War of Frontier and Empire

by David J Silbey

  The situation was made worse for the Spanish because the emperor of Spain, Alfonso XIII, was twelve years old. His mother, Maria Cristina, was the regent, but another member of the royal family, Don Carlos, also claimed the throne. In 1897 Carlos was in exile, but there were strong factions within Spain which would have welcomed his return. Any capitulation on Cuba would likely have led to open revolution in Spain. The Spanish were, in essence, trapped politically and militarily. They were not winning the war in Cuba, but domestic concerns made it nearly impossible to pull out.

  In the summer of 1897 McKinley prodded the Spanish government, instructing the new ambassador to Madrid, Steward Lyndon Woodford, to ask the king whether “Spain has not already had a reasonable time to restore peace and has been unable to do so.” This “inability entails upon the United States a degree of injury and suffering which can not longer be ignored.” The ambassador was instructed to say however that the only goal of the United States was to find “a peaceful and enduring result … just and honorable alike to Spain and to the Cuban people.” Nonetheless, McKinley reminded the Spanish, the situation was urgent enough that the United States would have to reach “an early decision as to the course of action which the time and the transcendent emergency may demand.”3

  McKinley’s delicate verbal balancing act drew results. The Spanish government recalled Weyler and offered autonomy to the Cuban revolutionaries: not independence, but self-government under a Spanish version of benign neglect. The Cubans, who sensed the weakness of Spain and the growing interest of the United States, refused. It was to be Cuba Libre or nothing at all.

  McKinley might well have extended his negotiations for a long time. In December he reiterated his wish to use “peaceful agencies” to resolve the situation.4 In addition to his own personal beliefs, the business interests that had done so much to get McKinley elected were deeply ambivalent about a war with Spain. But a catastrophe intervened. The battleship Maine, sent to Cuba after riots in Havana threatened American property, blew up on the night of February 15, 1898, killing most of its crew.

  Reaction to the explosion in the United States was immediate and fierce. William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper proprietor, said, immediately upon hearing the news, “This means war!” The newspapers and the public blamed Spanish sabotage. A court of inquiry was immediately convened to probe the explosion. The investigation took more than a month, and in that period war fever in the United States surged. McKinley’s wait for the results of the inquiry came to be seen as spinelessness, and his popularity began to slip. Charles Dawes, the controller of the currency and one of McKinley’s closest advisers, wrote of the “abuse” and “awful pressure” heaped on the president by the papers. When Wall Street slid down upon the prospect of war, the press turned on it, calling the New York financial interests “the colossal and aggregate Benedict Arnold of the Union and the syndicated Judas Iscariot of humanity.”5

  When the court finally reported its conclusion that the ship had been “destroyed by the explosion of a submarine mine” by a person or persons unknown, war became inevitable. On April 11 McKinley sent a message to Congress recommending military intervention in Cuba, although even that was, as Dawes put it, “too judicial and too just to suit those who are for war at any price.” On April 20 Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing the use of force, but disclaiming (in the so-called Teller Amendment) any interest in long-term American possession of the island. A declaration of war on Spain followed on April 25, 1898.6

  To understand how the Philippines reappear in this story requires understanding the dynamics within the Navy Department. The elderly and infirm secretary of the navy, John Long, was prone to a range of chronic digestive troubles. He was often overwhelmed by his youthful and energetic assistant secretary, Theodore Roosevelt. In 1896 a young officer in the Navy Department, Lt. Warren Kimball, had designed a war plan in case of conflict with Spain. The plan included major actions in the Caribbean, but it also postulated sending the U.S. Asiatic fleet—a collection of armored cruisers based in Hong Kong—against Spanish ships in the Philippines.

  Pursuant to that plan, Roosevelt acted to ensure that the Asiatic fleet was led by an aggressive and thrusting commander. He chose Commodore George Dewey, who had impressed him during the crisis with Chile. Political maneuvering in September 1897 while Secretary Long was out of the office got Dewey appointed to the command over Long’s preferred candidate, the more passive Commodore John Howell. Long returned from his vacation to find a letter from McKinley asking for Dewey’s appointment. He could hardly overrule the president.

