Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (48 page)

Lili‘uokalani was arrested on January 16. The republic’s government had moved into the ‘Iolani Palace, with the house of representatives meeting in the former throne room. The ex-queen was escorted in under guard and confined upstairs in the southeast bedroom, overlooking Palace Square and the Ali‘iolani Hale, which was now the Judiciary Building. As confinements go it was not harsh—at least this was the bedroom with the private bath, and she occupied herself with music and quilting. Sadly for her cause, a search of Washington Place revealed an arms cache buried in a flower bed—thirty or more rifles with a thousand rounds of ammunition, coconut-shell bombs, swords, and sidearms. She was tried as Lili‘uokalani Dominis, convicted, and sentenced to pay a fine of five thousand dollars and serve five years at hard labor. Probably she was guilty, but the irregularities of her trial—under U.S. law it would have been illegal to try a civilian in a military court when there was no fight ongoing; sudden reduction of the charge from treason, which could not stick, to misprision of treason; the lack of time given her to prepare a defense—placed the whole proceeding under a cloud.
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Hers was the most prominent trial; one prince of the House of Kalakaua, Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole, received a one-year jail term and had his photo taken in prison stripes; 191 others were tried; Wilcox and four others were sentenced to death. Lili‘uokalani finally abdicated in the hope that it would save the lives of the condemned. She was told rather insolently that former queens could not abdicate, but there was little stomach in the country for the harsh sentences, and all went free by the following January, except for the ex-queen. After eight months’ confinement in the palace, she was placed under house arrest at Washington Place for five months more, and confined to the island for another eight.

After the countercoup was suppressed, the Dole government (not risking an election, the constitution appointed him president for the first six-year term) gained expertise in the seeding of confidential informants in hostile organizations and environs, ready to root out further disloyalty wherever it was uncovered. Sometimes their gumshoes made asses of themselves. One government monitor whose job it was to translate native-language newspapers for the junta was taken aback by the headline, “The Glad Tidings: Methodist Missionary Steamer Wrecked.” Thinking that he had caught someone in a wicked thought, he read on, and had to report (to his apparent disappointment) that the native reporter was not exulting in the death of missionaries—the name of the vessel was the
Glad Tidings
, “which removes our first impression.”
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Lorrin Thurston was sent to Washington as the Hawaiian minister, perhaps not the best appointment, as the American secretary of state was still Walter Gresham, who was left with a bad taste of the whole revolution. Thurston made himself obnoxious enough that Gresham requested his recall, but then the annexationists received some good news, that the United States had elected a Republican president, William McKinley, the man who as a senator from Ohio had had much to do with tariff relations between Hawai‘i and the United States. The possibility of annexation seemed alive again, as the fate of Hawai‘i continued to thump like a shuttlecock back and forth with each change in the occupancy of the White House—Democratic in 1884, Republican in 1888, Democratic in 1892, and Republican again in 1896.

Thurston and Commissioners William Kinney and Francis Hatch took ship for America, and in June 1897 worked out a new deal for annexation as a territory. McKinley signed it and transmitted it to the Senate for ratification, with the beatific endorsement that the failure of annexation in 1893 not only demonstrated the virtuous disinterest of the United States, but that annexation now would be not a change but a consummation. Of ninety senators in that body, McKinley needed the votes of sixty—two-thirds—to approve the treaty. From the beginning he knew that he could safely rely on fifty-eight. Finding two more who could be persuaded to add these magnificent islands to the American family should not be difficult—especially in view of the fact that the Senate had discarded James Blount’s hotly critical report and replaced it with a shameless whitewash of the coup authored by the new chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, John Tyler Morgan of Alabama, who was the perfect combination of racist and imperialist to meet the new republic’s needs. The Morgan Report held the provisional government blameless in the coup and laid all the fault on the queen, without ever sailing to Hawai‘i or interviewing a single witness who was not partial to the revolution.

