Part 5 (2/2)

Yet General Anderson's letter to the Adjutant-General of the army of July 18th [84] uses the words ”since reading the President's instructions to General Merritt,” etc., showing that he had a copy of them; and those instructions order and direct (see ante) that as soon as the commanding general of the American troops arrives he is to let the Filipinos know that ”the powers of the military occupant are absolute and supreme and immediately operate upon the political condition of the inhabitants.” A charitable view of the matter would be that, technically, those were Merritt's orders, not Anderson's. But the whole scheme was to conceal the intention to a.s.sume supreme authority and keep Aguinaldo quiet ”until,” as General Merritt afterwards expressed it in his report, ”I should be in possession of the city of Manila, * * * as I would not until then be in a position to * * * enforce my authority, in the event that his [Aguinaldo's] pretensions should clash with my designs.” [85]

The same day that General Anderson wrote Aguinaldo his billet doux about the dictators.h.i.+p, viz., July 22d, he cabled Was.h.i.+ngton a much franker and more serious message; which read: ”Aguinaldo declares dictators.h.i.+p and martial law over all islands. The people expect independence.” The very next day, July 23d, he wrote Aguinaldo asking his a.s.sistance in getting five hundred horses, and fifty oxen and ox-carts, and manifesting considerable impatience that he had not already complied with a similar request previously made ”as it was to fight in the cause of your people.” [86] The following day, July 24th, replying to General Anderson's letter of the 22d wherein General Anderson had advised him that he was as yet without orders concerning the question of recognizing his government, Aguinaldo wrote:

It is true that my government has not been acknowledged by any of the foreign powers, but we expected that the great North American nation, which had struggled first for its independence, and afterwards for the abolition of slavery, and is now actually struggling for the independence of Cuba, would look upon it with greater benevolence than any other nation. [87]

That cablegram of July 22d, above quoted, in which the commanding general of our forces in the Philippines advises the Was.h.i.+ngton government, ”The people expect independence,” is the hardest thing in the published archives of our government covering that momentous period for those who love the memory of Mr. McKinley to get around. [88] After the war with the Filipinos broke out Mr. McKinley said repeatedly in public speeches, ”I never dreamed they would turn against us.” You do not find the Anderson cablegram of July 22d in the published report of the War Department covering the period under consideration. General Anderson addressed it to the Secretary of War and signed it, and, probably for lack of army cable facilities, got Admiral Dewey to send it to the Secretary of the Navy for transmission to the Secretary of War. [89] Certain it must be that at some Cabinet meeting on or after July 22, 1898, either the Secretary of the Navy or the Secretary of War read in the hearing of the President and the rest of his advisers that message from General Anderson, ”The people expect independence.” The object here is not to inveigh against Mr. McKinley. It is to show that, as Gibbon told us long ago, in speaking of the discontent of far distant possessions and the lack of hold of the possessor on the affections of the inhabitants thereof, ”the cry of remote distress is ever faintly heard.” The average American to-day, if told the Filipinos want independence, will give the statement about the same consideration Mr. McKinley did then, and if told that the desire among them for a government of their people by their people for their people has not been diminished since the late war by tariff taxation without representation, and the steady development of race prejudice between the dominant alien race and the subject one, he will begin to realize by personal experience how faintly the uttered longings of a whole people may fall on distant ears.

We saw above that in a letter written July 21st, the day before the telegram about the ”people expect independence,” which letter must have reached Was.h.i.+ngton within thirty days, General Anderson not only notified Was.h.i.+ngton all about Aguinaldo's government and its pretensions, but stated that at the request of Admiral Dewey he had made no protest against it. [90] Yet straight on through the period of General Merritt's sojourn in the Islands, which began July 25th, and terminated August 29th, we find no protest ordered by Was.h.i.+ngton, and we further find the purpose of the President as announced in the instructions to Merritt, ”The powers of the military occupant are absolute and supreme” throughout the Islands, not only not communicated to the Filipino people, but deliberately suppressed from the proclamation published by General Merritt pursuant to those instructions. [91]

Comments and conclusions are usually impertinent and unwelcome save as mere addenda to facts, but in the light of the facts derivable from our own official records, is it any wonder that General Anderson, a gallant veteran of the Civil War, and perhaps the most conspicuous figure of the early fighting in the Philippines, delivered an address some time after he came back home before the Oregon Commandery of the Loyal Legion of the United States [92] on the subject, ”Should republics have colonies?” and answered the question emphatically ”No!”

