Independence Day (Hawaii)
former national holiday in Hawaii
Hawaiian Independence Day (Hawaiian: Lā Kūʻokoʻa) is a national holiday celebrated annually on November 28 to commemorate the signing of Anglo-Franco Proclamation of 1843, the official diplomatic recognition of the independence and sovereignty of the Hawaiian Kingdom by Great Britain and France. It continues to be celebrated today by proponents of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement.
Background
In 1839, Captain Cyrille Pierre Théodore Laplace of the French frigate Artémise landed in Honolulu in what became known as the Laplace Affair and forced the government of the Hawaiian Islands under His Majesty King Kamehameha III to acknowledge the rights of Catholics in his realm with the Edict of Toleration. The Hawaiian government also had to pay $20,000 in compensation to the French.
Anticipating further foreign encroachment on Hawaiian territory following the Laplace Affair, King Kamehameha III dispatched a diplomatic delegation to the United States and Europe to secure the recognition of Hawaiian independence.
Timoteo Haʻalilio, William Richards and Sir George Simpson were commissioned as joint Ministers Plenipotentiary on April 8, 1842. Simpson left for Great Britain while Haʻalilio and Richards went to the United States on July 8, 1842. The Hawaiian delegation secured the assurance of United States President John Tyler of Hawaiian independence on December 19, 1842, and then met Simpson in Europe to secure formal recognition by the United Kingdom and France. Their first meeting with British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen, on February 22, 1843, was unsuccessful. Traveling to Brussels and then Paris, the Hawaiian delegation gained the support of King Leopold I of Belgium who was sympathetic and promised to use his influence to help them gain recognition.
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This entry incorporates text from “Independence Day (Hawaii)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.