Part 6 (1/2)

”For three and one half months,” says General Otis in describing the facts of this same situation a year later, ”the insurgents on land had kept Manila tightly bottled [meaning while Admiral Dewey had been blockading the place by water] * * * and food supplies were exhausted.” [96] ”We had Manila and Cavite. The rest of the island was held not by the Spanish but by the Filipinos,” said General Anderson, in the North American Review for February, 1900. ”It is a fact that they were in possession, they had gotten pretty much the whole thing except Manila,” said Admiral Dewey to the Senate Committee in 1902. [97]

General Merritt took Manila August 13th, and sailed away for Paris August 31st, and only a week after that General Otis wired Was.h.i.+ngton (under date of September 7th) from Manila: ”Insurgents have captured all Spanish garrisons in island [of Luzon] and control affairs outside of Cavite and this city.” [98]

The recruiting by Aguinaldo of an army of 40,000 men with guns within one hundred days after his little ”Return from Elba”--”15,000 fighting men, 11,000 of them armed with guns,” in fifty days, [99]

which number had swelled to nearly 40,000 men with guns in another fifty days (by August 29th) [100]--is no more remarkable than his progress in organizing his government and making its grip on the whole island of Luzon effective in a short s.p.a.ce of time.

As all Americans who know the Filipinos know how fond they are of what government offices call ”paper work,” and how their escribientes [101]

can work like bees in drafting doc.u.ments, it might be easy to ignore Aguinaldo's various proclamations, already hereinbefore noticed in Chapter II., as representing merely ”a government on paper,” were there no other proof. But among the insurgent captured papers we found long afterward, there is a doc.u.ment containing the minutes of a convention of the insurrecto presidentes from all the pueblos of fifteen different provinces, on August 6, 1898, which throws a flood of light on the subject now under consideration. [102] This convention was held at Bacoor, then Aguinaldo's headquarters, a little town on the bay sh.o.r.e between Manila and Cavite. The minutes of the convention recite that its members had been previously chosen as presidentes of their respective pueblos in the manner prescribed by previous decrees issued by Aguinaldo (already noticed), and that thereafter they had taken the oath of office before Aguinaldo as President of the government, etc. They then declare that the Filipino people whom they speak for are ”not ambitious for power, nor honors, nor riches, aside from the rational aspirations for a free and independent life,” and ”proclaim solemnly, in the face of the whole world, the Independence of the Philippines.” They also re-affirm allegiance to Aguinaldo as President of the government and request him to seek recognition of it at the hands of the Powers, ”because,” says the paper, ”to no one is it permitted to * * * stifle the legitimate aspirations of a people”--as if Europe cared a rap what we did to them except in the way of regret that it did not have a finger in the pie. However, they were not only apprehensive, on the one hand, lest we might be tempted to take their country away from Spain for ourselves, but also, on the other hand, lest we might in the wind-up decide to leave them to Spain at the end of the war. That this last was not an idle fear is shown by the fact that during the deliberations of the Paris Peace Commission, Judge Gray urged, in behalf of his contention against taking the islands at all, that if Dewey had sunk the Spanish fleet off Cadiz, instead of in Manila Bay, and the Carlists had incidentally helped us about that time, we would have been under no resulting obligation ”to stay by them at the conclusion of the war.” [103] When the presidentes in convention a.s.sembled as aforesaid got through with their whereases and resolutions they presented them to His Excellency the President of the Republic, Aguinaldo, who then issued a proclamation which recited, among other things: ”In these provinces [the fifteen represented in the convention] complete order and perfect tranquillity reign, administered by the authorities elected” [104] according to his previous decrees as Dictator, which decrees have already been placed before the reader. The proclamation claims that the new government has 9,000 prisoners of war and 30,000 combatants. The former claim no one having any acquaintance with those times and conditions will question for a moment. As to the 30,000 combatants, if he had 11,000 men armed with guns on July 9th and 40,000 on August 29th, why not 30,000 on August 6th? Of course, men without guns, bolo men, do not count for much in a serious connection like this now being considered. In November, 1899, at San Jose, in Nueva Ecija province, I heard General Lawton tell Colonel Jack Hayes to disarm and turn loose 175 bolo men the colonel had just captured and was lining up on the public square as we rode into the town. But we are considering how much of a government the Filipinos had in 1898, because the answer is pertinent to what sort of a government they could run if permitted now or at any time in the future; and, physical force being the ultimate basis of stability in all government, when we come to estimate how much of an army they had when their government was claiming recognition as a legitimate living thing, we must remember that ”It was just a question of arming them. They could have had the whole population.” [105]

