The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912

The American Occupations of the Philippines

Chapter I

Mr. Pratt’s Serenade

Any narrative covering our acquisition of the Philippine Islands must, of course, centre in the outset about Admiral Dewey, and the destruction by him of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on Sunday morning, May 1, 1898. But as the Admiral had brought Aguinaldo down from Hong Kong to Manila after the battle, and landed him on May 19th to start an auxiliary insurrection, which insurrection kept the Spaniards bottled up in Manila on the land side for three and a half months while Dewey did the same by sea, until ten thousand American troops arrived, and easily completed the reduction and capture of the beleaguered and famished city on August 13th, it is necessary to a clear understanding of the de facto alliance between the Americans and Aguinaldo thus created, to know who brought the Admiral and Aguinaldo together and how, and why.

The United States declared war against Spain, April 21, 1898, to free Cuba, and at once arranged an understanding with the Cuban revolutionists looking to co-operation between their forces and ours to that end.For some years prior to this, political conditions in the Philippines had been quite similar to those in Cuba, so that when, two days after war broke out, the Honorable Spencer Pratt, Consul-General of the United States at Singapore, in the British Straits Settlements, found Aguinaldo, who had headed the last organized outbreak against Spain in the Philippines, temporarily sojourning as a political refugee at Singapore, in the Filipino colony there, he naturally sought to arrange for his co-operating with us against Spain, as Gomez and Garcia were doing in Cuba.Thereby hangs the story of “Mr. Pratt’s Serenade.”However, before we listen to the band whose strains spoke the gratitude of the Filipinos to Mr. Pratt for having introduced Aguinaldo to Dewey, let us learn somewhat of Aguinaldo’s antecedents, as related to the purposes of the introduction.

The first low rumbling of official thunder premonitory to the war with Spain was heard in Mr. McKinley’s annual message to Congress of December, 1897,1 wherein he said, among other things:

In that very month of December, 1897, Aguinaldo was heading a formidable insurrection against Spanish tyranny in the Philippines, and the Filipinos and their revolutionary committees everywhere were watching with eager interest the course of “The Great North American Republic,” as they were wont to term our government.

The Report of the First Philippine Commission sent out to the Islands by President McKinley in February, 1899, of which President Schurman of Cornell University was Chairman, contains a succinct memorandum concerning the Filipino revolutionary movement of 1896–7, which had been begun by Aguinaldo in 1896, and had culminated in what is known as the Treaty of Biac-na-Bato,2 signed December 14, 1897. This treaty had promised certain reforms, such as representation in the Spanish Cortez, sending the Friars away, etc., and had also promised the leaders $400,000 if Aguinaldo and his Cabinet would leave the country and go to Hong Kong. “No definite time was fixed,” says President Schurman (vol. I. , p. 171), “during which these men were to remain away from the Philippines; and if the promises made by Spain were not fulfilled, they had the right to return.” Of course, “the promises made by Spain” were not fulfilled. Spain thought she had bought Aguinaldo and his crowd off. “Two hundred thousand dollars,” says Prof. Schurman, “was paid to Aguinaldo when he arrived in Hong Kong.” But instead of using this money in riotous living, the little group of exiles began to take notice of the struggles of their brothers in wretchedness in Cuba, and the ever-increasing probability of intervention by the United States in that unhappy Spanish colony, which, of course, would be their opportunity to strike for Independence. They had only been in Hong Kong about two months when the Maine blew up February 15, 1898, Then they knew there would be “something doing.” Hong Kong being the cross-roads of the Far East and the gateway to Asia, and being only sixty hours across the choppy China Sea from Manila, was the best place in that part of the world to brew another insurrection against Spain. But Singapore is also a good place for a branch office for such an enterprise, being on the main-travelled route between the Philippines and Spain by way of the Suez Canal, about four or five days out of Hong Kong by a good liner, and but little farther from Manila, as the crow flies, than Hong Kong itself. Owing to political unrest in the Philippines in 1896–7–8, there was quite a colony of Filipino political refugees living at Singapore during that period. Aguinaldo had gone over from Hong Kong to Singapore in the latter half of April, 1898, arriving there, it so chanced, the day we declared war against Spain, April 21st. He was immediately sought out by Mr. Pratt, who had learned of his presence in the community through an Englishman of Singapore, a former resident of Manila, a Mr. Bray, who seems to have been a kind of striker for the Filipino general. Aguinaldo had come incognitoOut of Mr. Pratt’s interview with the insurgent chief thus obtained, and its results, grew the episode which is the subject of this chapter.

A word just here, preliminary to this interview, concerning the personal equation of Aguinaldo, would seem to be advisable.

While I personally chased him and his outfit a good deal in the latter part of 1899, in the northern advance of a column of General Lawton’s Division from San Isidro across the Rio Grande de Pampanga, over the boggy passes of the Caraballa Mountains to the China Sea, and up the Luzon West Coast road, we never did catch him, and I never personally met him but once, and that was after he was captured in 1901.He was as insignificant looking physically as a Japanese diplomat.But his presence suggested, equally with that of his wonderful racial cousins who represent the great empire of the Mikado abroad, both a high order of intelligence and baffling reserve.And Major-General J.Franklin Bell, recently Chief of Staff, United States Army, who was a Major on General Merritt’s staff in 1898, having charge of the “Office of Military Information,” in a confidential report prepared for his chief dated August 29, 1898, “sizing up” the various insurgent leaders, in view of the then apparent probability of trouble with them, gives these notes on Aguinaldo, the head and front of the revolution: “Aguinaldo: Honest, sincere, and * * * a natural leader of men.”3

Any one acquainted with General Bell knows that he knows what he is talking about when he speaks of “a natural leader of men,” for he is one himself. Our ablest men in the early days were the first to cease considering the little brown soldiers a joke, and their government an opera-bouffe affair. General Bell also says in the same report that he, Aguinaldo, is undoubtedly endowed in a wonderful degree with “the power of creating among the people confidence in himself.” He was, indeed, the very incarnation of “the legitimate aspirations of” his people, to use one of the favorite phrases of his early state papers, and the faithful interpreter thereof. That was the secret of his power, that and a most remarkable talent for surrounding himself with an atmosphere of impenetrable reserve. This last used to make our young army officers suspect him of being what they called a “four-flusher,” which being interpreted means a man who is partially successful in making people think him far more important than he really is. But we have seen General Bell’s estimate. And the day Aguinaldo took the oath of allegiance to the United States, in 1901, General MacArthur, then commanding the American forces in the Philippines, signalized the event by liberating 1000 Filipino prisoners of war. General Funston, the man who captured him in 1901, says in Scribner’s Magazine for November, 1911, “He is a man of many excellent qualities and * * * far and away the best Filipino I was ever brought in contact with.”

Aguinaldo was born in 1869. To-day, 1912, he is farming about twenty miles out of Manila in his native province of Cavite; has always scrupulously observed his oath of allegiance aforesaid; occasionally comes to town and plays chess with Governor-General Forbes; and in all respects has played for the last ten years with really fine dignity the rôle of Chieftain of a Lost Cause on which his all had been staked. He was a school-teacher at Cavite at one time, but is not a college graduate, and so far as mere book education is concerned, he is not a highly educated man. Whether or not he can give the principal parts of the principal irregular Greek verbs I do not know, but his place in the history of his country, and in the annals of wars for independence, cannot, and for the honor of human nature should not, be a small one. Dr. Rizal, the Filipino patriot whose picture we print on the Philippine postage stamps, and who was shot for sedition by the Spaniards before our time out there, was what Colonel Roosevelt would jocularly call “one of these darned literary fellows.” He was a sort of “Sweetness and Light” proposition, who only wrote about “The Rights of Man,” and finally let the Spaniards shoot him—stuck his head in the lion’s mouth, so to speak. Aguinaldo was a born leader of men, who knew how to put the fear of God into the hearts of the ancient oppressors of his people.Mr. Pratt’s own story of how he earned his serenade is preserved to future ages in the published records of the State Department.4 We will now attempt to summarize, not so eloquently as Mr. Pratt, but more briefly, the manner of its earning, the serenade itself, and its resultant effects both upon the personal fortunes of Mr. Pratt and upon Filipino confidence in American official assurances.

It was on the evening of Saturday, April 23, 1898, that Mr. Pratt was confidentially informed of Aguinaldo’s arrival at Singapore, incognito“Being aware,” says Mr. Pratt, “of the great prestige of General Aguinaldo with the insurgents, and that no one, either at home or abroad, could exert over them the same influence and control that he could, I determined at once to see him.”Accordingly, he did see him the following Sunday morning, the 24th.

At this interview, it was arranged that if Admiral Dewey, then at Hong Kong with his squadron awaiting orders, should so desire, Aguinaldo should proceed to Hong Kong to arrange for co-operation of the insurgents at Manila with our naval forces in the prospective operations against the Spaniards.

