The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912 Part 11

Senator h.o.a.r had put Mr. McKinley on notice that he was going to present the ethics of the case in the debate on the treaty. Congress had gone home for the holidays, and after it re-a.s.sembled in January the treaty would come up. The vote was sure to be close, and a too vigorous manifestation of belief on the part of the Filipinos that this nation was not closing the war with Spain animated by "the same high rule of conduct which guided it in facing war" (Mr. McKinley's instructions to the Peace Commissioners) might defeat the ratification of the treaty. Indeed, the final vote of February 6th, was so close that the Administration had but one vote to spare. The final vote was fifty-seven to twenty-seven--just one over the necessary two-thirds. The smoke of a battle to subjugate the Filipinos might "dim the l.u.s.tre and the moral strength," as Mr. McKinley had expressed it in his instructions to the Peace Commissioners, of a war to free the Cubans. Therefore there must be no trouble, at least until after the ratification of the treaty. President McKinley had invented in the case of Cuba a very catchy phrase, "Forcible annexation would be criminal aggression," and every time anybody now quoted it on him it tended to take the wind out of his sails. So benevolently eager was that truly kind-hearted and Christian gentleman to avoid the appearance of "criminal aggression" that he evidently got to thinking about that telegram of December 23d in which he had authorized General Otis to send troops to the relief of the beleaguered Spanish garrison at Iloilo, and also about the message from Admiral Dewey received November 18th previous, to the effect that the entire island of Panay except Iloilo was then already in the hands of the insurgents. The result was that he decided not to let his conciliatory proclamation of December 21st await the slow process of the mails, and therefore, though it consisted of something like one thousand words, he had it cabled out to General Otis in full on December 27th. It is now here reproduced in full because it precipitated the war in the Philippines, and is the key to all our subsequent dealings with them [157]:

THE BENEVOLENT a.s.sIMILATION PROCLAMATION

Executive Mansion, Washington, December 21, 1898.

The destruction of the Spanish fleet in the harbor of Manila by the United States naval squadron commanded by Rear-Admiral Dewey, followed by the reduction of the city and the surrender of the Spanish forces, practically effected the conquest of the Philippine Islands and the suspension of Spanish sovereignty therein. With the signature of the treaty of peace between the United States and Spain by their respective plenipotentiaries at Paris on the 10th instant, and as a result of the victories of American arms, the future control, disposition, and government of the Philippine Islands are ceded to the United States. In the fulfilment of the rights of sovereignty thus acquired and the responsible obligations of government thus a.s.sumed, the actual occupation and administration of the entire group of the Philippine Islands becomes immediately necessary, and the military government heretofore maintained by the United States in the city, harbor, and bay of Manila is to be extended with all possible despatch to the whole of the ceded territory. In performing this duty the military commander of the United States is enjoined to make known to the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands that in succeeding to the sovereignty of Spain, in severing the former political relations, and in establishing a new political power, the authority of the United States is to be exerted for the securing of the persons and property of the people of the islands and for the confirmation of all their private rights and relations. It will be the duty of the commander of the forces of occupation to announce and proclaim in the most public manner that we come not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends, to protect the natives in their homes, in their employments, and in their personal and religious rights. All persons who, either by active aid or by honest submission, co-operate with the Government of the United States to give effect to these beneficent purposes will receive the reward of its support and protection. All others will be brought within the lawful rule we have a.s.sumed, with firmness if need be, but without severity, so far as possible. Within the absolute domain of military authority, which necessarily is and must remain supreme in the ceded territory until the legislation of the United States shall otherwise provide, the munic.i.p.al laws of the territory in respect to private rights and property and the repression of crime are to be considered as continuing in force, and to be administered by the ordinary tribunals, so far as practicable. The operations of civil and munic.i.p.al government are to be performed by such officers as may accept the supremacy of the United States by taking the oath of allegiance, or by officers chosen, as far as practicable, from the inhabitants of the islands. While the control of all the public property and the revenues of the state pa.s.ses with the cession, and while the use and management of all public means of transportation are necessarily reserved to the authority of the United States, private property, whether belonging to individuals or corporations, is to be respected except for cause duly established. The taxes and duties heretofore payable by the inhabitants to the late government become payable to the authorities of the United States unless it be seen fit to subst.i.tute for them other reasonable rates or modes of contribution to the expenses of government, whether general or local. If private property be taken for military use, it shall be paid for when possible in cash, at a fair valuation, and when payment in cash is not practicable, receipts are to be given. All ports and places in the Philippine Islands in the actual possession of the land and naval forces of the United States will be opened to the commerce of all friendly nations. All goods and wares not prohibited for military reasons by due announcement of the military authority will be admitted upon payment of such duties and other charges as shall be in force at the time of their importation. Finally, it should be the earnest wish and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by a.s.suring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of

BENEVOLENT a.s.sIMILATION

subst.i.tuting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule. In the fulfilment of this high mission, supporting the temperate administration of affairs for the greatest good of the governed, there must be sedulously maintained the strong arm of authority, to repress disturbance and to overcome all obstacles to the bestowal of the blessings of good and stable government upon the people of the Philippine Islands under the free flag of the United States.

William McKinley.

The words used in the foregoing proclamation which were regarded by the Filipinos as "fighting words," i. e., as making certain the long antic.i.p.ated probability of a war for independence, are those which appear in italics. The rest of the proclamation counted for nothing with them. They had been used to the hollow rhetoric and flowery promises of equally eloquent Spanish proclamations all their lives, they and their fathers before them.

In suing to President McKinley for peace on July 22d, previous, the Prime Minister of Spain had justified all the atrocities committed and permitted by his government in Cuba during the thirty years'

struggle for independence there which preceded the Spanish-American War by saying that what Spain had done had been prompted only by a "desire to spare the great island from the dangers of premature independence." [158]

Clearly, from the Filipino point of view, the United States was now determined "to spare them from the dangers of premature independence,"

using such force as might be necessary for the accomplishment of that pious purpose.

The truth is that, Prometheus-like, we stole the sacred fire from the altar of Freedom whereupon the flames of the Spanish War were kindled, and gave it to the Filipinos, justifying the means by the end; and "the links of the lame Lemnian" have been festering in our flesh ever since. The Benevolent a.s.similation Proclamation was a kind of Pandora Box, supposed to contain all the blessings of Liberty, but when the lid was taken off, woes innumerable befell the intended beneficiaries, and left them only the Hope of Freedom--from us. Verily there is nothing new under the sun. It is written: "Thou shalt not steal"

anything--not even "sacred fire." There is no such thing as nimble morality. The lesson of the old Greek poet fits our case. So also, indeed, do those of the modern sage, Maeterlinck, for the Filipinos could have found their own Bluebird for happiness. The record of our experience in the Philippines is full of reminders, which will multiply as the years go by, that, after all, every people have an "unalienable right" to pursue happiness in their own way as opposed to somebody else's way. That is the law of G.o.d, as G.o.d gives me to see the right. Conceived during the Christmas holiday season and in the spirit of that blessed season and presented to the Filipino people on New Year's Day, received by them practically as a declaration of war and baptized in the blood of thousands of them in the battle of February 4th thereafter, the manner of the reception of this famous doc.u.ment, the initial reversal and subsequent evolution of its policies, and all the lights and shadows of Benevolent a.s.similation will be traced in the chapters which follow.

CHAPTER IX

THE ILOILO FIASCO

The King of France with forty thousand men Marched up the hill and then marched down again.

Old English Ballad.

We have already seen how busily Aguinaldo occupied himself during the protracted peace negotiations at Paris in getting his government and people ready for the struggle for independence which he early and shrewdly guessed would be ultimately forthcoming. General Otis was in no position to preserve the status quo. The status quo was a worm in hot ashes that would not stay still. The revolution was a snow-ball that would roll. The day after Christmas, General Otis at last sent an expedition under General Marcus P. Miller to the relief of Iloilo, but when it arrived, December 28th, the Spaniards had already turned the town over to the insurgent authorities, and sailed away. When General Miller arrived, being under imperative orders from Washington to be conciliatory, and under no circ.u.mstances to have a clash with the insurgents, the Administration's most earnest solicitude being to avoid a clash, at least until the treaty of peace with Spain should be ratified by the United States Senate, he courteously asked permission to land, several times, being refused each time. With a request of this sort sent ash.o.r.e January 1, 1899, he transmitted a copy of the proclamation set forth in the preceding chapter. The insurgent reply defiantly forbade him to land. Therefore he did not land--because Washington was pulling the strings--until after the treaty was ratified. "So here we are at Iloilo, an exploded bluff,"

wrote war correspondent J. F. Ba.s.s to his paper, Harper's Weekly.

By the time the treaty was ratified the battle of Manila of February 4th had occurred, and the pusillanimity of self-doubting diplomacy had given way to the red honesty of war. [159]

