The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912 Part 2

Childe Harold.

The battle of Manila Bay was fought May 1, 1898. Until the thunder of Dewey's guns reverberated around the world, there was perhaps no part of it the American people knew less about than the Philippine Islands.

We have all heard much of what happened after the battle, but comparatively few, probably, have ever had a glimpse at our great sailor while he was there in Hong Kong harbor, getting ready to go to sea to destroy the Spanish armada. Such a glimpse is modestly afforded by the Admiral in his testimony before the Senate Committee in 1902. [11]

Asked by the Committee when he first heard from Aguinaldo and his people in 1898, Admiral Dewey said [12]:

I should think about a month before leaving Hong Kong, that is, about the first of April, when it became pretty certain that there was to be war with Spain, I heard that there were a number of Filipinos in the city of Hong Kong who were anxious to accompany the squadron to Manila in case we went over. I saw these men two or three times myself. They seemed to be all very young earnest boys. I did not attach much importance to what they said or to themselves. Finally, before we left Hong Kong for Mirs Bay [13]

I received a telegram from Consul-General Pratt at Singapore saying that Aguinaldo was there and anxious to see me. I said to him "All right; tell him to come on," but I attached so little importance to Aguinaldo that I did not wait for him. He did not arrive, and we sailed from Mirs Bay without any Filipinos.

From his testimony before the Committee it is clear that Admiral Dewey's first impressions of the Filipinos, like those of most Americans after him, were not very favorable, that is to say, he did not in the outset take them very seriously. It will be interesting to consider these impressions, and then to compare them with those he gathered on better acquaintance from observing their early struggles for independence. The more intimate acquaintance, as has been the case with all his fellow countrymen since, caused him to revise his first verdict. Answering a question put by Senator Carmack concerning what transpired between him and the Philippine Revolutionists at Hong Kong before he sailed in search of the Spanish fleet, the Admiral said [14]:

They were bothering me. I was getting my squadron ready for battle, and these little men were coming on board my ship at Hong Kong and taking a good deal of my time, and I did not attach the slightest importance to anything they could do, and they did nothing; that is, none of them went with me when I went to Mirs Bay. There had been a good deal of talk, but when the time came they did not go. One of them didn't go because he didn't have any tooth-brush.

Senator Burrows: "Did he give that as his reason?"

Admiral Dewey: "Yes, he said 'I have no tooth-brush.'"

They used to come aboard my ship and take my time, and finally I would not see them at all, but turned them over to my staff.

Now the lack of a tooth-brush is hardly a valid excuse for not going into battle, however great a convenience it may be in campaign. But the absence of orders from your commanding officer stands on a very different footing. Aguinaldo had not yet arrived. Three hundred years of Spanish misgovernment and cruelty is not conducive to aversion to fict.i.tious excuses by the lowly in the presence of supreme authority. The answer was amusingly uncandid, but disproved neither patriotism nor intelligence.

Aguinaldo arrived at Hong Kong from Singapore a day or so after Admiral Dewey had sailed for Manila. Of the battle of May 1st, no detailed mention is essential here. Every schoolboy is familiar with it. It will remain, as long as the republic lasts, a part of the heritage of the nation. But the true glory of that battle, to my mind, rests, not upon the circ.u.mstance that we have the Philippines, but upon the tremendous fact that before it occurred the att.i.tude of our State Department toward an American citizen sojourning in distant lands and becoming involved in difficulties there had long been, "Why didn't he stay at home? Let him stew in his own juice"; whereas, since then, to be an American has been more like it was in the days of St. Paul to be a Roman citizen.

