth government of the session she appointed Reform Party members, which sufficiently angered members of the Liberal Party whose leaders had expected ministerial posts that they supported two revenue bills that she found crucial to keeping the government financed.

  The members of the Reform Party, who had once risked their necks by conspiring to form the Hawaiian League, responded to the queen’s machinations by forming a new, equally clandestine, organization whose very name made its purpose unmistakable: the Annexation Club. The 1892 legislature met contentiously for 172 days, the longest session in the history of the kingdom. The sugar industry, and therefore the economy, was close to ruin because the Americans’ McKinley Act had gutted the reciprocity treaty, and much of the quarreling in the legislature was over how to raise revenue needed to sustain the government when its usual mainstay, sugar, was facing its bleakest hour.

  Two notable proposals had been made in this regard: One was to begin a lottery, and the other was regulate and tax the import of opium. Both measures raised objections, mostly from the Americans in the legislature, on moral grounds. The queen was ambivalent on the subject of opium. She was grateful that the missionaries had brought the knowledge of Jesus to the islands. She spent most of her youth boarding in the Royal School, as she was reminded every day because the site of its building was now the barracks for her palace guard. Unlike Liholiho and Emma, she had remained loyal to that denomination and had her own pew in the Kawaiaha‘o Church, the first and still the largest church that they had founded. But the queen also knew them to be cold, dour people, and whether they actually preached it or whether it was because that was the way they lived their lives, they conveyed the message that the enjoyment of life was sinful. They took a dim view of both lotteries and opium. Nor did the Americans’ hypocrisy escape her notice: They did not seem to mind working the Chinese to death, but they spun into a moral tizzy at the thought of opium.

  Her feeling about the lottery was more ambivalent. “They are not native productions of my country,” she wrote later, “but introduced into our ‘heathen’ land by so-called Christians, from a Christian nation, who have erected monuments, universities, and legislative halls by that method.”6 The queen’s opinion of lotteries incorporated another point of view as well, which she confided freely enough to her diary but judiciously omitted from her memoirs. For some time she had been taking lessons in German from a tutor named Gertrude Wolf, who proceeded to insinuate herself into the queen’s confidence as a medium and fortune-teller. Even as Kalakaua had never entirely abandoned his attraction to the occult, Lili‘u gave access and her attention to Fräulein Wolf. The company behind the lottery proposal had attempted a similar operation in Louisiana, and seeking an easier game in Hawai‘i, probably had the acumen to use Fräulein Wolf to influence the queen.7

  The preceding July 7, after a ball, the queen retired at 1:30 a.m. with Fräulein Wolf, who read her cards. “She told me,” the queen wrote in her diary, “that at ten the next morning a gentleman will call on me with a bundle of papers where it would bring lots of money across the water.… She says I must have the House accept it, it would bring 1,000,000.” Wolf ventured further—the strongest evidence that it was the lottery boosters who were behind her—and using initials only, instructed the queen what men should and should not be appointed to her next cabinet.

  Wolf went home at 3:30 a.m. but returned to the queen at 9:00. “When she felt sure the man was in the house,” the diary continued, “I sent her home. 10:25—sure enough—the man came up with the bundle of papers and spoke of lottery. How strange she should have told me.”8 A month later Fräulein Wolf indicated that if the lottery bill passed, the queen herself would profit by fifteen to twenty thousand dollars per annum, “pocket money.”9 This could only be called a bribe, but the queen was looking at least as hard at the public works projects to benefit the people that could be undertaken with such sums of money. Eventually the bills passed the legislature, and it was up to her to sign them or veto them. The kingdom needed revenue, and there was little chance at least in the near term of persuading the United States to repeal the McKinley Act. Taking pen in hand, she affixed her signature: Liliuokalani R.

  During some of that 172-day session, at least her worst nemesis was out of her hair: Lorrin Thurston, firebrand of the Reform Party, had sailed to the United States to manage the continental end of his business affairs. Had she known what he was up to, she would have felt differently about his absence. During his “business” trip to the United States, Thurston visited Washington on behalf of the Annexation Club to ascertain the current sentiment there on the possible American acquisition of Hawai‘i. He obtained a meeting with the chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, James H. Blount, a Democrat of Georgia, who thought Thurston was a seditious little troublemaker and gave him short shrift. Angling higher, Thurston turned toward the Republican administration, and met with Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Tracy, and with Secretary of State (and onetime presidential nominee) James G. Blaine, who had recruited Minister Stevens for the Hawai‘i post. It would have seemed too conspiratorial for President Benjamin Harrison to himself receive Thurston, but those two cabinet officers carried his case to the president and returned with an explicit statement of the U.S. position: “If conditions in Hawaii compel you to act as you have indicated, and you come to Washington with an annexation proposition, you will find an exceedingly sympathetic administration here.”10

  With the legislature’s tasks nearly completed, the queen had a no-confidence vote called on Thursday, January 12, 1893; the cabinet resigned, and she installed a new one that would be adequate to govern until the legislature was called again during the spring. The leaders of the legislature agreed that their session had finally come to its end, and the ceremony of prorogation, their dismissal, was set for noon on Saturday, January 14. The queen had her own reason for looking forward to that day, for just as Thurston had been scurrying about the United States making certain of American support for annexation, Lili‘uokalani had been equally busy behind closed doors: She had written a new constitution.

