Republic of Hawaii
Republic of Hawaii Lepupalika o Hawaiʻi | |||||||||
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1894–1898 | |||||||||
Motto:
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Anthem: "Hawaiʻi Ponoʻī" "Hawaiʼi's Own True Sons" | |||||||||
Capital | Honolulu | ||||||||
Common languages | English, Hawaiian | ||||||||
Government | Unitary presidential republic under a one-party regime | ||||||||
• President | Sanford B. Dole | ||||||||
• Vice President | William Chauncey Wilder | ||||||||
History | |||||||||
• Established | July 4, 1894 | ||||||||
January 6, 1895 | |||||||||
• Restoration attempt ends | January 9, 1895 | ||||||||
August 12, 1898 | |||||||||
Currency | Hawaiian dollar, U.S. dollar | ||||||||
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Today part of | United States |
Part of Hawaiian flag represents the Hawaiian Kingdom in distress and is the main symbol of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. |
Main issues |
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Part of a series on the | |
History of Hawaii | |
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1779 |
The Republic of Hawaii (
The leaders of the Republic, such as Sanford B. Dole and Lorrin A. Thurston, were Hawaii-born descendants of American settlers who spoke the Hawaiian language but had strong financial, political, and family ties to the United States. They intended the Republic to become a territory of the United States. Dole was a former member of the Royal Legislature from Koloa, Kauai, and Justice of the Kingdom's Supreme Court, and he appointed Thurston—who had served as Minister of the Interior under King Kalākaua—to lead a lobbying effort in Washington, D.C., to secure Hawaii's annexation by the United States. The issue of overseas imperialism was controversial in the United States due to its colonial origins. Hawaii was annexed under Republican President William McKinley on 12 August 1898, during the Spanish–American War. The Territory of Hawaii was formally established as part of the U.S. on June 14, 1900.
The
Establishment of the Republic
In 1887, members of the Reform Party of Hawaii forced the King to accept a new constitution limiting the monarch's constitutional power as defined by the Constitution of 1864. The Constitution of 1887, also called
President Cleveland sent an investigator who wrote the Blount Report, which concluded that Minister Stevens had manipulated and orchestrated the revolt. Cleveland decided that the United States should restore the Queen; he asked for Dole's resignation; however, Dole ignored the request. The U.S. Senate held hearings regarding another report called the Morgan Report, which undermined the Blount Report's claims. Public opinion in the United States favored annexation. In May 1894 the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution opposing restoration of the Queen, opposing intrusion into the affairs of the Dole government, and opposing American action that could lead immediately to annexation. President Cleveland thereupon dropped the issue, leaving the Republic of Hawaii to effectively fend for itself.[9]
The Provisional Government convened a constitutional convention, limited to Hawaiians, and taxpayers of American or European origins, not including Asians.[10]
Politics
This section needs additional citations for verification. (July 2017) |
The President of Hawaii was the
Article 23 of the constitution of 1894 specifically named Sanford B. Dole as the republic's first President. He would also be the nation's only President, as it was annexed by the United States in 1898. Upon annexation, Hawaii became a U.S. territory and Dole became its first Governor.[11]
The republic's Legislature consisted of a senate and a house of representatives. Each had fifteen members with the former having six-year terms and the latter only two with the exception of the first legislature which was constitutionally granted a three-year term. Appropriation bills originated from the
As royalists had boycotted the republic and refused to take the oath of allegiance to run for office, the American Union Party won every seat in the 1894 and 1897 elections. There was also a property requirement of $1500 net worth to vote for Senators, kept from the 1887 constitution, which ran counter to the prevailing trends of that period. The 1897 election had the lowest turnout in Hawaii's history with less than one percent of the population going to the polls. The new Republic Constitution allowed only men that were natural born citizens of the Hawaiian Kingdom, or naturalized Citizens of the Kingdom to vote in the new Republic. This eliminated most all Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and European immigrants from voting. As a result, Native Hawaiians had a two-thirds majority voting block and were the highest represented group in the Republic Legislature. The Speaker of the House of the Republic was also a Hawaiian, John Lot Kaulukoʻu.
