War of Frontier and Empire

by David J Silbey

None of this was high drama. None of this rose to the attention of Arthur MacArthur or William Taft, let alone the government in Washington, D.C. A commanding officer fed both his troops and some impecunious natives. He established a trading bond with other natives, both Filipino and Chinese. He regulated and organized the trade of the local port. He helped the local Moros deal with their wounded. He treated his native soldiers well. He helped (albeit at a profit) set up a local school. It wasn’t spectacular, but, writ large, it was crucial. America’s control of the Philippines was built on hundreds if not thousands of similar situations. The conflict consisted not merely of combat, but of a whole set of activities along the broad spectrum that had politics at one end and war at the other. And it was successful, more or less. Combined with the military campaigns and the failures of the insurgent forces, the pacification efforts had the essential effect of sucking necessary oxygen out of the revolution.

  Some American soldiers integrated themselves into Filipino society so successfully that they decided to stay when their enlistments ended. Enlistees had the choice of accepting their discharge either in the Philippines or at home in the United States, and it appears that quite a few took them in the Philippines. For many, the Philippines were an attractive place to settle. They had grown to understand the culture and speak—at least adequately—the languages. Many soldiers started relationships with native women. These women were sometimes called queridas (lovers) and sometimes, in another echo of the American West, “squaws.”14 For African-American soldiers the islands were particularly attractive. The Filipinos, though ruled by white Americans, were largely a people of color. In addition, their army pensions gave them an economic position that far surpassed that of most African-Americans in the United States. “In this country will be many fortunes made,” wrote William F. Blakeny, a soldier in the Twenty-fifth Infantry Regiment, to the Indianapolis Freeman on January 24, 1902. “Why not come and share with us the glorious good times which are sure to come? Come now.”15

  Despite all of this, of course, the war was not over. The insurgency had been dealt a severe blow. That it was mortal would not become obvious for many months. The surrenders of the spring months had made clear the success of MacArthur’s offensive and general plan. But, as always, the rainy season would enforce a suspension of active military campaigning, if not of pacification efforts, and only the arrival of the fall would tell if the insurgency could recover itself. American commanders had considered the war over once before. They would not make the same mistake twice.

  The highlight of the rainy season was, of course, the handover of governing power from the U.S. Army to the Philippine Commission. It happened, for all the right patriotic reasons, on July 4, 1901. Earlier that week, Taft had held a farewell reception for Arthur MacArthur and had even courteously escorted him down to his waiting steamer. Only an ungracious mind would suspect that the Ohio politician was making sure that the general did leave the archipelago for good.

  He did. To be fair to both Taft and MacArthur, despite their difficulties, they never admitted in public the friction that had dogged them, even when, as in their testimony before a Senate committee in 1902, they had ample opportunity to do so. Moreover, Taft found that Chaffee, though perhaps never rising to the heights of MacArthur, could be troublesome in his own right. But the lines of authority were much more clearly drawn after July 1901. Taft was the man in charge and Chaffee, while still enjoying a fair amount of room to maneuver, never had the sort of proconsular authority that MacArthur did. A U.S. general would not be in that kind of position as an American Caesar again until Douglas MacArthur accepted Japan’s surrender on the deck of the battleship Missouri in September 1945 and became that nation’s de facto ruler.

  Taft quickly set about adding a strong Filipino presence at every level of the American government. He wished to give the Filipinos as much responsibility as they could handle, always, of course, under the paternal and guiding hand of the United States. He increased, with Chaffee’s grudging assent, the size of the Philippine constabulary. He added three Filipino members to the Philippine Commission itself, giving the native population a voice (albeit one that could be outvoted by the American commissioners) in the highest levels of government. With the insurgency winding down, it was time to look to the long-term governance of the islands.

  Difficulties in the Fall

  As always, however, American plans went awry in the first few months after the end of the rainy season. September 1901 witnessed a series of events that unsettled American efforts domestically and in the archipelago, and ensured that the war was unlikely to end that year.