  This was not a closely held secret. She had previously given a draft of it to the man she now installed as her attorney general, Arthur P. Peterson, to comment on it and make suggestions; he returned it after a month with no recommended changes. One of her legislative defeats during the session was that she tried and failed to persuade the legislature to call a constitutional convention to debate, perfect, and enact the new fundamental law. So it was widely known that the queen had a new constitution ready to enact; the only question was whether she would limit herself to trying to put it into force through presently constitutional means, which would be difficult to impossible, or whether she would risk pulling down the monarchy around her in an attempt to restore the native franchise and her royal prerogatives by attempting to replicate Kamehameha V’s bold step.

  On Saturday morning before the ceremony, she conferred with the cabinet in the blue room of the palace. Once closeted with them, Lili‘uokalani informed them that after she prorogued the legislature, she intended to abrogate the Bayonet Constitution and establish the new one. In it she would restore the vote to native Hawaiians, and—incorporating
elements of the constitution of Kamehameha V—restore royal executive authority. Ministers would serve at her pleasure, she would appoint members of the house of nobles, and her sovereign acts would no longer depend upon the advice and consent of the cabinet. Her plan had only one breathtaking flaw: Under the provisions of the Bayonet Constitution then in force, she was barred from changing it except under the terms of its own admittedly all-but-insuperable amendment process.

  Her four American ministers, in office for two days, were staggered. Most gravely shocked was Peterson. Born in the islands, the son of a business émigré from Plymouth, Massachusetts, he had attended law school at the University of Michigan and clerked for a Supreme Court justice. He was only thirty-three, but had previously served King Kalakaua as assistant attorney general and then attorney general toward the end of his reign. If any man in the government was positioned to know the angry mood of the American business community, it was he: His former law partner, W. A. Kinney, now practiced in the office of William O. Smith—whose partner was Lorrin Thurston. Before her sucker-punched ministers could recover, the queen further informed them of her intention to announce the new Constitution after she dismissed the legislature, first to an assemblage in the throne room, and again to the people from the palace balcony.

  Bowing themselves away from this audience, Attorney General Peterson and the interior minister, John F. Colburn, beat a hasty retreat from the palace. Almost in panic at the queen’s contemplated overthrow of the 1887 constitution, they hurried to a place where they could receive counsel on what to do. Whether it was an act of betraying the queen’s plan (she later called it treason) or whether it was because they genuinely did not know where else to turn, they entered the law office of Lorrin Thurston.

  Now returned with assurances of American sympathy toward annexation, Thurston knew exactly what to tell Peterson and Colburn: They must oppose the queen, but for the moment they must endure her fury; they must not resign from the cabinet. If they resigned, Lili‘uokalani would replace them with others who would do her bidding, and cabinet signatures on the new constitution would give it a greater appearance of legality. But once the legislature had been prorogued, she could not dismiss ministers until they convened again, and they would have her in the box in which their Bayonet Constitution was designed to keep her.

  As the noon hour approached, Lili‘uokalani and her entourage emerged in procession from the ‘Iolani Palace and crossed the street to the Ali‘iolani Hale, where the legislative chamber had been filling with members, dignitaries, and guests. Most noticeable about the assemblage was the absence of its representatives of American ancestry, the core of the Reform Party. As Lili‘uokalani mounted the broad steps and passed through the rusticated Ionic portal of the Ali‘iolani Hale, her view of the harbor was blocked by the neighboring music hall and she could not see the white, 3,300-ton U.S armored cruiser Boston slipping back through the narrows into Honolulu Harbor. She had been stationed there for some weeks and become a familiar sight, her two black eight-inch guns protruding from their blast shields, one on the bow and one on the stern, and the lesser five- and three-inch guns jutting like thorns down the length of her gun deck.

  That vessel, one of the most powerful in the Pacific, had departed Honolulu only a few days before, for gunnery practice, and to convey U.S. minister Stevens on a visit to Hilo. Later it was alleged by natives and royalists that Stevens and Thurston, as aware as anyone that the queen was fiercely anxious to bring out the new constitution, had agreed that she was more likely to be tempted into an unconstitutional step if the Boston and her big guns were out of the harbor, and Stevens had the ship’s captain, G. C. Wiltse, make speed back to Honolulu as soon as he heard the rumor racing like wildfire through the country that the queen was about to act.

  Even as the warship dropped anchor, a launch hurried out bearing an invitation to Captain Wiltse to attend the prorogation ceremony, but he hesitated. Members of the Reform Party had previously conferred both with Stevens and separately with himself to ascertain whether, if there was trouble and they appealed for marines to protect American lives and property, they could count on the Boston. If it was true that the queen was planning to nullify the 1887 constitution and issue the new one, there was likely to be trouble. If it came to that, Wiltse would be needed aboard ship. He therefore ordered Lt. Lucien Young into his dress uniform with all haste, not just to attend the closing of the legislature, but to converse, eavesdrop, and learn what he could of the situation.