May 16th, our consul at Hong Kong, Mr. Wildman, succeeded in getting the insurgent leader and his staff off for Manila on board the U. S. S. McCulloch by authority of Admiral Dewey. Like his colleague over at Singapore, Consul Wildman was bent on the role of Warwick. Admiral Dewey was quite busy there in Manila Bay the first two or three weeks after the battle, but yielding to the letters of Wildman, who meantime had const.i.tuted himself a kind of fiscal agent at Hong Kong for the prospective revolution in the matter of the purchase of guns and otherwise, the Admiral told the commanding officer of the McCulloch that on his next trip to Hong Kong he might bring down a dozen or so of the Filipinos there. The frame of mind they were in on reaching Manila, as a result of the a.s.surances of Pratt and Wildman, is well ill.u.s.trated by a letter the latter wrote Aguinaldo a little later (June 25th) which is undoubtedly in keeping with what he had been telling him earlier:

Do not forget that the United States undertook this war for the sole purpose of relieving the Cubans from the cruelties under which they were suffering, and not for the love of conquest or the hope of gain. They are actuated by precisely the same feelings for the Filipinos. [15]

And at the time, they were.

"Every American citizen who came in contact with the Filipinos at the inception of the Spanish War, or at any time within a few months after hostilities began," said General Anderson in an interview published in the Chicago Record of February 24, 1900, "probably told those he talked with * * * that we intended to free them from Spanish oppression. The general expression, was 'We intend to whip the Spaniards and set you free.'"

The McCulloch arrived in Manila Bay with Aguinaldo and his outfit, May 19th. Let Admiral Dewey tell what happened then [16]:

Aguinaldo came to see me. I said, "Well now, go ash.o.r.e there; we have got our forces at the a.r.s.enal at Cavite, go ash.o.r.e and start your army." He came back in the course of a few hours and said, "I want to leave here; I want to go to j.a.pan." I said, "Don't give it up, Don Emilio." I wanted his help, you know. He did not sleep ash.o.r.e that night; he slept on board the ship. The next morning he went on sh.o.r.e, still inside my lines, and began recruiting men.

Enterprises of great pith and moment have often turned awry and lost the name of action for lack of a word spoken in season by a stout heart. Admiral Dewey spoke the word, and Aguinaldo, his protege, did the rest. "Then he began operations toward Manila, and he did wonderfully well. He whipped the Spaniards battle after battle * * *."

[17] In fact, the desperate bravery of those little brown men after they got warmed up reminds one of the j.a.ps at the walls of Peking, in the advance of the Allied Armies to the relief of the foreign legations during the Boxer troubles of 1900. Admiral Dewey told the Senate Committee in 1902 that Aguinaldo actually wanted to put one of the old smooth-bore Spanish guns he found at Cavite on a barge and have him (Dewey) tow it up in front of Manila so he could attack the city with it. "I said, 'Oh no, no; we can do nothing until our troops come.'"

Otherwise he was constantly advising and encouraging him. Why? Let the Admiral answer: "I knew that what he was doing--driving the Spaniards in--was saving our troops." [17] In other words they were daily dying that American soldiers might live, on the faith of the reasons for which we had declared war, and trusting, because of the words of our consuls and the acts of our admiral, in the sentiment subsequently so n.o.bly expressed by Mr. McKinley in his instructions to the Paris peace Commissioners:

The United States in making peace should follow the same high rule of conduct which guided it in facing war. [18]

"I did not know what the action of our Government would be," said the Admiral to the Committee, [19] adding that he simply used his best judgment on the spot at the time; presumably supposing that his Government would do the decent thing by these people who considered us their liberators. "They looked on us as their liberators," said he. [20] "Up to the time the army came he (Aguinaldo) did everything I requested. He was most obedient; whatever I told him to do he did. I saw him almost daily. [21] I had not much to do with him after the army came." [22]

That was no ordinary occasion, that midsummer session of the Senate Committee in 1902. It was a case of the powerful of the earth discussing a question of ethics, even as they do in Boston. The nation had been intoxicated in 1898 with the pride of power--power revealed to it by the Spanish War; and in a spirit thus mellowed had taken the Philippines as a sort of political foreign mission, forgetting the injunction of the Fathers to keep Church and State separate, but not forgetting the possible profits of trade with the saved. A long war with the prospective saved had followed, developing many barbarities avenged in kind, and the breezes from the South Seas were suggesting the aroma of shambles. "How did we get into all this mess, anyhow?" said the people. "Let us pause, and consider." Hear the still small voice of a nation's conscience mingling with demagogic nonsense perpetrated by potent, grave, and reverend Senators:

Admiral Dewey: "I do not think it makes any difference what my opinion is on these things."

