Armed Militia Forces King Kalakaua to Sign "Bayonet Constitution," Stripping Hawaiian Sovereignty and Disenfranchising Native Hawaiians

On July 6, 1887, the Hawaiian League—a secret organization of white American and European businessmen, lawyers, sugar planters, and missionary descendants—backed by the armed Honolulu Rifles militia, forces King Kalakaua at gunpoint to sign a new constitution that radically restructures the Hawaiian government and strips the monarchy of most executive authority. The constitution, drafted over less than a week by attorneys Sanford B. Dole, Lorrin Thurston, William Ansel Kinney, William Owen Smith, George Norton Wilcox, and Edward Griffin Hitchcock, becomes known as the “Bayonet Constitution” due to the explicit threat of violence used to compel the King’s signature. Queen Liliuokalani later asserts that her brother “signed that constitution under absolute compulsion” with his life directly threatened. The new constitution is never ratified by the Hawaiian Kingdom’s legislature, making it an illegal document imposed through armed coup rather than legitimate constitutional process.

The Bayonet Constitution fundamentally transforms Hawaiian governance to serve American economic interests while systematically disenfranchising Native Hawaiians. It sharply restricts the powers of the monarchy, transfers executive authority to a cabinet controlled by the Hawaiian League, and replaces native Hawaiian officials with white American businessmen and politicians. Most significantly, it imposes property ownership and literacy requirements for voting that disenfranchise the majority of Native Hawaiians while granting voting rights to foreign resident aliens who are not Hawaiian citizens. Asian residents, including subjects who previously enjoyed voting rights under the 1864 Constitution, are explicitly denied suffrage regardless of property ownership or literacy. The result is a racial hierarchy where white foreign residents gain political power while Native Hawaiians and Asians lose it, converting a sovereign Hawaiian kingdom into an oligarchy controlled by American business interests.

The Hawaiian League members who orchestrate the coup have explicit annexationist goals, seeking to end the independent Hawaiian Kingdom and secure annexation by the United States to protect and expand their sugar plantation profits. American sugar growers in Hawaii benefit enormously from the 1875 Reciprocity Treaty granting Hawaiian sugar duty-free access to U.S. markets, but they fear that Hawaiian political independence threatens this arrangement and that the King might grant concessions to competing interests or assert greater Hawaiian control over land and resources. By capturing the Hawaiian government through the Bayonet Constitution, American business interests ensure that Hawaiian policy serves their economic agenda rather than the interests of Native Hawaiians or the preservation of Hawaiian sovereignty.

The property requirements for voting are particularly designed to disenfranchise Native Hawaiians while empowering white settlers. Voters must own property worth at least $3,000 or have an annual income of at least $600—thresholds that exclude most Native Hawaiians who have been systematically dispossessed of land through previous legal manipulations including the Great Mahele land division of 1848 that converted communal land tenure into private property and facilitated massive land transfers to white settlers. By making property ownership a voting prerequisite after ensuring that Native Hawaiians have lost most property, the Bayonet Constitution creates a self-reinforcing cycle where political disenfranchisement prevents Native Hawaiians from using democratic processes to challenge the economic structures that dispossessed them.

The constitution grants the legislature power to override the King’s veto, removes the King’s authority to appoint cabinet members without legislative approval, and strips the monarchy of control over the House of Nobles, which is converted from a body appointed by the King to one elected by the propertied minority. These changes reduce King Kalakaua to a figurehead while transferring real governing power to institutions controlled by the white business elite. The King can no longer use executive authority to protect Native Hawaiian interests, negotiate with foreign powers to preserve independence, or resist American economic domination of the islands.

The racial dimensions of disenfranchisement are explicit and intentional. The constitution allows European and American men to vote if they meet economic thresholds, and it grants voting rights to foreign residents who have not become Hawaiian citizens, ensuring that recent white immigrants can participate in Hawaiian politics. Simultaneously, it imposes literacy requirements that disproportionately affect Native Hawaiians and explicitly excludes all Asians regardless of their qualifications, property ownership, or length of residence in Hawaii. This racial targeting reflects the Hawaiian League’s white supremacist ideology and its conviction that Native Hawaiians and Asians are unfit for self-governance and that white Americans have the right and duty to rule Hawaii regardless of the wishes of the indigenous population.

The coup represents institutional capture on multiple levels: economic elites capture the constitutional structure through armed force; foreign residents capture political institutions meant to serve Hawaiian citizens; and American business interests capture Hawaiian sovereignty to serve U.S. expansionist goals. The methods used—armed militia, threats of assassination, forced signing of an illegal constitution, immediate implementation without legislative ratification—establish precedents for governance through violence and intimidation rather than consent of the governed. These methods foreshadow the complete overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom six years later when many of the same actors will use similar tactics to depose Queen Liliuokalani and establish an American-controlled Republic of Hawaii as a stepping stone to annexation.

