At the proper moment a procession of natives attired in morning dress entered the throne room. They were members of a patriotic movement, the Hui Kala‘ia‘ina. The first one carried an elegant folio that he presented to the queen, begging her to heed the many petitions of her people and proclaim this new constitution, and liberate them from the alienation they had suffered since 1887. It was impressive, but it was royal stagecraft; in fact the constitution they offered her was the one over which she herself had labored for months.
The queen decided to have the cabinet also sign the document, as was provided in the Bayonet Constitution anyway. She dispatched her chamberlain to fetch them, and she said that she would receive them in the Blue Room. As the crowd waited in the throne room, she crossed the grand hall and entered the palace’s principal reception chamber, with its yellow-cream walls, royal blue draperies and upholstery, expansive cream-and-blue carpet, and—as throughout the palace—glowing wainscoting and trim of rare, exotic native woods. The room was dominated by the pompous 1848 portrait of Louis-Philippe. Watched over by the king of the French and other European monarchs who had sent their portraits as tokens of friendship, Liliuokalani waited—for three hours.
When the cabinet finally assembled, freshly coached by Thurston, they declined to sign the document, and urged on her the fatal irregularity of what she was about to do. Lili‘uokalani was furious with them, alleging that she would not have proceeded with the constitution without their having encouraged her; accusing Peterson of playing her falsely in returning the draft after a month with no correction, from which she assumed that he found it acceptable. She raged, but they would not be moved. It was said that she even threatened to tell the restive crowd outside that it was her ministers who prevented her from issuing the new constitution. She hardly needed to remind them that during the riots in support of Queen Emma over Kalakaua, the mob had stormed the Ali’iolani Hale and cast an offending legislator from an upper-story window down to the natives who killed him. Steeling himself to the moment, Attorney General Peterson protested their loyalty but insisted that she stop and realize the danger. The step she was taking was unconstitutional, however defective she found that 1887 document to be. What she proposed to do would give the annexationists the only excuse they needed to arm themselves for revolution. With enormous difficulty Peterson and the others persuaded Lili‘uokalani for her own safety’s sake to postpone promulgating the new constitution.
It was almost unthinkable for an ali‘i of her station to back down from such a confrontation, and it was four in the afternoon before Lili‘uokalani returned to the throne room. “Princes, Nobles, and Representatives,” she began, “I have listened to thousands of the voices of my people that have come to me, and I am prepared to grant their request. The present Constitution is full of defects, as the Chief Justice here will testify.… It is so faulty that I think a new one should be granted. I have prepared one in which the rights of all have been regarded—a Constitution suited to the wishes of the people. I was ready and expected to proclaim the new Constitution today as a suitable occasion for it … but with regret I have to say I have met with obstacles that prevent it.… You have my love and with sorrow I now dismiss you.”
Now the humiliation would have to be repeated before the crowd that had gathered outside to welcome the restoration of their rights. Her people had despised the Bayonet Constitution that stole the vote from them, and they had petitioned her relentlessly to do what she had done. She knew they would rise up if she asked them to, but she did not want anyone’s blood on her soul. More to the point, she knew that she would be blamed for any violence, and she knew that the United States would respond fiercely if any of their people, property, or investments were threatened. Although she was angry, the queen could not be responsible for any replay of the 1874 riots.
With bitterness but determination, the queen mounted the iridescent koa staircase and appeared on the palace balcony, motioning the crowd for quiet. She spoke in Hawaiian and in the style of the epic chants: “O, ye people who love the chiefs!” she hailed them. “Hereby I say unto you, I am now ready to proclaim the new constitution of my Kingdom, thinking that it would be successful. But look you! Obstacles have arisen. Therefore I say unto you, my loving people, go with good hope and do not be disturbed in your minds. Because within the next few days now coming, I will proclaim the new constitution.”
The crowd grumbled and began to disperse, but the listening Americans—including Lorrin Thurston and others of the Annexation Club—buzzed among themselves. What had she said? Many of them spoke Hawaiian, but it was an ambiguous language: Ua keia mau la.14 Had she actually meant the next few days now coming, in a short time, or had she merely meant sometime? They must not take the chance, and the members of the secret Annexation Club dispersed to gather again immediately at William O. Smith’s law office.
Harking back to the French Revolution and the goodwill that it might buy them from the United States, they formed a Committee of Safety—mostly the same people as the Annexation Club—which decided breathlessly that the time had come to abolish the monarchy and establish a provisional government. They therefore set to work at what they did best—drafting documents.
The next day, Sunday, they shared their work with Peterson and Colburn, who were not prepared to go quite so far. After conferring with proroyalist leaders, they believed that the queen’s pledge not to change the constitution would suffice to head off such a drastic step. By now word of a mass antigovernment meeting for Monday was abroad, with all the trouble that portended. Lili‘uokalani sent urgently to U.S. minister Stevens to learn whether the government could count on American protection, of which Stevens declined to assure her. Some advised the queen to declare martial law and round up the conspirators before things went any further, but that could ignite the fighting she dreaded. Lili‘u chose a milder course: simply calling a competing mass meeting for the next day, as though her supporters could merely shout down the annexationists.