  Dewey had not particularly distinguished himself until the Chilean crisis. Growing up in Vermont, he had been an adequate student, and had won admittance to the Naval Academy only as an alternate in 1854. Dewey made little mark at Annapolis. He finished fifth in his class of fourteen. During the Civil War he served adequately under Admiral Farragut. But along with all other naval officers, he faced stagnation in the post–Civil War years. Perhaps his most important move in those postwar years was getting married to Susan Goodwin, the daughter of the Republican governor of New Hampshire, in 1867. Unfortunately Susan Goodwin Dewey died soon after childbirth, leaving Dewey with a son, George, Jr., to raise.

  It is perhaps cynical to see his marriage simply as a career move to help him advance in the navy, although according to his sister he “felt as if in no little measure his career had ended at the grave of his wife.”7 Now, at Roosevelt’s behest, Dewey had been given what would turn out to be perhaps the most important American naval command in the years between 1865 and 1941.

  When the crisis with Spain erupted, Roosevelt was thus prepared. On February 25, 1898, Long was absent from the office because of illness, and Roosevelt seized the opportunity to send a telegram to Dewey, ordering the Asiatic fleet to Hong Kong and telling the commodore that, upon declaration of war with Spain, he should attack the Spanish fleet in the Philippines.

  This was grossly outside of Roosevelt’s authority as assistant secretary. When Long returned the next day and discovered what Roosevelt had done, he complained that “in my short absence, I find that Roosevelt … has come very near causing more of an explosion than happened to the Maine.”8 Long wished in his heart of hearts that the United States could remain “provincial,” an agrarian nation safe behind its ocean walls. But he did not believe he could stop the “march of events—a march which seems to be beyond human control.”9 Thus, fatalistically, he did not countermand Roosevelt’s orders, and so Dewey moved the fleet to Hong Kong, provisioned himself with coal and supplies, and waited, the Philippines in his gaze.

  It is here that Aguinaldo reappears. Aguinaldo had been in Europe in the spring of 1898, in large part to avoid a lawsuit in Hong Kong. On his return he stopped in Singapore and met with the American consul there, E. Spencer Pratt. The resulting conversation has remained shrouded in controversy. Aguinaldo insisted that Pratt promised American support for Filipino independence, that the consul wooed him with “honeyed phrases and Old-World courtesies.”10 Pratt just as strongly denied that he had promised anything. The only witness was their translator, an Englishman named Howard Bray. Bray backed up Aguinaldo. The Englishman, however, had been promised money and a job by the Filipino leader, opening his testimony to some doubt. Aguinaldo did not make it to Hong Kong before Dewey left, but when he arrived, he was loaded onto an American ship and sent in the fleet’s wake.

  The Battle of Manila Bay

  It was not the right season for naval operations in the South China Sea. Monsoons blowing from the southwest made sailing difficult for all but the largest vessels. To make things worse, when Dewey arrived in Hong Kong, he found that an outbreak of the bubonic plague was sweeping through the city, killing thousands.

  The commodore nonetheless anchored, ordered his white ships painted gray for battle, and set forth on April 27 with a force of seven modern warships, led by the armored cruiser Olympia and including the cruisers Baltimore, Raleigh, and Boston
, the gunboats Concord and Petrel, and the revenue cutter McCulloch. It did not seem like a large or imposing force to the British officers stationed in Hong Kong. They had liked the Americans: “A fine set of fellows, but unhappily we shall never see them again.”11

  There were three reporters hitching a ride on the McCulloch, Edwin Harden of the New York World, Joseph Stickney of the New York Herald, and John McCutcheon of the Chicago Record. Though not as pessimistic as the British officers, they were nonetheless worried: “For Harden, Stickney, and myself,” wrote McCutcheon, “it seemed like we would be sailing into the jaws of a dragon. … Fearing the worst, we wrote farewell letters home. …”12

  The Americans, to make matters worse, had to give battle quickly. They had two supply ships with them, but that was not nearly enough for a lengthy campaign. Without a local base, and during a season in which monsoons and typhoons were frequent, Dewey could not risk staying at sea for long.