King Kalakaua attempts to resist the Hawaiian League’s demands in the days before signing, consulting with loyalist advisors and considering armed resistance, but ultimately concludes that resistance would trigger a massacre of Hawaiian forces by the better-armed Honolulu Rifles militia. The King’s private correspondence and later statements by Queen Liliuokalani confirm that he signs only because the alternative is immediate violence against himself and likely broader bloodshed. This coercion invalidates the constitution under both Hawaiian and international law, but the Hawaiian League has the armed force to implement the illegal document regardless of its legal invalidity, demonstrating that ultimately power rather than law determines constitutional outcomes when institutions can be captured by actors willing to use violence.

The Bayonet Constitution’s restriction of suffrage has devastating long-term consequences for Native Hawaiian political power. With the majority of Native Hawaiians unable to vote, the subsequent 1890 election produces a legislature thoroughly dominated by American business interests and annexationists. Native Hawaiians become politically powerless in their own country, unable to use electoral processes to resist further dispossession, unable to vote out the politicians who serve foreign interests, and unable to prevent the gradual erosion of Hawaiian sovereignty that culminates in the 1893 overthrow and 1898 annexation. The disenfranchisement ensures that when American business interests move to overthrow the monarchy in 1893, there will be no democratic mechanisms through which Native Hawaiians can resist or seek redress.

The economic motivations behind the coup are inseparable from U.S. trade policy. In 1890, the U.S. Congress passes the McKinley Tariff, which eliminates the preferential treatment Hawaiian sugar previously enjoyed and extends bounties to U.S. domestic sugar producers, threatening to destroy the profitability of Hawaiian plantations owned by American businessmen. The planters conclude that only full annexation to the United States can restore their economic advantages by making Hawaiian sugar production domestic rather than foreign. The Bayonet Constitution’s concentration of political power in the hands of these planters positions them to pursue annexation regardless of Native Hawaiian opposition, converting the Hawaiian government into an instrument for advancing American annexationist goals.

The Honolulu Rifles militia that enforces the Bayonet Constitution consists primarily of American and European residents who form a private military force nominally independent of the Hawaiian government but actually serving the interests of the Hawaiian League. The existence of this armed force reveals the vulnerability of the Hawaiian Kingdom to internal subversion backed by the implicit or explicit support of the U.S. government. While the U.S. officially maintains that Hawaii is an independent nation, the presence of armed American settlers loyal to U.S. interests rather than Hawaiian sovereignty creates a fifth column capable of overthrowing Hawaiian institutions whenever American business interests demand it. The U.S. military presence in Hawaii, including marines stationed on U.S. warships in Honolulu harbor, provides potential backup for the Honolulu Rifles, making armed resistance by Hawaiian loyalists a likely trigger for U.S. military intervention on behalf of the coup plotters.

The Bayonet Constitution establishes the template for constitutional corruption that will be replicated throughout U.S. imperial expansion in the Pacific and Caribbean: foreign business interests capture local institutions through armed force or threat thereof, impose constitutions that disenfranchise indigenous populations while empowering foreign residents, concentrate political power in institutions controlled by economic elites aligned with U.S. interests, and use this captured political structure to facilitate eventual annexation or permanent U.S. military and economic control. The model combines the appearance of constitutional legality with the reality of armed conquest, allowing the U.S. to claim that annexation reflects local political processes rather than imperial coercion.

For Native Hawaiians, the Bayonet Constitution represents a catastrophic loss of sovereignty and self-determination. In a single day, the Hawaiian people lose the right to govern themselves through their monarch, lose the right to vote if they lack property that was stolen from them by the very people now demanding property qualifications, and lose the ability to use political processes to resist foreign domination. The coup transforms Hawaiians from citizens of a sovereign nation into a disenfranchised minority in their own homeland, subject to rule by foreign settlers whose primary loyalty is to American business interests rather than to Hawaii or its indigenous people. This political dispossession accompanies and enables continued economic dispossession, as the Hawaiian League-controlled government will enact policies that facilitate further land seizures, labor exploitation, and transfer of Hawaiian resources to American corporations.

The events of July 1887 demonstrate the vulnerability of small nations to internal capture by foreign economic interests when those interests can mobilize armed force and when major powers like the United States tolerate or tacitly support such capture as serving their broader strategic and economic goals. The Bayonet Constitution proves that constitutional government provides no protection against elite capture when elites control the means of violence and face no external constraints on their use of force to reshape institutions. The coup succeeds because American business interests are willing to use violence, because they possess superior armaments through the Honolulu Rifles, because the U.S. government will not intervene to protect Hawaiian sovereignty against American settlers, and because King Kalakaua correctly calculates that armed resistance would fail and result in greater bloodshed without preventing the constitutional coup.