On Monday afternoon, January 17, several hundred royalists gathered in Palace Square, having been adjured to be peaceful and give no excuse for an intervention. Wilcox and Bush, who were back in the queen’s camp, addressed them, and read a statement that Lili‘uokalani had issued, declaring that she would make no further attempt to change the constitution except by the means provided in the existing one.
That morning the Committee of Safety had sent their letter to Minister Stevens pleading for intervention to protect American lives and property:
The Queen, with the aid of armed forces, and accompanied by threats of violence and bloodshed from those with whom she was acting, attempted to proclaim a new constitution; and while prevented for the time from accomplishing her object declared publicly that she would only defer her action. This [has] created general alarm and terror. We are unable to protect ourselves without aid and, therefore, pray for the protection of the United States forces.
The document’s exaggerations are self-apparent; conspiracy to depose the queen could not be viewed as other than treason, and they needed to know where U.S. minister Stevens would stand. It was getting late in the day, but Thurston and two others hurried to his residence. Stevens was easy, declaring that it was the queen who had committed a revolutionary act and placed herself beyond his protection. He would send for the marines when they asked for them, and once they had secured the public buildings, he would recognize their provisional government. Another messenger boarded a launch out to the USS Boston to make certain of Captain Wiltse’s position.
* * *
And Captain Wiltse was not just aware of the ferment in Honolulu, he was alive to the much, much larger question of America acquiring an empire, and the role forecast for the U.S. Navy in such a venture: For two generations Americans had vented their certainty in the perfection of their civilization with the pursuit of “Manifest Destiny.” That was the idea that Providence had gifted all of North America to the growing nation to display the superiority of demo
cracy and laissez-faire capitalism. First coined in 1839, the expression came into popular usage to justify the annexation of the Republic of Texas to the United States in 1845, advanced by Democrats for the glory of the nation, attacked by Whigs as a justification for naked conquest. But always Manifest Destiny had looked westward: across the Mississippi River, mastering the Great Plains and subduing the native Indians on them, over the Rockies, and backwashing from the Pacific Coast to fill in those corners leapfrogged in the westward hurry.
In 1893, however, the year of the Hawaiian crisis, the historian Federick Jackson Turner announced in a seminal paper to the American Historical Association that the frontier, which had formed the essence of the American character, was gone. Manifest Destiny was accomplished, and it had made the United States a continental nation but not a world power. Where now to direct the national energy?
In fact, the hour had already provided the man: Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan, president of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, author of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, which posited that no nation had ever sustained itself as a mighty world power without the service of an overpowering navy. It was one of the most influential books of its generation; scholars have noted that what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for abolitionism half a century before, Mahan did in 1890 for imperialism: He galvanized a large segment of the country behind a sense of purpose, that America must join Britain, France, Spain, Germany, and others as a colonial master. No one in the American navy, or foreign service, or in government at the national level was unaware of Mahan, his theories, or their implications for American expansion. And Hawaii’s potential was clear: “In our infancy,” wrote Mahan, “we bordered on the Atlantic only; our youth carried our boundary to the Gulf of Mexico; to-day maturity sees us upon the Pacific. Have we no right or no call to progress farther in any direction?”15 And Hawaii, whose people had been spiritually and culturally captured seventy years before, and whose economy had been grafted to that of the United States twenty years before, was now in the crosshairs to become the first asset of an American empire.
Mahan considered himself a naval theoretician, not a historian, but in his historical writing he advanced the Hegelian “Great Man” theory and noted the times when strong men of conviction, in the right places and times, had wrought great changes in the story of civilization. In this tiny corner of the globe, such a well-placed man was Captain Wiltse of the USS Boston.
* * *
As the queen’s mass meeting was under way on Palace Square, the Committee of Safety’s meeting at the armory also commenced, and Lorrin Thurston tried his hand at oratory,16 but as inflammatory rhetoric it was rather a dud, and the Committee of Safety sent word to Stevens that they were not ready yet, there were more plans to make for a new government. But it was too late. Triumphant that his moment had finally come, Stevens had already sent for the marines.
By five thirty in the afternoon the royalist meeting had dispersed, and the queen retired to the private second floor of the palace, when a disturbance became audible outside. American troops were landing on the wharf. From the front balcony the harbor was closer than it is today, for the landfills that extended the city out into the waterfront had not been created. Four launches from the Boston were unloading sailors and marine “bluejackets”; from the balcony the queen could plainly see two field guns, two ten-barreled Gatling machine guns, and the small caissons that carried their ammunition.
She watched the sailors and marines form into platoons and march into Palace Square. Seeing the queen on the balcony they gave her a “royal marching salute,” of all things—“arms port, drooping of colors, and ruffles on the drums”17—before separating into two small squadrons and one large unit. One of the small groups continued on toward the American legation, the other turned up Nu‘uanu Street toward the residence of Minister Stevens. The remainder trooped into the opera house, next door to the Ali‘iolani Hale. As the queen’s ministers continued to seek information from the unresponsive Stevens, the rest of the diplomatic corps advised her glumly not to resist. Thurston worked feverishly all night on a declaration of causes and justification for the coup; others set about trying to find a president for the new junta.18
Thurston at least recognized that he was not suitable, having been the prime mover in the affair, but there was always Dole, whose support would give much color of legitimacy to the enterprise. Dole weighed the situation carefully, resigned from the supreme court, and accepted. With the backing of the U.S. marines and the Honolulu Rifles, the junta took control of the public buildings, which they found virtually deserted, and proclaimed the new government. Also that afternoon, a deputation from the junta called at the palace, headed by a former finance minister, J. S. Walker. He told the queen that they had come on a painful mission: the matter of her abdication. With amazing composure she told Walker that she had no mind to do any such thing.
It was apparent that she would not get away without having to sign something, but abdication was a finality, or at least it could be argued as a finality even if it was compelled. Twice in the history of her kingdom, junior officers of foreign powers had seized the country, only to have those chagrined powers hand it back. With this history, and in view of their long-standing friendship with the United States, there might be a way out other than abdication, a middle way, a way to stall. The queen excused herself to confer with her secretary, and said when she returned that an appropriate document was being prepared.
Especially for having been composed in the exigency of the moment, it was a brilliant instrument. She ceded her authority, but only provisionally, noting that it was Stevens who had caused troops to be landed; she handed power not to the coup plotters but to the United States.19 By alleging American collusion in surrendering power, she had in effect slammed the lid down on the cookie jar with the American hand still inside it. That was all she could do for now. She was aware that among her household guard and the volunteer rifle companies still loyal, her forces may have outnumbered the Honolulu Rifles and U.S. Marines by close to double. But she did not want bloodshed on her conscience, and sent word over to the police station giving Marshal Wilson permission to stand down, and with Wilson’s assent, the annexationists disarmed 270 Royal Hawaiian troops. But the game was far from over, for the United States would have no choice but to respond.
18. The Inscrutable Mr. Blount
‘Iolani Palace began a transition from royal residence to a makeshift capitol. In the coming days of the republic, the House of Representatives met in the throne room, the Senate in the blue room. When she retired to Washington Place, Lili‘uokalani took with her many of the symbols and trappings of her reign. Other members of the family also rounded up royal keepsakes for safety. Archibald Cleghorn had been overseeing construction of a luxurious home in Waikiki, called ‘Ainahau, as a residence for Ka‘iulani when she returned from boarding school in England. A visitor to the almost-finished house found it “crowded with relics of Hawaiian royalty, evidently hastily gathered together—feather coronets, shell necklaces, pieces of furniture, and in a large box was one of the celebrated feather mantles like those worn by the nobles.”1
At the new government headquarters Sanford Dole endorsed the queen’s provisional cession of authority. He could have rejected it and insisted on an abdication, but it didn’t occur to him that by accepting her wording, he was submitting the revolution to American approval and setting in motion another year’s controversy. Whatever Minister Stevens’s posture of good faith about doing his duty and protecting American citizens and property, on February 1 he revealed his true bearing, and the object of his labors, in a letter to President Harrison’s secretary of state, John W. Foster: “The Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe and this is the golden hour for the United States to pluck it.”2 Five representatives of the junta took ship for the United States, and the Harrison administration made good on its pledge to Thurston to be “exceedingly sympathetic.” They negotiated, drafted, and finaliz
ed a treaty of annexation, which was signed on February 14, 1893—one month precisely after Lili‘uokalani had brought the rafters down on her head. If haste could be unseemly, this seemed shameless.
Their timing was poor, however, for the Harrison administration had only days to live. Grover Cleveland, whom Harrison had unseated four years before, reclaimed the White House in the 1892 election, the only American president to serve two terms without them being consecutive. Cleveland chose for his secretary of state a Republican defector, Walter Q. Gresham, and one of his first acts was to withdraw the annexation treaty from Senate consideration. Harrison saw it coming. “I am sorry the Hawaiian question did not come six months sooner,” he wrote, “or sixty days later, as it is embarrassing to begin without the time to finish.”3
At the time the American administration changed, a new wrinkle appeared on the revolutionary front when it seemed that the junta’s ends might be more quickly and easily met not by abolishing the monarchy but by accepting Lili‘uokalani’s abdication in favor of her niece, Victoria Ka‘iulani, now seventeen and finishing her education in England. Her father Archibald Cleghorn had been present in the blue room as Lili‘uokalani berated her cabinet for not signing her new constitution. He vented his temper in a nineteen-page letter to his daughter: “If she had followed my advice, she would have been firm on the throne, and Hawaiian Independence safe, but she has turned out a very stubborn woman and was not satisfied to Reign, but wanted to Rule.… If the Queen had abdicated … in your favor, the Throne I think could have been saved, but she did not think they would do as they did.”4 The princess’s guardian Theo Davies who was one of Honolulu’s richest sugar factors, pressed her to go to America and campaign to restore the crown.
Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii Page 34