1838–1917 · United States · 20th century
Liliʻuokalani (1838–1917) was the last queen of Hawaiʻi, reigning from 1891 to 1893, until the monarchy was overthrown. She was also a writer and songwriter, and Aloha ʻOe is hers. The site catalogue has this song in a version for voice and piano, at advanced level.
Liliʻuokalani was born on 2 September 1838 in Honolulu, on Oʻahu, the child of Analea Keohokālole and Caesar Kapaʻakea. Her birthplace was a big grass hut belonging to her mother's father, ʻAikanaka, beneath Punchbowl Crater.
At birth she was named Lydia Liliʻu Loloku Walania Kamakaʻeha. By Hawaiian custom a child is named for an event linked to the birth: at that time the regent Elizabeth Kīnaʻu had an eye infection, and she made up the name from words meaning smarting, tearful, a burning pain and sore eyes. The American missionary Levi Chamberlain noted in his journal that the girl was baptised on 23 December.
Her family belonged to the aliʻi, the Hawaiian nobility, and were distant relatives of the ruling Kamehameha dynasty. She was the third of the children who survived; among her siblings by birth were the brothers William Pitt Leleiohoku II, David Kalākaua and James Kaliokalani, and the sisters Miriam Likelike, Anna Kaʻiulani and Kaʻiminaʻauao. Following the hānai custom of informal adoption, Abner Pākī and his wife Laura Kōnia took her in as a newborn, and she was raised alongside their daughter Bernice Pauahi.
She started school in 1842 at the Chiefs' Children's School, which was later renamed the Royal School. Kamehameha III formally declared that its pupils could be considered for the throne. She studied in English with her two elder brothers, James Kaliokalani and David Kalākaua, and thirteen royal cousins, under the American missionary couple Amos Starr Cooke and Juliette Montague Cooke. Subjects included music, English composition, bookkeeping, history, geography, physics, algebra, geometry, arithmetic, spelling and reading.
The Cookes' boarding school closed around 1850, so Liliʻuokalani moved to a day school that was also called the Royal School, headed by Reverend Edward G. Beckwith. In her final exams, on 5 May 1853, she came third. In 1865 she attended Oahu College informally, studying with Susan Tolman Mills, who went on to be a cofounder of Mills College in California.
The question of marriage arose early. Around 1857 she was briefly betrothed to William Charles Lunalilo, a fellow enthusiast for writing music, but she ended it because King Kamehameha IV pressed her to and the Bishops objected. Her next attachment was to John Owen Dominis, born in America, who was secretary to King Kamehameha IV.
The engagement to Dominis lasted from 1860 to 1862. The wedding was put off until 16 September 1862, in memory of the late Prince Albert Kamehameha, child of Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma. The Anglican ceremony took place at the Bishops' home, and the newlyweds settled at Washington Place in Honolulu, the Dominis family residence. Dominis was later made Governor of Oʻahu and Maui. They remained childless, but Liliʻuokalani adopted three children in the hānai tradition.
Having married, she remained at court under Kamehameha IV, and then under Kamehameha V, who succeeded his brother. In 1864 she and Pauahi assisted Princess Victoria in founding the Kaʻahumanu Society, a women-led body for aiding the old and sick. Kamehameha V asked her for a new national anthem, and in 1866 she wrote He Mele Lāhui Hawaiʻi. The anthem stayed in use until her brother's piece, Hawaiʻi Ponoʻī, took its place.
In 1874, after Lunalilo died without an heir, the legislature elected Liliʻuokalani's brother David Kalākaua as king. He gave royal titles to his brothers and sisters. In 1877, after the death of her younger brother Leleiohoku II, Liliʻuokalani was proclaimed heir apparent, and Kalākaua at that time changed her name to Liliʻuokalani, replacing her given name Liliʻu and her baptismal name Lydia. In 1878 she sailed with her husband to California for her health.
In 1881 Kalākaua travelled round the world, and Liliʻuokalani acted as regent. A smallpox epidemic was among her first duties: after consulting her brother's ministers she shut every port, stopped passenger ships leaving Oʻahu and set up a quarantine. That September she visited the Kalaupapa leprosy settlement on Molokaʻi, and for her brother she honoured Father Damien with the rank of knight commander in the Royal Order of Kalākaua. In 1886 she set up a women's savings bank in Honolulu and an educational society that helped fund the schooling of Hawaiian girls.
In April 1887 Kalākaua dispatched a delegation to London for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, including Queen Kapiʻolani, Princess Liliʻuokalani and her husband, and others. After landing at San Francisco they crossed the United States, and in Washington President Grover Cleveland received them. At Buckingham Palace in London, Queen Victoria granted an audience to Kapiʻolani and Liliʻuokalani. Soon after the Jubilee came news of the Bayonet Constitution, which Kalākaua had signed under duress, with his life threatened; they called off their European tour and went back to Hawaiʻi.
Liliʻuokalani came to the throne in January 1891 after her brother died, the only woman to rule the Hawaiian Kingdom as monarch. Early on she asked the ministers who had served under her brother to step down. They declined and sought a ruling from the Supreme Court; every justice but one backed the queen, and the ministers left office. On 9 March, with the consent of the House of Nobles, she designated her niece Kaʻiulani as successor. In August her husband Dominis died; once she became queen he had received the title Prince Consort and the governorship of Oʻahu back.
The legislature sat for an unprecedented 171 days, between May 1892 and January 1893. No majority formed among its four parties. It discussed demands for a new constitution and bills on a lottery and opium licences. The queen's quarrel with legislators centred on her cabinet: over the session they brought seven no-confidence resolutions and removed four of her cabinets. On 13 January 1893 she appointed a new cabinet headed by Samuel Parker, planning to proclaim a new constitution at a time when the legislature was not sitting.
