The Dark History of Hawaii: Overthrow, Annexation, and Sovereignty

The dark history of Hawaii is the story of how an internationally recognized sovereign kingdom, with treaties on four continents, was reduced by disease, dispossessed of its land, overthrown with the help of U.S. troops, annexed without consent, and folded into the United States through a statehood vote that offered no path to independence. Much of that history is still contested in courts, in Congress, and among Native Hawaiians themselves.

An Independent Kingdom Before 1893

By the mid-nineteenth century, the Hawaiian Kingdom was a recognized member of the community of nations. Great Britain and France jointly recognized its sovereignty on November 28, 1843; the United States followed on July 6, 1844.¹ The Kingdom held treaties with roughly twenty nations, including the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia, and operated more than ninety legations and consulates around the world.² It joined the Universal Postal Union in 1882. At the time, only forty-four independent states existed on Earth, and Hawaii was one of them.

Before Captain James Cook’s ships appeared off Oahu in January 1778, Hawaiian society had been governed for centuries by the kapu system, a religious and legal framework in which the paramount chief held authority extending to life and death.³ In 1819, after the death of Kamehameha I, his son Liholiho abolished the kapu system, ending the religious order that had structured Hawaiian civilization for generations.

The Population Collapse After Western Contact

Cook’s crew brought venereal diseases and tuberculosis almost immediately.⁴ Within two years of contact, one in seventeen Native Hawaiians had died.⁵

Estimates of the pre-contact population range from 300,000 to as high as 683,000. By 1800, the population had dropped by roughly 48 percent. By 1820, 71 percent. By 1840, 84 percent.⁵ Successive waves of measles, whooping cough, mumps, dysentery, and influenza swept the islands. Between 1832 and 1836, whooping cough and measles alone killed roughly 22,000 Hawaiians. In 1848–1849, another wave killed an estimated 10,000 people, more than a tenth of the survivors. A missionary doctor described it as “a raging battle, with all its turmoil and its sad scenes of death and carnage.”⁶ By 1920, the U.S. Census counted just under 24,000 Native Hawaiians.⁷

Cook did not survive his second visit. In February 1779, after his crew took wood from sacred burial sites and Cook tried to kidnap a ruling chief as a hostage for a stolen boat, he was killed in the confrontation. His men fired on Hawaiians from their ships and burned a village in retaliation.⁴

How Hawaiians Lost Their Land

For centuries, land had been held communally through the ahupua’a system, with the king, chiefs, and commoners sharing undivided interests. The Great Māhele of 1848, instituted by King Kamehameha III, formally divided those interests into private parcels and introduced Western-style ownership.⁸ Securing title required filing formal claims and paying fees, steps many Native Hawaiians did not understand or could not afford.

The Kuleana Act of 1850 allowed commoners to claim fee-simple title to land they occupied. More recent research indicates commoners acquired approximately 195,948 acres through purchases of government land between 1850 and 1893, higher than earlier estimates of about 28,000 acres.⁹ Whatever the exact figure, the structural change was clear: Hawaiian land was now available for sale to foreigners. Scholar Jon Kamakawiwo’ole Osorio has called the Māhele the “single most critical dismemberment of Hawaiian society.” Crown Lands, roughly one million acres retained by the king, were declared inalienable in 1865. That protection would not last.

The Bayonet Constitution of 1887

The political dismantling of the monarchy began six years before the overthrow. In early 1887, a secret organization called the Hawaiian League formed with the explicit goal of annexing Hawaii to the United States. Its military arm, the Honolulu Rifles, was an armed militia of primarily white businessmen.¹⁰

On June 30, 1887, these forces compelled King David Kalākaua to dismiss his cabinet and sign a new constitution at gunpoint. He would call it the Bayonet Constitution. It stripped the monarch of personal authority and shifted power to the legislature and cabinet, whose ministers could only be removed by legislative vote. It also imposed property and income requirements for voting: to vote for members of the upper house, a resident needed taxable property worth at least $3,000 or an annual income of $600.¹¹ Those thresholds excluded the majority of Native Hawaiians and all Asian residents from meaningful participation and consolidated power among the white planter class. By 1892, Americans owned over 74 percent of the value of sugar estates in the islands, more than $32 million.

