Hawaii’s “Bayonet Constitution”

News reports of how Hawaiians greeted Biden’s motorcade in Maui on August 21 with middle fingers and shouts of “F_ _ _ You!”  “F_ _ _ You!” was especially appropriate – if not a century or so too late – in light of the history of how Hawaii became a U.S. government possession.

Twenty-two years after the Lincoln regime proclaimed to have saved American government “of the people, for the people, by the people,” by slaughtering nearly half a million fellow citizens in the Southern states, the Republican party of Lincoln disenfranchised the native people of Hawaii with what was known as the “bayonet constitution.”  At the time, the American crony capitalists who essentially ran the Republican party (as they had from its inception) wanted Hawaii to be declared an American province under U.S. control (aka, their control).  As historian Gregg Jones wrote in Honor in the Dust, Hawaiian Queen Liliuokalani attempted to stave off the American crony capitalist imperialists by creating a new constitution.  The crony capitalists responded by creating a laughingly named “Committee of Safety” that plotted to overthrow the Hawaiian monarchy.

They got the U.S. government to appoint one John Stevens as an “envoy” to Hawaii, whose job was to arrange for American troops to land there, take over, get rid of the Monarchy, and create a puppet government with one of their own as the head of the government.  Sound familiar?

A Judge Sanford Dole, whose family had long Puritan/Yankee roots in the state of Maine, was put in place as the new head of government.  A paramilitary organization known as the Honolulu Rifles forced the Hawaiian king at gunpoint with the threat of being stabbed to death with bayonets to sign off on a new constitution that came to be known as the “bayonet constitution.”  This was “the party of Lincoln” in all its glory, having just two decades earlier forced the Southern states at gunpoint to accept a new constitutional order that essentially destroyed the system of federalism of the founding fathers and replaced it with a consolidated, monopolistic, bureaucratic Leviathan in Washington, D.C. run by “rich men north of Richmond,” as a popular new country music song describes it.

The ”bayonet constitution” disenfranchised all Asians living in Hawaii as “an inferior race” as well as most native Hawaiians.

Voting rights were preserved for the relatively wealthy American land and business owners.  James Dole, the cousin of Judge Sanford Dole, then founded the Dole Fruit Company.

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