The Kingdom and the Republic
AMERICA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Series editors:
Brian DeLay, Steven Hahn, Amy Dru Stanley
America in the Nineteenth Century proposes a rigorous rethinking of this most formative period in US history. Books in the series will be wide-ranging and eclectic, with an interest in politics at all levels, culture and capitalism, race and slavery, law, gender, and the environment, and regional and transnational history. The series aims to expand the scope of nineteenth-century historiography by bringing classic questions into dialogue with innovative perspectives, approaches, and methodologies.
THE
KINGDOM
AND THE
REPUBLIC
Sovereign Hawai‘i and the Early United States
NOELANI ARISTA
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved.
Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Arista, Noelani, author.
Title: The kingdom and the republic: sovereign Hawai‘i and the early United States / Noelani Arista.
Other titles: America in the nineteenth century.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [2019] | Series: America in the nineteenth century | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018022539 | ISBN 9780812250732 (hardcopy: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Hawaii—Politics and government—To 1893. | Hawaii—Foreign relations—United States—19th century. | United States—Foreign relations—Hawaii—19th century.
Classification: LCC DU627.1 .A75 2019 | DDC 327.730969/0904—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022539
For my father, Vicente Arista, and my mother, Rose Marie Arista No ku‘u kāne ‘o Chad Hashimoto a me nā lei a kāua Hi‘iakalehuakaulei lāua ‘o Ka‘ulawena No ke aloha.
CONTENTS
Introduction. He Ao ‘Ōlelo: A World of Words
Chapter 1. The Political Economy of Mana: Obligation, Debt, and Trade
Chapter 2. Creating an Island Imaginary: Hawai‘i’s American Origins
Chapter 3. The Isles Shall Wait for His Law: Planting the American Congregational Mission
Chapter 4. Hawaiian Women, Kapu, and the Emergence of Kānāwai
Chapter 5. Libel, Law, and Justice Before the ‘Aha ‘ōlelo
Appendix. Textual Sources and Research Methods
INTRODUCTION
He Ao ‘Ōlelo
A World of Words
I ka ‘ōlelo nō ke ola, i ka ‘ōlelo nō ka make
In speech there is life, in speech death.
—On the mana that inheres in chiefly oral pronouncement
This is a study of a world of words, world-making words, and how historians have written—or not—about them. We begin right in the middle of a dramatic expansion of this world. It is December 1827. An ‘aha ‘ōlelo, a Hawaiian chiefly council, has met for several days on the matter of an American missionary, Rev. William Richards, accused of libel by a British whaleship captain, William Buckle, and the British consul, Richard Charlton. Rev. William Richards, according to the British men, had libeled Captain Buckle when he wrote back to the home office of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in Boston, Massachusetts, describing the captain’s “purchase” in 1825 of a Hawaiian woman named Leoiki. Excerpts of this letter and others like it were then published in various missionary and American newspapers as a public airing of the violations of Christian morality occurring between American and European sailors and Hawaiian women.
It wasn’t Christian morality that had British consul Charlton and Captain Buckle concerned. It was, instead, the accusation that Captain Buckle had bought the Hawaiian woman, Leoiki. Such a claim opened Captain Buckle to charges of trading in slaves, a violation of Britain’s 1807 Slave Trade Act. Thus, words about a Hawaiian woman, written in a letter from Hawai‘i, edited and rewritten in New England, printed in American newspapers, and read in England, brought the British, American, and Hawaiian legal worlds into collision.
On this day in 1827, a group of American Congregationalist missionaries was summoned from their new settlements across the archipelago by the ali‘i (chiefs) to appear before them on O‘ahu. In this ‘aha ‘ōlelo, spoken words carried the force of law. And words were the central issue in this dispute. While the British men chose to focus on the parts of Richards’ letter that told of Leoiki’s sale, for Richards, what was far more important about the letter and other reports like it from the mission were their detailed accounts of the “outrages” or attacks on mission stations by British sailors and whalers over a kapu (chiefly legal pronouncement) that prohibited Hawaiian women from traveling to ships. Serving as his own defense, Rev. Richards gave a verbal performance illustrating his already ripe capacity for political expression in the Hawaiian language, though he had lived