Five
ONE WAR ENDS, ANOTHER BEGINS
Aguinaldo left behind the Army of Liberation in his escape, and as the news of the government’s decision to turn to guerrilla war spread throughout Luzon, the officers and men of the Army of Liberation weighed their choices. They could, as Aguinaldo had, melt into the mountains and continue the fight using irregular tactics. They could return home as individuals and sit out the rest of the conflict. They could surrender to or ally themselves with the Americans.
This was what Aguinaldo had feared about the transition from conventional to guerrilla war. The Philippine Republic was losing, and losing badly. For many Filipinos that meant, quite reasonably, figuring out the best resolution for their own situation.
For example, in northern Luzon, the Cagayen Valley was occupied by a force of about 1,200 men under Gen. Daniel Tirono, a close personal friend of Aguinaldo. In fact, Aguinaldo’s original flight to Bayombong was predicated on the assumption that there he would be protected by Tirono’s force. But Tirono began to have other ideas, and when the American ships Newark and Helena, commanded by Commodore Bowman McCalla, showed up at the city of Aparri, on the northern coast of Luzon, Tirono began negotiations. The general eventually agreed to surrender himself and his forces, and McCalla immediately appointed him acting governor of the valley and his officers to lower posts.
McCalla was not even really there to wage war or accept surrenders. A small force of American soldiers from the African-American Twenty-fourth Regiment, under Capt. Joseph Batchelor, had gotten lost in the Cagayen. Batchelor’s original orders had simply been to move north and occupy Bayombong. But he quickly reconceived them to direct him to invade and conquer the entire Cagayen Valley. His announcement of this, in a letter back to General Lawton in late November, was greeted with some disbelief. As Lawton put it, “His departure for Aparri was as much of a surprise as though he had started for San Francisco.”1 Nonetheless, Batchelor and his soldiers moved northward. The resulting march was epic; the unit hiked all the way through the Cagayen Valley, fighting as they did so, and made it to within eighty miles of Aparri. Batchelor’s aggressiveness was an exaggerated version of the push that had served the American army well so far in the campaign. And like that larger aggressiveness, even Batchelor’s overwrought actions did not result in the destruction of his unit. Instead, McCalla’s ships were sent to find him, and a gunboat sent up the Cagayen River from Aparri located the battered unit, worn by constant fighting and marching. Batchelor was not particularly pleased to see the navy, and even less pleased to hear that Tirono had surrendered to McCalla. As McCalla put it in a letter to Young on December 14, 1899:
Batchelor has done splendidly, but he is very much disappointed that the insurrectos in this province surrendered to me. His actions now tend to produce discord between the army and navy and to set the natives against each other. I therefore suggest that it might be well to order Captain Batchelor to report to me officially, until you can come here yourself.2
Tirono’s surrender was to foretell the gradual co-optation of many Filipinos by the American forces and the gradual whittling away of Aguinaldo’s support. The transition from conventional to guerrilla warfare left each commander, for a moment, his own man, free to make his own decisions. Until formal lines of communication and command could be constructed, Aguinaldo—or whoever was in command—could have great difficulty bringing such commanders to heel.
Tirono had more freedom than most. For the majority of the Army of Liberation, stuck in Luzon with the American forces closing around them, the choice was much more limited and unpleasant. Melting away into the mountains meant abandoning any equipment they could not carry personally, meant leaving the most densely populated areas of the Philippines and heading into the difficult terrain of the mountains, meant becoming, essentially, fugitives.
Nonetheless, thousands of insurrectos tried to slip out of the closing trap, while American units worked to bring them to heel. Both were, to some extent, successful. American forces moving throughout the central Luzon plain captured or killed hundreds of Philippine insurgents and took enormous quantities of their equipment. This was small-scale warfare, as the giant net swept in hundreds of tiny fish.
For a sense of the action, let us look at a particular unit, the Twenty-fifth Regiment, the African-American soldados negros, as some Filipinos called them. On November 19, 1899, 400 men from the Twenty-fifth Regiment captured the town of O’Donnell and the insurgent garrison there: 105 men, 273 rifles, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “No casualties on either side,” said the official report, an indication that the garrison most likely surrendered without a fight.3 This was not always the case; units of the same regiment were attacked on January 5 by an insurgent force estimated at around one thousand men (although that estimate was likely exaggerated). They repulsed the insurrectos without loss. The combat itself was confused, frequently at close quarters, and marked (as always) by confusion and chaos. The American army depended on its small-unit leaders—lieutenants and captains—to wage such war effectively.
