Republic of Hawaii

Statehood also left unresolved another fundamental question.

Who controlled Hawaii's land? Nearly 1.8 million acres of land, once held by the Hawaiian kingdom, changed hands after the overthrow, first to the Republic of Hawaii, then to the United States, and later to the new state government in 1959.

For sovereignty advocates, these were not simply, quote unquote, ceded lands.

They were Hawaiian national lands, transferred without the consent of the Hawaiian people.

Government lands are the surplus lands after the land tenure changes of the mid-19th century, which are public lands.

So these are lands that today, largely a part of the public lands that we understand to be designated and under the jurisdiction of the state and even the federal government, military lands, but it also includes crown lands.

And so what happens in the overthrow and the blossoming government after the provisional one the republic of hawaii merges the crown lands and the government lands together

so

William McKinley, December sixth, eighteen ninety-seven, part three.

By a special message dated the sixteenth day of June last, I laid before the Senate a treaty signed that day by the plenipotentiaries of the United States and of the Republic of Hawaii, having for its purpose the incorporation of the Hawaiian Islands as an integral part of the United States and under its sovereignty.

The Senate, having removed the injunction of secrecy, although the treaty is still pending before that body, the subject may be properly referred to in this message because the necessary action of the Congress is required to determine by legislation many details of the eventual union should the fact of annexation be accomplished, as I believe it should be.

While consistently disavowing from a very early period any aggressive policy of absorption in regard to the Hawaiian group, a long series of declarations through three-quarters of a century has proclaimed the vital interest of the United States in the independent life of the islands and their intimate commercial dependence upon this country.

At the same time, it has been repeatedly asserted that in no event could the entity of Hawaiian statehood cease by the passage of the islands under the domination or influence of another power than the United States.

Under these circumstances, the logic of events required that annexation, heretofore offered but declined, should in the ripeness of time come about as the natural result of the strengthening ties that bind us to those islands and be realized by the free will of the Hawaiian state.

That treaty was unanimously ratified without amendment by the Senate and the President of the Republic of Hawaii on the tenth of September last and only awaits the favorable action of the American Senate to effect the complete absorption of the islands into the domain of the United States.

What the conditions of such a union shall be, the political relation thereof to the United States, the character of the local administration, the quality and degree of the elective franchise of the inhabitants, the extension of the federal laws to the territory, or the enactment of special laws to fit the peculiar condition thereof, the regulation, if need be, of the labor system therein, are all matters which the treaty has wisely relegated to the Congress.