Oration, delivered July 4, 1854, at Honolulu

Rare first edition of this speech delivered in Honolulu on 4 July 1854, marking the seventy-eighth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, by David Lawrence Gregg, United States Commissioner to the Kingdom of Hawaii. Honolulu, no publisher stated, 1854, 22 pp., octavo. No copy currently located in the CCFr; not in Sabin.

Original printed yellow wrappers, the title repeated within a ruled border. Lower wrapper lacking, a few small marginal spots.

On 4 July 1854, Gregg celebrated American independence in Honolulu while at the same time negotiating the annexation of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Since February, he had been dealing with Robert Crichton Wyllie on behalf of Kamehameha III; the proposed treaty provided for Hawaii to enter the Union not merely as a territory, but as a fully fledged State.

Hawaii is never named in the speech; yet it is present throughout by implication. By declaring the age of European colonisation closed “in America and the contiguous islands, in both oceans,” and then rejecting any colony, protectorate or foreign intervention, Gregg was addressing an audience well aware that the future of the kingdom was then under negotiation. Years later, Alexander would retain an even more striking image of that day: that of a new star soon to be added to the American flag.

The pamphlet also preserves the material record of the occasion, opening with the exchange of letters of 6 and 8 July between Gregg and a committee of American residents - Barnum W. Field, Edwin O. Hall and Richard Coady - requesting that the speech be printed “in English and Hawaiian, for gratuitous distribution.” A separate Hawaiian-language edition was indeed published. The text closes with lines from Joseph Rodman Drake’s The American Flag and the “nine cheers” that greeted the speaker.

The death of Kamehameha III brought the annexation project to an end, and Kamehameha IV abandoned it. Gregg, however, remained in Hawaii: a few years later, the former negotiator of annexation became Minister of Finance of the kingdom he had failed to bring into the Union.

Printed in Honolulu at the very moment when the political future of the kingdom was being negotiated, this Fourth of July speech preserves the public voice of the man who was then working behind the scenes to make Hawaii a new star on the American flag.