Essay On The Overthrow Of The Hawaiian Kingdom

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The overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom began in 1887 after the Reciprocity Treaty with the Bayonet Constitution. In the Bayonet Constitution, King David Kalakaua, the ruler of Hawaii at the time, was forced to sign a constitution that gave foreigners more power. After, On the night of January 17, 1893, a storm broke on the Hawaiian Islands, in which a group of American men overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom, which lead to many unrightful events. Although the overthrow could have been the right call, the act was still gratuitous. The overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom was unjustified because Lorrin A. Thurston had done illegal acts and the Committee of Public Safety did the same.
To start off, one reason that the overthrow was an unrightful event was because Lorrin A. Thurston had done many wicked and unrighteous acts. Thurston was a grandson of a missionary and also a member of the Hawaiian League, Annexation Club, and the Committee of Public Safety (Potter). Planning and executing the Bayonet Constitution was one action that Thurston did. He had pointed bayonets toward the King of Hawaii to get him to sign a constitution, making the foreigners get more voting rights and reduced the King's power (Part 1). Wholly, Thurston had done many unlawful acts in order to overthrow the Hawaiian Kingdom. …show more content…

The Committee of public Safety was a group of men which had started off as the Annexation Club in 1892 whose goal was to overthrow the government, set up a provisional government, and apply for U.S. annexation. One example of an illegal act they had done would be when they had worked with Minister John L. Stevens to bring in military force into the islands. This is a criminal act because the military was part of the U.S. and at the time Hawaii was its own territory. Altogether, a group of men wanted to overthrow the Hawaiian monarchy and did so, but

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