Accordingly, that Sunday, Mr. Pratt telegraphed Dewey through our consul at Hong Kong:

Admiral Dewey (then Commodore) replied:

This message was received late Sunday night, April 24th, and was at once communicated to Aguinaldo. Mr. Pratt then did considerable bustling around for the benefit of his new-found ally, whom, with his aide-de-camp and private secretary, all under assumed names he “succeeded in getting off,” to use his phrase, by the British steamer Malacca, which left Singapore for Hong Kong, April 26th. In the letter reporting all this to the State Department, Mr. Pratt adds that he trusts this action “in arranging for his [Aguinaldo’s] direct co-operation with the commander of our forces” will meet with the Government’s approval. A little later Mr. Pratt sends the State Department a copy of the Singapore Free Press of May 4, 1898, containing an impressive account of the above transaction and the negotiations leading up to it. This account describes the political conditions among the population of the Philippine archipelago, “which,” it goes on to say, “merely awaits the signal from General Aguinaldo to rise en masse.”Speaking of Pratt’s interview with Aguinaldo, it says:

Mr. Pratt also forwards a proclamation gotten up by the Filipino insurgent leaders at Hong Kong and sent over to the Philippines in advance of Admiral Dewey’s coming, calling upon the Filipinos not to heed any appeals of the Spaniards to oppose the Americans, but to rally to the support of the latter. This manifesto of the Filipinos is headed, prominently—for all we know it may have had a heading as big as a Hearst newspaper box-car type announcement of the latest violation of the Seventh Commandment—: “America’s Allies.”

It begins thus:

For twelve days after his letter to the State Department enclosing the above proclamation, Mr. Pratt, so far as the record discloses, contemplated his coup d’état in silent satisfaction. Since its successful pulling off, Admiral Dewey had smashed the Spanish fleet, and Aguinaldo had started his auxiliary insurrection. The former was patting the latter on the back, as it were, and saying, “Go it little man.” But nobody was patting Pratt on the back, yet. Therefore, on June 2d, Mr. Pratt writes the State Department, purring for patting thus:

A glow of conscious superiority, in value to the Government, over his consular colleague and neighbor, Mr. Wildman, at Hong Kong, next suffuses Mr. Pratt’s diction, being manifested thus:

Considering that in his letter accepting the nomination for the Vice-Presidency two years after this Mr. Roosevelt compared Aguinaldo and his people to that squalid old Apache medicine man, Sitting Bull, and his band of dirty paint-streaked cut-throats, Mr. Pratt’s next Pickwickian sigh of complacent, if neglected, worth is particularly interesting:

In other words, knowing the proverbial ingratitude of republics, Mr. Pratt is determined to impress upon his Government and on the discerning historian of the future that he was “the original Aguinaldo man.” A week later (June 9th) Mr. Pratt writes the Department enclosing copies of the Singapore papers of that date, giving an account of a generous outburst of Filipino enthusiasm at Singapore in honor of America, Admiral Dewey, and, last, if not least, Mr. Pratt. He encloses duplicate copies of these newspaper notices “for the press, should you consider their publication desirable.”His letter begins:

He then proceeds with further details of the event, without self-laudation. The Singapore papers which he encloses, however, not handicapped by the inexorable modesty of official correspondence, give a glowing account of the presentation of the “address,” and of the serenade and toasts which followed. Says one of them, the Straits Times:

First there was music by the band. Then followed the formal reading and presentation of the address by a Dr. Santos, representing the Filipino community of Singapore. The address pledged the “eternal gratitude” of the Filipino people to Admiral Dewey and the honored addressee, alluded to the glories of independence, and to how Aguinaldo had been enabled by the arrangement so happily effected with Admiral Dewey by Consul Pratt to arouse 8,000,000 of Filipinos to take up arms “in defence of those principles of justice and liberty of which your country is the foremost champion” and trusted “that the United States * * * will efficaciously second the programme arranged between you, sir, and General Aguinaldo in this port of Singapore, and secure to us our independence under the protection of the United States.”

Mr. Pratt arose and “proceeded speaking in French,” says the newspaper—it does not say Alabama French, but that is doubtless what it was—“to state his belief that the Filipinos would prove and were now proving themselves fit for self-government.”The gentleman from Alabama then went on to review the mighty events and developments of the preceding six weeks, Dewey’s victory of May 1st,

Says the newspaper clipping which has preserved the Pratt oration: “At the conclusion of Mr. Pratt’s speech refreshments were served, and as the Filipinos, being Christians, drink alcohol,7 there was no difficulty in arranging as to refreshments.”

Then followed a general drinking of toasts to America, Dewey, Pratt, and Aguinaldo. Then the band played. Then the meeting broke up. Then the Honorable Spencer Pratt, Consul-General of the United States, retired to the seclusion of his apartments in Raffles Hotel, and, under the soothing swish of his plunkah, forgot the accursed heat of that stepping-off place, Singapore, and dreamed of future greatness.

A few days later the even tenor of Mr. Pratt’s meditations was disturbed by a letter from the State Department saying, in effect, that it was all right to get Aguinaldo’s assistance “if in so doing he was not induced to form hopes which it might not be practicable to gratify.”8 But it did not tell him to tell the Filipinos so. For Aguinaldo was keeping the Spaniards bottled up in the old walled city of Manila on short and ever shortening rations, and American troops were on the way to join him, and the shorter the food supply grew in Manila the readier the garrison would be to surrender when they did arrive, and the fewer American soldiers’ lives would have to be sacrificed in the final capture of the town. Every day of Aguinaldo’s service under the Dewey-Pratt arrangement was worth an American life, perhaps many. It was too valuable to repudiate, just yet. July 20th, the State Department wrote Mr. Pratt a letter acknowledging receipt of his of June 9th “enclosing printed copies of a report from the Straits Times of the same day, entitled ‘Mr. Spencer Pratt’s Serenade,’ with a view to its communication to the press,” and not only not felicitating him on his serenade, but making him sorry he had ever had a serenade. It said, among other things:

“The extract now communicated by you from the Straits Times of the 9th of June has occasioned a feeling of disquietude and a doubt as to whether some of your acts may not have borne a significance and produced an impression which this government would feel compelled to regret.”9 Hapless Pratt! “Feel compelled to regret” is State Department for “You are liable to be fired.”

The letter of reprimand proceeds:

“The address * * * discloses an understanding on their part that * * * the ultimate object of our action is * * * the independence of the Philippines * * *.Your address does not repel this implication * * *”.

The letter then scores Pratt for having called Aguinaldo “the man for the occasion,” and for having said that the “arrangement” between Aguinaldo and Dewey had “resulted so happily,” and after a few further animadversions, concludes with this great blow to the reading public of Alabama:

“For these reasons the Department has not caused the article to be given to the press lest it might seem thereby to lend a sanction to views the expression of which it had not authorized.”

“The Department” was very scrupulous about even the appearance, at the American end of the line, of “lending a sanction” to Pratt’s arrangement with Aguinaldo, while all the time it was knowingly permitting the latter to daily risk his own life and the lives of his countrymen on the faith of that very “arrangement,” and it was so permitting this to be done because the “arrangement” was daily operating to reduce the number of American lives which it would be necessary to sacrifice in the final taking of Manila. The day the letter of reprimand was written our troop-ships were on the ocean, speeding toward the Philippines. And Aguinaldo and his people were fighting the Spaniards with the pent-up feeling of centuries impelling their little steel-jacketed messengers of death, thinking of “Cuba Libre,” and dreaming of a Star of Philippine Independence risen in the Far East.

Such are the circumstances from which the Filipino people derived their first impressions concerning the faith and honor of a strange people they had never theretofore seen, who succeeded the Spaniards as their overlords. Mr. Pratt was subsequently quietly separated from the consular service, and doubtless lived to regret that he had ever unloosed the fountains of his Alabama French on the Filipino colony of Singapore.

---

1 Congressional Record, December 6, 1897, p.3.

2 Split Rock.

3 Senate Document 62, p.381.

4 See pages 341 et seq., Senate Document 62, part 1, 55th Cong., 3d Sess., 1898–9.

5 Senate Document 62, p.346.

6 Ib., 349.

7 The natives in and about Singapore are Mohammedans, forbidden by their religion to use alcoholic beverages.

8 Senate Document 62, p.354.

9 Senate Document 62, p.356.

Chapter II

Dewey and Aguinaldo

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 1902.1

Asked by the Committee when he first heard from Aguinaldo and his people in 1898, Admiral Dewey said2:

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 said4:

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 fictitious 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 circumstance that we have the Philippines, but upon the tremendous fact that before it occurred the attitude 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 rôle 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 constituted 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 assurances of Pratt and Wildman, is well illustrated 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:

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 then6:

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 protégé, did the rest.“Then he began operations toward Manila, and he did wonderfully well.He whipped the Spaniards battle after battle * * *.”7 In fact, the desperate bravery of those little brown men after they got warmed up reminds one of the Japs 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.”7 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 nobly expressed by Mr. McKinley in his instructions to the Paris peace Commissioners:

“I did not know what the action of our Government would be,” said the Admiral to the Committee,9 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.10 “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.11 I had not much to do with him after the army came.”12

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:

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.