Wilcox Rebellion of 1895
Robert William Wilcox was a Hawaiian native revolutionary. In 1889, he led an army of 150 Hawaiians, Europeans and Chinese in rebellion against the Hawaiian Kingdom. In 1895, Wilcox participated in another attempt, this time to overthrow the Republic of Hawaii and to restore Queen Liliuokalani to power. Royalist supporters landed a cargo of arms and ammunition from San Francisco, California in a secret Honolulu location. At the location on January 6, 1895, a company of royalists met to draft plans to capture the government buildings by surprise. A premature encounter with a squad of police alarmed Honolulu and the plans were abandoned as the royalists were quickly routed. Wilcox spent several days in hiding in the mountains before being captured. The son of one annexationist was killed. Several other skirmishes occurred during the following week resulting in the capture of the leading conspirators and their followers. The government found arms and ammunition and some potentially evidential documents on the premises of Washington Place, Liliuokalani's private residence, outlining in her own handwriting who she would select for her cabinet after the counter revolution, further implicating her in the plot.
Liliuokalani's trial
The Republic of Hawaii put the former Queen on trial. The prosecution asserted that Liliuokalani had committed misprision of treason, because she allegedly knew that guns and bombs for the Wilcox attempted counter-revolution had been hidden in the flower bed of her personal residence at Washington Place. Liliuokalani denied these accusations.
She was sentenced to 5 years' imprisonment at hard labor and a fine of $10,000. However, the imprisonment was served in a large bedroom with a piano, bathroom with hot and cold running water bathtub and sink at Iolani Palace where she was allowed two maids in waiting while under guard by military personnel at all times.[12] After eight months she was allowed to go to her Washington Place home and kept under house arrest by President Sanford B. Dole.[12] A year later she was granted a full pardon, including the right to travel, and President Dole gave her a passport to travel to Washington D.C. to visit her friends and in-laws. However, she used that opportunity to lobby the U.S. Senate in 1897 against annexation.
End and annexation of the Republic
Upon the inauguration of William McKinley as the 25th President of the United States on March 4, 1897, the Republic of Hawaii resumed negotiations for annexation, which continued into the summer of 1898. In April 1898, the United States went to war with Spain, and Republic of Hawaii declared its neutrality. In practice, it gave enormous support to the United States, demonstrating its value as a naval base in wartime, and winning widespread American approval for its non-neutral behavior.[13]
With the opposition weakened, Hawaii was annexed by means of the
Popular controversy
The issue of annexation became a major political issue heatedly debated across the United States, which carried over into the 1900 presidential election. By then the national consensus was in favor of the annexation of both Hawaii and the Philippines.[14]
Historian Henry Graff says that in the mid-1890s, "Public opinion at home seemed to indicate acquiescence.... Unmistakably, the sentiment at home was maturing with immense force for the United States to join the great powers of the world in a quest for overseas colonies."[15]
President Cleveland's biographer Alyn Brodsky argues his position was a deeply personal conviction that would not tolerate an immoral action against the little kingdom:
- Just as he stood up for the Samoan Islands against Germany because he opposed the conquest of a lesser state by a greater one, so did he stand up for the Hawaiian Islands against his own nation. He could have let the annexation of Hawaii move inexorably to its inevitable culmination. But he opted for confrontation, which he hated, as it was to him the only way a weak and defenseless people might retain their independence. It was not the idea of annexation that Grover Cleveland opposed, but the idea of annexation as a pretext for illicit territorial acquisition.[16]
Cleveland had to mobilize support from Southern Democrats to fight the treaty. He sent former Georgia Congressman
A vigorous nationwide anti-expansionist movement, organized as the American Anti-Imperialist League, emerged that listened to Cleveland and Carl Schurz, as well as Democratic leader William Jennings Bryan, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, author Mark Twain, and sociologist William Graham Sumner.[18] The anti-imperialists opposed expansion, believing that imperialism violated the fundamental principle that just republican government must derive from "consent of the governed." The League argued that such activity would necessitate the abandonment of American ideals of self-government and non-intervention—ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, George Washington's Farewell Address and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.[19]
However, the Antis could not stop the even more energetic forces of imperialism. They were led by Secretary of State John Hay, naval strategist Alfred T. Mahan, Republican congressman Henry Cabot Lodge, Secretary of War Elihu Root, and young politician Theodore Roosevelt. These expansionists had vigorous support from newspaper publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, whipping up popular excitement. Mahan and Roosevelt took the forging a global strategy calling for a competitive modern navy, Pacific bases, an isthmian canal through Nicaragua or Panama, and, above all, an assertive role for America as the largest industrial power.[20] President McKinley's position was that Hawaii could never survive on its own. It would quickly be gobbled up by Japan—already a fourth of the islands' population was Japanese. Japan would then dominate the Pacific and undermine American hopes for large-scale trade with Asia.[21][22]
See also
Notes
- OCLC 19662315.