It is worth quoting one of those small-unit leaders at length to give a sense of the experience. Lt. William T. Schenck of the Twenty-fifth Regiment wrote of a battle on Mt. Arayat in central Luzon in which he led a scouting detachment. They were scouting a hill on January 6 when unseen insurgents opened up, killing a corporal and wounding several other soldiers. Schenck continued forward:
When we got within forty or fifty feet of the top I saw one of the insurgents, and he seemed to locate me at the same time, and let drive, and the bullet went right over me. I yelled at one of the men on my right to kill the “hombre,” and two of the scouts let drive and missed. Then I took a rifle away from one of the men and fired. The bullet struck a root in front of the insurgent and went through, missing him by not more than six inches. I thought I had him sure and crept up a little higher. Then he ran up and I ducked and he landed a bullet between me and Sergeant Lightfoot. A mighty close shave— worse than the first. I got mad then and dragged out my pistol, handed back the rifle, and crept up on my stomach under a rock and then raised up and fired a shot at him. This time I was not thirty feet away. My pistol missed fire the second time and I dropped back. The stone protected me and I lay there and looked around to see how many men there were with me. Martin was on my left and Lightfoot on my right with three other men—and that was all we had. So I knew we would have to get some more there or else we were all gone.
But of course, it was not that simple.
Just then someone in the rear opened up and then the whole outfit—about seventy men—turned loose. We poor devils on the hill were right in it then. Three bullets hit just below my feet, fired by my own men. The insurgent tried another shot at me, which went high—thanks be to God—and the rock. I curled up like a worm to make a small target for my men, and yelled like a stuck pig to cease firing.4
Schenck managed to get his soldiers to stop firing, organized his unit, attacked, and carried the hill. He was killed in an ambush a few weeks later, by insurgents rather than his own men, but his account suggests just how chaotic the combat was, and how important it was for the American army to have aggressive and able junior leaders.
Despite the battles and the searching, thousands of insurgents escaped into the mountain ranges, often with nothing more than a rifle and the clothes on their backs, but free for the moment to continue fighting. They were joined by a deserter from the U.S. Army who would gain a bit of fame over the next year. David Fagen, an African-American soldier of the Twenty-fourth Infantry, defected to the insurgents in November 1899 and was given a commission in Aguinaldo’s army. In addition to leading units against the Americans, he also penned insulting letters to Gen. Frederick Funston.
Despite Fagen, the war seemed over. “We have the rebel army pretty well wiped out,” bragged Pvt. Charles Wafer of the Ninth U.S. Volunteer Infantry from Tarlac on December 7, 1899. “All there is here is rain, piss ants, and mosquitos, a
nd they are as big as junebugs.”5 General Otis certainly thought that the war was nearly done. The campaign, though it had not gone entirely according to plan, had resulted in the defeat and dissolution of the enemy army, a mark of success in any operation. The only conventional stronghold for the Philippine Republic in Luzon was south of Manila, in the Cavite province. There, a Filipino force under Gen. Antonio Trias protected a still-working insurgent government and besieged the few outposts that the Americans had managed to open up around the Laguna de Bay. But this was the product of Otis’s focus on Aguinaldo and the northern army. Now that the north was secure, Otis could turn south. He planned an offensive to begin in early January 1900. His chosen general was Henry Lawton, whom he called back to Manila in early December to begin planning. Unfortunately for Otis, and more unfortunately for Lawton, the general was killed in a small skirmish outside the capital city on December 19. His replacement, Maj. Gen. John Bates, did not arrive in the Philippines until the offensive was about to begin, and so Otis gave the command to Brig. Gen. Theodore Schwan, his chief of staff.
That offensive, which kicked off on January 4, repeated American successes in the south. Two brigades of U.S. Volunteers and regulars swept through the Cavite province and into the Batangas, defeating the insurgent forces arrayed against them and inflicting heavy casualties. Typical was the experience of the U.S. Thirty-ninth Regiment, which in the first week of the campaign fought four major skirmishes with the insurgent forces and killed two hundred insurrectos at the cost of fourteen wounded.6 The conventional campaign ended as it had always done to this point, with American victory.
There were some worrying portents, however. The insurrectos, scattered by the American assault, refused to go gently. Led by enterprising officers, they began to put into practice the principles of guerrilla warfare. It was a return to the days of 1896, and they found that old habits came back quickly. In the middle of January, Miguel Malvar, an insurgent officer, reconnoitered an American position at San Tomas, a supply hub for the advancing U.S. forces, by attending the cockfight that took place there every evening. The knowledge gained enabled him to mount an ambush on a U.S. mule train on January 18. The Filipinos drove off the American detail guarding the shipment, killing one and wounding five, and captured the pack mules and their supplies. “Pitiable,” said one officer witnessing the American soldiers straggle into San Tomas, wounded and beaten.7
But for the most part, the campaign went easily, and by early February Schwan could report the southern provinces pacified. The insurgents were no longer capable of organized action, and
their attempts on all but individuals, mere squads, or inadequately escorted trains are feeble to a degree and are evidently induced by a spirit of bravado rather than by any hope of success. … they emerge from their mountain retreats mainly for the purposes of rapine and murder.8
Schwan’s disparaging opinion of the insurgents’ efforts was shared by Otis. The war, both believed, was winding down. By the end of February, the Americans had successfully occupied the great majority of southern Luzon and faced no large and organized opposing forces. Normal life could resume. “All citizens,” Schwan said, could “return to their homes and … pursue their peaceful avocations, in which they will not be molested.”9
Out from Luzon
Victory in Luzon meant that Manila could turn to a new, twofold goal. First, Otis aimed to occupy the rest of the Philippines, or at least the major islands. Second, Otis intended to set up an infrastructure of government and control. With the war ending, the United States had to set about ruling. Otis first broke Luzon itself into administrative districts headed by various of his generals. Then he brought troops back to Manila and organized amphibious expeditions to the other islands. Of particular interest—not only to Otis and to the McKinley administration—were the far southern provinces of Luzon, the islands of Samar and Leyte, and the northern provinces of Mindanao.