  Lieutenant Young hurried ashore and was one of the last guests to be seated. In the legislative chamber Young noticed immediately that virtually all the lawmakers in attendance were from one or another of the native parties, and mostly sympathetic to returning the islands to native rule. Young seated himself behind an ali‘i with whom he had previously been acquainted, and greeted him. The native chief seemed very pleased with things. “We have them at last,” he gloated. He could only have been referring to the absent Americans’ Reform Party. “Wait until we leave the hall and you will see something. Come over to the palace when you go out.”

  Young guessed his meaning but determined to draw him out a bit more. “Do you refer to the new constitution?”

  The chief nodded and then gave his attention to the front of the hall as the ceremony commenced. Young’s recollection of the occasion was typical of what had come to be the American attitude toward Hawai‘i, mocking the ceremony as buffoonery in blackface. As the queen’s entourage entered the front of the chamber from a side door, Young wrote:

  First came the Chamberlain, supporting in front of him a large portfolio containing the Queen’s message of prorogation. From it were streaming the ends of white and blue silk ribbons. Next came four dusky aides-de-camp in full uniform.… They were stiff and pretentious, and exhibiting the air of fully realizing the importance of their exalted position. After them were the feather kahili bearers, supporting the emblems of savage royalty. These were followed by her Majesty the Queen, dressed in a light colored silk which tended to add somewhat to her dark complexion and negro-like features, and more plainly exhibiting in the facial outlines a look of savage determination.… Next came four homely ladies in waiting, dressed in the loud colors so much admired by all dark-colored races. Then the two royal princes, modest in demeanor, but dudish in appearance.

  Only after these came the cabinet and the justices of the Hawaiian supreme court—the only American-Hawaiians in the queen’s retinue—including Associate Justice Sanford Ballard Dole. Young marked him particularly, seeing a man “whose manly bearing and intellectual appearance gave a relief to what had preceded.”

  Dole was tall, now not quite fifty, still rail thin, his age denoted by his gray hair and long, square beard that affected a close impersonation of King Leopold II of the Belgians. His apple cheeks, however, and his unlined face and delicate features made him seem many years younger. Observers always felt that he conveyed great dignity. It was Lorrin Thurston and others who had prosecuted the revolution of 1887 and forced the king to sign the Bayonet Constitution, but it was Dole whose later approval made it seem solemn and acceptable.

  The queen seated herself at the front desk, but not before she had tripped over her long train, which caused her to snap at her train bearers—the four “lackeys,” Lieutenant Young called them, in knee breeches, blue velvet cutaway coats, and buckled slippers.11 (The two “modest … but dudish” princes Young mentioned were David Kawananakoa and Jonah Kuhio Kalaniana‘ole, twenty-four and nineteen, respectively, sons of Kapi‘olani’s sister Victoria Kinoiki, who had begun taking part in court life.) After the ceremony Lili‘uokalani withdrew to an anteroom, and a receiving line formed for her to greet. When it came his turn, Lieutenant Young recorded that she received him coldly, but his presence was probably the first indication she had of the Boston’s return. She would naturally be sorry to see the ship back so quickly; any day that Minister Stevens was out of Honolulu was a good day.

  Leaving the Ali�
�iolani Hale, the queen and her attendants crossed the square toward the ‘Iolani Palace. Her palace guard was present, turned out in their dress uniforms for the greater ceremony to follow. On the palace grounds the Royal Hawaiian Band was playing light airs in the pavilion that her brother had built for his coronation. The queen was an expert pianist and composer, and always listened to the band and its German conductor with a more critical ear than did her people, who just enjoyed the music and always gathered when the band played.

  After entering, on her left she saw that the marshal of the kingdom, her trusted friend Charles Wilson, stood at the entrance to the blue room. She paused and asked him if everything was ready, and he said that it was. All four of the arched doors on the right side of the hall passed into the throne room, which occupied the entire east side of the first floor. At the north end of the room, two thrones reposed upon the canopied dais, flanked by two tall kahilis. Before the thrones was a kapu stick to create a sacred space. Hawai‘i was now a Christian country, but the principle of kapu had been an element of chiefs’ courts for centuries, and it was retained in deference to tradition. The kapu stick was made of a seven-foot narwhal tusk that a whaling captain had presented to Kamehameha III, and since then it had been mounted on a gold sphere.

  * * *

  Lili‘uokalani had come through the 1892 legislature with more wins than losses: she had successfully manipulated no-confidence votes, she had played the Liberal and Reform Parties against each other to obtain two means of income for the kingdom that might see it through until something could be done about the McKinley Tariff Act. Hawai‘i’s leading historian has written that had she been content with that, the coup might have been averted.12 But she could not let it go, and she would not continue to play the existing system for what good she could get from it. Once again in Hawaiian history, royal overreach led to mayhem.13