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.14 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:

Asked as to how big a force Aguinaldo had under arms then and afterwards, the Admiral said maybe 25,000, adding, by way of illustration 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.”16 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 bloody 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 masses are loyal to Aguinaldo and the government which he heads”.17

Is it at all unlikely that Admiral Dewey did in fact say of his protégés, 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.”18

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 protégé with a series of bloody 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,”19 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:

The truth is that instead of leaving everything to the chance of our continuing in the same unselfish frame of mind we were really in when the Spanish-American War started, Aguinaldo and his people, not sure but what in the wind-up they might even be thrown back upon the tender mercies of Spain, played their cards boldly and consistently from the beginning with a view of organizing a de facto government and getting it recognized by the Powers as such at the very earliest practicable moment. They believed that the Lord helps those who help themselves. They had anticipated our change of heart and already had it discounted before we were aware of it ourselves. They were already acting on the idea that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty while public opinion in the United States concerning them was in a chrysalis state, and trying to develop a new definition of Liberty which should comport with the subjugation of distant island subjects by a continental commonwealth on the other side of the world based on representative government. The prospective subjects did not believe that a legislature ten thousand miles away in which they had no vote would ever give them a square deal about tariff and other laws dictated by special interests. They had had three hundred years of just that very sort of thing under Spain and instinctively dreaded continuance of it. That their instincts did not deceive them, our later study of Congressional legislation will show. The Filipinos had greatly pondered their future in their hearts during the last twelve months of Spain’s colonial empire, watching her Cuban embarrassments with eager eye.

Having seen the frame of mind in which they approached the contract implied in Admiral Dewey’s cheery words, “Well now, go ashore there and start your army,” what were the facts of recent history within the knowledge of both parties at the time?What had been the screams of the American eagle, if any, concerning his moral leadership of the family of unfeathered bipeds?

President McKinley’s annual message to Congress of December, 1897,21 calling attention to conditions in Cuba as intolerable, had declared that if we should intervene to put a stop to them, we certainly would not make it the occasion of a land-grab. The other nations said: “We are from Missouri.” But Mr. McKinley said, “forcible annexation” was not to be thought of by us. “That by our code of morality would be criminal,” etc. So the world said, “We shall see what we shall see.” Then had come the war message of April 11, 1898,22 reiterating the declaration of the Cuban message of December previous, that “forcible annexation by our code of morality would be criminal aggression.” In other words we announced to the overcrowded monarchies of the old world, whose land-lust is ever tempted by the broad acres of South America, and ever cooled by the virile menace of the Monroe doctrine, that we not only were against the principle of land-grabbing, but would not indulge in the practiceImmediately upon the conclusion of the reading of the war message, Senator Stewart was recognized, and said, among other things: “Under the law of nations, intervention for conquest is condemned, and is opposed to the universal sentiment of mankind.It is unjust, it is robbery, to intervene for conquest.”Then Mr. Lodge stood up, “in the Senate House a Senator,” and said:

These speeches went forth to the world almost like a part of the message itself.And Admiral Dewey, like every other American, in his early dealings with Aguinaldo, after war broke out, must have assumed a mental attitude in harmony with these announcements.But the world said, “All this is merely what you Americans yourselves call ‘hot air.’We repeat, ‘We are from Missouri.’” Then we said: “Oh very well, we will show you.”So in the declaration of war against Spain we inserted the following:

This meant, “It is true we do love the Almighty Dollar very dearly, oh, Sisters of the Family of Nations, but there are some axiomatic principles of human liberty that we love better, and one of them is the ‘unalienable right’ of every people to pursue happiness in their own way, free from alien domination.”All these things were well known to both the contracting parties when Admiral Dewey set Aguinaldo ashore at Cavite, May 20, 1898, and got him to start his insurrection “under the protection of our guns,” as he expressed it.24 Accordingly, when the insurgent leader went ashore, the declaration of war was his major premise, the assurances of our consuls and the acts of our Admiral pursuant thereto were his minor premise, and Independence was his conclusion. Trusting to the faith and honor of the American people, he took his life in his hands, left the panoplied safety of our mighty squadron, and plunged, single-handed, into the struggle for Freedom.

What was the state of the public mind on shore, and how was it prepared to receive his assurances of American aid?Consider the following picture in the light of its sombre sequel.

Just as the war broke out, Consul Williams had left Manila and gone over to Hong Kong, where he joined Admiral Dewey, and accompanied him back to Manila, and was thus privileged to be present at the battle of Manila Bay, May 1st. Under date of May 12th, from his consular headquarters aboard the U. S. S. Baltimore, he reports25 going ashore at Cavite and being received with enthusiastic greetings by vast crowds of Filipinos. “They crowded around me,” says Brother Williams, “hats off, shouting ‘Viva los Americanos,’ thronged about me by hundreds to shake either hand, even several at a time, men, women, and children, striving to get even a finger to shake. So I moved half a mile, shaking continuously with both hands.”

Tut!tut!says the casual reader.What did the Government at Washington know of all these goings on, that it should be charged later with having violated as binding a moral obligation as ever a nation assumed?It is true that the news of the Williams ovation, as in the case of the Pratt serenade, reached Washington only by the slow channels of the mail.But Washington did in fact receive the said news by due course of mail.When it came, however, Washington was nursing visions of savages in blankets smoking the pipe of peace with the agents of the Great White Father in the White House—i.e., thought, or hoped, the Filipinos were savages—and remained as deaf to the sounds of the Williams ovation as it had been to the strains of the Pratt serenade.

However, hardly had Admiral Dewey taken his binoculars from the gig that carried Aguinaldo ashore to raise his auxiliary insurrection, when he called his Flag Secretary, or the equivalent, and dictated the following cablegram to the Secretary of the Navy:

This sounds a little more serious than “earnest boys” alleging the lack of a toothbrush as an excuse for declining mortal combat, does it not? How valuable did this assistance prove? Admiral Dewey had to wait three and one half months for the army to arrive, and this is how the commanding general of the American forces describes conditions as he found them in the latter part of August:

And, he might have added, the taking of the city was thus made perfectly easy. Otherwise, as Aguinaldo put it in one of his letters to General Otis, we would not have taken a city, but only the ruins of a city. Admiral Dewey said to the Senate Committee in 1902: “They [the Spaniards] surrendered on August 13th, and they had not gotten a thing in after the 1st of May.”28

In the early part of the next year, 1899, President McKinley sent out a kind of olive-branch commission, of which President Schurman of Cornell University was Chairman. The olive branch got withered in the sulphur of exploding gun-powder, so the Commission contented itself with making a report. And this is what they said concerning what followed the Dewey-Aguinaldo entente:

Of conditions in July, sixty days after Admiral Dewey had on May 20th said to Aguinaldo in effect, “Go it, little man, we need you in our business,” Mr. Wildman, our Consul at Hong Kong, writing to the State Department, said, in defending himself for his share in the business of getting Aguinaldo’s help under promises, both express and implied, which were subsequently repudiated, that after he, Wildman, put the insurgent chief aboard the McCulloch, May 16th, bound for Manila to co-operate by land with our navy: “He * * * organized a government * * * and from that day to this he has been uninterruptedly successful in the field and dignified and just as the head of his government,”30 a statement which Admiral Dewey subsequently endorsed.31

