Introduction

Imperial Children and Empire Formation in the Nineteenth Century

Kauhua Ku, ka Lani, i-loli ka moku; Hookohi ke kua-koko o ka Lani; He kua-koko, pu-koko i ka honua; He kua-koko kapu no ka Lani. (Big with child is the Princess Ku; the whole island suffers her whimsies; the pangs of labor are on her; labor that stains the land with blood.)

Ancient Hawaiian mele 1

In 1819, when passenger travel across the Pacific Ocean was unfathomable to most Americans, seven couples and five children left New England and made the nearly six-month sea voyage around Cape Horn to the Hawaiian Islands, arriving in 1820. The young missionaries left behind their worldly possessions but took with them the prayers and financial support of the newly established American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). The missionaries were soon joined by others. Between 1819 and 1848 the ABCFM launched roughly 150 missionaries across the Pacific Ocean to the Hawaiian Islands. As the first U.S. missionary organization with an international agenda, the ABCFM hoped to evangelize the small, independent island kingdom according to Congregational and Presbyterian theology.2

American missionaries embarked upon their voyages to the Hawaiian Islands with hopes of transforming the kingdom into a Christian nation. Believing they could refrain from political interference and economic pursuits, missionaries eschewed personal possessions and money, placing their material well-being in the hands of Hawaiian ali‘i (the chiefly class), as well as donors in the United States. American missionaries did not embark upon a program of territorial acquisition in the Hawaiian Islands, yet their decision to have children altered their course. As one missionary revealed, “Most of us came from home without even thinking whether we should ever have a child to provide for, and asked no questions about such a matter.”3 By the 1850s missionary parents were reevaluating their economic choices as they sought to protect the futures of their children, who together numbered over 250.4 Domestic concerns became political ones, and the American missionaries began to rationalize policies transferring land and political power to their control.

In fact, the number of white children born in the Hawaiian Islands influenced more than missionary policy. Children did not retain their missionary parents’ qualms about using the Hawaiian land for material benefit or shaping the islands into what they termed an “Anglo-Hawaiian” society.5 In reality the essence of their childhoods had groomed them for little else. Through parental neglect, as well as their parents’ imperfect attempts to racially segregate them, the children developed an aggressive independence that tended to question both parental and native authority. In the process the children cultivated a deep possessiveness over Hawaiian lands, which culminated in their revolt against the Hawaiian monarchy at the end of the nineteenth century.

American missionary parents could not have anticipated in 1820 the critical role their children would play in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and U.S. acquisition of the Hawaiian Islands in 1898. With the birth of the first white child in the islands, the missionaries began to view childhood in the islands as a critical and contested battlefield upon which they were to wage war for American cultural values and Protestant Christianity. As historian Emily Conroy-Krutz notes, “Their goal was to export an evangelical Protestantism that was Anglo-American in its roots and its culture, and in so doing they made claims about the proper role of the United States in the world.”6 Not only did the children of American missionaries propel the Hawaiian and U.S. governments toward their 1898 conflagration, but the children themselves became subjects of a colonial project, their American parents constructing and transmitting a religious and cultural agenda for them, as well as for the indigenous Hawaiian population.

2. In 1820 American missionaries entered a world unlike any they had ever known. For their Hawaiian-born children, the islands were their only home. Image of male native standing on shore, Puna, Hawai‘i, ca. 1910. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-61291.

American missionaries initially did not seek government positions or financial reward, but they did demand economic security for their children, arguing to the ABCFM that they needed family stipends, subsidized private education, and the right to pass on to their children profits derived from the land. In the Hawaiian Islands, American missionaries became hostage to the most fundamental of concerns: household economics.7

In the process missionaries found acceptance among Hawaiian elites, including Kauikeaouli (Kamehameha III), who reigned from 1825 to 1854, promulgated a constitution, opened ancestral lands to private ownership, and created a legislature limiting monarchal power. Kamehameha’s government—which included former missionaries—sold land to the missionary families at cheap prices, in part to reward their efforts at teaching Hawaiians to read and write a missionary-transcribed Hawaiian language, but, more importantly, to keep their children in the islands. Missionary children, the beneficiaries of such changes, disregarded the enormity of Kamehameha’s changes and aggressively pursued additional political and economic gifts. Native Hawaiians, noting the missionary families’ increasingly secular agenda, tried to stem the tide, arguing to the Hawaiian king in 1845 that white settler power had grown too strong. Hawaiian monarchs Kalākaua (r. 1874–91) and Lili‘uokalani (r. 1891–93), who retrenched against American missionary influence, found that the missionary children—now adults—were willing to use violence and U.S. Marines to maintain their privileged positions in the islands.

