Bingham and his wife arrived first on the Island of Hawaii in 1820, and sailed on to Honolulu on Oahu on April 19. In 1823, Queen Kaahumanu and six high chiefs requested baptism. Soon after, the Hawaiian government banned prostitution and drunkenness, which resulted in the shipping industry and the foreign community resenting Bingham's influence. Bingham wrote extensively about the natives and was critical of their land-holding regime and of their "state of civilization". Bingham supported the introduction of market values along with Christianity. Those writings are now used by historians to illustrate the imperial values that were central to the attitudes of the United States towards Hawaii. Bingham was involved in the creation of the spelling system for writing the Hawaiian Language, and also translated some books of the Bible into Hawaiian. Bingham designed the Kawaiahaʻo Church in Honolulu on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu. The church was constructed between 1836 and 1842 in the New England style typical of the Hawaiian missionaries. It is one of the oldest standing Christian places of worship in Hawaii. Bingham used his influence with Queen Kaʻahumanu to instigate a strongly anti-Catholic policy in Hawaii, considerably impeding the work of the French Catholic missionary Alexis Bachelot and resulting in decades of persecution of Hawaiians who were converted to Catholicism. This was motivated by opposition to the spread of French influence in Hawaii as well as by the religious Protestant-Catholic rivalry and enmity.
Legacy and honors
A math building in Punahou School is named after Bingham.
Bingham Tract School was an academically rigorous elementary school named for him that operated on the Bingham lands until the mid-1990s.
Return
The board grew concerned that Bingham was interfering too often in Hawaiian politics and recalled him. The Binghams left August 3, 1840 and reached New England February 4, 1841. It was intended to be a sabbatical due to Sybil's poor health, but the board refused to reappoint Bingham as a missionary, even after Sybil's death on February 27, 1848. He published a memoir, A Residence of Twenty-One Years in the Sandwich Islands in 1847. Bingham remained in New England, where he served as the pastor of an African-American church. He remarried to Naomi Morse in 1852, who ran a girls' school. He died November 11, 1869 and was buried at Grove Street Cemetery, in New Haven, Connecticut. Leonard Bacon gave the address at his funeral.
Bingham was the leader of a group of missionaries, that included Asa Thurston, Artemas Bishop and himself, who translated the Christian Bible into the Hawaiian language. The New Testament was published in 1832, and the Old Testament in 1839. The entire NT/OT Bible was revised in 1868, and was re-published as Ka Baibola Hemolele in 2018, in the forms of book and electronic document.. Binamu also composed Hawaiian hymns, such as "Himeni Hope", which were typically quiet, reflexive, but powerful. His hymns are still sung in Hawaii at the churches and by the choruses in concert.
