Initial research for this Special Issue was funded by The Nation Institute.

II

On March 29, 1893, two months after the overthrow of Queen Lili'uokalani and only a few weeks after the second inauguration of Democratic President Grover Cleveland, whose first term had been followed by the presidency of Benjamin Harrison, a Republican, there arrived in Honolulu a courtly, silver-haired gentleman named James Blount, sent by the new President to find out what had really happened in the islands. The political circumstances of Blount's mission were these. Two days after the overthrow, representatives of the self-appointed Provisional Government--essentially the leaders of a longstanding movement for annexation in a new guise--had set off for Washington carrying with them a well-developed petition for annexation to the United States, which they had every reason to believe would be warmly welcomed, but not carrying the representatives of the Kingdom, who were forced to wait for the next crossing, several weeks later, to present their case. Annexation was a cherished ambition of many prominent Republicans, in particular Benjamin Harrison's expansionist Secretary of State, James Blaine, a long-term associate of the American minister to Hawai'i, John Stevens. The American minister, it would turn out, had not only, on his own initiative, recognized the Provisional Government even before it was in full possession of the buildings traditionally considered to warrant such recognition, but had conspired with its leading members beforehand to encourage their revolutionary plans. Barely a month after the first outlines of the American-led revolt had stirred Honolulu and with only seventeen days of the Republican Administration left to go, on February 15 a treaty of annexation was whisked before the US Senate for ratification. Democrat Cleveland was appalled. If the United States was to depart "from unbroken American tradition in providing for the addition to our territory of islands of the sea more than two thousand miles removed from our nearest coast [the] transaction should be clear and free from suspicion," the President told Congress later. Five days after taking the oath of office, on March 9, 1893, Cleveland withdrew the treaty from the Senate for "re-examination." Two days later, he summoned Blount.

The Blount Report would be a remarkable government document in any era. A 1,400-page model of open diplomacy, it contains what appears to be the entire diplomatic correspondence between the Hawaiian Kingdom and the United States from the 1820s on, including communications between the State Department and its ministers in Honolulu of a sort that would never be published today, transcripts of Blount's interviews with the principals, analyses of the Kingdom's successive Constitutions, learned articles of the period on important aspects of Hawaiian life from health to population, newspaper reports, public speeches, budgets, sugar export statistics, stockholder data for the leading corporations--in short, everything an independent observer would need to arrive at an opinion about what had taken place and why. It is a primary source for understanding the events of the Hawaiian revolution even today. Its moral heft is no less impressive than its physical heft. "Colonel" Blount was nobody's pawn. A former Confederate officer, he had endured the Yankee occupation of his hometown of Macon, Georgia, after the Civil War and the lesser indignities that came from representing it in Congress for twenty years after Georgia was readmitted to the Union, rising to become the chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee before he retired. Thinking that Blount was a friend, but not taking chances, the leaders of the Provisional Government and Minister Stevens were unpleasantly surprised when they rowed out to greet his vessel with the news that they had already rented him, as he would report, a "house, well furnished [with servants and a carriage and horses]...[for which] I could pay...just what I chose, from nothing up," and he declined. He also declined the Queen's offer of a mere carriage ride into the city. Sensing at once that "with the minds of Hawaiian citizens...full of uncertainty as to what the presence of American troops, the American flag, and the American protectorate implied" no one would speak with him freely, he had the flag hauled down and the troops returned to their ships, not dissuaded even by an urgent visit from Stevens and one of the annexationists who informed him with "intense gravity...that he knew beyond doubt...that if the flag and troops were removed" troops from a Japanese ship in the harbor would rush in to restore the Queen. "I was not impressed much with these statements," Blount noted wryly in his opening paragraphs. Details dispensed with, he set to work.

