Part 6 (2/2)

”I am quite unable to explain,” says Mr. Millet (p. 61), ”why we did not in the very beginning make them understand that we were masters of the situation, and that they must come strictly under our authority.” The obvious reason was that a war of conquest to subjugate a remote people struggling to be free from the yoke of alien domination was sure to be more or less unpopular with many of the sovereign voters of a republic, and more or less dangerous therefore, like all unpopular wars, to the tenure of office of the party in power. So that in entering upon a war for conquest, a republic must ”play politics,”

using the military arm of the government for the twofold purpose of crus.h.i.+ng opposition and proving that there is none.

The maxim which makes all fair in war often covers a mult.i.tude of sins. But let us turn for a moment from strategy to principle, and see what two other distinguished American war correspondents were thinking and saying about the same time. Writing to Harper's Weekly from Cavite, under date of July 16th, concerning the work of the Filipinos during the eight weeks before that, Mr. O. K. Davis said: ”The insurgents have driven them [the Spaniards] back over twenty miles of country practically impa.s.sable for our men. * * * Aguinaldo has saved our troops a lot of desperately hard campaigning * * *. The insurgent works extend clear around Manila, and the Spaniards are completely hemmed in. There is no hope for them but surrender.” Writing to the same paper under date of August 6th, Mr. John F. Ba.s.s says: ”We forget that they drove the Spaniards from Cavite to their present intrenched position, thus saving us a long-continued fight through the jungle.” This gentleman did not tackle the question of inventing a new definition of liberty consistent with alien domination. He simply says: ”Give them their liberty and guarantee it to them.” In the face of such plucky patriotism as he had witnessed, political casuistry about ”capacity for self-government” would have hung its head. Yet Mr. Ba.s.s was by no means a novice. He had served with the British army in Egypt in 1895, through the Armenian ma.s.sacres of 1896, and in the Cretan rebellion and Greek War of 1897. His sentiments were simply precisely what those of the average American not under military orders would have been at the time. After the fall of Manila he wrote (August 17th): ”I am inclined to think that the insurgents intend to fight us if we stay and Spain if we go.”

There were 8500 American troops in the taking of the city of Manila, on August 13, 1898. The Filipinos were ignored by them, although they afterwards claimed to have helped. As a matter of fact, the Spanish officers in command were very anxious to surrender and get back to Spain. The Filipinos had already made them ”long for peace,” to use a famous expression of General J. F. Bell. The garrison only put up a very slight resistance, ”to save their face,” as the Chinese say, i. e., to save themselves from being court-martialed under some quixotic article of the Spanish army regulations. The a.s.sault was begun about 9.30 A.M., and early that afternoon the Spanish flag had been lowered from the flag-staff in the main square and the Stars and Stripes run up in its stead, amid the convulsive sobs of dark-eyed senoritas and the muttered curses of melodramatic Spanish cavaliers. Thanks to the Filipinos' three and one half months' work, the performance only cost us five men killed out of the 8500. The list of wounded totalled 43. Our antecedent loss in the trenches prior to the day of the a.s.sault had been fourteen killed and sixty wounded. So the job was completed, so far as the records show, at a cost of less than a score of American lives. [120]

As Aguinaldo's troops surged forward in the wake of the American advance they were stopped by orders from the American commander, and prevented from following the retreating Spaniards into Manila. They were not even allowed what is known to the modern small boy as ”a look-in.” They were not permitted to come into the city to see the surrender. President McKinley's message to Congress of December, 1898, describes ”the last scene of the war” as having been ”enacted at Manila its starting place.” [121] It says: ”On August 13th, after a brief a.s.sault upon the works by the land forces, in which the squadron a.s.sisted, the capital surrendered unconditionally.” In this connection, by way of explaining Aguinaldo's treatment at the hands of our generals from the beginning, the message says, ”Divided victory was not permissible.” ”It was fitting that whatever was to be done * * * should be accomplished by the strong arm of the United States alone.” But what takes much of the virtue out of the ”strong arm”

proposition is that Generals Merritt and Anderson were carrying out President McKinley's orders all the time they were juggling Aguinaldo out of his positions before Manila, and giving him evasive answers, until the city could be taken by the said ”strong arm” alone. For, as the message puts it, in speaking of the taking of the city, ”By this the conquest of the Philippine Islands * * * was formally sealed.”

