Preface: I'll mostly be talking about this from the perspective of Hawaiian history. I will contrast with the Philippines at the end, but I'm much better equipped to speak about colonialism in Hawaii.
As a starting point, I'd offer that one key difference is that the Republic of Hawaii, whose government was made up primarily of the white planter class, had been actively seeking annexation since they overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1893. The entire history of Westerners (by which I mean Europeans and Anglo-Americans) in the Hawaiian Kingdom period is a bit much to unpack in the span of a reddit comment, but suffice it to say that it was often a tendentious and ambivalent one, with the monarchs both actively adopting and encouraging some Western practices (e.g. religion) while also experiencing regular infringements on their sovereignty from both Western powers and settlers within the Kingdom. In any event, particularly relevant to our story here is that in 1887, an armed militia called the Honolulu Rifles forced King Kalākaua to sign a new constitution at gunpoint, earning the nickname the Bayonet Constitution. This militia was the armed wing of the Hawaiian League, a group of white planters who were technically 'subjects' of the Hawaiian Kingdom, but were mostly descended from American missionaries. The new constitution moved power out of the monarchs' hands and into the settler-friendly legislature.
In 1891, Kalākaua died and his sister Liliʻuokalani [nicknamed Lili'u] replaced him on the throne. From the outset, the new constitution rendered effective governance impossible, with the legislature removing her cabinet members from office at least four times. The constitution was also wildly unpopular with the citizens of Hawaii, particularly the kānaka maoli (indigenous people) -- 6,500 eligible voters had signed a petition demanding a new constitution in 1892, when there were literally only 9,500 eligible voters in the Kingdom. Lili'u was intent on implementing a new constitution (which, among other things, would have restored voting rights to thousands of kānaka maoli and extended them to Asian settlers for the first time), and tried to do so while the legislature was in recess. The effort failed -- her ministers refused to back the plan for fear of reprisals -- but it alarmed the white planters.
Under the name "the Committee of Safety," the planters led an armed revolution against the Queen, deposing her in January of 1893. Critically to our story, immediately after the coup, a detachment of US marines from the USS Boston, which had been stationed in Pearl Harbor, landed to 'restore the peace,' taking stations outside several government buildings and preventing a counterrevolution of Hawaiian royalists under the command of Charles Wilson, the Marshal of the Kingdom. Although the marines never actually fired a shot, the fear of sparking a war with the United States was enough to dissuade Wilson and his men.
The new government, under the leadership of Sanford Dole (cousin of James Dole, who started the pineapple company), was made up almost entirely of white planters who viewed themselves culturally as Americans and wanted tariff-free access to US sugar markets. They immediately began seeking annexation by the United States. The annexation treaty was initially received enthusiastically by Benjamin Harrison's administration, but he was replaced by Grover Cleveland before it could be ratified. Cleveland, already an anti-expansionist, was alarmed by the events of the overthrow, particularly the involvement of US marines in deposing a government whose sovereignty had long been recognized, and sent James H. Blount to investigate. The result, dubbed the Blount Report, found that US involvement had violated international law and could be construed as an 'Act of War.' Cleveland thus refused annexation, and suggested that Lili`u should be returned to the throne (though he didn't actually take any significant action to see that happen).
However, this setback for Dole and the Republic government was only temporary. The much more annexation-friendly McKinley replaced Cleveland in 1897, and immediately began trying to ratify an annexation treaty. Initially they could not muster the necessary 2/3 support in the Senate. The outbreak of the Spanish-American War (with Hawaii's key position in the Pacific) melted much of the resistance, though, and they eventually annexed the archipelago via a (potentially legally dubious) joint resolution, rather than a cession treaty. Lili`u, the last reigning monarch, had abdicated her throne (while imprisoned, in a bid for leniency for some of her followers who attempted an armed rebellion in 1895), and the only entity recognizable as the government of Hawaii was made up of people who were American-in-all-but-name already and welcomed annexation with open arms. Nonetheless, it should be noted that kanaka maoli did resist annexation, and there is an active sovereignty movement that has persisted to this day.
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