Part 3 (1/2)
Once the President [Aguinaldo] is in the Philippines with his prestige, he will be able to arouse the ma.s.ses to combat the demands of the United States, if they should colonize that country, and will drive them, the Filipinos, if circ.u.mstances render it necessary, to a t.i.tanic struggle for their independence, even if later they should succ.u.mb to the weight of the yoke of a new oppressor. If Was.h.i.+ngton proposes to carry out the fundamental principles of its Const.i.tution, it is most improbable that an attempt will be made to colonize the Philippines or annex them. It is probable then that independence will be guaranteed. [30]
The truth is that instead of leaving everything to the chance of our continuing in the same unselfish frame of mind we were really in when the Spanish-American War started, Aguinaldo and his people, not sure but what in the wind-up they might even be thrown back upon the tender mercies of Spain, played their cards boldly and consistently from the beginning with a view of organizing a de facto government and getting it recognized by the Powers as such at the very earliest practicable moment. They believed that the Lord helps those who help themselves. They had antic.i.p.ated our change of heart and already had it discounted before we were aware of it ourselves. They were already acting on the idea that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty while public opinion in the United States concerning them was in a chrysalis state, and trying to develop a new definition of Liberty which should comport with the subjugation of distant island subjects by a continental commonwealth on the other side of the world based on representative government. The prospective subjects did not believe that a legislature ten thousand miles away in which they had no vote would ever give them a square deal about tariff and other laws dictated by special interests. They had had three hundred years of just that very sort of thing under Spain and instinctively dreaded continuance of it. That their instincts did not deceive them, our later study of Congressional legislation will show. The Filipinos had greatly pondered their future in their hearts during the last twelve months of Spain's colonial empire, watching her Cuban embarra.s.sments with eager eye.
Having seen the frame of mind in which they approached the contract implied in Admiral Dewey's cheery words, ”Well now, go ash.o.r.e there and start your army,” what were the facts of recent history within the knowledge of both parties at the time? What had been the screams of the American eagle, if any, concerning his moral leaders.h.i.+p of the family of unfeathered bipeds?
President McKinley's annual message to Congress of December, 1897, [31] calling attention to conditions in Cuba as intolerable, had declared that if we should intervene to put a stop to them, we certainly would not make it the occasion of a land-grab. The other nations said: ”We are from Missouri.” But Mr. McKinley said, ”forcible annexation” was not to be thought of by us. ”That by our code of morality would be criminal,” etc. So the world said, ”We shall see what we shall see.” Then had come the war message of April 11, 1898, [32] reiterating the declaration of the Cuban message of December previous, that ”forcible annexation by our code of morality would be criminal aggression.” In other words we announced to the overcrowded monarchies of the old world, whose land-l.u.s.t is ever tempted by the broad acres of South America, and ever cooled by the virile menace of the Monroe doctrine, that we not only were against the principle of land-grabbing, but would not indulge in the practice. Immediately upon the conclusion of the reading of the war message, Senator Stewart was recognized, and said, among other things: ”Under the law of nations, intervention for conquest is condemned, and is opposed to the universal sentiment of mankind. It is unjust, it is robbery, to intervene for conquest.” Then Mr. Lodge stood up, ”in the Senate House a Senator,” and said:
We are there [meaning in this present Cuban situation] because we represent the spirit of liberty and the spirit of the new time, and Spain is over against us because she is mediaeval, cruel, dying. We have grasped no man's territory, we have taken no man's property, we have invaded no man's rights. We do not ask their lands. [33]
These speeches went forth to the world almost like a part of the message itself. And Admiral Dewey, like every other American, in his early dealings with Aguinaldo, after war broke out, must have a.s.sumed a mental att.i.tude in harmony with these announcements. But the world said, ”All this is merely what you Americans yourselves call 'hot air.' We repeat, 'We are from Missouri.'” Then we said: ”Oh very well, we will show you.” So in the declaration of war against Spain we inserted the following:
Fourth: That the United States hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said island except for the pacification thereof, and a.s.serts its determination when that is accomplished, to leave the government and control of the island to its people.
