The Overthrow, How a Kingdom Was Ended

On the morning of January seventeenth, eighteen ninety-three, Queen Liliuokalani of the Hawaiian Kingdom prepared to announce a new constitution. The constitution she planned would have restored voting rights that Native Hawaiians had lost under the Bayonet Constitution of eighteen eighty-seven, a document imposed on her predecessor King Kalakaua by a group of armed sugar planters. Liliuokalani had legal authority to promulgate a new constitution. She had heard directly from petitioners across the islands that the people wanted one. She never got the chance to announce it.

The Committee of Safety, thirteen men mostly tied to the plantation economy and to American commercial interests, had been meeting in private for months, corresponding with John L. Stevens, the United States Minister to Hawaii, who had made no secret of his personal desire to see the islands annexed to the United States. When word spread that the queen intended to announce a new constitution, the committee moved.

Stevens, without authorization from Washington, ordered United States Marines from the USS Boston to land in Honolulu. The Marines did not enter the palace or arrest anyone. They did not need to. They positioned themselves between the palace and any force the queen might use to defend her government. The committee announced the formation of a Provisional Government. The queen's position was militarily untenable.

President Grover Cleveland, when he learned what had happened, was appalled. He sent a commissioner to Hawaii who concluded in plain language that the United States government had directly participated in overthrowing a friendly sovereign nation. Cleveland asked Congress to restore the queen. Congress declined. The men who had overthrown the kingdom became its government.

President Cleveland's commissioner wrote that the Hawaiian people had not asked for the change of government and that an overwhelming majority would oppose it if given the choice. No one gave them the choice.