The abolition did not go unopposed. Kekuaokalani, a nephew of Kamehameha who had been given charge of the war god Kukailimoku, refused it and gathered support; the two sides met at Kuamo'o on Hawaii island in December 1819 and he was killed. The new order was settled by force as well as by decree.
As kuhina nui, Ka'ahumanu governed alongside two kings, and after Liholiho died in England in 1824 she held the practical authority in the kingdom. She was baptised in December 1825 and thereafter used that authority for the mission: promoting schools and literacy, which spread with remarkable speed, backing the printing of Hawaiian, and issuing laws against practices the missionaries condemned. Her later years brought her into conflict with Catholic missionaries and with foreign traders, and the coercive edge of that period is part of the record.
Reading her is not simple, and Hawaiian scholarship has read her in more than one way. She can be seen as the person who dismantled her own tradition and admitted a foreign church, and she can be seen as a ruler who recognised that the old order had already been fatally undermined and moved decisively to control what replaced it, keeping the kingdom's authority in chiefly hands for another seventy years. Both readings are argued from the same events.