[1] His younger brother James Wood Bush was a sailor in the Union Navy and veteran of the American Civil War.

He temporarily acted as Minister of Foreign Affairs replacing Celso Caesar Moreno for much of the same time as well, until William Lowthian Green took the office on a more permanent basis.

[5]: 268 On December 23, 1886, Kalākaua named him a special envoy to Samoa in an attempt to form a Polynesian alliance with Samoan King Malietoa Laupepa.

After being refitted at great expense (over budget and behind schedule), the ship was renamed Kaimiloa (from ka ʻimi loa which roughly means "the explorer" in the Hawaiian language[8]), and ceremonially launched on April 20, 1887.

[9] Henry A. P. Carter, who was in Europe trying to negotiate treaties between Hawaiian and major powers at the time, informed the German Empire of the agreement.

The crew exchanged salutes with the German ship Adler, which shadowed Kaimiloa while Bush tried to gather support for Laupepa in other parts of Samoa.

[6] When he returned to Apia on July 19, Bush found a letter from Gibson replacing him as envoy with his secretary Henry F.

[6] In the meanwhile, back in Hawaii, on June 30, 1887, a group of businessmen and lawyers supported by the Honolulu Rifles had forced Kalākaua to dismiss Gibson and sign a new constitution that limited the monarch's powers.

[5]: 328–329 The ship finally returned on September 23, 1887, and was decommissioned and sold for a fraction of the cost of its refitting, ending the brief existence of a pan-Polynesian navy.

"[5]: 523 In a May 12 editorial, he called Marshall Charles Burnett Wilson and cabinet minister Samuel Parker "a half-Tahitian blacksmith and a half-caste cowboy... pitiful specimens of ignorance.

After the elections Joseph Nawahi then became president of the Liberal Party, objecting to Bush's aggressive anti-monarchy stance.

When Liliʻuokalani proposed a new constitution to break the political crisis in January 1893, the Honolulu Rifles were again behind the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii by the conservative Reform Party.

Out of political favor, Bush's only government position was a court interpreter, as he struggled to keep his newspaper business profitable.

[19] In May 1900, he spoke and acted as interpreter at the organizational meeting of the Hawaii Democratic Party,[20] was a member of its first territorial committee,[21] and campaigned unsuccessfully in the next election.

[22] His former ally Robert William Wilcox had formed the Home Rule Party of Hawaii which split opposition voters.

He first married Mary Ann Peters,[1] who was considered one of the most beautiful women in the Hawaiian Islands and presented a lei around the neck of Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh on his visit to Hawaii in 1869.