The 1893 Overthrow

Queen Liliʻuokalani took the throne in 1891 and sought to restore royal authority and Native Hawaiian voting rights through a new constitution. That effort prompted a group of American businessmen, organized as the Committee of Safety, to act.

On January 16, 1893, U.S. Minister John L. Stevens ordered more than 160 Marines from the USS Boston to land in Honolulu with artillery, ammunition, and medical supplies.² The next day the Committee of Safety declared a provisional government, and Stevens immediately recognized it. Faced with armed U.S. troops, Queen Liliʻuokalani issued a formal protest and a conditional surrender. Her words were precise: 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,” pending the day the U.S. government would “undo the action of its representatives and reinstate me.”¹²

President Grover Cleveland, inaugurated weeks later, sent former Congressman James Blount to investigate. The Blount Report concluded that U.S. diplomatic and military representatives had “abused their authority and were responsible for the change in government.”¹³ Stevens was recalled. The military commander in Hawaii was disciplined and forced to resign. In December 1893, Cleveland reported to Congress that the provisional government owed its existence entirely to the unauthorized landing of U.S. troops and that the United States had committed an “act of war” against a “feeble but independent State.”² The provisional government refused to yield, and Cleveland did not use force to restore the Queen.

Resistance, the Queen’s Imprisonment, and Annexation

Native Hawaiians did not accept the overthrow quietly. Robert Wilcox, who had already led an 1889 armed rebellion of 150 men against the Bayonet Constitution and been acquitted of treason by a jury, helped organize a larger effort in January 1895 to restore the Queen.¹⁴ About 400 royalists took up arms, having procured 288 Winchester rifles, 100 pistols, and 30,000 rounds of ammunition. The republic declared martial law and suppressed the uprising through engagements at Diamond Head and in Manoa Valley.¹⁵

Queen Liliʻuokalani was arrested for alleged knowledge of the plot, which was never proven.¹⁶ She was tried before a military tribunal in her own throne room, convicted, and sentenced to five years of hard labor plus a $5,000 fine, and forced to relinquish all future claims to the throne.¹⁷ The hard labor sentence was reduced to nearly eight months of imprisonment in an upstairs bedroom of Iolani Palace. During that time, fearing she would not survive, she translated the Kumulipo, a Hawaiian creation chant, from King Kalākaua’s text into English to preserve it.

Annexation came through political maneuvering rather than democratic consent. A treaty of annexation failed to secure the required two-thirds Senate majority, in part because Native Hawaiians organized a mass petition campaign. More than 21,269 signatures were delivered to the U.S. Senate in opposition.¹⁸ The treaty was defeated. But in 1898, amid the nationalism of the Spanish-American War, proponents bypassed the treaty process entirely, pushing through the Newlands Resolution, a joint resolution requiring only simple majorities. The House passed it 209 to 91; the Senate, 42 to 21.¹⁹ On August 12, 1898, approximately 1.8 million acres of Crown and Government Lands were transferred to the United States without the consent of or compensation to the Hawaiian people.

The Plantation Economy

The population collapse created a labor vacuum that sugar planters filled by importing contract workers on subsistence wages. By 1851, the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society had set up such a system.²⁰ The industry came to be dominated by the Big Five. At their peak, roughly eighty individuals, mostly white elites, owned nearly half of all land in the islands and controlled banks, insurance companies, transportation, and utilities.²¹

Planters recruited from China, Japan, Portugal, the Philippines, Korea, Puerto Rico, Russia, Spain, Norway, and Germany, deliberately drawing from multiple nations to prevent workers from organizing across ethnic lines. Workers lived in segregated camps and were paid different rates based on nationality. Days ran ten to twelve hours, six days a week, at less than six cents an hour. Women earned two-thirds of men’s wages. Workers faced violence or imprisonment for breaking their contracts. By 1929, forty-one sugar plantations employed over 52,000 workers, with Filipinos comprising nearly 70 percent of the adult male workforce.²² Strikes were met with strikebreakers, mass evictions, and violence. A Filipino-led walkout in 1924 was suppressed with twenty deaths, sixteen workers and four police, and sixty of seventy-six strikers tried in court were sent to prison. The 1946 strike, in which the ILWU organized more than 20,000 workers across thirty-three of thirty-four major plantations for seventy-nine days, finally forced the Big Five to make meaningful concessions.²⁰