Now the great significant fact about this Bacoor convention of presidentes of August 6th--a week before Manila surrendered to our forces--is that in it more than half the population of the island of Luzon was represented. The total population of the Philippines is about 7,600,000, [106] and, of these, one-half, or 3,800,000 [107]

live on Luzon. The other islands may be said to dangle from Luzon like the tail of a kite. Taking the tables of the American census of the Philippines of 1903 (vol. ii., p. 123), as a basis on which to judge what Aguinaldo's claims of August 6th amounted to if true, the population of the provinces thus duly incorporated into the new government and in working order on that date, was, in round numbers, about as follows: South of Manila:--Cavite, 135,000; Batangas, 260,000; Laguna, 150,000; Tayabas, 150,000; North of Manila:--Bulacan, 225,000; Pampamga, 225,000; Nueva Ecija, 135,000; Tarlac, 135,000; Pangasinan, 400,000; Union, 140,000; Bataan, 45,000; Zambales, 105,000. This represents a total of more than 2,000,000 of people.

But Aguinaldo's claims of August 6th are not the only evidence as to the political status of the provinces of Luzon in August, 1898. Toward the end of that month, Maj. J. F. Bell, Chief of General Merritt's Bureau of Military Information, made a report on the situation as it stood August 29th, the report being made after most careful investigation, and intended as a summary of the then situation according to the most reliable information obtainable, in order that General Merritt might know, as far as practicable, what he would be ”up against” in the event of trouble with the insurgents. [108]

This report not only corroborates Aguinaldo's claims of August 6th, but it also concedes to the Aguinaldo people eight other important provinces--four south of the Pasig River with a total population of about 630,000, [109] the only four of southern Luzon not included in Aguinaldo's claim of August 6th, thus conceding him practically all of Luzon south of the Pasig; and it furthermore concedes him four great provinces of northern Luzon with a total population of nearly 600,000. [110] General Bell states that these last are ”still in the possession of the Spanish,” but practically certain to be with the insurgents in the very near future. ”Insurgents have been dispatched to attack the Spanish in these provinces,” says the Bell report.

In this same report Major Bell said: ”There is not a particle of doubt but what Aguinaldo and his leaders will resist any attempt of any government to reorganize a colonial government here.” [111] When the insurgent government was finally dislodged from its last capital and Aguinaldo became a fugitive hotly pursued by our troops, he started for the mountains of northern Luzon, pa.s.sing through provinces he had never visited before. The diary of one of his staff officers, Major Villa, in describing a brief stop they made in a town en route (Aringay, in Union province) says: ”After the honorable President had urged them [the townspeople] to be patriotic, we continued the march.” [112] They certainly did ”continue the march.” The Maccabebe scouts, of which the writer commanded a company at the time, took the town a few hours later, Aguinaldo's rear-guard retiring after a brief resistance, following which we found, among the dead in the trenches, a major other than Villa. Certainly, to read this little extract from the diary of Aguinaldo's retreat is to feel the pulse of northern Luzon as to its loyalty to the revolution at that time, and is corroborative of these claims of Aguinaldo made in August, 1898, supplemented, as we have seen them, by General Bell's appraisal.