On these islands grew the best hemp in the world, critical for rope making. Raised by peasant farmers in the interior and sold to merchants, it was shipped out of the port towns of each province to—among other places—the West Coast of the United States. Rope was a critical component of the U.S. agricultural industry, and the administration, especially as 1900 started and thoughts of the upcoming presidential election filled their heads, listened to the complaints of the rope makers. Those rope makers spoke of a “hemp panic” if the ports were not opened and the trade reestablished. This seems to have been more about competitive advantage than an actual shortage—one company, the Plymouth Cordage Company, had laid in a great stock before the war started, and its rivals had not. This might not have made a difference, but most of those competitors were from New York State, Elihu Root’s home state, and the secretary of war paid particular attention to their concerns and passed them on to Otis.10
Otis listened to Root, and on January 18 he sent an amphibious expedition to capture the hemp provinces. Scrounging together some troop transports, Otis loaded up the Forty-third and Forty-seventh Infantries under Brig. Gen. William A. Kobbé. The expedition first reached Sargosan City at the end of the Bicol Peninsula of Luzon and occupied it without extensive fighting; Kobbé then approached Legaspi, the most important city in the peninsula, on January 23. There he was confronted by around eight hundred insurrectos under Gen. Vito Belarmino. The following battle reinforced all the results of the northern Luzon campaign. The insurgents were in fortifications, waiting for the American assault. Kobbé went ashore with seventy-five soldiers and managed to flank the fortifications under cover of naval gunfire. The result was a rout, with more than fifty insurgents killed, the town taken, and only a few Americans wounded. Kobbé left an occupying force and moved on to the other towns. By the end of February he had occupied most of the important ports of the Leyte and Samar.
Control of the ports gave Otis enormous leverage. Each was reopened to commerce as soon as it was occupied, and American merchants descended on them, eager to buy hemp. A peculiar three-way trade soon developed. The hemp fields were in the interior, which was still controlled by the insurgents. The insurgents would usually tax the money that the farmers received for selling their hemp. In the towns, controlled by the Americans, the merchants would buy the hemp, pay tariffs to the American government, and sell the hemp abroad. It was, oddly, beneficial for everyone. Otis let such an informal arrangement continue because of political pressure from home, but also because doing so tied the elites in the hemp provinces closer and closer to the U.S. government. The hemp trade was moving again, courtesy of the Americans, and the locals began to think that U.S. rule was perhaps not such a bad thing after all. In a microcosm, what happened with the hemp ports happened in many areas throughout the Philippines.
In addition to the economy, the American occupation forces began to work on legal reform. During the spring of 1900, U.S. officials fundamentally revamped the Filipino legal system, replacing the heavily Spanish-influenced laws with ones of their own. The Spanish system was chaotically intricate and frequently corrupt. It had been based on centuries of precedent, royal prerogative, and decrees. The Americans replaced it with a code that topped out at twenty pages and had 110 articles of law. On top of everything was a Philippine Supreme Court, which had ultimate authority. Below that was an entire structure of courts, judges, lawyers, and proceedings. The code adopted wholesale American concepts such as bail, habeas corpus, and search warrants. The change was so revolutionary that the Americans had to lend experts to the Philippine courts to help Filipino lawyers and judges figure out their new laws.11
Allied with that legal reform was a reform of the tax system. The Spanish system had been horrendously complex, with layer after layer of taxes built up over the centuries. In addition, it had been heavily tilted in favor of landowners, at the expense of those below them. The American reform simplified the system and reduced the number and amount of taxes that the average Filipino had to pay. Otis avoided instituting a land tax, officially because he want
ed to leave that to a civilian government, but likely also because he wanted to avoid angering the landowners whose support was still critical to American control.
Finally, on March 29, 1900, Otis issued General Order 40, which outlined the organization of Filipino municipal governments. These local governments would be elected by property owners from the middle class on up. They would control their own affairs for the most part, under the supervision of a provincial administrator who answered to Manila. As planned, it was a system that, as Otis put it, showed the “beneficient [sic] intentions of the United States Government.”12
The attempted return to normality had its effect, especially in Luzon. Filipinos began to return and rebuild their towns, villages, and homes, slowly at first, but with increasing energy. John Clifford Brown, a soldier in the Battalion of Engineers, wrote on April 7, 1900, of the Mariquini Valley outside Manila:
This valley was fiercely fought over. It is immensely rich and populous and much desired by the insurgent army, therefore it was burned first by one side then by the other. … Now what is happening? The population, driven no one knew where, is returned and is busy building new houses and taking care of hastily-gathered rice. Everywhere was noise and business.13
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