McKinley signs the Newlands Resolution; Hawaii is annexed, and its $4 million debt with it
By the summer of 1898, the Spanish-American War had made the Pacific look different to Washington: whoever held Hawaii held the coaling station and naval anchorage that connected California to Asia. On July 7, 1898, President William McKinley signed the Newlands Resolution, which had passed the House 209 to 91 and the Senate 42 to 21, annexing Hawaii, which became an organized U.S. territory two years later, and absorbing $4 million of Hawaiian government debt. Sovereignty formally transferred five weeks later, on August 12, at ʻIolani Palace in Honolulu, where the Hawaiian flag came down and the American flag went up. Hawaii became an organized U.S. territory in 1900.
McKinley told his secretary annexation was "manifest destiny," the same phrase used to justify the continental expansion a half-century earlier, now aimed across open ocean. The Newlands Resolution set the template for the acquisitions that followed within months, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, marking the moment American expansion stopped being about contiguous land and became a debate about overseas empire that Congress is still litigating in different forms today.
QWhy did Congress use a joint resolution instead of a treaty to annex Hawaii?
A formal annexation treaty needed a two-thirds Senate vote, and pro-annexation forces had tried that route in 1897 without enough support to clear it. Nevada Representative Francis Newlands found the workaround: a joint resolution, a joint resolution requires only simple majorities in both chambers, unlike the two-thirds vote needed for a treaty. It passed the House 209 to 91 and the Senate 42 to 21, comfortable margins that never would have cleared the treaty threshold. The maneuver was legally contested then and remains a central argument for native Hawaiian sovereignty advocates now, who note that annexing a foreign nation through a simple legislative resolution rather than a treaty was a significant and legally contested departure from normal practice.
QHow many Native Hawaiians signed the petition against annexation?
Between September 11 and October 2, 1897, organizers gathered 21,269 signatures on a formal Petition Against Annexation, organized by the Hui Aloha 'Aina and Hui Kulai'aina groups. That figure represented more than half of the entire native Hawaiian population alive at the time, an extraordinary mobilization given the era's limited transportation and communication across the islands. The petition drive is understood to have contributed to the failure of the 1897 annexation treaty, which lacked the two-thirds Senate support needed to pass. They did not stop the 1898 joint resolution, but they survive today as one of the most complete records of organized Hawaiian opposition to annexation.
QWho did the U.S. send to write Hawaii's new territorial laws?
McKinley appointed a five-member commission to draft the legal framework for the incoming territory: Sanford B. Dole, the former Republic of Hawaii president who would become the first territorial governor; Senators Shelby M. Cullom of Illinois and John T. Morgan of Alabama; Representative Robert R. Hitt of Illinois; and Chief Justice Walter F. Frear. Dole, who had led the Republic of Hawaii government being replaced, served on the commission and then became the first territorial governor. The commission's report formed the basis for congressional debate that led to the 1900 Hawaiian Organic Act, which governed the territory until statehood in 1959.
