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Typed Letter Signed as Secretary, Republic Of Hawaii Foreign Office,  Honolulu, Jan. 18, 1897. 1 page, docketing note on verso. 8 x 13”. To James G. Swan, Hawaiian Consul, Port Trinidad, Washington.

“I have the honor by direction of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to enclose to you a design representing the Hawaiian National Ensign…” The original enclosure is lacking but the design is incorporated in the stationery of this letter, written four years after the birth of the Republic in Hawaii in the 1893 revolution that overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy – a coup d’etat in which Potter, a trusted employee of the Republic’s only President, Sanford Dole, led a company of military “volunteers”.

Potter was later Dole’s emissary in dealing with the deposed queen Liliuokalani. The official “National Ensign” had a short life; a year and a half later, in August 1898, the Republic ceased to exist when Hawaii was annexed by the United States.

Swan, the Hawaiian Consul, was a former Indian agent in the Washington Territory who wrote the first ethnography of the Indian tribe with which he lived.