As to the political conditions which prevailed in southern Luzon, particularly in the Camarines, in August and the fall of 1898, information derived from one who was there then would seem appropriate here. Major Blanton Wins.h.i.+p, Judge Advocate's Corps, U. S. A., Major Archibald W. b.u.t.t, the late lamented military aide to President Taft, and the writer, lived together in Manila, in 1900, at the house of a Spanish physician, a Dr. Lopez, who had been a ”prisoner” at Nueva Caceres, a town situated in one of the provinces of southern Luzon (Camarines) in the fall of 1898. Dr. Lopez had a large family. They had also been ”prisoners” down there. No evil befell them at the hands of their ”captors.” They had the freedom of the town they were in. They had good reason to be pretty well scared as to what the insurgents might do to them. But they were never maltreated. The main impression we got from Dr. Lopez and his family was that the political grip of the Aguinaldo government on southern Luzon was complete during the time they were ”prisoners” there. If anybody doubts the absoluteness of the grip of the Revolutionary government on the situation in the provinces which were represented at the Bacoor convention of August 6, 1898, above mentioned, when the Filipino Declaration of Independence was signed and proclaimed, let him ask any American who had a part in putting down the Philippine insurrection what a presidente, an insurrecto presidente, in a Filipino town, was in 1899 and 1900. He was ”the whole thing.” Even to-day the presidente of a pueblo is as absolute boss of his town as Charles F. Murphy is of Tammany Hall. And a town or pueblo in the Philippines is more than an area covered by more or less contiguous buildings and grounds. It is more like a towns.h.i.+p in Ma.s.sachusetts. So that when you account governmentally for the pueblos of a given province, you account for every square foot of that province and for every man in it. For several years before our war with Spain, nearly every Filipino of any education and spirit in the archipelago belonged to the secret revolutionary society known as the Katipunan. This had its organization in every town when Dewey sank the Spanish fleet and landed Aguinaldo at Cavite. The rest may be imagined.

By September, 1898, Aguinaldo was absolute master of the whole of Luzon. Before the Treaty of Paris was signed (December 10, 1898), in fact while Judge Gray of the Peace Commission was cabling President McKinley that not to leave the government of the Philippines to the people thereof ”would be to make a mockery of instructions,” Aguinaldo had become equally absolute master of the situation throughout the rest of the archipelago outside of Manila.

Toward the end of July, 1898, our Manila Consul, Mr. Williams, who was one of our consular triumvirate of would-be Warwicks, or ”original Aguinaldo men,” of 1898, used to have nice talks with Aguinaldo about the lion and the lamb lying down together without the lion eating the lamb, and in one instance, at least, he goes so far as to represent Aguinaldo as willing to some such arrangement--e. g., annexation, or some vague scheme of dependence. But whenever we hear from Aguinaldo over his own signature, we hear him saying whatever means in Tagalo ”Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.” For instance, at page 15, of Senate Doc.u.ment 208, he writes Williams, under date of August 1st, with fine courtesy:

I congratulate you with all sincerity on the acuteness and ingenuity which you have displayed in painting in an admirable manner the benefits which, especially for me and my leaders, and in general for all my compatriots, would be secured by the union of these islands with the United States of America. Ah! that picture, so happy and so finished * * * This is not saying that I am not of your opinion * * * You say all this and yet more will result from annexing ourselves to your people * * * You are my friend and the friend of the Filipinos and have said it. But why should we say it? Will my people believe it? * * * I have done what they desire, establis.h.i.+ng a government * * * not only because it was my duty, but also because had I acted in any other manner they would fail to recognize me as the interpreter of their aspirations, and would punish me as a traitor, replacing me by another more careful of his own honor and dignity.

Now that we know what was in the Filipino mind when General Merritt arrived in the Philippines, let us see what was in the American military mind out there at the same time. Says General Merritt: ”General Aguinaldo did not visit me on my arrival nor offer his services as a subordinate leader.” We trust the reason of this at once suggests itself from what has preceded, including General Anderson's dealings with the insurgent chief. The latter wanted some understanding as to what the intentions of our government were, and what was to be the programme afterward, should he and his countrymen a.s.sist in the little fighting that now remained necessary to complete the taking of Manila. Those intentions were precisely what Merritt was determined to conceal. ”As my instructions from the President fully contemplated the occupation of the Islands by the American land forces, and stated that 'the powers of the military occupant are absolute and supreme and immediately operate upon the political condition of the inhabitants,' I did not consider it wise to hold any direct communication with the insurgent leader until I should be in possession of the city of Manila.” [113]

