Missionary children remaining in the Hawaiian Islands perpetuated their parents’ goals upon entering adulthood. While disavowing their parents’ missionary profession, the children nevertheless sought to retain the island image their parents had molded. As one missionary son explained this generational transition, “We lived very much after the manner of missionary itinerants engaged in periodical visitation of their converts; only our discourse with the people was not so much concerning treasure in heaven as of land and worldly property.”52

The size of American missionary families in the islands and the entrance of white missionary children into adulthood were crucial factors leading to the Hawaiian monarchy’s decision to transfer land to the missionaries and employ their children in the islands. Just as other sites of nineteenth-century European and American colonization required the participation of indigenous elites to aid the administration of Western occupation, so, too, did missionary children accept their role as leaders in Hawaiian society and seek to enhance a political system within which they could benefit.

Yet nineteenth-century African American slaves resisted their Southern owners, twentieth-century Native Americans asserted their indigenous rights in U.S. courts, and some native Hawaiians today agitate for sovereign nationhood. As decolonization efforts around the world have demonstrated, European and American colonization was incomplete, and the colonization of white missionary children in the Hawaiian Islands was no different.53 Missionary children contested their parents’ agendas and rejected the sacrifices they had been forced to make in childhood. Many rejected Calvinist orthodoxy, and some rejected Christianity altogether. Almost all rejected the missionary trade.

Nevertheless, what Nancy Rose Hunt has called the “debris” of colonization remained.54 Confusion over their personal identity, fear of displeasing their parents, and detachment toward the indigenous Hawaiian population reflected the children’s deep-seated emotions about their childhoods. Some missionary children entered adulthood insecure, “wanderers,” as their parents described them.55 “My life is fitful, strange, and lacks the essential of permanence,” James Chamberlain mused.56 “I am a pilgrim, still, though in my native land,” decided Robert Andrews.57

Nineteenth-century missionary children in the Hawaiian Islands seemed to instinctively understand that they were culturally different from their parents and that these differences affected the trajectory of their lives. Missionary children absorbed the Hawaiian language, despite their parents’ taboo, and some even preferred it.

The missionary children’s cultural education was not the only difference between them and their American parents. The children’s formative years were also developmentally dissimilar. Reality, Harvey Newcomb advised nineteenth-century American parents, should be children’s chief concern “through the whole of their being.”58 Yet, as scientists now understand, a child’s prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with “limiting and focusing experience, action, and thought,” is undeveloped during childhood, allowing children to see the world differently from adults and contemplate possibilities that parents have long rejected through planning and inhibition. Childhood play, Alison Gopnik writes, is “the most visible sign of the paradoxically useful uselessness of immaturity.”59 Many missionary children in Hawai‘i had great freedom to explore the islands. They relished travel and embraced adventure. Their childhood play allowed them to contemplate change in ways their parents could not.

Ironically native Hawaiian children had the most independence of all—“free and unconstrained,” as historian Linda K. Menton describes them.60 Their boundless childhood perhaps influenced the Hawaiians’ easy acceptance of white foreigners. The American missionaries represented new possibilities and a different way to view the world. Unafraid, indigenous Hawaiians made up their own minds about the haole missionaries and their children. Tellingly, native Hawaiians also distinguished a substantive difference between the parents and their children. “Your father combined in one person the various vocations which you five brothers have followed, and all of you put together are not equal to the old man,” a native Hawaiian told John Emerson’s sons.61

The Hawaiian Islands, where missionary children spent their earliest and most formative years, possessed them in a way no other geographical space ever did. The path toward U.S. colonialism in the Hawaiian Islands began in white missionary childhood. The American Civil War, by contrast, increased the missionary children’s devotion to the United States and gave them a moral license to exploit their insecurity and discontent. For the majority of missionary children, the Christian faith remained their primary source of security—a bridge to their parents, a compass directing them throughout Hawaiian and American cultures. The tenacity with which most missionary children maintained a form of Christianity was witnessed by the populations among whom the children lived as adults. Their religious adherence influenced U.S. foreign policy in China and Japan and, of course, the Hawaiian Islands.

Missionary children represented a white minority within Hawai‘i, yet being white in the nineteenth century garnered enormous protection from European and American states. These international powers sent out with their militaries an ideology of racial superiority by which the missionary children benefited. Missionary children utilized their international standing to comb the world. Their attitudes regarding race and religion, as well as their restless action, ultimately shaped nations, overturned governments, and divided cultures. Their strength of will demonstrates the tremendous capacity children have to piece together childhood into meanings that impact history.