The ABCFM in the Pacific

The Hawaiian Islands, made up of eight main islands and hundreds of tiny islands, are the northernmost islands considered part of Polynesia, a triangle of over a thousand islands in the Southern and mid-Pacific Ocean. The people of Polynesia shared a common ancestry and similarities of language and cultural beliefs. A sea people, Polynesians navigated by the stars at night and fanned out across the Pacific Ocean. For nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans, the Hawaiian Islands represented the center station along major shipping routes from the Americas to Canton.8

The Hawaiian Islands had only been known to the United States since their “discovery” by British Captain James Cook in 1778, and Americans had little information except what had been given them by Hawaiian “converts” to Christianity, a handful of Hawaiian youth who had made it to New England shores aboard merchant ships and had embraced the religion and language of its residents. Their strange stories of human sacrifice, infanticide, polygamy, idolatry, and sexual promiscuity enthralled the American populace, as did descriptions of the “dancing ground” upon which “drums pounded, gourds rattled, singers chanted and hundreds of dancers garlanded with green leaves and flowers and adorned with dog-tooth anklets moved endlessly to and fro in serried ranks, their bare brown flesh glistening with sweat.” Honoring Laka, goddess of hula, chanters and dancers, who had undergone years of rigorous training, celebrated birth, mourned death, and praised the uniting of the Hawaiian nation under King Kamehameha I in 1795.9

Despite the peace and conformity that Kamehameha brought to a political system ruled by hereditary chiefs and religious taboos, the increased arrivals of foreign traders not bound to such beliefs had already caused internal fissures. No Hawaiian gods murdered the white men who trampled Hawaiian practice by eating and sleeping in the same quarters with women or partaking of chiefly foods such as bananas, coconuts, and pork. Hawaiian women, too, began to use foreigners to defy these kapu (taboos). When Kamehameha died in 1819, his successor Liholiho allowed—not uncontested—the state religion to expire.

Such was the turmoil into which the first American missionaries arrived ready to establish one God and a new set of kapu for the Hawaiian people. Determined to stay out of politics, the missionaries sought to influence the chiefs and chiefesses, assuming that the infusion of Christian principles into all Hawaiian society would follow. Thinking the American missionaries politically disinterested, the Hawaiian monarchs increasingly called upon their advice in trade negotiations with France, Great Britain, and Russia. “Rarely,” wrote American missionary Hiram Bingham (1789–1869), “has a missionary a more favorable opportunity to exert an influence on a whole nation, than was here afforded in the circle of the highest chiefs of these islands.”10 Within five years of the missionaries’ arrival, a dozen chiefs had sought Christian baptism and church membership, including the king’s regent Kaahumanu. The Hawaiian people followed their native leaders, accepting the missionaries as their new priestly class. They accepted the missionary children, born on Hawaiian soil, as members of their society. The process culminated in Kamehameha III’s adoption of a constitution in 1840 that proclaimed that no Hawaiian law was to be contrary to the Bible.11

As the first American missionary organization, the ABCFM commanded resources and attention. Formed in 1810 in the midst of New England revival and influenced by similar British evangelical societies, the ABCFM led the nineteenth-century American impetus to develop private benevolent and reform organizations capable of commanding the public sphere. These voluntary organizations were, in part, a backlash to the post-Revolutionary disestablishment of state-supported churches, yet by 1830 they shared evangelical goals, memberships, and financial contributors and had become a “benevolent empire.”12

Missionary efforts in the Hawaiian Islands would have been impossible without the donations of the American public. Conversely, the ABCFM’s efforts in the Hawaiian Islands played a crucial role in building support for American influence abroad. “We know of no Mission . . . that has hitherto left this country, which has excited such general interest and prompted so many prayers as that to the [Hawaiian] Islands,” the Boston Recorder stated at the departure of the first company of ABCFM missionaries to the islands.13 Contributions to the ABCFM jumped with news that the missionaries had reached the islands, and by the 1840s the ABCFM had raised for the Hawaiian mission over $700,000, roughly $15 million today.14