- ^ Ball, Milner S. "Symposium: Native American Law," Georgia Law Review 28 (1979): 303
- ISBN 9780870224331.
- ^ Tate, Merze. (1965). The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom: A Political History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. p. 235.
- ISBN 978-0-19-977905-5.
- ^ Network, The Learning (January 17, 2012). "Jan. 17, 1893 | Hawaiian Monarchy Overthrown by America-Backed Businessmen". The Learning Network. Retrieved March 27, 2017.
- ISBN 9780393039504.
- ISBN 978-0-618-91629-0.
- ^ Tennant S. McWilliams, "James H. Blount, the South, and Hawaiian Annexation," Pacific Historical Review (1988) 57#1 pp. 25-46 esp p 43
- ISBN 9780803287501.
- ^ Sanford Ballard Dole Encyclopædia Britannica
- ^ a b Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen
- ^ Thomas A. Bailey, "The United States and Hawaii during the Spanish–American War" American Historical Review 36#3 (1931), pp. 552-560 online
- JSTOR 1891336.
- ISBN 9780805069235.
- ISBN 9780312268831.
- ^ Tennant S. McWilliams, "James H. Blount, the South, and Hawaiian Annexation." Pacific Historical Review (1988) 57#1: 25-46 online.
- ^ Fred H. Harrington, "The Anti-Imperialist Movement in the United States, 1898-1900." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 22.2 (1935): 211-230. online
- ^ Fred Harvey Harrington, "Literary Aspects of American Anti-Imperialism 1898–1902," New England Quarterly, 10#4 (1937), pp 650-67. online.
- ^ Warren Zimmermann, "Jingoes, Goo-Goos, and the Rise of America's Empire." The Wilson Quarterly (1976) 22#2 (1998): 42-65. Online
- ^ Thomas J. Osborne, "The Main Reason for Hawaiian Annexation in July, 1898," Oregon Historical Quarterly (1970) 71#2 pp. 161–178 in JSTOR
- ^ Thomas A. Bailey, "Japan's Protest Against the Annexation of Hawaii" Journal of Modern History 4#1 (1931), pp. 46-61 online
Bibliography
- Allen, Helena G. Sanford Ballard Dole: Hawaii's Only President, 1844-1926 (1998).
- Grenville, John A. S. and George Berkeley Young. Politics, Strategy, and American Diplomacy: Studies in Foreign Policy, 1873-1917 (1966) pp 102–124 on Hawaii policy, 1893-1895
- Kuykendall, Ralph Simpson. Hawaii: A History, from Polynesian Kingdom to American State (1961)
- Morgan, William Michael. Pacific Gibraltar: U.S.-Japanese Rivalry Over the Annexation of Hawaii, 1885-1898 (Naval Institute Press, 2011). A major scholarly history; see online review by Kenneth R. Conklin, PhD
- Russ, William Adam. The Hawaiian Revolution (1893-94) (1992)
- Russ, William Adam. The Hawaiian Republic (1894–98) and its struggle to win annexation (Susquehanna U Press, 1992); a major scholarly history
- Schweizer, Niklaus R. His Hawaiian Excellency: The Overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy and the Annexation of Hawaii (1994).
External links
- morganreport.org Online images and transcriptions of the entire Morgan Report
- "Blount Report: Affairs in Hawaii". University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa Library. Retrieved June 17, 2010.
- "The Annexation Of Hawaii: A Collection Of Documents". Hawaiian Digital Collection. University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa Library.
- . Hawaiian Sovereignty: Thinking Carefully About It.