US History The Annexation of Hawaii The United States was built together by individual areas coming together as a whole. When we adjoin these areas we become stronger.
After 1874 the great question that increasingly came to the fore was that of the relationship of the islands to the United States. Kamehameha III, as early as 1854, had suggested annexation. Between 1874 and 1893 the Americans in Hawaii became increasingly disturbed by what they regarded as the fiscal and other irresponsibilities of the constitutional monarchy. Under Queen Liliuokalani (reigned 1891–1893) they believed that they detected moves toward the reestablishment of a more absolute monarchy. They were also more and more concerned about trade agreements with the United States, being especially anxious to ensure the permanence of tariff-free entry rights for Hawaiian sugar, first obtained by treaty in 1875 and renewed in 1887.
The native Hawaiian people were overwhelmingly demoralized. Since the arrival of whites they had lost their native religion, their land, and their traditions; with the overthrow of the monarchy they lost even their independence. The descendants of early missionaries and other whites had gained complete economic control of the islands, establishing a political system run by a few powerful men that was essentially undisturbed for half a century.
The Hawaiian kingdom was then reconstituted with American advice under the so-called Organic Acts of 1845–1847. The reigns of Kamehameha IV and Kamehameha V (1854–1863 and 1863–1872) and Lunalilo (1873–1874) are sometimes referred to as the middle period of the Hawaiian kingdom. It was a time of extensive agricultural experimentation, the growth of sugar plantations, the development of ranching, and the peak of whaling, which had flourished from the 1830's
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