The success of the Hawaiian mission was critical to the ABCFM. Although earlier ABCFM missions had embarked to India in 1812 and Ceylon in 1815, they had yielded few converts. As an organ of the Congregationalist and Presbyterian denominations, the ABCFM hoped to counteract the continuing decline of Congregationalist influence in the United States. The ABCFM was also in the midst of reevaluating its domestic efforts among Native Americans. Working in concert with the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, the ABCFM had hoped to Christianize and educate Native American, Hawaiian, and other foreign youth, in order to return them as missionaries to their own cultures. The results were not as hoped. In 1825, eight years after the school’s founding, Cherokee student Elias Boudinot caused near rioting in Cornwall by marrying Harriet Gold, a white woman. The following year the school closed its doors, stating that “inquisitive curiosity” and “established prejudices” had made the students feel as “mere shows.”15

The Hawaiian Islands’ strategic location in the Pacific was just what the ABCFM needed to revitalize the American evangelical missionary spirit, as well as provide future prospects for its work among Native Americans. As early as 1822 the ABCFM’s Missionary Herald argued that from Hawai‘i “salvation may go to the tribes and nations in the north-western and western parts of America, in the north-eastern and eastern parts of Asia, and on the numerous islands of the Pacific.”16 Not long after the establishment of the mission in Hawai‘i, the ABCFM sent Marcus and Narcissa Whitman to Oregon Country.17

The diplomatic and fundraising successes of the ABCFM also grabbed the attention of the U.S. government. In 1829 President John Quincy Adams instructed Secretary of the Navy Samuel Southard to write Kamehameha III and encourage the Hawaiian monarch to support the ABCFM missionaries living among his people.18 In 1841 the ABCFM sought and received U.S. diplomatic intervention for its Syria mission after the Ottoman Empire ordered it to leave.19 With competing British, French, Dutch, and Russian interests in the Pacific region, a few American statesmen flirted with the idea of Hawaiian annexation as early as the 1850s. “The Pacific Ocean, its shores, its islands, and the vast regions beyond, will become the chief theatre of events in the world’s great hereafter,” stated U.S. senator William Henry Seward in 1851. His pronouncement became the masthead of the ABCFM’s Hawaiian newspaper the Friend.20 As secretary of state during the 1860s, Seward advocated the acquisition of Hawai‘i and directed U.S. annexation of the Midway Islands, the halfway point between Hawai‘i and Japan.

Americans Abroad

The American missionary project in Hawai‘i was part of a much larger market movement. Kamehameha I had already granted U.S. merchants a near monopoly in the Hawaiian sandalwood trade during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Prized for its long-lasting scent and red hue, sandalwood could be made into expensive furniture, perfume, and incense, providing U.S. merchants with a product to exchange for Chinese luxury goods. By the 1830s, the king’s laborers had stripped the islands of its native bark, just as U.S. whalers were joining other maritime nations in utilizing Honolulu and Lahaina as trading ports.

These U.S. industries were not small. American ships carrying furs from the Pacific Northwest stopped in the Hawaiian Islands for sandalwood and garnered as much as one million dollars annually in Canton. Pacific whaling earned ten times as much by 1850.21 The Japanese imprisonment of U.S. whalers shipwrecked off its coast influenced the United States to forcibly open Japanese ports in 1854. On the heels of Britain’s first Opium War with China, the United States negotiated the 1844 Treaty of Wanghia, allowing U.S. naval access to China for the protection of its growing economic interests in the region.

With the U.S. acquisition of California in 1848, San Francisco supplanted Honolulu as the most important Pacific port for American traders. As its nearest trading partner, Hawai‘i became California’s principal supplier of agricultural and manufactured goods. With the discovery of California gold and the concurrent decline in whaling, the Hawaiian monarchy shifted its focus to export agriculture, opening lands to private purchase, even by foreigners. Some in the United States saw the eventual U.S. domination of the islands. “The native population [is] fast fading away, the foreign fast increasing,” declared the San Francisco Alta California in 1851. “The inevitable destiny of the islands is to pass into the possession of another power. That power is just as inevitably our own.”22

Tragically, the newspaper was right. Between 1832 and 1853, over half of the native Hawaiian population perished, a shocking decline caused by the introduction of foreign diseases, such as smallpox, measles, syphilis, and tuberculosis. Some in Washington now argued that the annexation of the islands was necessary for protecting California and the Northwest Territory from encroaching French, British, and German interests in the Pacific.23