To save the lives of her supporters Lili‘uokalani had sworn allegiance to the junta, but after her release it would have been disastrous publicity to prevent her from political advocacy and opposition any more than they could any other Hawaiian. Once she was freed from house arrest, it being painfully obvious that there was no opposing the march toward annexation within Hawai‘i, Lili‘uokalani went to the place where she might still derail the move. Mortgaging Washington Place and some other properties to raise money, she relocated to Washington, D.C., and stayed there for six months.
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Her presence alone was meant as a reproach to the annexationists—as indeed it proved to be: Unable to get a private audience with McKinley, the ex-queen, shortly before leaving for New York, crashed McKinley’s weekly reception for the general public in the White House. After sending her card—“Liliuokalani of Hawaii”—upstairs, an usher showed her and her suite to a group of chairs in a corner of the East Room farthest from the waiting file of well-wishers and patronage seekers. The president appeared and greeted his way through the hundred or so waiting to bend his ear to their particular needs. Lili‘uokalani rose as he approached, and she wrote that they chatted amiably for several minutes. Only Mrs. McKinley’s illness, said the president, prevented him from inviting her up for a more private visit. In her mind one head of state paid an informal social call on another; McKinley was the one who needed to explain why he had agreed to steal her country.

Back in Hawai‘i word of the new treaty, along with news that the proannexation senator John Tyler Morgan, who had buried the Blount Report, would arrive in September, set into motion two native organizations from former times. In the wake of the 1887 Bayonet Constitution, native activists had formed the
Hui Kala‘ia‘ina
to preserve some base for their political action. And after the 1893 coup, angry Hawaiians had coalesced into a political group, the
Hui Aloha Aina
(or Patriotic League) that had two divisions, the Queen’s Women and the Queen’s Men. The Hawaiian
maka‘ainana
, the commoners, had been mostly disenfranchised by the Bayonet Constitution of 1887, and they mattered even less after the takeover, but they had been too indoctrinated over too many decades in the propaganda of American democracy to believe that there was absolutely nothing they could do now. A mass meeting was announced for Palace Square on September 6, 1897.

Despite threats published in the annexationist papers that they could be arrested for treason, the square was jammed with natives. James Keauiluna Kaulia, the lawyer and president of the Queen’s Men who had given Blount an earful when he was taking depositions, stoked the crowd:

We, the nation, will never consent to the annexation of our lands, until the very last patriot lives.… If the nation remains steadfast in its protest of annexation, the Senate can continue to strive until the rock walls of Iolani Palace crumble, and never will Hawaii be annexed to America!… Let us take up the honorable field of struggle … Do not be afraid, be steadfast in aloha for your land and be united in thought. Protest forever the annexation of Hawaii until the very last
aloha aina
[patriot]!
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Kaulia was followed on the podium by the leader of the older
Hui Kala‘ia‘ina,
David Kalauokalani, who made certain that the crowd understood exactly what annexation as a territory meant. Public lands and crown lands, and all infrastructure and improvements, would be handed over to the United States. The American Congress would rule the islands, but the protections of U.S. law would not necessarily come with it.

The instruments of their protest would be two petitions, one remonstrating against American annexation of the islands, the other seeking restoration of the queen, to be signed by as many native Hawaiians as they could muster. Petitions were drafted and printed, and only five days after the rally on Palace Square, James Kaulia was on Maui, collecting signatures for the Queen’s Men. Organizing the petition drive for the Queen’s Women was its formidable president, Abigail Kuaihelani Campbell. Now thirty-nine, she had been nineteen in 1877 when she married Scotch-Irish sugar baron James Campbell, a man thirty-two years her senior. That year he sold his interest in the Pioneer Mill for half a million dollars, a fortune he doubled and redoubled by buying and irrigating the Ewa Plain on Oahu. What was good for sugar was good for her family, but they were aligned with the British interests; Campbell had been a friend of King Kalakaua, who had appointed him to the house of nobles during and after the Bayonet Constitution, and he was close to Archibald Cleghorn, father of the heiress presumptive. Abigail, moreover, was descended from the Kalanikini line of Maui royalty, with a solid reputation for noblesse oblige and charity toward native people.
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Petitions in hand, Campbell and her aide, Mrs. Emma Aima Nawahi, sailed for Hilo on the interisland ship
Kinau
. Nawahi, secretary of the Hilo chapter, was the recent widow of Joseph Nawahi; the former legislator and publisher of the
Ke Aloha Aina
had died in San Francisco the preceding November of the tuberculosis he may have contracted while imprisoned by the junta. Unbowed, Aima Nawahi continued publishing their antiannexation newspaper and would do so until 1910. Hilo was her hometown, where she was popular as the daughter of a chiefess and the Chinese businessman Tong Yee, founder of the Paukaa Sugar Plantation.
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It was an accurate expression of native temper, albeit organized by the local chapter of the
Hui Aloha Aina,
that the ship was met by a traditional twin-hulled canoe, with chairs of honor on its deck draped with leis, to bring Campbell and Nawahi into Hilo harbor.