On one occasion General Merritt pa.s.sed through the village of Bacoor where Aguinaldo had his headquarters, but, says Mr. Millet [114]

in mentioning this, ”They never met.” After the taking of the city, General Merritt remembered that with some 13,000 Spanish prisoners to guard, and a city of 300,000 people, all but a sprinkling of whom were in sympathy with the insurgent cause, on his hands, and an army of at least 14,000 insurgents--probably far more than that--clamoring without the gates of that city, and only 10,000 men of his own with whom to handle such a situation, frankness was out of the question, in view of his orders from the President. [115] Therefore, on the day after the city surrendered, General Merritt issued a proclamation, copying [116] verbatim from Mr. McKinley's instructions (ante) such innocuous milk-and-water pa.s.sages as the one which a.s.sured the people that our government ”has not come to wage war upon them * * *

but to protect them in their homes, in their employments, and in their personal and religious rights; all persons who, by active aid or honest submission, co-operate with the United States * * * will receive the reward of its support and protection.” But he carefully omitted the words quoted above about the powers of the military occupant being absolute and supreme, ”lest his [Aguinaldo's] pretensions,” to use General Merritt's expression, ”should clash with my designs.” ”For these reasons,” says General Merritt (p. 40), ”the preparations for the attack on the city were * * * conducted without reference to the situation of the insurgent forces.”

Here General Merritt is speaking frankly but not accurately. He means he made his preparations without any more reference to the situation of the insurgent forces than he could help. As a matter of fact, their situation bothered him a good deal. They were in the way. For instance, there was a whole brigade of them at one point between our people and Manila. ”This,” says General Merritt (p. 41), ”was overcome by instructions to General Greene to arrange if possible with the insurgent brigade commander in his immediate vicinity to move to the right and allow the American forces un.o.bstructed control of the roads in their immediate front. No objection was made,”

etc. That reads very well--that about ”arrange if possible,” ”no objection was made,” etc.,--does it not? Nothing there through which ”the l.u.s.tre and the moral strength” of the motives that prompted the Spanish war might be ”dimmed by ulterior designs which might tempt us,” [117] is there? It was stated above that General Merritt was speaking frankly in this report. He was. He probably did not know how General Greene carried out the order to ”arrange if possible with the insurgent brigadier-commander.” But it so happened that there was a newspaper correspondent along with General Greene who has since told us. This gentleman was Mr. Frank D. Millet, from whom we have already above quoted, the correspondent of the London Times and of Harper's Weekly. General Greene had known him years before in the campaigns of the Turco-Russian war. Mr. Millet had been a war correspondent in those campaigns also, and General Greene was there taking observations. So that in the operations against Manila, Mr. Millet, being an old friend of General Greene's, known to be a handy man to have around in a close place, was acting as a civilian volunteer aide to the general. [118]

Here is Mr. Millet's account of what happened, taken from his book, The Expedition to the Philippines:

On the afternoon of the 28th [of July, 1898], General Greene received a verbal message from General Merritt suggesting that he juggle the insurgents out of part of their lines, always on his own responsibility, and without committing in any way the commanding general to any recognition of the native leaders or opening up the prospect of an alliance. This General Greene accomplished very cleverly.

Mr. Millet then goes on to tell how General Greene persuaded one of Aguinaldo's generals (Noriel) to evacuate certain trenches so he (Greene) could occupy them, ”with a condition attached that General Greene must give a written receipt for the entrenchments.” This condition, Mr. Millet says, was imposed by ”the astute leader”

(Aguinaldo). General Greene's ”cleverness” consisted in purposely failing and omitting to give the receipt, which Mr. Millet says ”looked very much like a bargain concluded over a signature, and was a little more formal than General Greene thought advisable.” The key to this sorry business may be found in the first paragraph of General Merritt's instructions to all his generals at the time:

No rupture with insurgents. This is imperative. Can ask insurgent generals or Aguinaldo for permission to occupy trenches, but if refused not to use force. [119]