Liliʻuokalani: The Queen Who Outlasted Her Kingdom
In 1895 the last sovereign of Hawaiʻi was held prisoner in an upstairs bedroom of her own palace, denied books and newspapers. She had paper and a pencil. With them she composed songs — among them the hymn *Ke Aloha o Ka Haku*, the Queen's Prayer — and translated the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian creation chant her great-grandmother had carried orally, believing she would never leave the building alive. Her kingdom had been taken; she spent the confinement making sure what lay beneath it survived.
Born at Punchbowl
She was born on 2 September 1838 in a grass hut at the base of Punchbowl Crater in Honolulu, and named Lydia Liliʻu Loloku Walania Kamakaʻeha — a string of words meaning smarting, tearful, burning pain and sore eyes, for an eye infection afflicting the Kuhina Nui Elizabeth Kīnaʻu at the time. Her parents were Analea Keohokālole and Caesar Kapaʻakea; following the Hawaiian custom of hānai she was given at birth to Abner Pākī and Laura Kōnia.
At four she entered the Chiefs' Children's School, later the Royal School, run by the American missionaries Amos Starr and Juliette Montague Cooke. The curriculum was serious — algebra, geometry, physics, history, bookkeeping, music and English composition — and she finished third in her final examinations on 5 May 1853, fluent in Hawaiian and English. In 1862 she married John Owen Dominis, the Boston-connected son of a sea captain; the marriage was reportedly unhappy. She had no biological children and raised three hānai children.
Nā Lani ʻEhā
Music was not an accomplishment but a vocation. "To compose was as natural to me as to breathe," she wrote. By the Hawaiʻi State Archives' count she wrote more than 150 songs, played guitar, piano, organ, ʻukulele and zither, sang alto, and was an expert sight-reader. With her siblings David Kalākaua, William Pitt Leleiōhoku and Miriam Likelike she formed Nā Lani ʻEhā, the Four Heavenly Ones, whose compositions became the classical repertoire of Hawaiian music.
In 1866, at twenty-eight, she wrote *He Mele Lāhui Hawaiʻi* at Kamehameha V's request; it served as the national anthem until her brother's *Hawaiʻi Ponoʻī* replaced it. In 1878 she wrote a lover's farewell called *Aloha ʻOe*. Transcribed and printed while she was a prisoner, it became the most recognisable Hawaiian song in the world and, in the process, changed meaning entirely: a private goodbye turned into the sound of a country being lost.
Regent, and the Bayonet
She governed before she reigned. As regent during Kalākaua's 1881 world tour she met a smallpox epidemic by closing all ports, halting passenger vessels out of Oʻahu and quarantining the infected; the outbreak still produced 789 cases and 289 deaths, overwhelmingly among Native Hawaiians. She visited the leprosy settlement at Kalaupapa, made Father Damien a knight commander of the Royal Order of Kalākaua, and in 1886 founded a savings bank for women in Honolulu and the Liliʻuokalani Educational Society to fund the schooling of Hawaiian girls.
In April 1887 she sailed as royal envoy to Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, meeting President Cleveland en route and receiving an audience at Buckingham Palace. The European tour was abandoned when news arrived that armed settlers had forced Kalākaua to sign the Bayonet Constitution under threat of death, stripping the monarchy of power and the vote from most Hawaiians and all Asians.
Two Years
Kalākaua died in San Francisco on 20 January 1891. On 29 January Liliʻuokalani took the oath, becoming the first and only queen regnant of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Her reign lasted one week short of two years, and the legislature consumed most of it — the "Longest Legislature," 171 days, four parties, seven no-confidence resolutions, four of her cabinets voted out.
In January 1893 she moved to promulgate a new constitution, drafted with the legislators Joseph Nāwahī and William Pūnohu White, restoring authority to the crown and the franchise to disenfranchised Hawaiians and Asians. It had the support of two-thirds of registered voters and none from her own cabinet. A thirteen-man Committee of Safety — mostly Americans and Hawaiian subjects of American descent, drawn from the business class and led by Lorrin A. Thurston — moved to depose her. Her marshal asked for warrants and martial law; the cabinet refused. On 17 January marines from the USS *Boston* landed under the American minister John L. Stevens and took positions around the capital. They never fired a shot; as the historian William Russ observed, the injunction against any fighting "made it impossible for the monarchy to protect itself." The queen yielded — not to Sanford Dole's provisional government but, explicitly and temporarily, to the United States.
Washington half listened. Cleveland's investigator James Blount reported the overthrow illegal, and Cleveland told Congress the new regime was "a mere executive council, or oligarchy, without the consent of the people." Restoration foundered on amnesty for the plotters, and the Senate's rival Morgan Report absolved everyone except the queen.
Prisoner in Her Own Palace
After the failed royalist rising of January 1895, rifles were found at Washington Place and Liliʻuokalani was arrested on 16 January. Tried in her own throne room on 8 February by a military commission, she was sentenced to five years' hard labour and fined $5,000. She had already signed an abdication on 24 January to save six condemned men, Wilcox and Nowlein among them: "For myself, I would have chosen death rather to have signed it." Her sentence was commuted to palace imprisonment, and she was pardoned on 13 October 1896.
The Long Protest
She then fought for two decades in the register available to her: paper. She published her Kumulipo translation in 1897 and *Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen* in 1898. In 1897 she attended McKinley's inauguration on a Republic of Hawaii passport and filed a formal protest with the Secretary of State against the annexation treaty. That summer Hui Aloha ʻĀina gathered over 21,000 signatures against annexation and Hui Kālaiʻāina another 17,000 — the Kūʻē petitions, which killed the treaty in the Senate. Congress annexed Hawaiʻi anyway by joint resolution in July 1898. At the annexation ceremony on 12 August at ʻIolani Palace she shuttered herself at Washington Place, and most Native Hawaiians stayed away with her. She sued the United States under the Fifth Amendment in 1909 for the seized Crown Lands and lost. In 1911 the Territory granted her a pension of $1,250 a month, and never addressed the legality of anything.
Why Liliʻuokalani Is Called a Genius
The strongest claim is musical, and it is a claim about craft rather than intellect. More than 150 compositions, fluency on five instruments, expert sight-reading, and the ability to write inside two systems at once — Hawaiian mele tradition and Western harmony and notation — is a technical achievement of a high order, and *Aloha ʻOe* is one of the few songs from any small nation to become globally standard. The rarer feat is what she did with that craft under duress: imprisoned and denied books, she used a pencil to fix in writing the Kumulipo, an oral genealogical chant her family had carried for generations, preserving a document Hawaiian scholarship still depends on. That is not sentiment but deliberate cultural salvage, performed by someone who expected to die.
The counter-case is straightforward. As a ruler she was outmanoeuvred: her move to promulgate a constitution by decree in January 1893 handed her enemies the pretext they wanted, her own cabinet refused to back her, and she rejected the amnesty terms that might have restored her throne while Cleveland was still willing. She faced a faction with warships behind it and few good options, but the political judgement was not the equal of the artistic gift. Liliʻuokalani was a first-rate composer and archivist of her own civilisation, and a queen who lost.
Legacy
She died at Washington Place on 11 November 1917, aged seventy-nine; the bells of Kawaiahaʻo and St Andrew's tolled seventy-nine times, and two hundred people drew her catafalque up Nuʻuanu Avenue on 1,200-foot ropes. The Liliʻuokalani Trust still operates and published *The Queen's Songbook* in 1999. The Kūʻē petitions remain documentary proof that annexation was imposed on a people who said no in writing, by name, in their tens of thousands. Her songs are sung daily in the islands she could not keep.
Achievements
- Notable work: He Mele Lahui Hawaii
- Worked as writer, composer and monarch