Martial Law and Selective Internment During World War II

Hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, martial law was declared across the Hawaiian Islands. It remained in effect until October 24, 1944, the longest period in U.S. history that a civilian population lived under military rule.²³ The Commanding General became the military governor, holding executive, legislative, and judicial authority. Habeas corpus was suspended. Military provost courts replaced civilian courts, denying jury trials and limiting counsel. Those courts processed approximately 55,000 cases with a conviction rate of 99 percent in Honolulu alone during 1942–1943.²⁴ Mail, newspapers, and radio were censored. Civilians were registered, fingerprinted, and required to carry identification cards.

Approximately 158,000 residents of Japanese ancestry, more than a third of the territory’s population, lived in Hawaii at the time. Mass removal was deemed impractical because their labor was essential to the war effort, so the military practiced selective internment. Within forty-eight hours of the attack, Buddhist priests, Japanese-language school officials, newspaper editors, and community leaders were rounded up.²⁵ Over the course of the war, more than 2,000 men and women of Japanese ancestry were detained across thirteen confinement sites, including Sand Island and Honouliuli, without formal charges.²³ None were ever found guilty of sabotage, espionage, or any act against the United States. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act formally acknowledging that internment had been motivated by “racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” In 1946, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Duncan v. Kahanamoku that the wartime replacement of civilian courts with military tribunals had been illegal under the Organic Act governing the territory.²⁴

The Bombing of Kahoʻolawe

Kahoʻolawe, the smallest of Hawaii’s eight main islands, had served for centuries as a center for celestial navigation training, fishing, and religious ceremony. In May 1941, the U.S. Army leased portions of the island for one dollar per year. After Pearl Harbor, the military seized it entirely.²⁶

For nearly five decades, the Navy used Kahoʻolawe as a live-fire bombing range. Ships shelled it from the sea. Submarines tested live torpedoes against it. Aircraft dropped thousands of tons of ordnance on it; between 1968 and 1970 alone, 2,500 tons of bombs. In 1965, during Operation Sailor Hat, the Navy and the Defense Atomic Support Agency detonated 500-ton TNT charges on the shoreline to simulate nuclear blasts. The explosions created a crater thirty feet deep and cracked the island’s freshwater aquifer, permanently destroying its capacity to hold fresh water.²⁶

In 1976, a group known as the Kahoʻolawe Nine landed on the island in protest, sparking the Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana movement.²⁷ The island was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981. President George H.W. Bush ordered a halt to bombing in 1990, and Congress voted in 1993 to return the island to the State of Hawaii, appropriating $400 million for cleanup. The Navy officially transferred it in 2003. Much of the island remains contaminated with unexploded ordnance.

The 1959 Statehood Plebiscite

On June 27, 1959, Hawaii held a plebiscite on statehood. The ballot offered exactly two options: statehood or remaining a territory. There was no option for independence, a requirement that the United Nations’ own Resolution 742 of 1953 had stipulated for territories seeking self-government.²⁸

The official tally was 132,773 in favor, 7,971 opposed. Proponents cited a 94 percent approval rate. Of the 381,859 eligible voters, only about 35 percent actually voted for statehood, and more than 30,000 voters who cast ballots in the general election abstained from the statehood question entirely. On the island of Niʻihau, which was entirely Native Hawaiian, the vote ran 70 to 18 against.²⁸ Despite these circumstances, the United Nations removed Hawaii from its list of Non-Self-Governing Territories later that year.²⁹ President Eisenhower signed the Hawaii Admission Act, and Hawaii became the fiftieth state on August 21, 1959.³⁰

The Ceded Lands Dispute

The approximately 1.8 million acres of Crown and Government Lands seized after the 1893 overthrow, combined by the provisional government in 1895, and transferred to the United States at annexation remain a central grievance. Under the 1959 Admission Act, these ceded lands were conveyed to the State of Hawaii in a public trust, with revenues designated for five purposes: public schools, the betterment of Native Hawaiians, farm and home ownership, public improvements, and public use.³¹

