The hostilities erupted when Aquino launched an attack against the American troops on the island on February 2, 1899, and declared war against the United States two days later. But before the Buffalo Soldiers left the Presidio, black resentment of yet another colonial war against dark-skinned people had already begun to mount. Ida Wells-Barnett, an African American journalist who had long been advocating equal treatment for black citizens in her articles and speeches, told the Afro-American Council in the nation’s capital on January 7, 1899, that “Negroes should oppose expansion [abroad] until the government was able to protect the Negro at home.” Mob violence and anarchy brutalized blacks in the North and South, she said.
She was not alone in her opposition to American imperialism, particularly as it involved risking the lives and limbs of black soldiers to feed the country’s growing appetite for a global empire. While the United States is embarking on a “hare-brained attempt to go into the colonizing business against its own Declaration of Independence,” stated an editorial in the Washington Bee on June 24, 1899, “and while she is making such frantic clamor of some kind of independence which she has up her sleeve for Cuba and the Filipinos, would it be extremely wise for the American Negro to show to the entire civilized world the class of liberty they enjoy here?”
“The colored American is for ‘expansion,’ but he wants expansion on lines consistent with the human principles, for which he has given his labor and shed his blood in four wars,” read an article in the Colored American on December 2, 1899. A prominent African American bishop, Henry M. Turner, called the crusade in the Philippines “an unholy war of conquest.” Some black voices defended the war. “It is now said that colored troops are to be sent to the Philippines. The sooner the better,” editorialized the Indianapolis Freeman, a black publication, on July 1, 1899. “The enemy of the country is a common enemy and the color of the face has nothing to do with it.” Again, on October 7, the same newspaper declared, “It is quite time for the Negroes to quit claiming kindred with every black face from Hannibal down. Hannibal was no Negro, nor was Aguinaldo. We are to share in the glories or defeats of our country’s wars; that is patriotism pure and simple.”
There was little question, though, that the vast majority of opinions among black Americans tilted against what was increasingly viewed as an imperialistic adventure. Many Buffalo Soldiers heading off to do battle again for white America openly expressed their views. Private William Fulbright adamantly stated that the war was “a gigantic scheme of robbery and oppression.” Robert L. Campbell, another black trooper, told the press that “these people are right and we are wrong, terribly wrong.” No man “who has any humanity about him at all would desire to fight against such a cause as this,” he added. Booker T. Washington said, “Until our nation has settled the Indian and Negro problems, I do not think we have a right to assume more social problems.” E. E. Cooper, another leading black intellectual of the period, warned that it was “impossible to Christianize and civilize people at gunpoint.” And the black dissenters were not alone; many influential whites, including Mark Twain, were increasingly alarmed by McKinley’s imperialistic foreign policy. “We can have our usual flag,” the great satirist wrote, “with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and crossbones.”
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The Buffalo Soldiers who set foot on the soil of the Philippines were greeted by posters and leaflets addressed to “The Colored American Soldier” and describing the lynching, discrimination, and abuse black people had suffered in the United States. The rebels asked them if they really wanted to be the instruments of white imperialist ambitions to oppress other people of color. If they were willing to switch sides, not only would Aquino and his followers welcome them with open arms, they would reward the black Americans with positions of responsibility and power.
For the most part, the Buffalo Soldiers resisted the attempt to sap their fighting spirit and turn against their compatriots, even as they understood the logic behind Aquino’s message. On October 7, 1899, the men of the Twenty-Fourth exhibited great valor as they waded through waist-deep mud in an attempt to assault rebel outposts in San Agustin, north of Manila, on the periphery of Aquino’s base of operations. The thrust was successful. Both sides exchanged a few rounds of gunfire, and the insurrectos fell back to the north, where they had more support from their fellow revolutionaries.