  First, and most importantly, was the assassination of William McKinley. We should remember that presidential assassinations were not an uncommon occurrence in the late nineteenth century. Presidents Lincoln and Garfield had both been shot to death while in office, meaning that before McKinley and after the start of the Civil War, two out of eight presidents had been murdered. One member of the McKinley administration, Secretary of State John Hay, had, in fact, served in the governments of both Lincoln and Garfield, and had been around for both their assassinations. It was his misfortune to be around for a third presidential killing.

  We should also remember that the presidency was a different office, with a different role, in the late nineteenth century. The presidents before McKinley were not surrounded by the layers of administration and security that characterized the twentieth century. Grover Cleveland would often walk by himself around Washington, unrecognized and unthreatened. McKinley increased the administrative layers, but not particularly the security, of the office of the president.

  Thus, when President McKinley visited the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, on September 6, 1901, he was not protected by a phalanx of Secret Service men. As he stood in a receiving line shaking hands, Leon Czolgosz stepped forward and, using a revolver he had concealed under a handkerchief, shot the president twice in the chest. Czolgosz was a mentally unbalanced hanger-on of the American anarchist movement. Estranged from his family, he had been inspired by the assassination of King Umberto I of Italy by an anarchist in 1900.

  The revolver was chambered for a .32-caliber round. This was a relatively low-powered bullet, and McKinley, though he collapsed when he was shot, rallied quickly and seemed on the mend. “Good news from the President,” presidential adviser Charles Dawes wrote in his diary on September 8. “The President continues to improve,” he wrote two days later. The situation seemed safe enough for Dawes to leave Buffalo and return to Washington. But McKinley’s condition turned for the worse. An infection set in, likely caused by the fragments of cloth and skin carried into the wounds by the bullets, and on September 13, Dawes was awakened at 4 a.m. to read a telegram in Washington warning him that the president was going through a “sinking spell.” Dawes hurried back to Buffalo, reaching the president’s bedside that evening. There he found McKinley surrounded by his family, fading rapidly. In the absence of antibiotics, there was little to do except watch and hope. The vigil continued throughout the evening. “Once, he said ‘Oh dear,’ as if in distress,” Dawes remembered, but other than that the president did not speak. At 2:15 a.m. on September 14, McKinley died.

  And so Mark Hanna’s greatest fear at the Republican National Convention had come true: “that damned cowboy is President of the United States.”16 Theodore Roosevelt—“that damned cowboy”—was vacationing in the Adirondacks when McKinley was shot. The weather was bad, and Roosevelt decided to stay put unless the president took a turn for the worse. Two telegrams reaching him on September 13 convinced him of the need to leave. The first announced McKinley’s sinking condition and ended with the unambiguous words “ABSOLUTELY NO HOPE.” The second, from the cabinet, suggested that Roosevelt should “LOSE NO TIME COMING.”17 Roosevelt rode overnight out of the mountains, through pouring rain, to reach the nearest train station. His secretary had commissioned a special train for him, and it carried Roosevelt first to Albany and then B
uffalo, reaching the city the same day as McKinley’s death.

  He was inaugurated that afternoon at a private house in Buffalo. Elihu Root spoke for the cabinet, pausing to struggle with tears. Roosevelt was sworn in by Judge John Hazel and in brief remarks to the assembled cabinet, politicians, and newspaper reporters, promised to “continue absolutely unbroken the policy of President McKinley for the peace, prosperity, and the honor of our beloved country.” Root, in a brief quiet conversation earlier, had suggested the phrasing. Roosevelt was forty-two years old, the youngest president to that date in American history.18 He walked back alone to his hotel room after the inauguration, refusing the security of a police escort.

  The new president of the United States, never shy, set about stamping his own mark on the office. He mostly lived up to the promise to continue McKinley’s policies, but Roosevelt’s personality was too large and too outgoing to be contained within the withdrawn shell that McKinley had perfected. Roosevelt lived the office, as he had lived so many roles before, and there was some adjustment required on behalf of all parties concerned. Roosevelt was even more fervently committed to the Philippine project than had been McKinley. His imperialism was heart-felt and ongoing, though he came to the presidency just as the conflict seemed to be winding down.