This meant, ”It is true we do love the Almighty Dollar very dearly, oh, Sisters of the Family of Nations, but there are some axiomatic principles of human liberty that we love better, and one of them is the 'unalienable right' of every people to pursue happiness in their own way, free from alien domination.” All these things were well known to both the contracting parties when Admiral Dewey set Aguinaldo ash.o.r.e at Cavite, May 20, 1898, and got him to start his insurrection ”under the protection of our guns,” as he expressed it. [34] Accordingly, when the insurgent leader went ash.o.r.e, the declaration of war was his major premise, the a.s.surances of our consuls and the acts of our Admiral pursuant thereto were his minor premise, and Independence was his conclusion. Trusting to the faith and honor of the American people, he took his life in his hands, left the panoplied safety of our mighty squadron, and plunged, single-handed, into the struggle for Freedom.
What was the state of the public mind on sh.o.r.e, and how was it prepared to receive his a.s.surances of American aid? Consider the following picture in the light of its sombre sequel.
Just as the war broke out, Consul Williams had left Manila and gone over to Hong Kong, where he joined Admiral Dewey, and accompanied him back to Manila, and was thus privileged to be present at the battle of Manila Bay, May 1st. Under date of May 12th, from his consular headquarters aboard the U. S. S. Baltimore, he reports [35] going ash.o.r.e at Cavite and being received with enthusiastic greetings by vast crowds of Filipinos. ”They crowded around me,” says Brother Williams, ”hats off, shouting 'Viva los Americanos,' thronged about me by hundreds to shake either hand, even several at a time, men, women, and children, striving to get even a finger to shake. So I moved half a mile, shaking continuously with both hands.”
Tut! tut! says the casual reader. What did the Government at Was.h.i.+ngton know of all these goings on, that it should be charged later with having violated as binding a moral obligation as ever a nation a.s.sumed? It is true that the news of the Williams ovation, as in the case of the Pratt serenade, reached Was.h.i.+ngton only by the slow channels of the mail. But Was.h.i.+ngton did in fact receive the said news by due course of mail. When it came, however, Was.h.i.+ngton was nursing visions of savages in blankets smoking the pipe of peace with the agents of the Great White Father in the White House--i.e., thought, or hoped, the Filipinos were savages--and remained as deaf to the sounds of the Williams ovation as it had been to the strains of the Pratt serenade.
However, hardly had Admiral Dewey taken his binoculars from the gig that carried Aguinaldo ash.o.r.e to raise his auxiliary insurrection, when he called his Flag Secretary, or the equivalent, and dictated the following cablegram to the Secretary of the Navy:
Aguinaldo, the rebel commander-in-chief, was brought down by the McCulloch. Organizing forces near Cavite, and may render a.s.sistance that will be valuable. [36]
This sounds a little more serious than ”earnest boys” alleging the lack of a toothbrush as an excuse for declining mortal combat, does it not? How valuable did this a.s.sistance prove? Admiral Dewey had to wait three and one half months for the army to arrive, and this is how the commanding general of the American forces describes conditions as he found them in the latter part of August:
For three and one half months Admiral Dewey with his squadron and the insurgents on land had kept Manila tightly bottled. All commerce had been interdicted, internal trade paralyzed, and food supplies were nearly exhausted. [37]
And, he might have added, the taking of the city was thus made perfectly easy. Otherwise, as Aguinaldo put it in one of his letters to General Otis, we would not have taken a city, but only the ruins of a city. Admiral Dewey said to the Senate Committee in 1902: ”They [the Spaniards] surrendered on August 13th, and they had not gotten a thing in after the 1st of May.” [38]
In the early part of the next year, 1899, President McKinley sent out a kind of olive-branch commission, of which President Schurman of Cornell University was Chairman. The olive branch got withered in the sulphur of exploding gun-powder, so the Commission contented itself with making a report. And this is what they said concerning what followed the Dewey-Aguinaldo entente:
Shortly afterwards, the Filipinos began to attack the Spanish. Their number was rapidly augmented by the militia who had been given arms by Spain, all of whom revolted and joined the insurgents. Great Filipino successes followed, many Spaniards were taken prisoners, and while the Spanish troops now remained quietly in Manila, the Filipino forces made themselves masters of the entire island [of Luzon] except that city. [39]