We have seen the preliminaries of this “government” started under the auspices of our Admiral and under what he himself called “the protection of our guns” (ante). Let us note its progress. If you turn the leaves of the contemporaneous official reports, you see quite a moving picture show, and the action is rapid. On May 24th, still “under the protection of our guns,” Aguinaldo proclaimed his revolutionary government and summoned the people to his standard for the purpose of driving the Spaniards out forever. The situation was an exact counterpart of the cotemporary Cuban one as regards identity of purpose between “liberator” and “oppressed.” His proclamation promised a constitutional convention to be called later (and which was duly called later) to elect a President and Cabinet, in whose favor he would resign the emergency authority now assumed; referred to the United States as “undoubtedly disinterested” and as considering the Filipinos “capable of governing for ourselves our unfortunate country”; and formally announced the temporary assumption of supreme authority as dictator. Copies of these proclamations were duly furnished Admiral Dewey. The latter was too busy looking after the men behind his guns and watching the progress of his plucky little ally to study Spanish, so he forwarded them to the Navy Department without comment—“without reading them,” said he to the Senate Committee in 1902.32 When his attention was called to them before the Committee by one of the members reading them, his comment was, “Nothing about independence there, is there?”33 It seems to me it did not take an international lawyer to see a good deal “there,” about independence. In a proclamation published at Tarlac in the latter part of 1899, which appears to have been a sort of swan-song of the Philippine Republic, Aguinaldo had said, in effect, “Certainly Admiral Dewey did not bring me from Hong Kong to Manila to fight the Spaniards for the benefit of American Trade Expansion,” and in this proclamation he claimed that Admiral Dewey promised him independence. It is true, that in a letter to Senator Lodge, which that distinguished gentleman read on the floor of the Senate on January 31, 1900, Admiral Dewey denounced this last statement as false. It is also true that those Americans are few and far between who will take Aguinaldo’s word in preference to Admiral Dewey’s. Certainly the writer is not one of them. But Aguinaldo is no Spanish scholar, being more of a leader of men than a master of language, and what sort of an interpreter acted between him and the Admiral does not appear. Certainly he never did get anything in writing from Admiral Dewey. But after the latter brought him to Manila, set him to fighting the common enemy, and helped him with guns and otherwise in quickly organizing an army for the purpose, the Admiral was at least put on inquiry as to just what Aguinaldo supposed he was fighting for. What did the Admiral probably suppose? He told the Senate Committee that the idea that they wanted independence “never entered his head.” The roar of mighty guns seems to have made it difficult for him to hear the prattlings of what Aguinaldo’s proclamations of the time called “the legitimate aspirations of a people.” The milk in the cocoanut is this: How could it ever occur to a great naval commander, such as Admiral Dewey, familiar with the four quarters of the globe, that a coterie of politicians at home would be so foolish as to buy a vast straggly archipelago of jungle-covered islands in the South Seas which had been a nuisance to every government that ever owned them? But let us turn from the Senate Committee’s studies of 1902 to the progress of the infant republic of 1898 at Cavite.

The same day the above proclamations of May 24th were issued, we find Consul Williams, now become a sort of amphibious civilian aide to Dewey, having his consular headquarters afloat, on the U. S. S. Baltimore, of the squadron, writing the State Department, describing the great successes of the insurgents, his various conferences with Aguinaldo and the other leaders, and his own activities in arranging the execution of a power of attorney whereby Aguinaldo released to certain parties in Hong Kong $400,000 then on deposit to his credit in a Hong Kong bank, for the purpose of enabling them to pay for 3000 stand of arms bought there and expected to arrive at Cavite on the morrow, and for other needed expenses of the revolutionary movement. He says, in part: “Officers have visited me during the darkness of the night to inform the fleet and me of their operations, and to report increase of strength. When General Merritt arrives he will find large auxiliary land forces adapted to his service and used to the climate.”34 Throughout this period Admiral Dewey reports various cordial conferences with Aguinaldo, though he is not so literary as to vivify his accounts with allusions to the weather. In one despatch he states that he has “refrained from assisting him * * * with the forces under my command”35—explaining to him that “the squadron could not act until the arrival of the United States troops.”

Six days after the issuance of the Dictatorship proclamations above mentioned, viz., on May 30th, Admiral Dewey cables the Navy Department36:

He did not succeed entirely, but there was hard fighting, and the cordon around the doomed Spaniards in Manila and its suburbs was drawn ever closer and closer.

The remarkable feat of Aguinaldo’s raising a right formidable fighting force in twelve days after his little “Return from Elba,” which force kept growing like a snowball, is difficult, for one who does not know the Filipinos, and the conditions then, to credit.It is explained by the fact that Admiral Dewey let him have the captured guns in the Cavite arsenal, that Cavite was a populous hotbed of insurrection, and that many native regiments, or parts of regiments, quite suited to be the nucleus of an army, having lots of veteran non-commissioned officers, deserted the Spaniards and went over to the insurgents, their countrymen, as soon as Aguinaldo arrived.

On June 6th, we have another bulletin sent to the Navy Department by Admiral Dewey, transmitting with perceptible satisfaction further information as to the progress of his indefatigable protégé:

Along about this period Aguinaldo happens to get hold of a belated copy of the London Times of May 5, 1898. It contains considerable speculation on the future of the Philippines which casts a shadow over the soul of the president of the incipient republic. Having read President McKinley’s immortal State papers about the moral obliquity of “forcible annexation,” he is moved to write direct to the source of those noble sentiments. The letter is dated June 10, 1898. It is addressed, with a quaintness now pathetic, “To the President of the Republic of the Great North American Nation.” It greets the addressee with “the most tender effusion of” the writer’s soul, expresses his “deep and sincere gratitude,” in the name of his people, “for the efficient and disinterested protection which you have decided to give it to shake off the yoke of the cruel and corrupt Spanish domination, as you are doing to the equally unfortunate Cuba” and then proceeds to tell of “the great sorrow which all of us Filipinos felt on reading in the Times the astounding statement that you, sir, will retain these islands,” etc. He proceeds:

The writer closes his letter with an impassioned protest against the occurrence of what is suggested in the Times, and speaks of his fellow-countrymen as “a people which trusts blindly in you not to abandon it to the tyranny of Spain, but to leave it free and independent,” and adds his “fervent prayers for the ever-increasing prosperity of your powerful nation.”39

But the signer of the foregoing letter did not spend all his time praying for us, as may be observed in this bulletin from Admiral Dewey concerning the way he was lambasting the common enemy, sent the Navy Department, June 12th:

Four days later Washington chided the hapless Pratt at Singapore about having talked to Aguinaldo of “direct co-operation” with Admiral Dewey, saying: “To obtain the unconditional personal assistance of General Aguinaldo in the expedition to Manila was proper, if in so doing he was not induced to form hopes which it might not be practicable to gratify.”41 This communication goes on to advise Mr. Pratt that the Department cannot approve anything he may have said to Aguinaldo on behalf of the United States which would concede that in accepting his co-operation we would owe him anything. Yet it did not tell Admiral Dewey to quit coaching him, because the service he was rendering was too valuableThere is no communication to Admiral Dewey about “hopes which it might not be practicable to gratify” in the official archives of those times.There was Admiral Dewey coaching Aguinaldo and telling him to wait for the main attack until General Merritt should arrive with our troops.Why?Because he expected Merritt to co-operate with Aguinaldo, and of course Aguinaldo expected exactly what Dewey expected.

In reviewing the history of those times the writer has not been so careless as to have overlooked Senator Lodge’s elaborate speech in the Senate on March 7, 1900, wherein attention is called to the circumstance that a few days after Aguinaldo landed at Cavite, the Navy Department cabled cautioning Dewey to have no alliance with him that might complicate us, and that the Admiral answered he had made no alliance and would make none.But if actions speak louder than words, the Senator’s point does not rise above the dignity of a technicality.

The same day the State Department reprimanded Pratt, as above indicated, viz., June 16th, Consul Williams at Manila wrote them a glowing communication42 about how “active and almost uniformly successful” Aguinaldo was continuing to be. But no resultant enthusiasm is of record. Two days later, on June 18th, Aguinaldo issued his first formal Declaration of Independence. The infant republic was now less than a month old, but it already had a fine set of teeth. The Spaniards had seen them. The proclamation was of course addressed to the Filipino people, and called on them to rally to the cause, but he was also driving at recognition by the Powers. It read in part: “In the face of the whole world I have proclaimed that the aspiration of my whole life, the final object of all my wishes and efforts, is your independence, because I have the inner conviction that it is also your constant longing.”43 Many Americans insist that this is mere “hot air” and that the average Filipino peasant does not think much more than his plough animal, the scoffer himself being stupidly unaware that this has been precisely the argument of tyranny in all ages. But the pride a people will have in seeing the best educated and most able men of their own race in charge of their affairs seems to me too obvious to need elaboration. It was always accepted by us as axiomatic until we took the Philippines. It is a cruel species of wickedness for an American to tell his countrymen that the Filipino people do not want independence, for some of them may believe it.

The Declaration of Independence of June 18th is known to students of Philippine political archæology as the Proclamation establishing the “dictatorial” government. The principal thing it did was to supplement the absolute dictatorship proclaimed May 24th by provisions for organizing in detail. It also declared independence. A more elaborate Declaration followed on June 23d, known as the proclamation establishing the “revolutionary” government. This made provision for a Congress, a Cabinet, and courts. Of course it was only a paper government the day the ink dried on it. But we will follow it through its teething, and adolescence, to the attainment of its majority at an inauguration where the president was driven to the place of the taking of the oath of office in a coach and four, through a short and very self-respecting heyday, and a longer peripatetic existence, to final dissolution. The document of June 23d reminds us of a fact which in reading it at this late date we are apt to forget, viz. , that the Filipinos did not know at what moment their powerful ally, the American squadron, might up anchor and sail away to the high seas, to meet another Spanish fleet; thus leaving them to the tender mercies of the Spaniards, possibly forever. So they were losing no time. In fact, they had set to work from the very beginning with a determination to try and secure recognition from the Powers at the earliest moment. In appealing to the public opinion of the world with a view of paving the way to recognition by the Powers—which recognition would mean getting arms for war with Spain or any other power without the inconveniences of filibustering—Aguinaldo says on behalf of his people in the proclamation of June 23d, above mentioned, that they “now no longer limit themselves to asking for assimilation with the political constitution of Spain, but ask for a complete separation (and) strive for independence, completely assured that the time has come when they can and ought to govern themselves.”