The Office of Hawaiian Affairs receives an interim annual payment of $15.1 million from trust revenues, though OHA contends its fair share is closer to $35 million. A 2012 settlement resolved back revenue claims from 1978 to 2012, transferring ten parcels in Kaka’ako Makai to OHA, valued at roughly $200 million.³¹ The Hawaii legislature sold 46,594 acres of Crown and Government Lands during the brief Republican period of 1895–1898 alone.³²

In 2008, the Hawaii Supreme Court imposed a moratorium on transferring ceded lands, citing their illegal seizure. The U.S. Supreme Court vacated that ruling on procedural grounds in Hawaii v. Office of Hawaiian Affairs (2009), holding that the 1993 Apology Resolution did not create a legal cause of action for land claims.³³ The Hawaii legislature responded by passing Act 176, which requires a two-thirds majority in both chambers to approve any sale or transfer of public trust lands, effectively maintaining the moratorium.³²

The 1993 Apology and the Unresolved Sovereignty Question

On November 23, 1993, President Bill Clinton signed Public Law 103-150, the Apology Resolution, marking the 100th anniversary of the overthrow. Congress formally apologized to Native Hawaiians, stating that the overthrow was “illegal,” that U.S. Minister Stevens had conspired with non-Hawaiian residents, that the insurrection would have failed without American military support, and that the Native Hawaiian people “never directly relinquished their claims to inherent sovereignty” through any plebiscite or referendum.³⁴ The resolution passed the Senate 65 to 34.³⁵

Section 3 of the resolution explicitly states that “nothing in this Joint Resolution is intended to serve as a settlement of any claims against the United States.” For some, the apology was a meaningful step toward reconciliation. For advocates of full independence, it was an acknowledgment without remedy.³⁰

The sovereignty question has moved through several channels since. The Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act, known as the Akaka Bill, proposed a government-to-government relationship between the United States and Native Hawaiians modeled on federal recognition of American Indian tribes. The House passed a version in 2010 by a vote of 245 to 164, but it never became law.³⁶ In 2018, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reversed its earlier position and endorsed federal recognition, acknowledging that its 2006 stance had failed to recognize Native Hawaiians as an indigenous people.³⁷

The Native Hawaiian community itself remains divided. Some pursue federal recognition as a practical path to protect health care, housing, education, and land rights. Others view it as diminished sovereignty, a substitute for the independence they believe international law entitles them to. Some scholars and advocates maintain that the Hawaiian Kingdom, never lawfully extinguished, continues to exist as an occupied state, and that any framework short of full de-occupation is inadequate.³⁸ The dispute over who Hawaii belongs to, and on what terms, is still open.

1
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2
NEA. The Illegal Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom Government
3
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4
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5
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6
Punahou Bulletin. Troubled Times: Scenes of Death and Carnage
7
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8
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9
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10
Iolani Palace. Bayonet Constitution and Illegal Overthrow
11
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12
Kamehameha Schools. The Truth Behind the Illegal Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom
13
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14
Kamehameha Schools. Historical Snapshots: Robert Wilcox and the 1889 Rebellion
15
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16
Onipaa. Her Story
17
Iolani Palace. Queen’s Imprisonment
18
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19
Bill of Rights Institute. The Annexation of Hawaii
20
APWU. Labor Organizing Changed the Hawaiian Islands Forever
21
Densho. Strikers, Scabs, and Sugar Mongers
22
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23
National Park Service. Honouliuli History and Culture
24
Densho Encyclopedia. Martial Law in Hawaii
25
Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai’i. The Untold Story
26
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27
Ka Wai Ola. Kahoʻolawe: A Sacred Island’s Journey
28
Statehood Hawaii. Plebiscite
29
University of Hawaii at Manoa Library. Statehood
30
White House Historical Association. Hawaii and the White House
31
State of Hawaii Land Use Commission. Public Land Trust Summary
32
Civil Beat. What Are the Ceded Lands of Hawaii
33
Harvard Law Review. Aloha ‘Aina: Native Hawaiian Land Restitution
34
U.S. Government Publishing Office. Public Law 103-150
35
U.S. Congress. S.J.Res.19
36
U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources. Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act
37
Civil Beat. Civil Rights Panel Backs Federal Recognition for Native Hawaiians
38
International Association of Democratic Lawyers. IADL Resolution on the US Occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom