Queen Overthrown: Hawaii Seized by American Planters

Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii was preparing to promulgate a new constitution that would restore the power of the monarchy when a group of American and European businessmen, backed by 162 United States Marines, overthrew her government on January 17, 1893. The coup was led by Lorrin Thurston, a lawyer and grandson of American missionaries, and it ended a sovereign kingdom that had existed for more than a century. The roots of the overthrow reached back decades. American sugar planters had established enormous plantations across the Hawaiian Islands, importing labor from China, Japan, and Portugal to work the fields. The 1887 "Bayonet Constitution," forced on King Kalakaua at gunpoint, had stripped the monarchy of most governing authority and restricted voting rights to wealthy property owners, effectively disenfranchising most Native Hawaiians while empowering the planter elite. Liliuokalani ascended the throne in 1891 after her brother's death and immediately moved to undo the Bayonet Constitution. She drafted a new governing document that would restore royal authority and expand voting rights to all Hawaiian citizens. The business community, which had profited enormously from the existing arrangement and wanted formal annexation by the United States to secure favorable sugar tariffs, saw her plan as an existential threat. Thurston's Committee of Safety, composed of thirteen men, mostly American-born, announced the overthrow on January 17 and declared a provisional government. John L. Stevens, the U.S. Minister to Hawaii, had ordered Marines from the USS Boston to come ashore the previous day, ostensibly to protect American lives and property. The queen recognized that resistance against armed troops would result in bloodshed and yielded her authority under protest, stating she was surrendering to "the superior force of the United States of America." President Grover Cleveland investigated the overthrow, and his appointed commissioner, James Blount, concluded it had been illegal and that the American minister had conspired with the plotters. Cleveland attempted to restore the queen but lacked congressional support. The provisional government refused to step down and declared the Republic of Hawaii in 1894. Annexation by the United States followed in 1898 during the Spanish-American War, when Hawaii's strategic location in the Pacific became too valuable to leave independent. Congress formally apologized for the overthrow in 1993, exactly one hundred years later, acknowledging that the Native Hawaiian people had never relinquished their sovereignty.