Of conditions in July, sixty days after Admiral Dewey had on May 20th said to Aguinaldo in effect, ”Go it, little man, we need you in our business,” Mr. Wildman, our Consul at Hong Kong, writing to the State Department, said, in defending himself for his share in the business of getting Aguinaldo's help under promises, both express and implied, which were subsequently repudiated, that after he, Wildman, put the insurgent chief aboard the McCulloch, May 16th, bound for Manila to co-operate by land with our navy: ”He * * * organized a government * * * and from that day to this he has been uninterruptedly successful in the field and dignified and just as the head of his government,”
[40] a statement which Admiral Dewey subsequently endorsed. [41]
We have seen the preliminaries of this ”government” started under the auspices of our Admiral and under what he himself called ”the protection of our guns” (ante). Let us note its progress. If you turn the leaves of the contemporaneous official reports, you see quite a moving picture show, and the action is rapid. On May 24th, still ”under the protection of our guns,” Aguinaldo proclaimed his revolutionary government and summoned the people to his standard for the purpose of driving the Spaniards out forever. The situation was an exact counterpart of the cotemporary Cuban one as regards ident.i.ty of purpose between ”liberator” and ”oppressed.” His proclamation promised a const.i.tutional convention to be called later (and which was duly called later) to elect a President and Cabinet, in whose favor he would resign the emergency authority now a.s.sumed; referred to the United States as ”undoubtedly disinterested” and as considering the Filipinos ”capable of governing for ourselves our unfortunate country”; and formally announced the temporary a.s.sumption of supreme authority as dictator. Copies of these proclamations were duly furnished Admiral Dewey. The latter was too busy looking after the men behind his guns and watching the progress of his plucky little ally to study Spanish, so he forwarded them to the Navy Department without comment--”without reading them,” said he to the Senate Committee in 1902. [42] When his attention was called to them before the Committee by one of the members reading them, his comment was, ”Nothing about independence there, is there?” [43] It seems to me it did not take an international lawyer to see a good deal ”there,” about independence. In a proclamation published at Tarlac in the latter part of 1899, which appears to have been a sort of swan-song of the Philippine Republic, Aguinaldo had said, in effect, ”Certainly Admiral Dewey did not bring me from Hong Kong to Manila to fight the Spaniards for the benefit of American Trade Expansion,” and in this proclamation he claimed that Admiral Dewey promised him independence. It is true, that in a letter to Senator Lodge, which that distinguished gentleman read on the floor of the Senate on January 31, 1900, Admiral Dewey denounced this last statement as false. It is also true that those Americans are few and far between who will take Aguinaldo's word in preference to Admiral Dewey's. Certainly the writer is not one of them. But Aguinaldo is no Spanish scholar, being more of a leader of men than a master of language, and what sort of an interpreter acted between him and the Admiral does not appear. Certainly he never did get anything in writing from Admiral Dewey. But after the latter brought him to Manila, set him to fighting the common enemy, and helped him with guns and otherwise in quickly organizing an army for the purpose, the Admiral was at least put on inquiry as to just what Aguinaldo supposed he was fighting for. What did the Admiral probably suppose? He told the Senate Committee that the idea that they wanted independence ”never entered his head.” The roar of mighty guns seems to have made it difficult for him to hear the prattlings of what Aguinaldo's proclamations of the time called ”the legitimate aspirations of a people.” The milk in the cocoanut is this: How could it ever occur to a great naval commander, such as Admiral Dewey, familiar with the four quarters of the globe, that a coterie of politicians at home would be so foolish as to buy a vast straggly archipelago of jungle-covered islands in the South Seas which had been a nuisance to every government that ever owned them? But let us turn from the Senate Committee's studies of 1902 to the progress of the infant republic of 1898 at Cavite.