  The news of the McKinley assassination made it to Manila by the middle of September and slowly trickled to American outposts throughout the islands over the rest of the month. In late September it reached the island of Samar and then on to the town of Balangiga, where Company C of the Ninth U.S. Volunteer Infantry Regiment was stationed. The company reacted with sadness, and flew the American flag at half mast to signal their mourning.

  Balangiga was a small town on the south coast of a province that had not yet been declared pacified. The insurgent leader there, Gen. Vincente Lukhban, had proven aggressive and able, and had managed to continue his resistance even as so many others were surrendering. In June an American patrol lost in the interior of Samar was ambushed and took heavy casualties. The island gained a reputation as a fierce and dangerous place, and activities there spilled over into the adjacent island of Leyte, separated by only a few hundred yards of open water.

  The American response on Samar had been stringent, including the burning of crops, the slaughter of domestic animals, and the concentration of the locals into guarded zones. The combination of tactics had brought the population dangerously close to starvation by the fall of 1901, and district heads were forced to import rice to stave off potential deaths.

  Company C had run into some difficulties from the start. Capt. Thomas W. Connell, the company commander, enforced fairly stringent discipline on the natives as soon as the troops arrived. Wanting to clear an area around the town and garrison, he took a number of hostages to get the villagers and surrounding Filipinos to work at cleaning up the town and clearing the brush.

  On September 27, the insurgents, led by Lt. Col. Eugenio Daza, armed largely with bolos, sneaked into the church next to the company’s mess area. Daza also managed to infiltrate a number of insurrectos into the hostages the Americans had taken. That done, the insurgents waited for a good moment to spring an ambush. The next morning, when the lion’s share of the company was eating breakfast without their rifles, the insurgents struck, spilling out of the church and the tents and setting upon the unsuspecting American troops.

  It was a textbook success for the Filipinos. The attack came suddenly enough that the soldiers did not realize immediately what was happening. Cpl. Ernest Manire had just filled his mess plate with hash when the commotion broke out. He asked the man next to him, Sergeant Martin, what was going on. “He could not answer, as he was split through the head obliquely towards the left shoulder with a bolo.”19

  With the surprise, and at such close range, the insurgent disadvantage in weapons was neutralized, and bitter hand-to-hand combat broke out. The soldiers fought back with whatever they could, Pvt. G. E. Meyer remembered: “clubs, baseball bats, pots, bolos—anything they could lay hold of. … I saw Private Degraffenreid, a great big fellow, standing on a pile of rocks, which he was hurling at the natives, bowling them over like nine pins.”

  In addition to going after the soldiers, the insurgents also sought out American weapons, but they were hindered by the fact that many could not operate captured Krag-Jorgensen rifles effectively. The rifle had a five-round magazine and a bolt action. It could be fired and loaded in two ways. In the first way, working the bolt would bring another round from the magazine into the chamber and ready the rifle to be fired immediately. In the second way, if the “lockout” was activated, working the bolt would open the chamber, but not load another round, relying instead on the operator to hand-load another cartridge. The idea was to hand-load and fire, while keeping the magazine in reserve. Many of the rifles were set in this position, and the natives did not understand how to deactivate the lockout, limiting them to the slower rate of fire. But it was more important for the insurgents to prevent the Americans from recovering their rifles, and this they did. They detailed a strong force to cover the American barracks, where most of the rifles were, and when the soldiers raced to get their weapons, the Americans were cut down.

  The American soldiers got much the worst of it. Meyer remembered the scene:

  The dead and dying [lay] all around. I particularly remember one man bleeding from a gaping wound in his forehead, sitting bolt upright on the ladder in front of our shack, dying. … Private J. J. Driscoll was crawling on his hands and feet like a stabbed pig, his brains falling out through a wound he had received.