Liliʻuokalani was sent petitions for a rewrite of the 1887 constitution by the day's two leading parties. With two-thirds of registered voters behind her, she resolved to set the existing constitution aside, yet her cabinet refused to back her. The queen drafted a new one together with Joseph Nāwahī and William Pūnohu White, both legislators; it would have returned authority to the monarchy and extended the franchise to native Hawaiians and Asians of limited means. Ministers and close friends opposed it and failed to talk her out of it.
The queen's opponents, among them citizens of Hawaiʻi, the United States, Britain and Germany, were angered by her attempt to issue a new constitution and resolved to end the monarchy and seek Hawaiʻi's annexation by the United States. Lorrin A. Thurston and William Owen Smith led them. They set up the Committee of Safety, supported chiefly by the American and European business community. Most leaders were Americans and Europeans who were also subjects of the Kingdom, and they included legislators, officials and a Supreme Court justice.
Royalists responded with a Committee of Law and Order of their own, and on 16 January 1893 they gathered in the square by the palace. Both the queen and those backing her dropped the idea of issuing a constitution by themselves. That same day, detectives warned Marshal Charles Burnett Wilson of the coup being prepared, and he asked for arrest warrants for the 13 members of the Committee of Safety's council. Fearing things would escalate, the queen's cabinet turned him down again and again. A force of US Marines from the USS Boston, together with two detachments of American sailors, landed in Honolulu; they stayed out of the palace grounds and did not fire.
The queen was deposed on 17 January 1893. John L. Stevens, the US minister, recognised the provisional government under Sanford B. Dole as the de facto authority. For the time being the queen gave up her throne, yielding it to the United States instead of Dole's government, hoping the Americans would restore sovereignty to its rightful holder. ʻIolani Palace became the seat of the new government's executive branch. On 19 January the queen sent President Benjamin Harrison a letter protesting the proposed annexation. On 1 February, at the provisional government's request, Stevens declared Hawaiʻi a US protectorate, and the Stars and Stripes went up above the palace.
Grover Cleveland began his second term on 4 March and commissioned James Henderson Blount to look into the events. Blount's report called the overthrow illegal and found that Stevens and the American troops had acted improperly. The Senate's own inquiry, which ended with the Morgan Report of 26 February 1894, took a different view, finding Stevens and everyone except the queen not guilty of responsibility for the overthrow. On 16 November Cleveland sent Albert S. Willis with an offer to return the crown to Liliʻuokalani on condition that she pardon everyone responsible. On 18 December Willis demanded that the provisional government reinstate her, but it refused.
On 4 July 1894 the Republic of Hawaiʻi came into being with Dole as president, and the United States annexed it in 1898. Robert W. Wilcox and Samuel Nowlein led a revolt against the Republic in early January 1895, hoping to bring back the queen and the monarchy. It was unsuccessful and many participants were arrested. Liliʻuokalani was herself arrested on 16 January 1895; firearms had been found, and she was confined to an upper-floor bedroom in the palace. She signed her abdication on 24 January so that her supporters would be freed and the death sentences of six of them, Wilcox and Nowlein among them, commuted.
On 8 February she was tried in the palace throne room by a military commission of the Republic, which sentenced her to five years' hard labour and a $5,000 fine. On 4 September the sentence was reduced to confinement in the palace, where her lady-in-waiting, Eveline Townsend Wilson, stayed with her. In the years that followed she lived as a private citizen. Lydia Dominis, as her official name now was, began a lawsuit over the crown lands; in the end the Hawaiian legislature granted her a pension of $4,000 a year and left her the income from a sugar plantation. She died on 11 November 1917 in Honolulu, at her home, Washington Place.
Liliʻuokalani is known not only as the last queen of Hawaiʻi but also as a writer and songwriter. Her occupations are listed as writer, composer, monarch and autobiographer. She wrote Aloha ʻOe along with many more pieces.
Music was part of her education from the age of four: in 1842 she began at the school for chiefs' children, which later became the Royal School. Juliette Montague Cooke and her husband Amos Starr Cooke, American missionaries, taught the pupils everything from spelling and arithmetic to algebra, physics, history and bookkeeping, as well as music and English composition. Her interest in writing music was shared by William Charles Lunalilo, whom she had known since childhood and to whom she was briefly engaged around 1857. Her studies went on later: in 1865 she informally attended Oahu College, receiving instruction from Susan Tolman Mills.
In 1866, still at court under Kamehameha V, she wrote He Mele Lāhui Hawaiʻi at his request as the new national anthem of Hawaiʻi. It stayed in use until it was replaced by Hawaiʻi Ponoʻī, a piece composed by her brother.
She was arrested on 16 January 1895 and held in an upstairs bedroom of the palace; she signed her abdication on 24 January, on 8 February she was sentenced to five years' hard labour and a $5,000 fine, and on 4 September the sentence was reduced to confinement in the palace, where her lady-in-waiting Eveline Townsend Wilson stayed with her. In captivity she kept composing. One song from that time is Ke Aloha o Ka Haku (The Queen's Prayer), a title meaning The Grace of the Lord. With her companions she also made a patchwork quilt, called either the Imprisonment Quilt or the Queen's Quilt, with words, pictures and symbols telling of Hawaiian history and hopes for the future. There she also wrote a memoir, titled Hawaiʻi's Story by Hawaiʻi's Queen, which appeared in 1898.
The site has Aloha Oe in a version for voice and piano, at advanced level. It is the only work by Liliʻuokalani in the site catalogue, so an acquaintance with her music has to start there.