The American flag rises over ʻIolani Palace; Hawaii's sovereignty ends in a ceremony
Five weeks after Congress authorized annexation, U.S. troops from the USS Philadelphia came ashore in Honolulu on August 12, 1898, and raised the American flag at ʻIolani Palace, replacing the Hawaiian flag and formally transferring control from the Republic of Hawaii to Washington. Queen Liliʻuokalani, the kingdom's last monarch, did not attend; she remained at her private residence, Washington Place, while Republic of Hawaii president Sanford B. Dole presided over the handover. Hawaii would not become an official U.S. territory for nearly two more years.
Annexation gave the United States its first Pacific territory and a coaling and naval station at Pearl Harbor just as the Spanish-American War made the ocean's strategic map matter. McKinley had failed to get a treaty ratified in 1897; the war supplied the votes. The coaling station at Pearl Harbor became central to American naval planning in the Pacific in the decades that followed.
QWho actually ran Hawaii's government on paper in the months before the flag ceremony?
Henry E. Cooper held the title of Minister of Foreign Affairs and Interior in Sanford Dole's final cabinet, the administrative post responsible for handling the mechanics of the handover to Washington. Cooper had also been a figure in the 1893 Committee of Safety that helped depose the monarchy in the first place, so by 1898 he was overseeing the paperwork end of a transition he had helped set in motion five years earlier. His cabinet role meant the Republic of Hawaii's foreign relations and internal governance funneled through him right up until Dole handed the whole apparatus to the United States. Cooper's name rarely appears outside Hawaiian archives, but his signature sat on the machinery of a government about to dissolve itself.
QHow close did the annexation treaty come to failing permanently in the Senate?
McKinley's 1897 annexation treaty needed a two-thirds Senate majority and never got a vote that could clear it, stalled in large part by two Native Hawaiian petitions bearing more than 20,000 signatures, representing over half the Hawaiian population at the time. Rather than fight for those votes, McKinley's administration switched strategies entirely and pushed the Newlands Resolution through as a joint resolution, which required only a simple majority in each chamber. It passed both houses on July 7, 1898.
QWhat became of ʻIolani Palace after the monarchy's government offices moved in?
The palace itself was carved up for territorial administration. The former throne room, where Liliʻuokalani had later stood trial, became the meeting chamber for the territorial house of representatives, while the old state dining room served as the senate floor. The queen's own second-floor bedroom was converted into the governor's office. When Liliʻuokalani died in 1917, territorial governor Lucius E. Pinkham granted her a state funeral held in that same former throne room.
