The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912. James H. Blount
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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 President3 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.
“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.”4 “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 1902.5
General Merritt took Manila August 13th, and sailed away for Paris August 31st, and only a week after that General Otis wired Washington (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.”6
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,7 which number had swelled to nearly 40,000 men with guns in another fifty days (by August 29th)8—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 space of time.
As all Americans who know the Filipinos know how fond they are of what government offices call “paper work,” and how their escribientes9 can work like bees in drafting documents, 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 document 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.10 This convention was held at Bacoor, then Aguinaldo’s headquarters, a little town on the bay shore 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.”11 When the presidentes in convention assembled 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”12 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 José, 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.”13
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 7,600,000,14 and, of these, one-half, or 3,800,00015 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