Unfamiliar Fishes

by Sarah Vowell

  God hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on 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 which He has given alike to every man and every chief of correct deportment; life, limb, liberty, freedom from oppression; the earnings of his hands and the productions of his mind, not however to those who act in violation of the laws.

  The Constitution of 1840 establishes a House of Nobles comprised of chiefs and an elected legislature (to pass laws in concert with the nobles). Regarding legislation, “No law shall be enacted which is at variance with the word of the Lord Jehovah.” The document also established a judiciary as well as governorships for each of the inhabited islands.

  In 1839, the king also signed the Edict of Toleration. Kaahumanu had outlawed Catholicism at the request of the Protestant missionaries. Catholic missionaries were deported and Catholic converts were jailed. But after a French military frigate sailed to Honolulu, demanding reparations, Kauikeaouli legalized Catholicism much to the Protestants’ dismay. Still, anti-Catholic traditions lingered among those in the missionaries’ orbit. The missionaries were born into the anti-Catholic atmosphere of New England, a region settled by Pilgrims and Puritans who rejected what they saw as the Church of England’s Catholic trappings. If the bright side of the Protestant Reformation is the revolution in literacy inspired by believers’ need to read the Bible for themselves instead of receiving its teachings from the mouths of priests, the dark side of the movement was an often violent loathing of those priests, and the pope especially. The Geneva Bible the Puritan settlers brought with them to the New World identified the pope as the Whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelation. That New England missionaries imported this prejudice to Hawaii is evident in Isabella Bird’s account of her travels to the islands in 1873 when, in a casual conversation with her native guide to Kilauea, the man “expressed a most orthodox horror of the Pope, who, he said, he knew from his Bible was the ‘Beast!’ ”

  Incidentally, I have met native Hawaiians who still have a bone to pick with the pope, but for a decidedly different reason than the missionaries. In fact, they identify the Catholic Church as the root cause of the coming of Catholic-hating Protestant missionaries to Hawaii, citing the papal bull Inter caetera of 1493, which charges Spain to Christianize the New World, as the founding document that bestowed moral justification on genocide and conquest. “The U.S. Manifest Destiny stems from that,” one activist told me. The papal decree proposes “that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.” As this papal bull has never been rescinded, some Hawaiians have joined indigenous peoples internationally in organizing protests in which they gather in front of Catholic churches to burn copies of the decree.

  FEARING FURTHER FOREIGN intervention, in 1842 King Kauikeaouli dispatched his secretary, a Lahainaluna-educated member of the House of Nobles named Timothy Haalilio to travel to the United States and Europe with William Richards to establish formal diplomatic relations with the U.S., England, and France. Arriving in Washington in December, the diplomats were informed by Secretary of State Daniel Webster that President John Tyler deemed a formal treaty unnecessary. (England and France issued a joint declaration of Hawaiian independence a few months later.) However, the Hawaiian representatives did receive a letter from Webster that historian Ralph Kuykendall calls “the document that is commonly cited as the first formal recognition of the independence of the Hawaiian kingdom.”

  Webster, acknowledging that most of the ship traffic passing through Hawaii was American, wrote, “The United States, therefore, are more interested in the fate of the islands, and of their Government, than any other nation can be.” Webster continued, “The Government of the Sandwich Islands ought to be respected; that no power ought either to take possession of the islands as a conquest, or for the purpose of colonization.” President Tyler then forwarded Webster’s letter to Congress along with a message asserting that the United States would be justified “should events hereafter arise, to require it, in making a decided remonstrance against the adoption of an opposite policy by any other power.” Which hints at military intervention should another country invade Hawaii.

  Kuykendall points out that after Tyler’s message was read in the House of Representatives, on December 31, an opportunistic congressman connected the recent history of Hawaii to “the unsettled Oregon question.” That question—whether the Oregon Territory was to be American or British—was threatening to lead to war and wouldn’t be settled until 1846, when the current Canadian border was drawn.

