Who was Queen Liliʻuokalani?

The last monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom

Liliʻuokalani was the sister of King Kalākaua, and she became queen of the Hawaiian Kingdom when he died in 1891, the last sovereign to rule the islands before the kingdom fell. The kingdom she inherited had been founded in 1795, when Kamehameha I united Oʻahu, Maui, Molokaʻi and Lānaʻi, joined in 1810 by Kauaʻi and Niʻihau, and recognized as an independent state by the United States and the powers of Europe.

She ruled from ʻIolani Palace in downtown Honolulu, the seat of government her predecessors had built after Kamehameha III moved the court and capital there in 1845, and she lived nearby at Washington Place, the house that still stands beside the State Capitol. Both buildings remain open to visitors today, within walking distance of each other.

By the time she took the throne, the islands around her had changed sharply. Disease brought by traders and whalers, among them smallpox, measles and tuberculosis, had reduced the Native Hawaiian population, while American missionary families built businesses in Honolulu and sugar plantations drew workers from Asia, reshaping the kingdom's economy and its people.

A queen who wanted to restore her people's power

Six years before she became queen, in 1887, a militia of American settlers called the Honolulu Rifles had forced Kalākaua to accept a new constitution under threat of force. Known as the Bayonet Constitution, it stripped the king of the power to dismiss his ministers without the legislature's approval, raised the property qualification for voting and denied the vote to Asians, who made up a large share of the population.

Liliʻuokalani inherited a throne weakened by that document and set out to replace it with a constitution that would restore the monarch's powers. She toured the islands to build support for the change, a journey that took her to communities across the kingdom rather than keeping her in the capital, meeting subjects who had watched royal authority erode.

She also received a long petition from Hawaiian subjects supporting a new constitution, evidence of how widely the loss of royal authority was felt outside Honolulu's business community. That effort alarmed the same settler interests who had organized the Bayonet Constitution eight years earlier, and it set the stage for the confrontation that followed within two years.

The overthrow of 1893

In January 1893 a group of Honolulu residents, most of them of American descent, organized as the Committee of Safety with the goal of deposing the queen and seeking annexation to the United States. At their request, the American minister John L. Stevens had 162 sailors and Marines landed from the USS Boston on 16 January to take up positions around the city.

The next day, 17 January, the Committee proclaimed the end of the monarchy and declared a Provisional Government. The troops never entered the palace grounds and fired no shot, but their presence was decisive: the queen had no army of her own to call on, and the police did not rally to her side.

To avoid bloodshed, Liliʻuokalani yielded. In her written statement she said she did so "to the superior force of the United States of America," under protest, until the United States should undo the action of its representatives and restore her to the throne. Control of ʻIolani Palace, where she had ruled, passed to the new government.

What Washington found

President Grover Cleveland sent an investigator, James Blount, to look into what had happened, and his report of July 1893 concluded that American diplomatic and military representatives had abused their authority and bore responsibility for the queen's fall. Cleveland told Congress that the honorable course was to undo the wrong and restore the previous government so far as practicable.

A Senate committee led by John Tyler Morgan then produced a conflicting report that cleared Stevens and the troops of wrongdoing. Cleveland's efforts to restore the queen stalled in the face of that disagreement, and the United States went on to recognize the Provisional Government, and later the Republic of Hawaiʻi that the Committee declared in 1894.

The two reports still frame the argument today: one side points to Blount's finding of American responsibility, the other to Morgan's defense of the men involved. Visitors who want the fuller record can follow it at the Bishop Museum, which holds collections from the kingdom era and its fall.

Arrest, trial and imprisonment

In January 1895, after an armed attempt by royalists to restore the monarchy failed, Liliʻuokalani was arrested at Washington Place. She was tried by a military tribunal set up under the Republic and imprisoned for nine months in a room of ʻIolani Palace, the building where she had once governed, now held by the government that had removed her.

Two years later, in 1897, Hawaiian organizations gathered twenty-one thousand two hundred sixty-nine signatures on a petition opposing annexation to the United States, more than half the Native Hawaiian population of the time. A treaty of annexation that President William McKinley signed that year failed to win the two-thirds support it needed in the Senate.

Congress annexed the Republic anyway, by joint resolution on 7 July 1898, and American troops raised the flag of the United States over the palace that August; the queen and many Hawaiian nobles stayed away. The islands became the Territory of Hawaiʻi in 1900 and remained one until statehood arrived in 1959.

Her legacy in Honolulu today

Liliʻuokalani lived at Washington Place for the rest of her life, and the house still stands beside the State Capitol in downtown Honolulu, a short walk from the palace where she was imprisoned. In 1993, on the hundredth anniversary of the overthrow, Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed the Apology Resolution.

The resolution acknowledges that the overthrow occurred with the active participation of agents and citizens of the United States, and that the Native Hawaiian people never directly gave up their claims to sovereignty over their national lands, whether through the monarchy or by any plebiscite or referendum. That finding sits at the root of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement active in the islands today.

Visitors can follow her story at the places she lived and was held: a tour of ʻIolani Palace covers her reign and imprisonment, and the story of the kingdom fills in the years before and after her. The flag of Hawaiʻi flies alone, without the American flag, at the palace and at only a few other sites in the islands, a detail worth noticing.