Mr. Frank D.Millet, who reached Manila soon enough (in July) to see the ripples of this proclamation, describes the effect on the people.While Mr. Millet is one of the best men that anybody ever knew, a proposition as to which I am quite sure the President of the United States and many people great and small in many lands would affirm my judgment,44 still, he writes from a frankly White Man’s Burden or land-grabbing standpoint—is in harmony with his environment. At page 50 of his book,45 he reproduces the proclamation last above quoted from, and adds the following satirical comment: “This flowery production was widely circulated and had a great effect on the imagination of the people, who, in the elation of their present success in investing the town and in their belief that the United States was beginning a campaign in the Philippines to free them from Spanish oppression (italics mine) shortly came to think that they were already a nation.”

Copies of these June proclamations also, as in the case of those of May 24th, were duly forwarded by Aguinaldo to Admiral Dewey46 and by him forwarded to Washington without comment. In his letter transmitting them to Dewey, Aguinaldo announces that his government has “taken possession of the various provinces of the archipelago.” Just exactly how many provinces he had control of on June 23d will be examined later. The very same day the proclamation of June 23d declaring independence was issued, Admiral Dewey cabled the Navy Department47: “Aguinaldo has acted independently of the squadron, but has kept me advised of his progress which has been wonderfulI have allowed him to take from the arsenal such Spanish arms and ammunition as he needed.”After adding that “Aguinaldo expects to capture Manila without any assistance,” the Admiral, evidently divining the temptation that was then luring the political St.Anthonies at Washington, volunteers this timely suggestion:

That there may be no doubt about the motive behind that suggestion, it may be noted here that the Admiral told the Senate Committee in 1902: “I wrote that because I saw in the newspapers that Congress contemplated giving the Cubans independence.”48

But this is not all. On August 13th, the day after the Peace Protocol was signed, Mr. McKinley wired Admiral Dewey asking about “the desirability of the several islands,” the “coal and mineral deposits,” and in reply on August 29th, the Admiral wrote:

As a result of one year’s stay in Cuba, and six in the Philippines—two in the army that subjugated the Filipinos and four as a judge over them—I heartily concur in the above opinion of Admiral Dewey, but with this addition: Whatever of solidarity for governmental purposes the Filipinos may have lacked at the date of the Admiral’s communications, they were certainly welded into conscious political unity, as one people, in their war for independence against us.

In the 1609 or Douay (pronounce Dewey) version of the Bible, the Latin Vulgate, Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer only says “Lead us not into temptation,” while Matthew adds “but deliver us from evil.”The Dewey suggestions to the Washington Government in 1898 remind a regretful nation of both the evangelical versions mentioned, for the first seems to say what Luke says, and the second seems to add what Matthew adds.

There is not an American who has known the Filipinos since the beginning of the American occupation who doubts for a moment that but for our intervention a Republic would have been established out there under the lead of Aguinaldo, Mabini, and their associates, which would have compared well with the republican governments between the United States and Cape Horn. The writer doubts very much if President Taft is of a contrary opinion. The real issue is, now that we have them, should we keep them in spite of the tariff iniquities which the Trusts perpetrate on them through Congress, until they have received the best possible tuition we can give them, or be content to give them their independence when they are already at least as fit for it as the Republics to the South of us, guaranteeing them independence by international agreement like that which protects Belgium and Switzerland?

Now why did Admiral Dewey repeat to his home government and emphasize on August 29th a suggestion so extremely pertinent to the capacity of the Filipinos for self-government which he had already made in lucid language on June 23d previous? The answer is not far to seek. General Anderson had arrived between the two dates, with the first American troops that reached the islands after the naval battle of May 1st, and brought the Admiral the first intimation, which came somewhat as a surprise of course, that there was serious talk in the United States of retaining the Philippines. “I was the first to tell Admiral Dewey,” says General Anderson in the North American Review for February, 1900, “that there was any disposition on the part of the American people to hold the Philippines if they were captured.” He adds: “Whether Admiral Dewey and Consuls Pratt, Wildman, and Williams did or did not give Aguinaldo assurances that a Filipino government would be recognized, the Filipinos certainly thought so, judging from their acts rather than from their words. Admiral Dewey gave them arms and ammunition, as I did subsequently at his request.”

General Anderson might have added that whenever the Admiral captured prisoners from the Spaniards he would promptly turn them over to the Filipinos—1300 at one clip in the month of June at Olongapo.50 These 1300 were men a German man-of-war prevented the Filipinos from taking until Aguinaldo reported the matter to Admiral Dewey, whereupon, he promptly sent Captain Coghlan with the Raleigh and another of his ships to the scene of the trouble, and Captain Coghlan said to the German “Hoch der Kaiser” etc. or words to that effect, and made him go about his business and let our ally alone.Then Captain Coghlan took the 1300 prisoners himself and turned them over to Aguinaldo by direction of Admiral Dewey.The motive for, as well as the test of, an alliance, is that the other fellow can bring into the partnership something you lack.The navy had no way to keep prisoners of war.There can be no doubt that if Admiral Dewey’s original notions about meeting the problems presented by his great victory of May 1, 1898, had been followed, we never would have had any trouble with the Filipinos; nor can there be any doubt that he made them his allies and used them as such.They were very obedient allies at that, until they saw the Washington Government was going to repudiate the “alliance,” and withhold from them what they had a right to consider the object and meaning of the alliance, if it meant anything.

The truth is, as Secretary of War Taft said in 1905, before the National Geographic Society in Washington, “We blundered into colonization.”51 As we have seen, Admiral Dewey repeatedly expressed the opinion, in the summer of 1898, that the Filipinos were far superior in intelligence to the Cubans and more capable of self-government. He of course saw quite clearly then, when he was sending home those commendations of Filipino fitness for self-government, just as we have all come to realize since, that a coaling station would be; the main thing we should need in that part of the world in time of war; that Manila, being quite away from the mainland of Asia, could never supersede Hong Kong as the gateway to the markets of Asia, since neither shippers nor the carrying trade of the world will ever see their way to unload cargo at Manila by way of rehearsal before unloading on the mainland; and that the taking of the islands was a dubious step from a financial standpoint, and a still more dubious one from the strategic standpoint of defending them by land, in the event of war with Japan, Germany, or any other first-class power. At this late date, when the passions and controversies of that period have long since subsided, is it not perfectly clear that after he destroyed the Spanish fleet, Admiral Dewey not only dealt with the Filipinos, until the army came out, substantially as Admiral Sampson and General Shatter did with the Cubans, but also that he did all he properly could to save President McKinley from the one great blunder of our history, the taking of the Philippine Islands?

---

1 Hearings on Philippine affairs, Senate Document 331, part 3, 57th Cong., 1st Sess., 1901–2, proceedings of June 26–8, 1902.

2 S.D.331, pt.3, p.2927.

3 The Senate Document has it backwards “left Mirs Bay for Hong Kong,” clearly an error.

4 S.D.331, pt.3, p.2932.

5 Cong.Record, April 17, 1900, p.4287.

6 S.D.331, pt.3, p.2928.

7 Ib.

8 S.D.148, 56th Cong., 2d Sess., 1901, p.6.

9 S.D.331, pt.3, p.2937.

10 S.D.331, pt.3, p.2934.

11 Ib., p.2967.

12 See pp. 2928 and 2956, S.D.331, part 3.

13 S.D.331, pt.3, p.2965.

14 S.D.331, pt.3, p.2939.

15 Ib., p.2936.

16 Ib., p.2940.

17 See letter of H. Irving Hancock, American war correspondent in the field, dated Manila, May 3, 1899, published New York Criterion, June 17, 1899. This Hancock interview with General MacArthur was quoted in debate on the floor of the Senate on April 17, 1900 (see Cong.Rec. of that date), and was corroborated by General MacArthur himself as substantially correct in that officer’s testimony before the Senate in 1902, S.D.331, pt.2, 57th Congress, 1st Session, p.1942, in answer to questions put by Senator Culberson.