The Twenty-Fourth moved northward in pursuit of the rebels and engaged them a few days later in the mountain village of Arayat, where they overran enemy trenches and sent them fleeing, with the Twenty-Fourth suffering only a single casualty in the operation. The troops were rolling ahead in harsh terrain, so far encountering only minor opposition as the other black units circled in on the mountainous region toward the heart of Aquino’s stronghold. Under the command of Captain Joseph B. Batchelor, a force of 350 Buffalo Soldiers entered an area of the islands where few non-Filipinos had ever ventured. They continued to close in on the enemy through the final weeks of October and into November and December. The early victories came easy, with the insurrectos pulling back and regrouping on more familiar turf as the Americans attempted to close in on Aquino and his followers. Then, suddenly, the momentum of the war suffered an unexpected reversal, and the road to American victory seemed loaded with pitfalls.
The insurrectos changed tactics and adopted a guerrilla style of fighting more suitable to their mountain redoubt. It was an unconventional kind of warfare, one that Americans had not faced before, and it proved highly effective for the inhabitants of the mountains, who were familiar with every square inch of their land. In addition, Aquino’s message exhorting the Americans to join his fight for independence instead of advancing the cause of US imperialism began to take root in the minds of both some white troops as well as a handful of Buffalo Soldiers. During the course of the war, sixteen Americans would defect to Aquino, six of them Buffalo Soldiers. The most famous among them, and the one most valuable to the cause of Filipino independence, was Corporal David Fagen of the Twenty-Fourth, who switched sides on November 17, just as his brothers were scoring their early victories in San Agustin and Arayat.
Ground hostilities in the Philippines commenced when a band of insurrectos led by Emilio Aguinaldo attacked US troops stationed on the island in February 1899.
Based on a map produced by www.Google.com/maps/place/Philippines.
While most of the Buffalo Soldiers remained loyal, Fagen had his sympathizers among the ranks. “We’re only regulars and black ones at that,” one soldier wrote home. “I expect that when the Philippine question is settled they’ll detail us to garrison the islands. Most of us will find our graves there.” Sergeant Major John W. Galloway of the Twenty-Fourth was even more adamant about the bind that ensnared the black troops. “The whites have begun to establish their diabolical race hatred in all its home rancor in Manila,” he wrote in a letter. He maintained that white Americans were determined to intimidate both Spaniards and Filipinos right from the start in order to impose white supremacy in the colony after the war was over.
Fagen had enlisted in the army in Tampa in June 1898 and was honorably discharged the following January. He was considered a model infantryman by his white officers, who had high praise for his combat performance in Cuba. They rewarded his efforts by promoting him to corporal in short order. Fagen reenlisted in June 1899 and sailed with the Twenty-Fourth from San Francisco to the Philippines. He fought against the Filipinos mostly around Arayat, until he decided he was on the wrong side of the conflict. Swayed by Aquino’s appeals to black Americans to join his revolution, Fagen arranged to be conducted over to the insurgents’ side on horseback by one of Aquino’s men, who slipped away with him into the jungle. Fagen rose through the ranks of the rebel army during the next year and a half, being promoted first to lieutenant, then to captain, and finally leading a band of rebels who called him General Fagen.
His exploits in Luzon earned him a front-page story in the New York Times, whi
ch reported that he was a “cunning and highly skilled guerrilla officer who harassed and evaded large conventional American units.” The article maintained that Fagen had been particularly brutal toward his former comrades, routinely murdering those who were taken prisoner. But two members of the Twenty-Fourth—black trooper George Jackson and white lieutenant Frederick Alstaetter—said that Fagen treated both of them humanely after he captured them, although Alstaetter claimed that Fagen did steal his West Point ring. Other soldiers with the Twenty-Fourth insisted that Fagen had only reluctantly switched sides after having endured several racially motivated altercations with some white officers.
His legend in the region as a formidable supporter of Aquino grew to the point where a US commander, General Frederick Funston, placed a $600 bounty on his head, stating that Fagen was “entitled to the same treatment as a mad dog.” A Tagalog hunter named Anastacio Bartolome delivered a decomposed head and a West Point ring to Funston on December 5, 1901, saying that he and other hunters had killed Fagen while he was bathing in a river. But the rebels insisted that Fagen was still alive and well, living in the mountains; the hunter had brought in someone else’s head, they said, to collect the bounty money. The rest of Fagen’s body couldn’t be found where Bartolome said he had buried it alongside the river, so the evidence was deemed inconclusive, with a head and a ring on one side of the argument and a missing body supporting the other. In any event, the Americans were content to put an end to the mythology surrounding Fagen’s exploits in the mountains of Luzon.