  When Dewey arrived at the Philippines on April 30, he was unsure of the location of the Spanish fleet. He sent a ship to investigate Subic Bay, to the north of Manila. Subic proved to be empty; Dewey concluded that the Spanish were sheltering in Manila Bay. He contemplated his course of action. There were dangers in the bay besides the Spanish ships. The Spanish would surely have mined the waters, and the island of Corregidor, which bisected the entry channel, was fortified with artillery emplacements. In such confined waters Dewey’s force might suffer heavily. But he had his old Civil War mentor to remember and decades of little action behind him:

  I have waited sixty years for this opportunity. Mines or no mines, I am leading the squadron in myself. … I confess, I was thinking of [Admiral Farragut] the night we entered Manila Bay and with the conviction that I was doing precisely what he would have done.13

  The commodore decided to push ahead and beard the Spanish lion in its den. Upon entering the bay, however, Dewey found the threats less than he expected. There were no mines, and the artillery on Corregidor was poorly handled. In addition, the ships that faced Dewey were massively inferior to his own. The seven Spanish vessels matched the Americans in number, but little else. They were antiquated, unarmored warships that presented no real threat to the American fleet. The Spanish had anchored off Cavite, a fortified point directly across from Manila city. There, protected by the artillery on Cavite, the Spanish would make their stand. The Spanish admiral, realizing the vulnerability of his ships, had deliberately anchored in shallow water, so that his sailors would have more chance to struggle ashore if their craft went down.

  The next morning, May 1, Dewey methodically set about destroying the Spanish fleet. The Spanish sailors and officers fought gallantly, but their guns had difficulty reaching the American ships and could not penetrate the armor when they did. By contrast, the American guns wrecked the Spanish ships. The battle lasted most of the day. By the time it had ended, the entire Spanish fleet had been sunk, with the loss of over four hundred men. John McCutcheon remembered the scene:

  At dark, the shores around Cavite glowed bright with the flames of burning ships. The Reina Cristina and Castilla [two of the Spanish ships] looked like skeletons. The fires consuming them made their bones appear black against the white-hot heat. In the flickering light, the devastation at Cavite took on a surrealistic look—like the gateway to Hades. Occasionally an ammunition magazine would erupt like a volcano, throwing its flaming debris high in the air, making a grisly picture of the horrors of modern warfare.14

  “The magnificent fleets of Spain,” wrote one newspaper at home, “have gone down as marvelously … as the walls of Jericho went down.”15

  By contrast, the American fleet lost no ships, had no sailors killed, and only a few wounded. In hindsight, given the disparity in forces, it was not surprising that the Americans had won. But at the time the victory created a deep impression, not only on the Spanish but on other European powers. It was a symbolic victory: the upstart American nation routing a great if decaying European empire. In that brief battle, Dewey had shown the United States to be a world power, one that demanded attention and respect.

  Dewey’s telegram home neatly summarized the situation: “Not one Spanish flag flies in Manila Bay today; not one Spanish warship floats except as our prize.”16 The news of the battle was received in the United States on May 7. It electrified a country awash with war fever but frightened of the possibility of a Spanish attack on the East Coast. Dewey’s victory was a tonic for a country nervously if enthusiastically involved in its first major external war since 1848. Dewey overnight became the most popular man in America, immortalized on everything from paperweights to cigarettes. Cities put up statues of the hero, and merchants did a brisk trade in Dewey photographs for the home. On May 10 the commodore was promoted to rear admiral as a reward. It was the overreaction of a country aching to place itself in the front rank of powers and eager to compare itself in might to its old colonial master, Great Britain. “England had her Sir Francis Drake, her Lord Howe, her Rodney and Lord Nelson. … [Dewey’s] name is destined to be wreathed with [the same] immortal glory,” wrote one biographer in 1898.17