Missionary children in Hawai‘i entered adulthood in the midst of these geopolitical changes. The U.S. acquisition of California, the Civil War, and industrial expansion brought new avenues for international trade and increasing political demands for international competitiveness. Steam power required ports, and urbanization and immigration required commercial markets to fuel continued economic growth. European states rushed to divide Africa in search of raw materials for factories back home, while the United States vied for influence in Asia. Everywhere, indigenous governments and populations suffered invasion, exploitation, and displacement. New racialist ideas appropriating Darwin allowed Europeans and Americans to justify conquest. Hawai‘i, the “crossroads of the Pacific,” as one missionary son called the islands, represented an American opportunity for merchant and military fueling on the way to opening Asian markets.24

Unlike their British missionary counterparts in the Pacific, American missionaries to Hawai‘i only reluctantly drew in tandem with U.S. interests in the region. Their children, however, presided over many of these historic transformations. Sanford Ballard Dole (1844–1926), for example, led the revolution overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy. John Thomas Gulick (1832–1923) helped U.S. and British powers open China and Japan to foreign influence. Samuel Chapman Armstrong (1839–93) founded Hampton Institute, the Virginia manual arts college for former slaves and Native Americans, which influenced American colonial education policies toward nonwhites in Puerto Rico, Hawai‘i, and the Philippines.25

Childhood and Empire

Throughout the nineteenth century, white missionary children in the Hawaiian Islands were avid chroniclers of the demographic, cultural, and political changes occurring around them. Through letters to parents and siblings, personal diaries, and school essays the children recorded their childhoods while capturing their own interpretation of U.S.-Hawaiian relations. At Punahou School—the Honolulu boarding school missionary parents founded for their children in 1841—students published a weekly student newspaper, laboriously hand-copied for peer consumption. As adults, white missionary descendants continued to detail their own roles in Hawaiian history through published and unpublished memoirs, newspaper editorials, speeches, and letters to each other. What is consistent throughout these sources is the missionary descendants’ abiding attachment to the Hawaiian ‘āina (land). Missionary sons and daughters, whether remaining in the islands or moving abroad, considered Hawai‘i their home.26

Their prolific written record from both childhood and adulthood also reveals an astounding generational and longitudinal history of American colonialism in the Hawaiian Islands. This work attempts to correct the absence of children’s voices in history by following the white children born to American missionaries in the Hawaiian Islands between 1820 and 1850 as they traveled toward political revolution in the 1890s. Students of childhood, Christian missions, or U.S. involvement in the Pacific will find within the children’s written record a stunning yet tainted view of Hawaiian history. In researching this story, I made use of archival sources at Punahou School and the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society, both in Honolulu, as well as at the Houghton Library, Library of Congress, and Huntington Library. The archives at Williams College and Mt. Holyoke College provided additional records regarding the children from Hawai‘i who attended these institutions as college students.

What I also have found is that placing the missionary children within Hawaiian history is fraught with complications. Although the children revered Hawai‘i as the land of their birth, were considered subjects by the Hawaiian monarchy, and often called themselves “Hawaiians,” this nomenclature today is highly problematic. That missionary children organized the “Hawaiian” League in 1887 to illegally force King Kalākaua to sign a new constitution and led the 1893 revolution to overthrow Queen Lili‘uokalani provides a glimpse as to why the nature of their Hawaiian citizenship remains contested.27 In this project I respect the work of Hawaiian scholars who have argued strenuously against the legacy of missionary descendants in the Hawaiian Islands.28 As Haunani-Kay Trask writes, “Despite American political and territorial control of Hawaii since 1898, Hawaiians are not American.” For Hawaiian scholars like Trask, the story of missionary childhood is irrelevant compared to the damages caused by missionary families. “We were orphaned in our own land,” Trask explains. “Such brutal changes in a people’s identity—their legal status, their government, their sense of belonging to a nation—are considered among the most serious human rights violations by the international community today.” Trask’s familial terms remind readers of an earlier Hawaiian genealogy in which the earth mother (Papa) and sky father (Wākea) created the Hawaiian Islands, out of which came the taro plant and Hawaiian people.29

Hawaiian scholars also point to the importance of reading Hawaiian language texts when looking at Hawaiian history. Throughout this project I have relied upon nineteenth-century native authors, such as John Papa Ii, Henry Obookiah, Samuel Kamakau, David Malo, and Lili‘uokalani. Yet native Hawaiian sources—even in their original Hawaiian language—are also problematic, for American missionaries transcribed the original Hawaiian language into a written language and translated the written language into English. Missionary-directed transitions between oral and written languages or indigenous and English translations were never seamless.30 Sadly, as John Papa Ii (1800–1870) noted, the art of maintaining Hawaiian history through the memorization of genealogical meles (chants) had largely disappeared by the 1860s, many of the original chants forgotten.31