“Fagen was a traitor and died a traitor’s death,” read an editorial in the black Indianapolis Freeman the same month the hunter delivered the unrecognizable, decomposed head, “but he was a man no doubt prompted by honest motives to help a weaker side, and one with which he felt allied by ties that bind.”
Notwithstanding Fagen’s betrayal and the ambivalence many Buffalo Soldiers experienced as they climbed over the mountains and slogged through the jungles of Luzon, the great majority of them fought loyally with their white compatriots as the war to suppress the insurrectos wore on longer than anyone anticipated. On November 23, 1899, less than a week after Fagen’s defection, the Twenty-Fourth marched forty-five miles from Cabanatuan City north of Manila to Tayug and reported to General Kent, who had led the unit in Cuba. The plan called for the men to cross over the mountain range to the east, down into the valley floor marked by the Cagayan River, to head off Aquino’s men before they could reach the strategically important area. It was a treacherous stretch of real estate over poorly mapped mountains that required several days of hazardous trekking, with every available horse roped into service for a pack train.
The troops ground their way over steep cliffs, “hardly any of them surmountable except by zigzag paths cut on shelves from a foot to eighteen inches wide,” Lawton wrote in his report of the campaign. Private Bruce Williams with the Twenty-Fourth said that the men ate “so much rice that we are ashamed to look at it. I, for one, am sick of it.” For a while, their diet consisted of nothing but rice and bitter green coffee, with little or no potable water to drink. They also ate sweet potatoes given to them by friendly natives, Williams added, although they tasted as though they were “cooked by barbarians.”
As they wound their way down into the valley, they learned that Aquino was approaching with a force of his own from the north. Lawton directed Captain Batchelor to take the 350 black troops in his command and block Aquino’s path by following the river all the way to the coast on the northern rim of Luzon. By commanding the valley floor from south to north across the region, Lawton and Batchelor would protect their men from being enveloped by the insurrectos. They skirmished with the enemy along the way, but most of the encounters were brief hit-and-run attacks, with little damage inflicted on either side as Aquino’s guerrillas disappeared back into the dense jungle. The biggest hurdle for the Twenty-Fourth was the high, sharp-bladed grass that sliced through their trousers like bayonets and cut their legs, ankles, and hands when the men tried to brush it away.
Batchelor pushed his men onward toward the coast. They marched along the banks of the river toward Naguilian, where the Cagayan intersected a smaller stream called the Magat River. When they approached the confluence of the two waterways, the Buffalo Soldiers could see a band of several hundred rebels staring down at them from a cliff overlooking the far bank. They exchanged fire with the insurrectos, with neither side prevailing because of the distance. The Americans had little choice but to ford the stream to reach the other side, but the water ran deep and the current was swift. The men searched the area and were unable to find any suitable materials to build a viable raft, so they tore down a hut at the edge of the jungle and began to cobble together a workable model.
As they were laboring away on it, four Buffalo Soldiers and one of their officers attempted to swim across the river, but one of the enlisted men, Corporal John H. Johnson, drowned in the effort. The four survivors made it across and found enough wood along the shore to construct a raft of their own. Amazingly, they pulled off the feat without being riddled by insurrecto bullets. They completed the job and floated back over to get their guns and help the other men complete the raft they were building. Finally, nine of them set off across the Magat on their makeshift rafts of wooden planks and bamboo poles tethered together with vines, canteen straps, and shelter-halves torn into strips. To the surprise of their comrades who stood on the shore cheering them on, the troops made it safely across and drove the insurrectos off into the brush. No one was more astonished by their success than their commander, Captain Batchelor.