  Dewey and the American fleet were left the essential masters of the Philippines. They controlled Manila Bay and the waters around the archipelago. There was no prospect of another Spanish fleet arriving. All her naval reinforcements were on the way to Cuba, and further disaster. The Spanish army in Manila, consisting of roughly 20,000 men, could do nothing except threaten Dewey’s ships with obsolete coastal artillery. Dewey controlled the bay, the entrepôt of the Philippines, and thus controlled the economy of the archipelago. Even worse for the Spanish, they soon had to deal with a reinvigorated insurgent army. Emilio Aguinaldo arrived in the Philippines on May 19, ready to resume the revolution.

  Upon arrival, he met with Dewey. As with his talk with Pratt, the resulting conversation was forever after reported differently by different parties. Aguinaldo claimed that Dewey also promised the Philippines independence; Dewey denied saying any such thing.18 Dewey, of course, did not have the authority to make such a promise—though given the propensity of many to exceed their authority, notably Roosevelt, perhaps this is not a convincing argument.

  In any case, it does not matter. Aguinaldo certainly had an interest, then and later, in representing whatever Dewey and Pratt said as a guarantee that the Philippines would be given independence. Dewey and Pratt for their parts wished for Aguinaldo’s support against the Spanish, but certainly knew that they had no chance of making any such assurance stick if the American government decided otherwise. They might have lied to Aguinaldo; they might have implied to Aguinaldo; they might have done neither. But whatever the full extent of the conversation, the immediate result was an informal alliance between the Philippine insurrectos and the United States, similar to the one between the United States and the Cuban insurrectos.

  The one concrete and lasting thing that Aguinaldo did get out of Dewey was equipment. The commodore gave Aguinaldo one hundred rifles immediately and had the American consul in Hong Kong purchase a few thousand more. Such weapons helped remedy the most critical shortcoming of the revolutionary army and ensured that Aguinaldo—whatever the skepticism about the Treaty of Biak-na-Bato—would be welcomed back by his Filipino comrades. Within a few weeks a reinvigorated Filipino army was again waging war against the Spanish. Aguinaldo organized his forces to include both regular troops, those with experience and equipment, and a revolutionary militia consisting of everyone else. They were soon besieging isolated Spanish garrisons outside Manila and moving on the city itself.19

  In addition, Aguinaldo began organizing a Filipino government. On June 23, 1898, he issued a proclamation laying out the form of the new government. He built his structure on the existing municipal councils. They would elect assemblies for each province, which, in turn, would elect a governor. Finally, each province would send two or three representatives to a gathering that would write a new constitution for the archipelago. The vote, in all cases, was strict
ly limited to those with substantial property holdings. On top of the whole structure was the president—Aguinaldo—who was the “personification of the Philippine people,” with a term that would “last until the revolution triumphs.”20 Aguinaldo and his allies were not interested in mass democracy, but an elite republic, controlled by the privileged and by Aguinaldo.

  Acquiring the Islands

  For McKinley, Dewey’s victory presented problems. What, exactly, should he do? One response would be to send troops to defeat the Spanish army and occupy at least Manila. The forces for that contingency were training at the Presidio base in San Francisco. Thousands of volunteer soldiers suffered there from the cold spring winds blowing off the ocean, the rigorous physical training put in place by Gen. Elwell Otis, and diseases caused by inadequate sanitary facilities. It was an odd force, composed of units hastily and irregularly raised and funded. For example, John Jacob Astor, the wealthy New Yorker, had opened his checkbook and promised funding for a unit of artillery. The so-called Astor Battery was put together by Lt. Peyton March, future chief of staff of the army, out of a set of guns purchased by telegram from Paris, a set of uniforms made of British khaki courtesy of a New York clothing firm, and volunteers from the Ivy League universities.21