The efforts of Hawaiian historians to restore traditional genealogies and return Hawaiian studies to indigenous sources are complicated by the Christianity of nineteenth-century Hawaiian authors. Educated by Christian missionaries, these authors adopted the Christian faith and wrote Hawaiian history from the moral perspective of Christian converts. Even Lili‘uokalani believed her white cabinet members would not abandon her due to their shared faith.32 The legacy of American missionary activity in Hawai‘i continues to be a highly politicized minefield into which even Hollywood and the White House have entered.33

Nevertheless, I believe missionary children in the Hawaiian Islands provide a lens through which to understand American imperialism in the Pacific. Despite the efforts of Hawaiian historians, terms like empire and colonialism remain contested within the broader field of U.S. foreign relations.34 Instead scholars more easily describe the impact of nineteenth-century Americans traveling abroad.35 Emily Conroy-Krutz argues, “If empire is about states and their power, imperialism is a more flexible term that allows us to think about unequal power dynamics between groups.”36

Ultimately children became key to the American colonization of Hawai‘i. Not only was the demographic size of white missionary families significant to the development of American colonialism, but children as children became participants in American expansion. The process began when white children became an imperial space upon which parents and missionary teachers attempted to transplant their goals and aspirations. Hawaiian history demonstrates a crucial yet neglected aspect of historical colonialism: generational and familial transition. U.S. imperialism in particular has often, and in the case of the Hawaiian Islands most decidedly, taken nongovernmental forms and required multiple forces working together. Examining the lives of nineteenth-century white children born in Hawai‘i provides a telling glimpse of why adults conquer nations and eradicate cultures, and do so believing they act righteously.37

The Language of Family

Children were often utilized as symbols of cultural power by nineteenth-century proponents of colonialism, the domestic sphere serving as political discourse. American missionaries in Hawai‘i, for example, fixated on the natives’ “uncouth and disgusting manners,” their “modes of dress and living,” and lack of “taste, refinement and comfort.” Missionaries wrote to their American supporters about Hawaiian defecating habits, calling native parents filthier than swine and their children as wild as goats. American missionary mothers believed demonstrating proper parenting and homemaking was essential to the Christianization of Hawaiian women, and used their growing number of children as tools to display proper obedience and respect to God.38

The discourse of family was already a useful tool in the continental United States, often justifying white intervention, settlement, or subjugation. New England Puritans had long argued that the “childish” ways of North American Indians should give way to Christian civilization. Timothy Dwight, Congregationalist minister, Yale University president, and founder of the ABCFM, went further, justifying the killing of Indian babies in war: “Should then these infants to dread manhood rise, / What unheard crimes would smoke thro’ earth and skies!” he opined in his 1785 epic poem, The Conquest of Canaan.39

Likewise Southern American slaveholders argued their race-based system rested on benevolent paternalism. “It is true that the slave is driven to labor by stripes,” one slave owner argued in 1837. “It is not degrading to a slave, nor is it felt to be so. Is it degrading to a child?”40 In the Hawaiian Islands American missionaries constructed their own racial hierarchy based on the analogy of a child. As one missionary argued to his U.S. supporters in 1857: “The Hawaiian people have not arrived at full manhood. They are yet in their teens.”41

Even those noting the negative impact of white settlement in the Hawaiian Islands reverted to analogies of family hierarchy: “[Now] the children have become adults,” the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ka Hoku proclaimed in the 1860s. “Living under parents, that is the Teachers [missionaries], is over, we have matured, our minds are made up.”42 After decades of missionary political influence, the newspaper called for the removal of foreign influence from government.