When General Merritt left Manila on August 30th, he proceeded to Paris to appear before the Peace Commission there. His views doubtless had great weight with them on the momentous questions they had to decide. But his views were wholly erroneous, and that they were so is not surprising. As above stated, he did not even meet Aguinaldo, purposely holding himself aloof from him and his leaders. He never did know how deeply they were incensed at being shut out of Manila when the city surrendered. In his report prepared aboard the steams.h.i.+p China, en route for Paris, he says: ”Doubtless much dissatisfaction is felt by the rank and file of the insurgents, but * * * I am of the opinion that the leaders will be able to prevent serious disturbances,”

etc. (p. 40). If General Merritt had caught the temper of the trenches he would have known better, but he saw nothing of the fighting prior to the final scene, nor did he take the field in person on the day of the combined a.s.sault on the city, August 13th, and therefore missed the supreme opportunity to understand how the Filipinos felt. Says General Anderson in his report:

I understood from the general commanding that he would be personally present on the day of battle. * * * On the morning of the 13th, General Babc.o.c.k came to my headquarters and informed me that the major-general commanding would remain on a despatch boat. [122]

Indeed, so reduced was Manila, by reason of the long siege conducted by the insurgents, that the a.s.sault of August 13th, not only was, but was expected to be, little more than a sham battle. Says Lieutenant-Colonel Pope, chief quartermaster, ”On the evening of August 12th an order was sent me to report with two battalions of the Second Oregon Volunteers, under Colonel Summers the next day on the Kwong Hoi to the commanding general on the Newport, as an escort on his entrance into Manila. At the hour named, I reported etc.” [123] As soon as Spanish ”honor”

was satisfied, up went the white flag and General Merritt was duly escorted ash.o.r.e and into the city, where he received the surrender of the Spanish general.

In the Civil War, General Merritt had received six successive promotions for gallantry, at Gettysburg, Yellow Tavern, Five Forks, etc., and had been with Sheridan at Winchester. So the way he ”commanded” the a.s.sault on Manila is proof only of the obligations we then owed the Filipinos. They had left very little to be done.

In his account of General Merritt's original personal disembarkation at Cavite, Mr. Frank Millet acquaints his readers with a Philippine custom we afterwards grew quite familiar with and found quite useful, of keeping your shoes dry in landing from a rowboat on a beach by riding astride the shoulders of some husky native boatman. The boatmen make it a point of special pride not to let their pa.s.sengers get their feet wet. Mr. Millet tells us that a general in uniform looks neither dignified nor picturesque under such circ.u.mstances, and that therefore he will not elaborate on the picture, but that it is suggestive ”more of the hilarious than of the heroic.” Presumably when General Merritt went ash.o.r.e on August 13th, from the despatch boat from which he had been watching the a.s.sault on Manila, to receive the surrender of the Spanish general, he followed the same custom of the country he had used on the occasion of his original disembarkation. So that in the taking of Manila, we were probably literally, as well as ethically, like General Mahone of Virginia as he is pictured in a familiar post-bellum negro story, according to which the general met a negro on a steep part of the road to heaven, told him that St. Peter would only admit mounted parties, mounted the negro with the latter's consent, rode on his back the rest of the toilsome journey to the heavenly gate, dismounted, knocked, and was cordially welcomed by the saint at the sacred portal thus: ”Why how d' ye do, General Mahone; jess tie yoh hoss and come in.”

CHAPTER V

OTIS AND AGUINALDO

Where people and leaders are agreed, What can the archon do?

Athenian Maxims.