18 Rev. Clay Macaulay, who afterwards made that statement in a letter to the Boston Transcript

19 S.D.331, pt.3, p.2939.

20 S.D.208, part 2, 56th Congress, 1st Sess., pp.7, 8.

21 Cong.Record, December, 1897.

22 See Cong.Record, April 11, 1898, pp. 3699 et seq.

23 Cong.Record, April 13, 1898, pp. 3701 et seq.

24 Navy Dept.Report, 1898, Appendix, p.103.

25 S.D.62, p.327.

26 Navy Dept.Report, 1898, App., p.100.Dispatch May 20, 1898.

27 War Dept.Report, 1899, vol.i, pt.4, p.13.

28 S.D.331, pt.3, p.2930.

29 Report Schurman Commission, vol.i., p.172.

30 S.D.62, p.337.

31 S.D.331, pt.3, 1902, p.2951.

32 S.D.331, p.2955.

33 Ib., p.2954.

34 S.D.62, pp.328–9.

35 Navy Dept.Report, 1898, Appendix, p.103.

36 Ib., p.102.

37 Navy Dept.Report, 1898, Appendix, p.102.

38 S.D.62, p.362.

39 Ib., pp.360–1.

40 Navy Dept.Report, 1898, Appendix, p.106.

41 S.D.62, p.354.

42 S.D.62, p.329.

43 Ib., p.432.

44 Alas, that rare man, Frank Millet, perished in the Titanic disaster of April, 1912, since the above was written.

45 Expedition to the Philippines.

46 Navy Dept.Report, 1898, Appendix, p.111.

47 See p. 2934, S.D.331, pt.3, 57th Cong., 1st Sess.

48 See p. 2934, S.D.331, pt.3, 57th Cong., 1st Sess.

49 S.D.62, p.383.

50 See Admiral Dewey’s testimony before the Senate Committee of 1902, S.D.331, pp.2942, 2957.

51 See National Geographic Magazine, August, 1905.

Chapter III

Anderson and Aguinaldo

The destruction of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on May 1, 1898, ten days after the outbreak of the war with Spain, having necessitated sending troops to the Philippines to complete the reduction of the Spanish power in that quarter, Major-General Wesley Merritt was on May 16th selected to organize and command such an expedition.

“The First Expedition,” as it was always distinguished, by the officers and men of the Eighth Army Corps, there having been many subsequent expeditions sent out before our war with the Filipinos was over, was itself subdivided into a number of different expeditions, troops being hurried to Manila as fast as they could be assembled and properly equipped in sufficient numbers.The first batch that were whipped into shape left San Francisco under command of Brigadier-General Thomas M.Anderson, on May 25th, and arrived off Manila, June 30th.General Merritt did not arrive until July 25th.It was General Anderson, therefore, who broke the ice of the American occupation of the Philippines.

In his annual message to Congress of December, following,1 summing up the War with Spain and its results, Mr. McKinley gives a brief account of the First Expedition. After recounting Admiral Dewey’s victory of May 1st previous, he states that “on the seventh day of May the Government was advised officially of the victory at Manila, and at once inquired of the commander of the fleet what troops would be required.” President McKinley does not give the Admiral’s answer, though he does state that it was received on the 15th day of May. The Admiral’s answer appears, however, in the Report of the Navy Department for 1898, Appendix, page 98. It was: “In my best judgment, a well-equipped force of 5000 men.” But the President’s message does state that he at once sent a “total force consisting of 641 officers and 15,058 enlisted men.”

The difference of view-point of the Admiral and the President is clear from the language of both.In recommending 5000 troops, the Admiral had said they would be necessary “to retain possession [of Manila] and thus control Philippine Islands.”This counted, of course, on the friendship of the people, as in Cuba.“I had in view simply taking possession of the city.”said Admiral Dewey to the Senate Committee in 1902.2

The purpose of the President in sending three times as many troops as were needed for the purpose Admiral Dewey had in mind is indicated in his account of what happened.After describing the taking of Manila by our troops on August 13th, the presidential message says:

Admiral Dewey contemplated that we should merely remain masters of the situation out where he was until the end of the war.President McKinley set about to effect “the conquest of the Philippine Islands.”The naval victory of Manila Bay having made it certain that at the conclusion of our war against a decadent monarchy we would at last have an adequate coaling station and naval base in the Far East, the sending of troops to the Philippines, in appropriate prosecution of the war, to reduce and capture Manila, the capital and chief port, raised the question at once “And then what?”

The genesis of the idea of taking over the archipelago is traceable to within a few days after the destruction of the Spanish fleet.

Within a few days after the official news of the battle of Manila Bay reached Washington, the Treasury Department set a man to work making a “Report on Financial and Industrial Conditions of the Philippine Islands.”4 The Interior Department also awoke, about the same time to possibilities of an El Dorado in the new overseas conquest. “In May, 1898,” says Secretary of the Interior, C. N. Bliss, in a letter intended for the Peace Commissioners who met at Paris that fall, “by arrangement between the Secretary of War with this Department”—Mr. Bliss’s grammar is bad, but his meaning is plain—“a geologist of the United States Geological Survey accompanied the military expedition to the Philippines for the purpose of procuring information touching the geological and mineral resources of said islands.”5 This report, which accompanies the Bliss letter, reads like a mining stock prospectus. That summer an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, presumably echoing the sentiments of the Administration, came out in one of the great magazines of the period, the Century, with an article in which he said: “We see with sudden clearness that some of the most revered of our political maxims have outlived their force.* * * A new mainspring * * * has become the directing force * * * the mainspring of commercialism.”6 Of course, the writer did not mention that Manila is an out-of-the-way place, so far as regards the main-travelled routes across the Pacific Ocean, and also forgot that, as has been suggested once before, the carrying trade of the world, and the shippers on which it depends, in the contest of the nations for the markets of Asia, would never take to the practice of unloading at Manila by way of rehearsal, before finally discharging cargo on the mainland of Asia, where the name of the Ultimate Consumer is legion. Nevertheless “Expansion”—of Trade, mainly—was the slogan of the hour, and any one who did not catch the contagion of exuberant allusion to “Our New Possessions” was considered crusty and out of date. People who referred back to the political maxims of Washington’s Farewell Address, and the cognate set represented by the Monroe Doctrine, were regarded merely as not knowing a good thing when they saw it. So on rode the country, on the crest of the wave of war. When President McKinley sent the troops to the Philippines, their job was to hurry up and effect what his subsequent message to Congress describing their work called “the conquest of the Philippine Islands.” That is, they were to effect a constructive conquest of the archipelago before Spain should sue for peace. It never seemed to occur to anybody at home that the Filipinos would object. If the country had, through some divine interposition, gotten it into its head that the Filipinos were quite a decent lot and really did object very bitterly, it would have risen in its wrath and smitten down any suggestion of forcing a government on them against their will.But nobody knew anything about them.They were a wholly new proposition.

General Anderson was of course furnished with a copy of the President’s instructions to his chief, General Merritt.They are quite long, and go into details about a number of administrative matters that would necessarily come up after the city should surrender, such as the raising of revenue, the military commander’s duty under the law of nations with regard to the seizure of transportation lines by land or sea, the protection of places of worship from desecration or destruction, and the like.The only portion of them that is essential to a clear understanding of subsequent events is now submitted: They are dated Executive Mansion, May 18, 1898, and read in part7:

While this document declares the purpose of our government to be a “two fold purpose,” viz., first, to make an appropriate move in the game of war, and, second, to police the Islands “while in the possession of the United States,” it is wholly free from inherent evidence of any intention out of harmony with the policy as to Cuba.In fact when the city of Santiago de Cuba surrendered to our forces in July thereafter, and it became necessary to issue instructions for the guidance of the military commander there, exactly the same instructions were given him,8 verbatim et literatim. But in respect of the Cuban instructions there was never any concealment practised or necessary because the Cubans had been assured by the Teller amendment to the resolutions declaring war against Spain that we had no ulterior designs on their country, and that, as soon as peace and public order were restored, we intended “to leave the government and control of the island to its people.” The Cuban instructions were therefore frankly and promptly published in General Orders No. 101 by the War Department, July 18, 1898, five days after they were received from the President, and were then translated into Spanish and spread broadcast over Santiago province without unnecessary delay. I remember poring over a Spanish copy of General Orders 101, at Santiago de Cuba, shortly after the fall of that city, which copy was one of many already posted about that city by direction of General Wood. The words “the powers of the military occupant are absolute and supreme and operate immediately upon the political condition of the inhabitants” never disturbed the Cuban leaders in the least, because they were read in the light of the disclaimer contained in the declaration of war.On the other hand, the proclamation which the military commander in the Philippines was enjoined by his instructions to publish “immediately upon his arrival in the islands,” which arrival occurred July 25th, was not so published until after we had taken Manila, August 13th, and then it copied only the glittering generalities of the instructions themselves, such as the part assuring the people that we had not come to make war on them and that vested rights would be respected, but it carefully omitted the words about the powers of the military occupant being absolute and supreme, because when the army arrived it found a native government that had already issued its declaration of independence, was making wonderful progress against the common enemy, and was able to put up a right good fight against us also, in case we should deny them independence.9