The heart of the Blount Report is a lucid and often droll thirty-nine-page, first-person narrative addressed to Cleveland's Secretary of State, W.Q. Gresham, describing some of his encounters and his conclusions. Whether it was his character, his experience or simply his chosen position outside the literally interrelated circles of power in Honolulu, this well-seasoned Southerner seems to have been as immune to rhetoric as he was to manipulation, particularly rhetoric draping racial and economic issues in the plumage of democracy. What Blount told Washington, in brief, was (1) the pretense of the new leaders that it was the Queen's moving to change the Constitution (the alleged "cause" of the coup) rather than their dethroning her that was illegal overlooked the racial truth that the Constitution she was trying to change was the one forced on her predecessor six years before for the very purpose of shifting power from the native monarchy to the white elite; (2) "the controlling element in the white population is connected with the sugar industry.... Annexation has for its charm the complete abolition of all duties on...exports to the United States"; (3) American diplomatic and military resources were strongly implicated in the coup; and (4) the natives didn't want it. "The testimony [even] of leading annexationists is that if the question of annexation was submitted to a popular vote...[it] would be defeated," he wrote.

The Blount Report's unsparing assessment of the US role in the overthrow was far from universally welcomed. Submitted to Congress by Cleveland in a lengthy message of December 18, 1893, in which he described the coup as "an act of war... [against] the Government of a feeble but friendly and confiding people...which a due regard for our national character as well as the rights of the injured people requires we should endeavor to repair"--words the visitor can find emblazoned on a rock in President Grover Cleveland Court in downtown Honolulu today--it became a cornerstone of the anti-annexationist position in the national struggle over Manifest Destiny taking place at the time. It was countered two months later by another voluminous document known as the Morgan Report, after the annexationist chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democrat John Tyler Morgan of Alabama, who established to his own satisfaction, though not to that of all the members of his committee, just what he set out to establish, among other points: that Blount's appointment to Hawai'i without the consent of the Senate was illegal in the first place, and that no illegalities had been committed by US representatives or armed forces in Hawai'i in the second place.

"Manifest Destiny" was the catchphrase for a whole confluence of late nineteenth-century racial, economic and national defense issues that divided the public as intensely as any such issues since slavery. With its dark-skinned natives, burgeoning sugar plantations and strategic location, Hawai'i was at the center of the debates. While The Nation, along with Harper's Weekly and a number of influential papers across the country, was passionately in the anti-annexationist column [see boxes, pages 18 and 19], other papers, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Sun, were just as eager for it to happen. The Anti-Imperialist League, with prominent members, sent speakers all over the country. Congress prevaricated. Despite his original hope of restoring Lili'uokalani to her throne, Cleveland appears to have been stymied by her alleged initial refusal to grant amnesty to those who conspired against her and by the stalemate in Congress. With their hopes for annexation stalled, on July 4, 1894, the leaders of the coup, who had been calling themselves the Provisional Government, renamed themselves the Republic of Hawai'i, further complicating efforts at US intervention, which they now claimed would be interference with the internal affairs of a sovereign state. In January 1895, after an unsuccessful native uprising against the government of which she was accused of having prior knowledge, Lili'uokalani was tried, convicted and imprisoned in 'Iolani Palace, which further strengthened the new government's position. In spring 1897, when expansionist Republican William McKinley succeeded Cleveland, the linked annexationists in Honolulu and Washington resumed their campaign. Still unable to achieve the two-thirds Senate majority required for ratification of annexation by treaty, Congressional annexationists attempted to acquire the islands by joint resolution of both houses--which also stalled until July 1898, two months after Commodore Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay, when it went through.

To those who had resisted the logic of Capt. Alfred Mahan, whose The Influence of Sea Power Upon History in 1890 had been followed by a pointed discussion in Forum titled "Hawaii and Our Future Sea Power" in 1893, the importance of our troops stopping over in Honolulu on their way to the Philippines now spoke for itself. There never was any treaty. On August 12, 1898, in a formal ceremony, Hawai'i was officially annexed, the land seized from the Kingdom in the 1893 coup included. In 1900 it became a territory. In 1959 in a referendum in which the only choice was whether the voter was for or against statehood--the restoration of the Kingdom or any other form of independence was not an option--it became the fiftieth state. The Blount Report has been challenged, ignored and, doubtless some would argue, transcended, but it has never been convincingly refuted. The issues of the illegality of the overthrow of the government of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the legality of the governments that followed have never really been settled.

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