  In other words, the first time the United States government acknowledged Hawaiian independence, the islands were nevertheless unwittingly roped into a Capitol Hill debate about American expansionism.

  On January 24, 1843, a few weeks after Congress received President Tyler’s message recognizing Hawaiian independence, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, chaired by John Quincy Adams, drew hope for an American future in Oregon from the accomplishments of the missionaries in Hawaii who brought the islands “from the lowest debasement of idolatry . . . to the fold of civilization by a written language and constitution.” The committee’s point was to praise the civilizing effects of American boots on the ground. On second thought, not boots—New England ladies’ shoes.

  Although for Washington politicians the connection between Oregon and Hawaii was metaphorical in 1843, Hawaiians had been trading busily with the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Oregon outpost for years. Kuykendall posits that Oregon “lumber was shipped to the islands as early as 1829, and salmon as early as 1830.” The boom years of whaling only intensified the economy and, as Kuykendall claims, “It is probably safe to say that Honolulu and other growing Hawaiian towns of the middle of the [nineteenth] century were built very largely with lumber brought from the Columbia River and Puget Sound.”

  In May of 1843, the first big wagon train of nearly a thousand settlers hit the Oregon Trail. That June, President Tyler submitted his treaty for the annexation of Texas to the Senate, where it failed to pass. Tyler’s successor, James K. Polk, annexed Texas through a joint resolution two years later in December of 1845, signing the treaty for Oregon six months after that. New York writer John L. O’Sullivan called these acquisitions America’s “manifest destiny.”

  Oregon, O’Sullivan opined in the New York Morning News, belonged to the United States because it was “our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us.” His generation, he predicts, will preside over “a noble young empire in the Pacific.”

  Even though originally the concept of Manifest Destiny, as stated by O’Sullivan, involved the divine right of the United States to occupy the North American continent from sea to sea, bold and grabby visionaries began to think bigger. As the joint resolution to annex Texas was being considered in 1845, Congressman John Wentworth of Illinois imagined the future delight of hearing the Speaker of the House recognizing “the gentleman from Texas” and “the gentleman from Oregon.” But Wentworth pined for yet more gentlemen: “the gentleman from Nova Scotia, the gentleman from Canada, the gentleman from Cuba, the gentleman from Mexico, aye, even the gentleman from Patagonia.”

  In 1849, French marines attacked the fort at Honolulu to protest unfair treatment of Catholics and excessive duties on French liquors. The sailors retreated but the incident prompted the Hawaiian government to dispatch diplomats abroad to seek treaties with foreign powers to shore up support for Hawaiian independence. The United States signed a formal treaty with Hawaii that year, proclaiming, “There shall be perpetual peace and amity between the United States and the King of the Hawaiian Islands, his heirs and his successors.”

  In addition to the United States, Britain, and France, Hawaii would eventually enjoy diplomatic relations with a number of countries, including Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Italy, Russia, Germany, Portugal, Samoa, and Japan.

  The adopti
on of the Hawaiian Constitution of 1840 and the establishment of diplomatic relations abroad speak to the haoles’ influence on the Hawaiian government, but they also reflect King Kauikeaouli’s active leadership in Westernizing his kingdom and asserting Hawaiian sovereignty before the rest of the world.

  Kauikeaouli’s most radical reform by far was the so-called Great Mahele, the land division of 1848. That year, as Hawaii’s official new friends the French and the Danes revolted against their monarchs, as Marx and Engels published their classwarfare classic The Communist Manifesto, the king of Hawaii was voluntarily giving up much of the land he controlled just as he had voluntarily given up some of his power by commissioning a constitution.

  Hawaiian land, previously controlled entirely by the king, was divided among the king, the government, the chiefs, and the commoners. Which sounds straightforward enough, though down the road many a Honolulu attorney will log billable hours untangling the weird aftereffects of what happens to crown lands after a monarchy has been overthrown.

  Back in 1835, a Bostonian named William Hooper arrived in Koloa, on the island of Kauai, with permission from Kamehameha III to start the first sugar plantation in the Sandwich Islands. On the one-year anniversary of the plantation’s founding, Hooper confided in his diary that the introduction of wage labor and for-profit agriculture in Hawaii would “serve as an entering wedge” that would “upset the whole system.”

  Hawaiians’ role in providing food for the surge of American settlers to Oregon and California in the 1840s contributed to increasingly prosperous planters lobbying the king to privatize the land. In an 1846 letter, the missionary Richard Armstrong wrote, “A brisk trade is opening with Oregon and California. . . . The sugar and molasses of the islands will be in demand in these territories and they will bring lumber, flour, salmon, etc. in exchange.” After the California gold rush of 1849, Armstrong reported, “Every bean, onion, potato or squash that we have to spare is at once snatched away to California to feed the hungry there.”

  As Hawaiian planters expanded their operations, it was only natural for them to want to secure their fields from the whims of chiefs or the king. They wanted ownership, and they wanted paperwork proving ownership.

  The Hawaiian government did not simply chop up maps of the islands and pass out deeds to commoners and chiefs. A Land Commission ruled on claims. Many commoners did not receive the land set aside for them because in order for a commoner to receive the deed to his allotted land, he had to petition the Land Commission. As Jon M. Van Dyke writes in his book Who Owns the Crown Lands of Hawai‘i?:

  The factors frequently mentioned for the low number of land awards include the unfamiliarity of the [commoners] with the concept of private property, the failure to educate them about the changes and the steps they needed to take to claim property, the difficulty in filing and providing claims (which required a survey for a fee that many did not have), the short period of time allowed to file and prove claims, which was particularly burdensome on the natives living in the country . . . fraud, conflicts of interest, favoritism, delays in processing claims, and the interference of some [chiefs] who sought to discourage such claims.

  Because the idea of private property was so new and the bureaucracy involved was so labyrinthine, David Malo, writes John H. Chambers, “[was] opposed to allowing land to be sold to foreigners and wanted a ten-year moratorium during which to educate native Hawaiians about land ownership.” Malo’s suggestion was ignored.

  Van Dyke concludes that “out of the 1,523,000 acres given to the Government by Kauikeaouli for his people, only 28,658 acres, or less than 1 percent of Hawaii’s land area” went to the commoners.

  Researching land records on Oahu for his book Kahana: How the Land Was Lost, Robert Stauffer found that in cases where commoners petitioned for land they and their ancestors had been cultivating for generations, their “homesteads were fully developed and productive and came with water rights through existing irrigation systems.” He argues that though the commoners occupied only a wee fraction of land, it was some of Hawaii’s best land, assessing the value of the commoners’ homesteads at “about $2.7 billion (in 2000 dollars), or almost half of all the land values.”

  Stauffer blames an 1874 law privatizing mortgage foreclosures for commoners’ biggest land losses, not the initial Mahele rulings. Still, per the Kuleana Act of 1850, the government could sell unclaimed land for fee simple to anyone, including foreigners. By May of that year alone, according to Van Dyke, “the Government had sold about 2,700 parcels of government land on all the islands. . . . Most of the individual purchasers were Hawaiians, but foreigners acquired almost two-thirds of the total land area.”

  In the end, due to unclaimed lands, mortgage foreclosures, gifts, or purchases of crown lands and garden-variety real estate sales and leases, haoles controlled about ninety percent of the land by 1890. Privatizing property ultimately resulted in the commoners, the “eyes of the land,” being left with little ground to watch over.

  As the U.S. Civil War denied the North access to Louisiana sugar, Hawaiian planters stepped into the breach. Cane fields soon replaced taro patches.

  For that reason, the popular refrain is that haoles “stole” the land. “Cry for the land that was taken away,” sang Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole in his song “Hawaii ’78.” However, nearly all of these transactions, even the fishiest, were legal. I’m not sugarcoating. To me, confronting the practical and moral limits of the law is far more disturbing than what The Communist Manifesto called mere “naked self-interest.” Expecting capitalists to refrain from gobbling up the earth is like blaming Pac-Man for gulping down pac-dots—to them, that’s what land is for. Which is kind of the reason the manifesto called for abolishing private land ownership the very year Hawaii started privatizing land ownership. (Not that implementing the Marxist vision worked out so well in the long run either.)