Such was the tension existing in the Hawaiian Islands as the early American missionaries reached the end of their lives and their numerous children began to raise families of their own. This project attempts to add to the body of literature utilizing domestic discourses of imperialism by allowing nineteenth-century children to appropriate and modify such discourses. White children living in the Hawaiian Islands internalized the numerous inconsistencies found between their cloistered upbringing at home, segregated preparatory education at Punahou School in Honolulu, and indigenous Hawaiian culture surrounding them. Missionary children heard their New England parents decry U.S. slavery but watched them rely on unpaid native labor for the most intimate tasks, including childcare. Children saw their parents bow in deference to Hawaiian ali‘i but listened to them degrade the Hawaiian way of life. Children saw their parents teach in schools considered too inferior for white children to attend. “It will raise fire!” wrote one missionary son about the idea that American missionary parents should coeducate their children with “dissipated” native Hawaiians.43

Missionary children observed parents worry about money while preaching against earthly possessions. Taught Calvinist orthodoxy, missionary children developed distaste for the version their parents attempted to transplant in the islands. Hearing their parents extol the blessings of their homeland, the children were unimpressed with the United States when introduced to it firsthand. Missionary families decried the deaths of native Hawaiians but increasingly relied upon bonded Chinese labor to take their place. Missionary children loved their birthplace yet explored the world as if its entitled citizens. Considering themselves “Hawaiians,” missionary children felt born to lead the Hawaiian race. Above all, missionary children both worshipped and despised their parents as living martyrs while searching for a cause to which they, too, could give their lives.

Hawaiian by birth, white by race, and American by parental and educational design, the children of nineteenth-century American missionaries in Hawai‘i occupied an ambiguous place in Hawaiian culture. More tenuous was the relationship between these children and the United States, where many attended college before returning to the Hawaiian Islands. The supposed American acculturation of white missionary children from Hawai‘i was never complete, nor was their membership in Hawaiian society uncontested, yet the roles these children played in both societies influenced the trajectories of each nation in surprising ways. Similarly, the children’s cultural experiences shaped their views of religion, race, and international affairs. This complicated, bicultural childhood inspired the missionary children to participate in revolution in Hawai‘i and accept U.S. annexation of the islands, even while attempting to keep the Hawaiian nation free from outside influence.

This study explores white childhood in the Hawaiian kingdom within six sections. Chapter 1 uncovers the economies of childrearing in the nineteenth-century Hawaiian Islands, demonstrating that the transition from politically disinterested ABCFM missionaries to supporters of U.S. imperialism exclusively revolved around parental concerns for their children.

Chapter 2 portrays the environmental and political impact of white childhood in the islands, the result of missionary children left isolated and unsupervised yet also forbidden to interact with indigenous Hawaiians. Missionary son John Gulick and his scientific and socialist endeavors as an adult are highlighted for their contrast to missionary ideology yet natural relationship to his childhood.

Chapter 3 examines the role Punahou School played in the construction of a white colonial agenda for the Hawaiian kingdom, as well as the development of a peer culture among missionary children who attended the school during the 1840s and 1850s. Initially a whites-only boarding school, Punahou teachers sought to raise a generation of white leaders for the islands. Punahou student newspapers, hand-copied during this period, display the level to which teachers succeeded in their mission, yielding a racially conscious student body whose geographic distance from parental influence ultimately bound the students together in a way that differed from parental hopes for their children’s future in the islands. Samuel Chapman Armstrong, for example, took his Punahou experiences and racial ideology to the United States and implemented many of his own childhood lessons at Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia.

Chapter 4 describes the incomplete acculturation process missionary children from the Hawaiian Islands endured during their schooling in the United States. For those entering the United States during the 1850s and 1860s, Williams College, Mount Holyoke Seminary, and the American Civil War yielded defining experiences that influenced missionary children for the remainder of their lives. Yet Williams College and Mount Holyoke had changed in important ways since missionary parents had first attended them. These cultural and religious realignments further distanced missionary children from their parents but also created in the children a deep desire to return to the islands. The American Civil War became an outlet for many students to express this confusion and frustration. Sanford Ballard Dole was one son who ultimately returned to the islands to help enact a new era of American imperialism in the islands, including political revolution.

Chapter 5 dissects the complex identities of missionary children, including their ambiguous citizenship status in the United States and Hawaiian kingdom, as well as their lingering resentments and insecurities toward their parents, affecting their occupational choices and political activism. The conclusion of this study attempts to refine our understanding of nineteenth-century white children as both colonized subjects and agents of imperial change.

The path toward nineteenth-century revolution in the Hawaiian Islands began in childhood, and the following pages are, above all, a children’s history. It is a tale that spans the globe and covers an important period in the history of globalization. Strong-willed, restless, and often ambivalent, missionary daughters and sons crossed boundaries and transformed nations. The children of American missionaries to Hawai‘i experienced what children of immigrant parents today readily understand—religion, race, and culture are powerful yet fragile markers of personal, familial, and national identities. For the children of American missionaries in Hawai‘i, it was a process that began at birth and took a lifetime.