General Anderson arrived in Manila Bay, June 30, 1898, with about 2500 men, and when General Merritt arrived, July 25th, we had about 10,000 all told, while the Filipinos had half again that many, and there were 12,000 Spanish soldiers in Manila.General Anderson had not been long camped on the bayshore, under cover of the Navy’s guns and in the neighborhood of Aguinaldo’s headquarters, before he understood the whole situation clearly and wrote the War Department as follows:

This letter is dated July 18, 1898.10

When General Anderson arrived in the islands on June 30th, the Washington Government was still wrestling with the angel of its announced creed about “Forcible Annexation” being “criminal aggression,” and Mr. McKinley had to get both that angel’s shoulders on the mat and put him out of business before he could get his own consent to giving any instructions to his generals which might sanction their killing people for objecting to forcible annexation. Hence his early anxiety to avoid a rupture with the Filipino leaders. The first stage of this wrestling coincides in point of time with General Anderson’s tenure as the ranking military officer commanding our forces in the Philippines, which was from June 30th until the date of General Merritt’s arrival, July 25th. As already made plain, the President’s instructions for the guidance of the military commander were entirely free from any land-grabbing suggestion. On the other hand, when General Anderson left San Francisco for Manila, May 25th, there was already talk in the United States about retaining the Islands, if they were captured, for he so informed Admiral Dewey in the first interview they had after the transports which brought his command cast anchor near our squadron in Manila Bay on the last day of June. “I was the first to tell Admiral Dewey,” says he, in the North American Review for February, 1900, “that there was any disposition on the part of the American people to hold the Philippines, if they were captured. The current opinion was setting that way when the expeditionary force left San Francisco, but this the Admiral had no reason to surmise.”

Relegated by the circumstances to his own discretion as to how he should act until Washington knew its mind, General Anderson’s attitude in the outset represented a “peace-at-any-price” policy, suffused with benevolent pride at championing the cause of the oppressed, but secretly knowing from the beginning that it might become necessary later to slaughter said “oppressed,” should they seriously object to a change of masters.

“On July 1st,” says General Anderson, in the North American Review article above quoted, “I called on Aguinaldo with Admiral Dewey.” Of the Admiral’s dealings with the insurgent chief prior to this time, the General says in this same article:

“Whether Admiral Dewey and Consuls Pratt, Wildman, and Williams did or did not give Aguinaldo assurances that a Filipino government would be recognized, the Filipinos certainly thought so, probably inferring this from their acts rather than from their statements.” This last quoted passage was read to Admiral Dewey by a member of the Senate Committee in 1902, along with other parts of the magazine article cited, and he was asked to comment on the same. He said:

“These are General Anderson’s statements. They are very interesting, indeed; I am here to make my own statements.”

He had stated that he never did specifically promise Aguinaldo independence, and the questioner was trying to show that his acts had amounted to assurances and therefore had committed the Government to giving the Filipinos their independence. Then Senator Patterson began another question, and had gotten as far as “I want to know whether your views—” when out came this, as of a sailor-man clearing decks for action:

“I do not like your questions a bit. I did not like them yesterday and I do not like them to-day.” So the Admiral’s feelings were respected and the question was not pressed. There is no doubt at all that in the Philippines in the summer of 1898 the army turned the back of its hand to Aguinaldo as soon as it got there and baldly repudiated what the navy had done in the way of befriending the Filipinos. But both had acted under the authority of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy—the President. The Admiral’s sensitiveness on the subject ought to have been respected. And it was.

By the time Admiral Dewey and General Anderson decided to call on “Don Emilio,” the day after the General’s arrival, the unexpected intimations which the latter brought, as to the Washington programme for the Philippine revolutionists being different from that as to Cuba, had begun to get in its work on the former. Not being a politician, the gallant Admiral was there ready and able to carry out any orders his government might send him, whenever the politicians should decide what they wanted to do. But in the absence of orders, he began to trim his sails a bit, so as to be prepared for whatever might be the policy. Accordingly, before he and the General started out to pay their call on “Don Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy, President of the Revolutionary Government of the Philippines and General in Chief of its Army”—as he had styled himself in his proclamation of June 23d,—the Admiral said, “Do not take your sword or put on your uniform, but just put on your blouse.Do not go with any ceremony.”And says he, in telling this, “We went in that way.”11 The reason of thus avoiding too much ceremony toward our “ally” claiming to represent an existing government which had lately declared its independence, is explained by an expression of the Admiral’s concerning said Declaration of Independence itself: “That was my idea, not taking it seriously.” At that same hearing the Admiral explained with much genuine feeling that from the day of the naval battle of May 1st until the arrival of the army “these great questions” were coming up constantly and he simply met them as they arose by acting on his best judgment on the spot at the time. But what a terrible mistake it was not to take that Declaration of Independence of June 23d, seriously, backed as it was by an army of 15,000 men flushed with victory, and under the absolute control of the author of the Declaration! Of course the Declaration had been published to the army. Could its author have checked them by repudiating it even if he had wanted to? As Aguinaldo himself expressed what would happen in such a contingency, “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.”12

This Dewey-Anderson call on Aguinaldo was on July 1st. Admiral Dewey now began to foresee that the Washington programme was going to put him in an awkward position.So he began to take Aguinaldo more seriously.On July 4th, he wired Washington: “Aguinaldo proclaimed himself President of the Revolutionary Republic on July 1st.”13 It was on July 7th that Admiral Dewey captured 1300 armed Spanish prisoners, the garrison of Isla la Grande, off Olongapo, and turned them over to the forces of the Aguinaldo government because he had no way to keep them.14 Was not that taking that government a bit seriously? How wholly unauthorized by the facts was this of “not taking it seriously,” on the part of “The Liberator of the Filipinos,”15 the immortal victor of Manila Bay, who two months before had taught the nation the magnitude of its power for good, in a cause as righteous as the crusades of old, and more sensible!

But to return to General Anderson’s account in the North American Review of his call, with Admiral Dewey, on the insurgent chief: “He asked me at once whether the ‘United States of the North’ either had, or would recognize his government. I am not quite sure as to the form of the question, whether it was ‘had’ or ‘would’? In either form it was embarrassing.” General Anderson then tells of Aguinaldo’s returning his call: “A few days thereafter he made an official call, coming with cabinet, staff, and band.He asked if we, the North Americans, as he called us, intended to hold the Philippines as dependencies.I said I could not answer that, but that in 122 years we had established no colonies.He then made this remarkable statement: ‘I have studied attentively the Constitution of the United States, and I find in it no authority for colonies, and I have no fear.’” General Anderson adds: “It may seem that my answer was evasive, but I was at the time trying to contract with the Filipinos for horses, fuel, and forage.”

While this history must not lapse into an almanac, it may not be amiss to follow these early stages of this matter through a few more successive dates, because the history of that period was all indelibly branded into Filipino memory shortly afterward with the red-hot iron of war.

July 4th, General Anderson writes the Filipino candidate for Independence inviting him to “co-operate with us in military operations against the Spanish forces.”16 This was written not to arrange any plan of co-operation but in order to get room about Cavite as a military base without a row. In his North American Review article General Anderson says that on that same day, the Fourth of July, Aguinaldo was invited to witness a parade and review “in honor of our national holiday.” “He did not come,” says the article, “because he was not invited as President but as General Aguinaldo.” An odd situation, was it not? Here was a man claiming to be President of a newly established republic based on the principles set forth in our Declaration of Independence, which republic had just issued a like Declaration, and he was invited to come and hear our declaration read, and declined because we would not recognize his right to assert the same truthsOn subsequent anniversaries of the day in the Philippines it was deemed wise simply to prohibit the reading of our Declaration before gatherings of the Filipino people.It saved discussion.

July 6th, General Anderson writes telling Aguinaldo that he is expecting more troops soon and therefore “I would like to have your excellency’s advice and co-operation.”17

July 9th, General Anderson writes the War Department that Aguinaldo tells him he has about 15,000 fighting men, 11,000 armed with guns, and some 4000 prisoners,18 and adds: “When we first landed he seemed very suspicious, and not at all friendly but I have now come to a better understanding with him and he is much more friendly and seems willing to co-operate.”

July 13th, we find Admiral Dewey also still in a co-operative mood.On that day he cables the Navy Department of the capture of the 1,300 prisoners on July 7th, mentioned above, which capture was made, it appears, because Aguinaldo complained to him that a German war-ship was interfering with his operations,19 the prisoners being at once turned over to Aguinaldo, as stated above.