As was noticed in the chapter preceding this, by the end of December, 1898, all military stations outside Luzon, with the exception of Zamboanga, in the extreme south of the great Mohammedan island of Mindanao near Borneo, had been turned over by the Spaniards to the insurgents. When General Miller, commanding the expedition to Iloilo, arrived in the harbor of that city with his teeming troop-ships and naval escorts on December 28th, an aide of the Filipino commanding general came aboard the boat he was on and "desired to know," says General Miller's report, [160] "if we had anything against them--were we going to interfere with them." General Miller then sent some of his own aides ash.o.r.e with a letter to the insurgent authorities, explaining the peaceful nature of his errand. They at once asked if our people had brought down any instructions from Aguinaldo. Answering in the negative, General Miller's aides handed them his olive-branch letter. They read it and said they could do nothing without orders from Aguinaldo "in cases affecting their Federal Government." The grim veteran commanding the American troops smoked on this for a day or so, and then asked a delegation of insurgents that were visiting his ship by his invitation--they would not let him land, you see--whether if he landed they would meet him with armed resistance. The Malay reverence for the relation of host and guest resulted in an evasive reply. They could not answer. But after they went back to the city they did answer. And this is what they wrote:

Upon the return of your commissioners last night, we * * *

discussed the situation and att.i.tude of this region of Bisayas in regard to its relations and dependence upon the central government of Luzon (the Aguinaldo government, of course); and * * * I have the honor to notify you that, in conjunction with the people, the army, and the committee, we insist upon our pretension not to consent * * * to any foreign interference without express orders from the central government of Luzon * * * with which we are one in ideas, as we have been until now in sacrifices. * * *

If you insist * * * upon disembarking your forces, this is our final att.i.tude. May G.o.d forgive you, etc."

Iloilo, December 30, 1898. [161]

This letter is recited in General Miller's report to be from "President Lopez, of the Federal Government of Visayas." General Miller then wrote Otis begging permission to attack on the ground that upon the success of the expedition he was in charge of "depends the future speedy yielding of insurrectionary movements in the islands." War correspondent Ba.s.s, who was on the ground at the time, also wrote his paper: "The effect on the natives will be incalculable all over the islands." But General Otis was trying to help Mr. McKinley nurse the treaty through the Senate on the idea that there weren't going to be any "insurrectionary movements in the islands," that all dark and misguided conspiracies of selfishly ambitious leaders looking to such impious ends would fade before the sunlight of Benevolent a.s.similation.

Cautioning Otis against any clash at Iloilo, Mr. McKinley wired January 9th: "Conflict would be most unfortunate, considering the present.

* * * Time given the insurgents cannot injure us, and must weaken and discourage them. They will see our benevolent purpose, etc." [162]

The Iloilo fiasco did indeed furnish to the insurgent cause aid and comfort at the psychologic moment when it most needed encouragement to bring things to a head. It presented a spectacle of vacillation and seeming cowardice which heartened the timid among the insurgents and started among them a general eagerness for war which had been lacking before. In one of his bulletins [163] to Otis, General Miller tells of two boats' crews of the 51st Iowa landing on January 5th, and being met by a force of armed natives who "asked them their business and warned them off," whereupon they heeded the warning and returned to their transport. This regiment had then been cooped up on their transport continuously since leaving San Francisco November 3d, previous, sixty-three days. They were kept lying off Iloilo until January 29th, and then brought back to Manila and landed, after eighty-nine days aboard ship, all idea of taking Iloilo before the Senate should act having been abandoned.

The Benevolent a.s.similation Proclamation was received by cable in cipher, at Manila, December 29th, and as soon as it had been written out in long hand General Otis hurried a copy down to General Miller at Iloilo by a ship sailing that day, so that General Miller might "understand the position and policy of our government." But he forgot to tell Miller to conceal the policy for the present. [164]

So the latter, on January 1st, not only sent a copy of it to the "President of the Federal Government of Visayas," Mr. Lopez, [165]

but in the note of transmittal he "asked," says his report, "that they permit the entry of my troops." [166] What a fatal mistake! Here was a proclamation representing all the "majesty, dominion, and power" of the American Government, signed by the President of the United States, in terms a.s.serting immediate, absolute, and supreme authority, and the natives were "asked" if they would "permit" its enforcement. General Miller's report says that he also had the proclamation "translated into Spanish and distributed to the people." [167] "The people laugh at it," he says. "The insurgents call us cowards and are fortifying at the point of the peninsula, and are mounting old smooth-bore guns left by the Spaniards. They are intrenching everywhere, are bent on having one fight, and are confident of victory. The longer we wait before the attack the harder it will be to put down the insurrection." This is especially interesting in the light of President McKinley's justification of the wisdom of temporizing--on the idea that delay would weaken the insurgents and could not hurt us. "Let no one convince you," writes Miller to Otis on January 5th, "that peaceful means can settle the difficulty here."