  The commie-quoting sucker in me wonders what happened to government regulation. The answer to that goes back to Kauikeaouli’s good intentions. The king had honorable motives in giving commoners land and establishing a constitution limiting his own powers. Yet those two decisions were deciding factors in the increase of haole control over the government and the land.

  Take, for instance, the judiciary established by the Constitution of 1840. Great idea. Problem was, no lawyers. (Insert joke here.) William Little Lee, a New Yorker who graduated from Harvard Law, was sailing to Oregon to start a new life in 1846 when ship repairs forced a stopover in Honolulu and he got talked into sticking around to become the first justice of the Hawaii Supreme Court. The other lawyer in town, John Riccord, had already become the kingdom’s attorney general.

  When Keanu Sai and I were standing next to an oil portrait of Lee in the Judiciary History Center, he said of Lee and Riccord, “They weren’t Puritans, they were lawyers. When they came, they were approached by the Hawaiian government to join the government, because what Hawaii needed to do, for its own self-protection, was to utilize people’s experience in areas of constitutional systems of government, because Hawaii didn’t have that experience. It came from an absolute rule, a feudal, aristocratic rule. That was the history of Hawaii.”

  Sai, nodding at the portrait of Lee, said, “He gets a bum rap. See, a lot of people say, ‘If he’s haole, he’s bad.’ That’s wrong, that’s very wrong. He was good. Very good. When he came, Hawaii was six years into being a constitutional monarchy. And he was a proponent of securing the people’s rights to the land and ensuring the monarch is limited, and held to be limited, in a constitutional form of government without being overbearing.”

  Thus, in order to build his new government it was only logical that Kauikeaouli would consult and include some of the besteducated people at hand. So whites, many of them ex-missionaries, were incorporated into the constitutional government from the beginning. Lorrin Andrews, for example, the former principal of Lahainaluna School, joined the Hawaiian Supreme Court as an associate justice after he resigned from his m
issionary post in protest of the ABCFM’s acceptance of donations from slave states.

  To work for the government, the foreigners stopped being foreigners, renouncing their American citizenship to become subjects of the kingdom. But that did not mean they suddenly lost their American prejudices and ideals, including a fundamental belief in the morality of private property, free enterprise, and agriculture-as-culture. They governed accordingly.

  Robert Stauffer, the scholar who cites an 1874 mortgage foreclosure law for separating most commoners from their homesteads, remarks that the law was introduced by a haole to a legislature “presided over by the leading banker of the day, an American, who incidentally would be expecting increases in both his own business and his profits through an opening of a market for these lands.” And if that law’s constitutionality had been challenged, Stauffer notes, it would have been decided by an all-white court. He summarizes that in the half century before the overthrow of 1893, “wherein the bulk of land was lost, 94 percent of Supreme Court justices were Haole, as were 82 percent of the extremely powerful executive cabinet members and a great many legislative leaders.”

  The monarchs, beginning with Kauikeaouli, welcomed these unfamiliar fishes into the government. If it is understandable that native Hawaiians wanted to hold on to some of their ancient traditions, it is also understandable that naturalized Hawaiians of New England stock held on to some of their ancestral traditions, such as the sanctity of private property (and, eventually, revolting against monarchs).

  Oni v. Meek, a case that came before Hawaii’s Supreme Court in 1858, perfectly illustrates the two worldviews in conflict during that transitional age. A native Hawaiian named Oni let his grazing horses stray outside of the boundaries of his land onto property leased by a Massachusetts-born rancher named John Meek. In the ancient Hawaiian land system, commoners were assigned land to farm by their landlord chief but were generally permitted grazing rights elsewhere in that chief’s purview.