“To see nine men,” he later reported to Lawton, “the officers in their drawers and the privates naked, cross such a stream by such means, and drive an entrenched force not less than ten times their number, in broad daylight where their number must soon become known, is something not soon to be forgotten.”
It was a victory badly needed by the American forces, who had been getting cut up by the insurrectos’ guerrilla tactics in other regions and had little to show for it. On December 7, 1899, they scored another telling victory when the commander of the one thousand insurrectos in the area, General Daniel Tirona, surrendered to Batchelor. The Buffalo Soldiers took them prisoner and confiscated their canoes and other supplies before continuing on. Batchelor advanced his 350-man contingent farther along the Cagayan River, reaching Tuguegarao, the capital of the province of Cagayan, on December 12. From there it was on to Solana and Amulung as they headed for the coast, encountering little opposition in this theater of operation. They made it to Aparri, their destination on the northern coast, on December 17, where they set up camp to rest and wait for badly needed supplies, including food and fresh clothing.
The swiftness of Batchelor and the Buffalo Soldiers’ accomplishments was all the more astonishing considering that they had traversed three hundred miles of rugged, unknown territory inhabited by hostile forces; crisscrossed unfamiliar trails in variable weather conditions; forded back and forth over rushing streams and rivers more than one hundred times; and suffered for more than three weeks with limited food supplies and filthy and ripped uniforms. One of Batchelor’s superiors, General Elwell Otis, commented afterward that the march was “memorable on account of the celerity of its execution, the difficulties encountered, and the discomforts suffered by the troops.”
For the men of the Twenty-Fourth, it was a victory worth savoring. But it was only one of many battles in a long and drawn-out campaign. The war to bring on the total collapse of the Spanish empire had barely begun.
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Just before the year ended, on December 19, 1899, Lawton succumbed to enemy fire, taking a bullet in the chest and becoming the first American general killed outside of North America and the highest-ranking officer killed in the Philippines. In his characteristic style, he was striding over the ground at the head of his troops at 9:15 AM within three hundred yards of an insurrecto trench near San Mateo. At six-foot-three, wearing a large white p
ith helmet and a yellow raincoat, he presented an easy target for enemy sharpshooters under the command of General Licerio Gerónimo. Lawton’s men implored him to take cover, but shrinking in combat and leading from the rear had never been his style. The insurrectos fired a round of bullets, most of which clipped the grass around the general’s feet. But one found its mark, drilling him through the chest. “I am shot!” were his last words as he fell dead into the arms of one of his staff officers. Not only was Lawton the highest-ranking officer killed in the Philippines, he was the only American fatality during this war.
The business of governing and maintaining order in the land now occupied would prove to be costly and hazardous. Early the following year, the Buffalo Soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth were sent in to garrison other cities and villages, including Santa Cruz, Iba, and Subic Bay, on the western coast of Luzon. Part of their job was to erect and maintain the telegraph lines that provided links to other parts of the island and to the outside world. But no sooner did they put them up than the insurrectos tore them down. The Americans simply did not have enough manpower to guard the entire network, and the rebels moved in from their hiding places in the brush and wreaked havoc on their work as soon as the Americans left an area. Even worse, the rebels, who were familiar with the terrain, observed the Americans’ every move as they themselves remained hidden, and the Buffalo Soldiers were in constant danger of having their men picked off one by one before the enemy scampered back into the jungle.
With their limited numbers, the occupiers resorted to stationing small units in each village, scarcely enough personnel to maintain law and order. They became, in fact, the only working government along the coastal towns, performing routine civil functions including serving as policemen, firemen, and even tax collectors to pay for ongoing expenses—the last of which hardly endeared them to the local populace. Keeping up morale in a war that many of the troops considered less than just, and in which they found themselves oppressing natives who had fought to free themselves from one group of colonialists only to find themselves attacked by others—others who they felt should have been sympathetic to their cause—was challenging in the extreme. Yet, the great majority of the Buffalo Soldiers loyally performed the tasks assigned to them by their white officers, even while they questioned the morality of what they had been sent to accomplish, a sentiment reinforced by constant criticism from home.
The Roughest Riders Page 19