Major-general Elwell S. Otis and staff arrived at Manila August 21, 1898. [124] He relieved General Merritt and succeeded to the command of the American troops in the Philippines, August 29th. Archbishop Chapelle, who was papal delegate to the Philippines in 1900, once said to the writer at Manila, in that year, that General Otis was ”of about the right mental calibre to command a one-company post in Arizona.” The impatience manifested in the remark was due to differences between him and the commanding-general about the Friar question. The remark itself was of course intended, and understood, as hyperbole. But the selection of General Otis to handle the Philippine situation was a serious mistake. He was past sixty when he took command. He continued in command from August 29, 1898, to May 5, 1900, a period of some twenty months. The insurrection was held in abeyance for some five months after he took hold, the leaders hoping against hope that the Treaty of Paris would leave their country to them as it did Cuba to the Cubans; and during all that time General Otis was apparently unable to see that war would be inevitable in the event the decision at Paris was adverse to Filipino hopes. A member of General Otis's staff once told me in speaking of the insurrection period that his chief pooh-poohed the likelihood of an outbreak right along up to the very day before the outbreak of February 4, 1899, occurred. Before the insurrection came he would not see it, and after it came he--literally--did not see it; that is to say, during fifteen months of fighting he commanded the Eighth Army Corps from a desk in Manila and never once took the field. His Civil War record was all right, but he was now getting well along in years. He was also a graduate of the Harvard Law School of the Cla.s.s of 1861, rather prided himself on being ”a pretty fair jack-leg lawyer,” and had a most absorbing pa.s.sion for the details of administrative work. They used to say that the only occasion on which General Otis ever went out of Manila the whole time he was there was when he went up the railroad once to Angeles to see that a proper valuation was put on a then recently deceased Quartermaster's Department mule. When he left the Islands he remarked to a newspaper man that he had had but one ”day off” since he had been there. Unswerving devotion to a desk in time of war, on the part of the commanding general of the army in the field, seemed to him an appropriate subject for just pride. This showed his limitations. He was a man wholly unable to see the essentials of an important situation, or to take in the whole horizon. He was known to the Eighth Corps, his command, as a sort of ”Fussy Grandpa,” his personality and general management of things always suggesting the picture of a painfully near-sighted be-spectacled old gentleman busily nosing over papers you had submitted, and finding fault to show he knew a thing or two. However, he had many eminently respectable traits, and did the best he knew how, though wholly devoid of that n.o.ble serenity of vision which used to enable Mr. Lincoln, amid the darkest and most tremendous of his problems, to say with a smile to Horace Greeley: ”Don't shoot the organist, he's doing the best he can.”

Before General Otis relieved General Merritt, the latter had written Aguinaldo politely requesting him to move his troops beyond certain specified lines about the city, [125] and Aguinaldo had replied August 27th, agreeing to do so, but asking that the Americans promise to restore to him the positions thus vacated in the event under the treaty the United States should leave the Philippines to Spain. [126]

August 31st, Otis notified Aguinaldo, then still at Bacoor, his first capital, that General Merritt had been unexpectedly called away, and that he, Otis, being unacquainted with the situation must take time before answering the Aguinaldo letter to Merritt of the 27th. On September 8th, he did answer, in a preposterously long communication of about 3000 words, which says, among other things: ”I have not been instructed as to what policy the United States intends to pursue in regard to its legitimate holdings here”; and therefore declines to promise anything about restoring the insurgent positions in the event we should leave the Islands to Spain under the treaty. Commenting on this in the North American Review for February, 1900, General Anderson says: ”I believe we came to the parting of the ways when we refused this request.” General Anderson was right. General Merritt had on August 21st sent Aguinaldo a memorandum by the hand of Major J. Franklin Bell which promised: ”Care will be taken to leave him [Aguinaldo] in as good condition as he was found by the forces of the government.” [127] In the role of political henchman for President McKinley, which General Otis seems to have conceived it his duty to play from the very beginning in the Philippines, it thus appears that he was not troubled about keeping unsullied the faith and honor of the government as pledged by his predecessor. His 3000-word letter to Aguinaldo of September 8th ignores Merritt's promise as coolly as if it had never been made. His only concern appears to have been to leave the government free to throw the Filipinos overboard if it should wish to. He peevishly implies later on that Aguinaldo's requests in this regard were merely a cloak for designs against us (p. 40). But his real reason is given in a sort of stage ”aside”--a letter to the Adjutant-General of the army dated September 12, 1898, wherein he explains: ”Should I promise them that in case of the return of the city to Spain, upon United States evacuation, their forces would be placed by us in positions which they now occupy, I thoroughly believe that they would evacuate at once. But, of course, under the international obligations resting upon us * * * no such promise can be given.” [128]

