In 1823, Harriet Bradford Tiffany Stewart and her husband, Charles, traveled to Hawai‘i with the  second company of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). The  arrival of these early U.S. missionaries in Hawai‘i coincided with a gradual social transition in  Hawaiian society, including shifts in religion and land regulation. King Kamehameha II, known  as Liholiho (1797–1824), welcomed them, and with his support, the missionaries orchestrated  the conversion of Hawaiians to Christianity. By the 1830s, the missionaries’ influence on the  ali‘i, or Hawaiian nobility, was such that businessmen could not lease land without the support of  those associated with the ABCFM. The missionaries’ influence and that of their descendants continued to build throughout the nineteenth century, eventually leading to the overthrow of the  Hawaiian monarchy in 1893. This portrait features the hills of Lake Otsego bordering  Cooperstown, New York in the background.