The appeal to Otis to permit commencement of operations was without avail. Otis was the Manila agent of the Aldrich Old Guard in the Senate, in charge of the pending treaty. He would simply send the disgusted Miller messages not to be hasty, a.s.suring him that the firing of a shot at Iloilo would mean the precipitation of general conflict about Manila and all over the place, and that this would be "most disappointing to the President of the United States, who continually urges extreme caution and no conflict." [168]

The Administration was counting senatorial noses at the time, and that its anxiety was justified is apparent from the fact already noted, that on the final vote whereby the treaty was ratified it had but one vote to spare. So General Miller sat sunning himself on the deck of his transport, and watching the insurgents working like ants at their fortifications, and vainly wishing his 2500 men could get ash.o.r.e at least long enough to stretch themselves a bit. John F. Ba.s.s, correspondent for Harper's Weekly, left Iloilo, returned to Manila, and wrote his paper on January 23d: "I returned to Manila well knowing that there was nothing more to be done in Iloilo until the Senate voted on the Treaty of Peace."

On the eighth day after General Miller had asked permission of the Iloilo village Hampdens to enforce the orders of the President of the United States, the "Federal Government of the Visayas," through its President, Senor Lopez, finally deigned to notice Mr. McKinley's proclamation. It said under date of January 9th:

General: We have the high honor of having received your message, dated January 1st, of this year, enclosing letter of President McKinley. You say in one clause of your message: "As indicated in the President's cablegram, under these conditions the inhabitants of the island of Panay ought to obey the political authority of the United States, and they will incur a grave responsibility if, after deliberating, they decide to resist said authority." So the council of state of this region of Visayas are, at this present moment, between the authority of the United States, that you try to impose on us, and the authority of the central government of Malolos.

Then follows this remarkable statement of the case for the Filipinos:

The supposed authority of the United States began with the Treaty of Paris, on the 10th of December, 1898. The authority of the Central Government of Malolos is founded in the sacred and natural bonds of blood, language, uses, customs, ideas, (and) sacrifices. [169]

General Otis was fond of throwing cold water on any particularly eloquent Filipino insurrecto doc.u.ment he had occasion to put in his reports by saying that Mabini was "the brains of" the Malolos Government--meaning the only brains it had [170]--and that he probably wrote such doc.u.ment, whatever it might be. But here is a piece of real eloquence, originating away down in the Visayan Islands, as far away from Malolos as Colonel Stark and his "Green Mountain Boys"

were from Washington and Hamilton in 1776 and after. What then is the explanation of composition so forceful in its impa.s.sioned simplicity, and in the light of subsequent events, so pathetic? There is but one explanation. It came from the heart. It was the cry of the Soul of Humanity seeking its natural affiliations. It was the language of what Aguinaldo's early state papers always used to call the "legitimate aspirations of" his people--legitimate aspirations which we later strangled. The reason of the writer's earnestness is that a few months later he helped do some of the strangling. Thirteen years afterwards, a thorough acquaintance with the Filipino side of the matter, derived from an examination of the information which has been gradually acc.u.mulated and published by our government during that time, causes him to say, "Father forgive me, for I knew not what I did." The 35,000 volunteers of 1899 knew nothing about the Filipinos or their side of the case. We were like the deputy sheriff who goes out with a warrant duly issued to arrest a man charged with unlawful breach of the peace. It is not his business to inquire whether the man is guilty or not. If the man resists arrest, he takes the consequences.

On the second day after the above defiance of the President of the United States was served up to General Miller, that gallant officer having dutifully swallowed it, sent an officer ash.o.r.e on a diplomatic mission. The name and rank of this military amba.s.sador were Acting a.s.sistant Surgeon Henry DuR. Phelan, who clearly appears to have been a man of keen insight and considerable ability. His written report to General Miller of what transpired is a doc.u.ment of permanent interest and importance to the annals of men's struggles for free inst.i.tutions. [171] It states that at the meeting the spokesman of the Filipinos, Attorney Raimundo Melliza, began by saying that "all the Americans owned was Manila." That was unquestionably true, so our amba.s.sador, it seems, did not gainsay it. Dr. Phelan suggested that the Americans had sacrificed lives and money in destroying the power of Spain. The spokesman, Attorney Melliza, replied that "they also had made great sacrifice in lives, and that they had a right to their country which they had fought for, and that we are here now to take from them what they had won by fighting; that they had been our allies, and we had used them as such." Dr. Phelan's report goes on to say: "I replied that military occupation was a necessity for a time, * * * and that as soon as order was a.s.sured it would be withdrawn * * *. They smiled at this." Well they might. Fourteen years have elapsed since then, and the law-making power of the United States has never yet declared whether the American occupation of the Philippine Islands is to be temporary, like our occupation of Cuba was, or permanent, like the British occupation of Egypt is. True, Dr. Phelan said "military" occupation, but the smile was provoked by the suggestion of temporariness. After the committee smiled, they remarked:

We have fought for independence and feel that we have the power of governing and need no a.s.sistance. We are showing it now. You might inquire of the foreigners if it is not so.

Dr. Phelan's report proceeds:

They stated that their orders were not to allow us to disembark, and that they were powerless to allow us to come in without express orders from their government.