  Connell and his second in command, Lt. Edward Bumpus, were killed in the first rush, and the soldiers that remained were dazed, scattered, and often wounded. “My ears,” Meyer continued, “were filled with the pitiful cries of our wounded and dying, pleading for help, some trying to stop the flow of blood with dry dirts and pieces of their shirts. … I saw Sergeant Martin seated at the table leaning forward with a spoon clutched in his hand and his head cut completely off.”20 Some of the soldiers sought refuge in the water of the bay, but the insurgents chased them out in boats and stabbed them until they sank and drowned. “The surprise and force of the attack,” Col. E. G. Peyton later wrote in the postmortem, “was so thoroughly carried out that all the officers and more than half of the enlisted men were killed or severely wounded during the first few minutes.”21

  Some of the Americans won the race to get to the rifles, and they, mostly, survived. Most did not, and they, mostly, did not. The first attack killed over forty American soldiers. Of the twenty-six that remained alive, twenty-four were wounded, some severely. They managed to gather near the beach and establish a defensive position. But they quickly realized that they could not stay. The insurgents were numerous, they controlled the town and the American camp, and the surviving soldiers had no food or water.

  What they did have were boats, and the remnants of Company C decided to board the boats and escape the town. They managed to load up the vessels and set off, with canoes full of insurgents chasing. But long-range rifle fire from the Americans induced the enemy to stay at a distance. After several days at sea, with limited food and water and suffering from the sun and salt, the men made it to the nearest American outpost at Basey. There they were treated, and the gunboat Pittsburgh was sent on a relief expedition back to Balangiga. When it arrived, it found the town abandoned but for dead American bodies. The final toll was forty-eight American soldiers killed. By contrast, the insurgents lost between twenty-five and thirty dead and a similar number wounded.

  The soldiers who survived, even unwounded, were traumatized by the sights they had seen. Experiences from the attack remained “vividly stamped” in the minds of the soldiers. Meyer would remember long afterward the “ghastly panoramas of my butchered messmates.” Cpl. Arnold Irish “used to have the most terrible nightmares, always fighting the natives, and finally I had a nervous breakdown and brain fever combined.”22

  Vengeance


  The reaction to the attack was immediate and telling. The slaughter was the worst loss of life the American army experienced in a single incident during the war, and it came at a time when the insurgency seemed to be ending. It seemed somehow illicit; didn’t the Filipinos understand that they were beaten? Part of this reaction can be seen in the label the attack was given. It was not called a battle or a skirmish or a loss, but the Balangiga massacre, and the implication of a sly, wanton, treacherous assault by ungrateful natives is clear. Hosts of legends sprang up around the attack: that 250 insurgents had been killed by the Americans and that the insurgents had mutilated the dead bodies of the American soldiers were only two out of many. In reality, however, the attack at Balangiga was just that: an attack. It was carried out skillfully by the insurgents led by Daza and resulted in an overwhelming military victory for them.

  Manila acted immediately. The town of Balangiga was razed to the ground, such that nothing there remains to this day but the bare walls of the church used to conceal the ambushers. General Chaffee organized a special unit, the Sixth Separate Brigade, to send to the island and once and for all end the insurgency there.

  In command, he appointed Gen. Jacob Hurd Smith, a Civil War veteran who had been in the army ever since. He had had, by any definition, a checkered career. Smith started off well, fighting valiantly in the Civil War. Shot at the Battle of Shiloh, he carried a Minié ball from that engagement in one hip for the rest of his life. But, much like Gen. George Patton in later years, Smith was not good outside active combat. While recuperating from his wound he served as a recruiting officer for the remaining three years of the Civil War. Smith illegally used money from recruiting bounties to invest in a variety of private firms, and saw his wealth grow rapidly.

  Despite the newfound money, after the Civil War he encountered the same career stagnation that so many others had. Smith did not take to the situation well. He showed a tendency to write imprudent things to senior officers, which led to a series of courts-martial. After a guilty verdict in one of these during the 1880s, Smith was cashiered from the army. Reinstated by the intervention of Grover Cleveland, Smith mostly behaved himself in the 1890s, perhaps scared by the nearness of his escape.