Queen Liliuokalani and the Day the Kingdom Ended

The document she signed on January seventeenth, eighteen ninety-three, was not a surrender. Liliuokalani was careful about that. She was the queen of a sovereign nation that had maintained diplomatic relations with the United States, Great Britain, and France for more than half a century, and she understood the difference between yielding to force and consenting to be governed by the men who had just surrounded her palace with rifles.

The Committee of Safety was thirteen men, most of them born in Hawaii to American or European parents, most of them tied to the sugar industry that had come to dominate the islands' economy. They had been meeting for two days, planning what they called a transition of governance. On the afternoon of January sixteenth, United States Marines from the warship USS Boston, anchored in Honolulu Harbor, landed on Hawaiian soil. Minister John L. Stevens, the American diplomatic representative, had requested the landing without authorization from Washington. The queen's own guard was outnumbered and outgunned.

Liliuokalani's statement the following afternoon was precise. She wrote that she yielded to the superior force of the United States of America, to avoid any collision of armed forces and perhaps the loss of life. She was not acknowledging the Committee's authority. She was making a record. She appealed directly to the United States government to investigate what had happened and restore her to her throne.

President Grover Cleveland ordered that investigation. His commissioner James Blount spent months in Hawaii and reported back that the overthrow was conducted with the active aid and intervention of the United States forces, and that without that aid the revolution never would have succeeded. Cleveland called it a substantial wrong done to a friendly and confiding people and asked Congress to restore the queen.

Congress refused. Sanford Dole, one of the committee's principal figures, became president of the Provisional Republic of Hawaii. The islands were annexed to the United States in eighteen ninety-eight under a joint resolution of Congress, not a treaty. Hawaii became a territory. Liliuokalani spent the rest of her life in Honolulu. She died in nineteen seventeen. Her palace still stands on the grounds where the marines positioned themselves that January afternoon. The building is the only royal palace on American soil.