Not known at the time, but made clear by recent research in Hawaiian-language letters, was that the petition drive did not materialize purely from these organizations. In fact it was the queen who suggested the idea, put forward some of the wording, and corresponded actively with Kaulia, Kalauokalani, and with Aima Nawahi, who shared her letters with Kuaihelani Campbell.
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The American journalist Miriam Michelson of the
San Francisco Morning Call
interviewed Campbell, cleverly (as she thought) leading Campbell into asserting that no Hawaiians supported annexation. “I met a woman at Hana,” Michelson rejoined pluckily, “on the island of Maui. She was.”

Campbell was unfazed. “Was she in the government’s employ?”

Michelson admitted that she was a teacher.

“Ah, I thought so. You see, the government will employ no one who does not swear allegiance. Even the schoolteachers.” (And not just teachers. All but sixteen players in the Royal Hawaiian Band were fired when they refused the oath.
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)

While Campbell and Nawahi gathered signatures in Hilo, Laura Mahelona worked the Kona Coast on the west side of the Big Island, her boat stopping at every village from Kona south to Kau to leave blank petitions, after which she reversed course back up the coast to gather them again, along with 4,216 names on the documents.

Back in Honolulu, Miriam Michelson got James Kaulia, president of the Queen’s Men, to pause for an interview on the hotel veranda. He verified Abigail Campbell’s assertion that government workers had given empty pledges of allegiance in order to secure their jobs. “Take the police now,” he said, “who have sworn allegiance, of course. Some of them have signed our petition against annexation.” Seven thousand natives had signed the petition since the preceding Thursday.
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Such a number spoke more eloquently than any interview. The men’s and women’s sections of the
Hui Aloha Aina
had to work fast. The annexation treaty was set to be debated at the winter session of Congress; they had to select and fund a delegation, travel to Washington, divine a lobbying strategy—and October was nearly upon them. Known as the
Ku‘e
petitions, when they were finally rounded up they bore some twenty-one thousand signatures—more than half of the surviving native population of the islands and the equivalent, in the United States at that time, of a petition bearing thirty-five
million
names.

Before sailing, when the
Hui Aloha Aina
for men and women and the
Hui Kala‘ia‘ina
learned that their former monarch had moved on to New York without pressing their case to McKinley, they sent her a perplexed letter requesting that she return to the American capital. With a delegation soon to take ship bearing the petitions of their last hope, Lili‘uokalani had to recognize that crashing the president’s public reception for a handshake was hardly sufficient, and she headed back to Washington. The groups decided to send four of their leaders as
elele lahui
, messengers, to make their case in Washington: Kaulia, Kalauokalani, the Maui attorney John Richardson, with William Auld as their secretary.
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While they expected the core of their support to be among the Democrats, the Hawaiian delegation was invited to the opening of the Senate session on December 6 by an important Republican, Richard F. Pettigrew. A onetime frontier surveyor and the first U.S. senator from South Dakota, he was also, happily for them, an amateur archaeologist with a fascination for indigenous cultures, and a committed anti-imperialist. Like a select few other senators, he was inclined to break with his Republican colleagues over matters of conscience such as this—a sinful habit for which the South Dakota legislature booted him from the Senate two years later.