July 18th, is the date of the letter to the War Department in which General Anderson states that the establishment of a provisional government by us will probably mean a conflict with the insurgents. This was equivalent to saying that they will probably be ready to fight whenever we assert the “absolute and supreme” authority that the President’s instructions had directed to be asserted by the army as soon as it should arrive in the Philippines. Yet in the fall of 1899, President McKinley said he “never dreamed” that Aguinaldo’s “little band” would oppose our rule to the extent of war against it. It would have been more accurate if the martyred Christian gentleman who used those words had said he “always hoped” they would not, instead of “never dreamed” they would.This letter of July 18th, informs the Department:

July 19th, General Anderson sends Major (now Major-General) J. F. Bell, to Aguinaldo, and asks of him a number of favors, such as any soldier may properly ask of an ally, for example, permission to see his military maps, etc., and that Aguinaldo “place at his [Bell’s] disposal any information you may have on the above subjects, and also give him [Bell] a letter or pass addressed to your subordinates which will authorize them to furnish him any information they can * * * and to facilitate his passage along the lines, upon a reconnaissance around Manila, on which I propose to send him.”20 All of which Aguinaldo did.

Military training is very keen on honor. Talk about what the French call foi d’officier,—the “word of an officer”!Did ever a letter from one soldier to another more completely commit the faith and honor of his government, to recognition of the existence of an alliance?“In 122 years we have established no colonies,” he had told Aguinaldo.“It looks like we are about to go into the colonizing business,” he had, in effect, said to Admiral Dewey, about the same time.

July 21st, General Anderson writes the Adjutant-General of the army as follows:

When he wrote this letter, General Anderson was evidently beginning to have some compunctions about the trouble he now saw ahead.He was a veteran of the Civil War, whose gallantry had then been proven on many a field against an enemy compared with whom these people would be a picnic.But things did not look to the grim old hero like there was going to be a square deal.So he put this in the letter:

Of course, this slam at “volunteers” was a bit rough. But the battle-scarred veteran’s sense of fair play was getting on his nerves. He foresaw the coming conflict, and though he did not shirk it, he did not relish it. He understood the “game,” and it seemed to him the cards were stacked, to meet the necessity of demonstrating that forcible annexation, instead of being criminal aggression, was merely Trade Expansion, and that his government was right then irrevocably committing itself, without any knowledge of, or acquaintance with, the Filipinos, to the assumption that they were incapable of running a government of their own.

The next day, July 22d, General Anderson wrote Aguinaldo a letter advising him that he was without orders as yet concerning the question of recognizing his government.But that this letter was neither a protest nor in the nature of a protest, is evident from its text:

Yet General Anderson’s letter to the Adjutant-General of the army of July 18th23 uses the words “since reading the President’s instructions to General Merritt,” etc., showing that he had a copy of them; and those instructions order and direct (see ante) that as soon as the commanding general of the American troops arrives he is to let the Filipinos know that “the powers of the military occupant are absolute and supreme and immediately operate upon the political condition of the inhabitants.” A charitable view of the matter would be that, technically, those were Merritt’s orders, not Anderson’s. But the whole scheme was to conceal the intention to assume supreme authority and keep Aguinaldo quiet “until,” as General Merritt afterwards expressed it in his report, “I should be in possession of the city of Manila, * * * as I would not until then be in a position to * * * enforce my authority, in the event that his [Aguinaldo’s] pretensions should clash with my designs.”24

The same day that General Anderson wrote Aguinaldo his billet doux about the dictatorship, viz. , July 22d, he cabled Washington a much franker and more serious message; which read: “Aguinaldo declares dictatorship and martial law over all islands. The people expect independence.” The very next day, July 23d, he wrote Aguinaldo asking his assistance in getting five hundred horses, and fifty oxen and ox-carts, and manifesting considerable impatience that he had not already complied with a similar request previously made “as it was to fight in the cause of your people.”25 The following day, July 24th, replying to General Anderson’s letter of the 22d wherein General Anderson had advised him that he was as yet without orders concerning the question of recognizing his government, Aguinaldo wrote:

That cablegram of July 22d, above quoted, in which the commanding general of our forces in the Philippines advises the Washington government, “The people expect independence,” is the hardest thing in the published archives of our government covering that momentous period for those who love the memory of Mr. McKinley to get around.27 After the war with the Filipinos broke out Mr. McKinley said repeatedly in public speeches, “I never dreamed they would turn against us.” You do not find the Anderson cablegram of July 22d in the published report of the War Department covering the period under consideration.General Anderson addressed it to the Secretary of War and signed it, and, probably for lack of army cable facilities, got Admiral Dewey to send it to the Secretary of the Navy for transmission to the Secretary of War.28 Certain it must be that at some Cabinet meeting on or after July 22, 1898, either the Secretary of the Navy or the Secretary of War read in the hearing of the President and the rest of his advisers that message from General Anderson, “The people expect independence.” The object here is not to inveigh against Mr. McKinley. It is to show that, as Gibbon told us long ago, in speaking of the discontent of far distant possessions and the lack of hold of the possessor on the affections of the inhabitants thereof, “the cry of remote distress is ever faintly heard.” The average American to-day, if told the Filipinos want independence, will give the statement about the same consideration Mr. McKinley did then, and if told that the desire among them for a government of their people by their people for their people has not been diminished since the late war by tariff taxation without representation, and the steady development of race prejudice between the dominant alien race and the subject one, he will begin to realize by personal experience how faintly the uttered longings of a whole people may fall on distant ears.

We saw above that in a letter written July 21st, the day before the telegram about the “people expect independence,” which letter must have reached Washington within thirty days, General Anderson not only notified Washington all about Aguinaldo’s government and its pretensions, but stated that at the request of Admiral Dewey he had made no protest against it.29 Yet straight on through the period of General Merritt’s sojourn in the Islands, which began July 25th, and terminated August 29th, we find no protest ordered by Washington, and we further find the purpose of the President as announced in the instructions to Merritt, “The powers of the military occupant are absolute and supreme” throughout the Islands, not only not communicated to the Filipino people, but deliberately suppressed from the proclamation published by General Merritt pursuant to those instructions.30

Comments and conclusions are usually impertinent and unwelcome save as mere addenda to facts, but in the light of the facts derivable from our own official records, is it any wonder that General Anderson, a gallant veteran of the Civil War, and perhaps the most conspicuous figure of the early fighting in the Philippines, delivered an address some time after he came back home before the Oregon Commandery of the Loyal Legion of the United States31 on the subject, “Should republics have colonies?” and answered the question emphatically “No!”

---

1 Congressional Record, December 5, 1898.

2 See p. 2938, S.D.331 (1902).

3 Congressional Record, December 5, 1898, p.5.

4 Senate Document 169, 55th Cong., 3d Sess.(1898).

5 Ib.

6 Hon. Frank A. Vanderlip, August, 1898 Century Magazine

7 See p. 85, S.D.208, 1900.

8 See General Orders No. 101, series 1898, Adjutant-General’s Office, Washington, July 18, 1898, a copy of which accompanied the President’s message to Congress of December, 1898, and may be seen at p. 783, House Document No.1, 55th Cong., 3d Sess., 1898–9.

9 For a copy of this proclamation, see p. 86, S.D.208, 56th Cong., 1st Sess.

10 S.D.208, p.8.

11 S.D.331, p.2976, Hearings before Senate Committee, 1902.

12 S.D.208, 56th Cong., 1st Sess., 1900, p.16.

13 Correspondence, War with Spain, vol. ii. , p. 720.

14 For Admiral Dewey’s cable report of this, see Navy Dept.Report, 1898, Appendix, p. 110. For particulars, given by him subsequently, see S.D.331, 1902, p.2942.

15 S.D.331, pt.3, 1902, p.2942, and thereabouts.

16 S.D.208, 56th Cong., 1st Sess., 1900, p.4.

17 S.D.208, p.4.

18 Anderson only had about 2500 troops then.

19 See Navy Dept.Report, 1898, Appendix, p. 110; S.D.331, 1902, p.2942.

20 Senate Document 208, 1900, p.8.

21 Ib., pp.12–13.

22 S.D.208, 1900, p.9.

23 Ib., p.8.

24 See page 40 of General Merritt’s Report, War Dept.Report, 1898, vol.i., part 2.

25 S.D.208, 1900, 56th Cong., 1st Sess., p.11.

26 Ib., p.10.

27 The writer is certainly one of these, and while calling in question the wisdom and righteousness of our Philippine policy, he cannot refrain from avowing just here a feeling of individual obligation to Mr. Root for his exquisite tribute to the personal equation of Mr. McKinley, delivered at the National Republican Convention of 1904, which was, in part, as follows: “How wise and skilful he was. How modest and self-effacing. How deep his insight into the human heart. How swift the intuitions of his sympathy.How compelling the charm of his gracious presence. He was so unselfish, so genuine a lover of his kind. And he was the kindest and tenderest friend who ever grasped another’s hand. Alas, that his virtues did plead in vain against his cruel fate.”

28 See Navy Dept.Report, 1898, Appendix, p.117.

29 S.D.208, 1900, p.13.

30 For the Merritt proclamation, see S.D.208, p.86.

31 In 1906.