In the sacred name of National Honor what of the Merritt promise? You only have to turn a few pages in the War Department Report for 1899 from the Merritt promise to the Otis repudiation of it. Yes, General Anderson was right. It was when General Otis practically repudiated in writing the written promise of his predecessor, General Merritt, that we ”came to the parting of the ways” in our relations with the Filipinos. Let no American suppose for a moment that the author of this volume is engaged in the ungracious, and frequently deservedly thankless task of mere muck-raking. He never met General Otis but once, and then for a very brief official interview of an agreeable nature. He is only attempting to make a small contribution to the righting of a great wrong unwittingly done by a great, free, and generous people to another people then struggling to be free--a wrong which he doubts not will one day be righted, whether he lives to see it so righted or not. General Otis's letter to the Adjutant-General of the army of September 12th, above quoted, shows that he was holding himself in readiness to carry out in the Philippines any political programme the Administration might determine upon, which would mean that he would afterwards come home and tell how entirely righteous that programme had been. Had the Administration hearkened back to Admiral Dewey's suggestion that the Filipinos were far superior to the Cubans, and decided to set before General Otis in the Philippines the same task it had set before General Wood in Cuba, we would have heard nothing about Filipino ”incapacity for self-government.” General Otis would have taken his cue from the President, his commander-in chief, and said: ”I cordially concur in the opinion of Admiral Dewey.” Then he would have gone to work in a spirit of generous rivalry to do in the Philippines just what Wood did in Cuba. And the task would have been easier. Had the Administration taken the view urged by Judge Gray, as a member of the Paris Peace Commission, that ”if we had captured Cadiz and the Carlists had helped us [we] would not owe duty to stay by them at the conclusion of the war,” [129] and therefore we were not bound to see the Filipinos through their struggle, General Otis would have adopted that view with equal loyalty and in the presidential campaign of 1900, he would have furnished the Administration with arguments to justify that course. This would have been an easy task, also, for two of Spain's fleets had been destroyed by us, leaving her but one to guard her home coast cities, and making the sending of reinforcements to the besieged and demoralized garrison of Manila impossible. The native army she relied on throughout the archipelago had gone over bodily to the patriot cause, and there was no hope of successful resistance to it. But General Otis did not have the boundless prestige of Admiral Dewey and so volunteered no advice. As soon as the Administration chose its course, he set to work to prove the correctness of it. From him, of course, came all the McKinley Administration's original arguments against doing for the Filipinos as we did in the case of Cuba. He was the only legitimate source the American people could look to at that time to help them in their dilemma. They were standing with reluctant feet where democracy and its ant.i.thesis meet, and Otis was their sole guide. But the guide was of the kind who wait until you point and ask ”Is that the right direction?” and then answer ”Yes.” Four days after General Otis sent his above quoted letter of September 12th, to Adjutant-General Corbin, Mr. McKinley signed his instructions to the Paris Peace Commissioners, directing them to insist on the cession of Luzon at least, the instructions being full of eloquent but specious argument about the necessity of establis.h.i.+ng a guardians.h.i.+p over people of whom we then knew nothing. From that day forward General Otis bent himself to the task of showing the righteousness of that course. ”I will let nothing go that will hurt the Administration,” was his favorite expression to the newspaper correspondents when they used to complain about his press censors.h.i.+p. Hypocrisy is defined to be ”a false a.s.sumption of piety or virtue.” The false a.s.sumption of piety or virtue which has handicapped the American occupation of the Philippines from the beginning, and which will always handicap it, until we throw off the mask and honestly set to work to give the Filipinos a square deal on the question of whether they can or cannot run a decent government of their own if permitted, is traceable back to the Otis letter to the Adjutant-General of September 12, 1898, ignoring General Merritt's promise to leave Aguinaldo ”in as good condition as he was found by the forces of the government” in case we should, under the terms of the treaty of peace, leave the Islands to Spain.

General Otis's letter of September 8th to Aguinaldo is apparently intended to convince him that he ought to consider everything the Americans had done up to date as exactly the correct thing, according to the standards of up-to-date, philanthropic, liberty-loving nations which pity double-dealing as mediaeval; and that he should cheer up, and feel grateful and happy, instead of sulking, Achilles-like, in his tents; and furthermore--which was the crux--that he must move said tents. General Otis does not forget ”that the revolutionary forces under your command have made many sacrifices in the interest of civil liberty (observe, he does not call it independence) and for the welfare of your people”; admits that they have ”endured great hards.h.i.+ps, and have rendered aid”; and avers, as a reason for Aguinaldo's evacuating that part of the environs of Manila occupied by his troops: ”It [the war with Spain] was undertaken by the United States for humanity's sake * * * not for * * * aggrandizement or for any national profit.” After stating, as above indicated, that he does not yet know what the policy of the United States is to be ”in regard to its legitimate holdings here,” General Otis proceeds to declare that in any event he will not be a party to any joint occupation of any part of the city, bay, and harbor of Manila--the territory covered by the Peace Protocol of August 13th--and that Aguinaldo must effect the evacuation demanded in the letter of General Merritt ”before Tuesday the 15th”

(of September), i.e., within a week. Aguinaldo finally withdrew his troops, after much useless parleying and much waste of ink.

There was some of the parleying and ink, however, that was not wholly wasted. But to properly appreciate it as ill.u.s.trative of the fort.i.tude and tact which the early Filipino leaders seem to have combined in a remarkable degree, some prefatory data are essential.

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