CHAPTER IV

MERRITT AND AGUINALDO

There are no tricks in plain and simple faith.

Julius Caesar, Act IV., Sc. 2.

Major-General Wesley Merritt's account of the operations of the troops under his command in the First Expedition to the Philippines may be found in volume i., part 2, War Department Report for 1898. He left San Francisco accompanied by his staff, June 29, 1898, arrived at Cavite, Manila Bay, July 25th, received the surrender of the city of Manila August 13th, and sailed thence August 30th, in obedience to orders from Was.h.i.+ngton to proceed without unnecessary delay to Paris, France, for conference with the Peace Commissioners. According to General Merritt's report, about the time he arrived Aguinaldo had some 12,000 men under arms, with plenty of ammunition, and a number of field-pieces. The late lamented Frank D. Millet has preserved for us, in his Expedition to the Philippines, some valuable and intimate studies of this army of Filipino besiegers whom our troops found busily at work when they arrived in the Islands:

It was an interesting sight at Camp Dewey to see the insurgents strolling to and from the front. Pretty much all day long they were coming and going, never in military formation, but singly, and in small groups, perfectly clean and tidy in dress, often accompanied by their wives and children, and all chatting as merrily as if they were going off on a pigeon shoot. The men who sold fish and vegetables in camp in the morning would be seen every day or two dressed in holiday garments, with rifle and cartridge boxes, strolling off to take their turn at the Spaniards.

The reader will readily understand that there were many times as many volunteers as guns. Mr. Millet continues:

When they had been at the front twenty-four hours they were relieved and returned home for a rest. They generally pa.s.sed their rifles and equipments on to another man and thus a limited number of weapons served to arm a great many besiegers. They had no distinctive uniform, the only badge of service being a red and blue c.o.c.kade with a white triangle bearing the Malay symbol of the sun and three stars, and sometimes a red and blue band pinned diagonally across the lower part of the left sleeve. * * *

Many of them * * * had belonged to the native volunteer force.

* * * The recruits were soon hammered into shape by the veterans of the rank and file. * * * Their men were perfectly obedient to orders * * * and they made the most devoted soldiers. There was no visible Commissary or Quartermaster's Departments, but the insurgent force was always supplied with food and ammunition and there was no lack of transportation. The food issued at the front was mostly rice brought up in carromatas to within a few hundred yards of the trenches, when it was cooked by the women.

* * * Each man had a double handful of rice, sometimes enriched by a small proportion of meat and fish, which was served him in a square of plantain leaf. Thus he was unenc.u.mbered with a plate or knife or fork and threw away his primitive but excellent dish when he had ”licked the platter clean.” It was noticeable that the insurgents carried no water bottles nor haversacks, and no equipments indeed, but cartridge boxes. They did not seem to be worried by thirst like our men.

”Although insignificant in appearance, they are fierce fighters,” wrote General Anderson to the Adjutant-General of the army in July. [93]

General Merritt states in his report that Aguinaldo had ”proclaimed an independent government, republican in form, with himself as President, and at the time of my arrival in the Islands the entire edifice of executive and legislative departments had been accomplished, at least on paper.” [94] Of course at that time we were still officially declining to take Filipino aspirations for independence seriously, and preferred to treat Aguinaldo's government as purely a matter of stationery. As a matter of fact, an exhaustive examination of the official doc.u.ments of that period, made with a view of ascertaining just how much of that Aguinaldo government of 1898 was stationery fiction and how much was stable fact, has absolutely surprised one man who was out there from 1899 to 1905 (the writer), and I have no doubt will be interesting, as mere matter of political necrology, to any American who was there ”in the days of the empire” as the ”ninety-niners” called it.

Early in the spring of 1899, Mr. McKinley sent out the Commission of which President Schurman of Cornell University was Chairman, to try to stop the war. They bent themselves to the task in a spirit as kindly as that in which we know Mr. McKinley himself would have acted. They failed because the war was already on and the Filipinos were bent on fighting for independence to the bitter end. But they learned a good deal about the facts of the earlier situation. Speaking of these in their report to the President [95] with especial reference to the period beginning with Aguinaldo's landing at Cavite in May, after describing how the Filipino successes in battle with the Spaniards finally resulted in all of them being driven into Manila, where they remained hemmed in, they say:

While the Spanish troops now remained quietly in Manila, the Filipino forces made themselves masters of the entire island except that city.

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