Senator Patterson: "There is no man whose opinion goes farther with the country than yours does, Admiral, and therefore I think you ought to be very prudent in expressing your views."

Senator Beveridge (Acting Chairman): "The Chairman will not permit any member to lecture Admiral Dewey on his prudence or imprudence."

This of course would read well to "Mary of the Vine-clad Cottage"

out in Indiana, whose four-year-old boy was named George Dewey--, or to her counterpart up in Vermont who might name her next boy after the brilliant and distinguished Acting Chairman, in token of her choice for the Presidency.

Senator Patterson: "I was not lecturing him."

Senator Beveridge: "Yes; you said he ought to be prudent."

Senator Patterson: "And I think it was well enough to suggest those things." [23]

Thawed into theorizing by these indubitably genuine evidences of a nation's high regard, the man of action tried to help the nation out. He said he had used the Filipinos as the Federal troops used the negroes in the Civil War. Senator Patterson struck this suggestion amidships and sunk it with the remark that the negroes were expecting freedom. Admiral Dewey had said "The Filipinos were slaves too"

and considered him their liberator. [24] But he never did elaborate on the new definition of freedom which had followed in the wake of his ships to Manila, viz., that Freedom does not necessarily mean freedom from alien domination, but only a change of masters deemed by the new master beneficial to the "slave."

Apropos of why he accepted Aguinaldo's help, the Admiral also said:

I was waiting for troops to arrive, and I felt sure the Filipinos could not take Manila, and I thought that the closer they invested the city the easier it would be when our troops arrived to march in. The Filipinos were our friends, a.s.sisting us; they were doing our work. [25]

Asked as to how big a force Aguinaldo had under arms then and afterwards, the Admiral said maybe 25,000, adding, by way of ill.u.s.tration of the pluck, vim, and patriotism of his valuable new-made friends, "They could have had any number of men; it was just a question of arming them. They could have had the whole population." [26]

Eleven months after that, when we captured the first insurgent capital, Malolos, General MacArthur, the ablest and one of the bravest generals we ever set to slaughtering Filipinos, said to a newspaper man just after a b.l.o.o.d.y and of course victorious fight: "When I first started in against these rebels, I believed that Aguinaldo's troops represented only a faction." "I did not like," said this veteran of three wars, who was always "on the job" in action out there as elsewhere, "I did not like to believe that the whole population of Luzon * * *

was opposed to us * * * but after having come thus far, and having been brought much in contact with both insurrectos and amigos, I have been reluctantly compelled to believe that the Filipino ma.s.ses are loyal to Aguinaldo and the government which he heads". [27]

Is it at all unlikely that Admiral Dewey did in fact say of his proteges, the Filipinos, to an American visiting Manila in January, 1899, three or four weeks before the war broke out, "Rather than make a war of conquest upon the Filipino people, I would up anchor and sail out of the harbor." [28]

If Dewey and MacArthur were right, then, about the situation around Manila in 1898, it was a case of an entire people united in an aspiration, and looking to us for its fulfilment.

When the American troops reached the Philippines and perfected their battle formations about Manila, and the order to advance was given, they did "march in," to use Admiral Dewey's expression above quoted. But they did not let the Filipinos have a finger in the pie. The conquest and retention of the islands had then been determined upon. The Admiral's reasons for saddling his protege with a series of b.l.o.o.d.y battles and a long and arduous campaign are certainly stated with the proverbial frankness of the sailorman: "I wanted his help, you know." But what was Aguinaldo to get out of the transaction, from the Dewey point of view?

"They wanted to get rid of the Spaniards. I do not think they looked much beyond that," [29] said the Admiral to the Senate Committee. Let us see whether they did or not. Aguinaldo had been shipped by the Honorable E. Spencer Pratt, Consul-General of the United States at Singapore, from that point to Hong Kong on April 26th, consigned to his fellow Warwick, the Honorable Rounseville Wildman, Consul-General of the United States at the last-named place, and had been received in due course by the consignee. May 5th, at Hong Kong, the Filipino Revolutionary Committee had a meeting, the minutes of which we subsequently came into possession of, along with other captured insurgent papers. The following is an extract from those minutes: