War of Frontier and Empire

by David J Silbey

  Spanish power reached its height in the last half of the sixteenth century under King Philip II. But imperial Spain was—as happened so often with great powers—economically overstretched by its wars, its empire, and its appetites. Despite the massive influx of monies from the Central American mines, the Spanish throne went bankrupt a number of times during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The eighty-year revolution in the Spanish Netherlands, the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–48, and the rise of Dutch, English, and, especially, French power doomed Spain to a long, slow slide from the top ranks.

  Her empire decayed along with her. The Thirty Years’ War, fought on a global scale against the Dutch, proved especially difficult for Spanish colonies.4 The Philippines themselves were taken briefly by the British in the middle of the eighteenth century, only to be handed back in a peace treaty, largely because the British were not interested in keeping them. The Central and South American colonies broke away in the first decades of the nineteenth century in a series of revolts that Spain could not prevent or defeat. Spanish Florida fell to the United States shortly thereafter. What was left of the empire by the late nineteenth century were remnants: islands scattered through the Caribbean, headlined by Cuba and Puerto Rico, and in the Pacific, the Philippines. Spain held them not by power but by indifference. None of the other great powers could be bothered to take them.

  Nor had the nineteenth century been kind to the Philippines. The Industrial Revolution sweeping through the Western nations had made the Philippines into part of the global hinterland that fed raw materials into the voracious factories of Europe. Unlike the previous few centuries, when the Philippines were largely shut off from the world economy, the demands of the Industrial Revolution levered the Philippine economy open. From the Philippines came the raw agricultural product needed by the factories and back to the Philippines went the manufactures of those factories. Manila, Iloilo, and Cebu became, by the end of the century, large trading ports through which most of the Philippine economic transactions took place.5

  The result was demographic upheaval, as populations shifted in adjustment to the new economy. Hundreds of thousands moved inland—most particularly into the great central plains of Luzon—to clear the land and turn it over to the production of agricultural goods like tobacco and abaca fiber, which could then be sold to industrial nations. This frontier, inland rather than westward, created a society that—oddly—resembled nothing so much as the American West. “The Philippines had pioneers and wagon trains, cattle ranching and rustling, cowboys and bandits, railroad building. …”6

  But the breakdown of traditional societal arrangements resulted in an increased number of mortality crises throughout the Philippines, in which death rates spiked because of disease, famine, and dislocation. The 1880s were a “decade of death” for the Philippines,7 and the 1890s were not much better. The province of the Batangas on the island of Luzon experienced a smallpox epidemic in 1889 and a cholera epidemic in 1890, and lost most of its coffee crops to disease in the first years of the 1890s. In addition, the cattle disease rinderpest killed thousands of water buffalo, the main domestic farm animal of the Philippines.8

  The result was a society in economic and social flux in the 1880s and 1890s. The Spanish government contributed to this social instability by first appointing a series of reforming governors from 1880 to 1888 who opened up Philippine society and allowed limited political and cultural freedom, and then appointing the reactionary Gen. Valeriano Weyler to the governorship from 1888 to 1891, who undid the reforms, embittering many Filipinos.9

  Revolution

  This was the situation when the last decade of the nineteenth century opened. A declining Spanish monarchy, its gaze turned inward to past glories, ruled over a Philippines riven by demographic and economic difficulties. It should not come as a surprise that something approaching a revolution began. What started was less an organized attempt to throw off Spanish rule than an effort of different groups to shape violently the unsteady social order around them.

  To understand the revolution, we must understand the racial divisions within Philippine society. At the top were the peninsulares, Spaniards born in Spain. Below them were insulares (also simply called Filipinos), Spaniards born in the Philippines. Below them, far below them, were the indios, non-Spanish native-born Filipinos. The Spanish—peninsulare and insulare—dominated the Philippine society and economy. The indios—even the term had racist connotations—were forever ruled rather than rulers: “The monkey will always be a monkey however you dress him with shirt and trousers,” was one friar’s summation in 1885.10

  But things began to shift slightly in the last part of the nineteenth century. Upper-class Filipinos (insulares) began to send their children abroad to be educated in Europe. This group came to be known as ilustrados. Among them was a young Filipino named José Rizal. In 1889 Rizal and his friends were touring Europe where they went to see the Paris Exposition of that year. At the Exposition they saw a Wild West show, which included Native American performers on horseback. Struck by the daring and popularity of the performers, Rizal and his friends decided to form an association for Filipinos to assert their own identity, to make themselves “braves” on the American Indian model. Los Indios Bravos, they called it, a spectacular entangling of Spanish and American themes and ideas.

  Rizal positioned his group not as one grasping to elevate itself to the level of the Spanish-born elite, but as one seeking common cause with the indio. The group explicitly denied the power and righteousness of Spanish and Catholic control of the islands by basing its appeal to power in the native population. At the same time, his appropriation of an American frontier motif connected Los Indios Bravos to that more open social mythos. The Filipinos would be warrior Indians resisting the imperial domination of their civilized overlords. Rizal appropriated another American theme in a protest novel whose title echoed one of the slogans of the American Revolution: Noli me tangere (Don’t Mess with Me).11 The irony of such an appeal to an American model was only equalled a half century later, when Ho Chi Minh stole chunks of the Declaration of Independence to declare Vietnamese autonomy in 1945.

  If this revolution—or revolutions—sounds chaotic, it was. What broke out in the mid-1890s consisted of various groups led by leaders with various motives, who shared a distaste for Spanish control, but something less than love for one another. Perhaps none of the divisions was more critical than the ethnic one. The Tagalogs—who dominated the revolution throughout this period—were held in suspicion by other Filipinos.12 But the Filipinos were divided on economic grounds as well. Wealthy Philippine landowners wished for freedom from the Spanish, but did not seek to restructure the economy or society of the Philippines. Theirs was a conservative vision of revolution, one that would send the Spanish home and leave the landowners still in charge. Their eventual champion and leader was the Tagalog Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy, whose family owned a plantation in Cavite, and who had studied law in Manila, although he dropped out short of earning his degree.13

  Other groups were more mixed economically and ethnically. One of the larger of these groups was the Katipunan, led by an ilustrado named Andres Bonifacio. Members of the Katipunan came from different economic and social groups within Philippine society, for the most part from the tenant farmers of the countryside and the middle classes of the cities. Like many others, the Katipunan were poorly equipped, poorly organized, poorly led, and prone to divisiveness. They squabbled with other groups and amongst themselves. That much later Bonifacio would become seen as a national hero had less to do with his own actions than with the need in a newly independent country for something akin to founding fathers.

  Bonifacio and Aguinaldo soon clashed. Bonifacio believed fervently in his cause, but he was naive in his dealings both with the Spanish and with Aguinaldo. Aguinaldo, whatever his other faults, proved something of an adept politician. He soon outmaneuvered Bonifacio, getting himself elected president of the revolutionary government in early
1897. Not satisfied with that, he had Bonifacio arrested and tried on trumped-up charges of treason and executed on May 10, 1897. Aguinaldo later claimed that he had commuted the sentence, but that by the sheerest bad luck the commutation did not arrive in time to prevent Bonifacio’s execution. From then until his capture in 1901, Aguinaldo would be the closest thing that the Philippines had to a native national leader.

  His leadership was never going to produce radical change. It might evict the Spanish, but it would never remake Philippine society. Though Renato Constantino is perhaps exaggerating when he says that Aguinaldo “led the force that preempted the revolution,” the government and society that resulted from a victorious insurgency by the Aguinaldo-led Filipinos would likely have strongly resembled a pre-insurgency Philippines in structure and control.14

  The chaos of the revolution was lucky for the enfeebled Spanish, for perhaps the only enemy they could have defeated was this one, forever teetering on the edge of dissolution. The Spanish army won most of the battles of 1897, driving revolutionary forces out of strongholds in places like Cavite and Talisay in the Batangas. In response, Aguinaldo signaled to the Spanish that he was open to negotiation. In July 1897, a revolutionary manifesto was published under the nom de plume of “Malabar.” In form it was similar to an earlier one put out by Aguinaldo, making it clear that he was the author. It laid out a series of demands on the Spanish, including a parliament for the Philippines, freedom of the press, and religious freedom. But it conceded, implicitly, continued Spanish sovereignty over the islands.

  The signal was received. In August 1897 the Spanish governor, Primo de Rivera, issued an amnesty for those who would turn themselves in, and sent a native lawyer, Pedro Paterno, to negotiate with Aguinaldo. Paterno carried no more than vague promises and statements that he had overheard the governor speak of reform, but Aguinaldo greeted him happily, releasing a number of Spanish prisoners as a show of good faith. The negotiations, which took place in the rebel town of Biak-na-Bato, resulted in the Treaty of Biak-na-Bato, signed on December 14, 1897.

  It is hard to see the treaty as anything but a victory for the Spanish. Though early drafts put forward by Aguinaldo had contained some demands for reform, the final copy of the treaty in essence traded the end of the rebellion by the Filipinos in return for large sums paid to Aguinaldo and his closest advisers, and their removal to Hong Kong. Whether the removal should be referred to as “exile,” as Aguinaldo would have liked, or “protective custody,” as perhaps his fellow Filipinos would have preferred, was open to debate. Primo de Rivera remarked that “chief among the wishes” of Aguinaldo was that his “future be assured” and that he (and his associates) be given “indispensable means of subsistence.”15 The “means” in this case consisted of 800,000 Spanish pesetas, quite enough to set Aguinaldo up comfortably in Hong Kong.

  The terms of the treaty were only loosely lived up to, by both sides. In the end Aguinaldo and the leadership found themselves in Hong Kong with 400,000 pesetas of Spanish money, half of Spain’s commitment. To his credit, Aguinaldo deposited most of the money in a bank for future use in service of the revolution. He kept enough to live comfortably, and there are indications that some of the other leaders were not particularly pleased with this virtuous disposition of the cash.16

  That was the situation as the year turned from 1897 to 1898. How much of the Philippines the Spanish actually controlled is not clear. They certainly ruled the major cities and essentially controlled the economic infrastructure of the colony. Since the value of the Philippines as an imperial possession had always been in the trade that flowed through the major cities, whether silk from China or agricultural goods from the interior, that seemed enough to them.

  America Enters, Stage Right

  But here another actor entered the scene, late-arriving but still crucial. The United States of America was, in many ways, the complete antithesis of Spain. Where Spain dreamed somnolently of past glories, the United States looked forward to future achievements. Where Spain had a long and storied history that stretched back centuries, if not millennia, the United States looked back to its founding barely a century before. Where Spain’s geography was littered with the leftovers of great empires that had surged and receded over her terrain—from the Roman arches of roads and aqueducts to the delicate minarets and graceful Moorish architecture of the Muslim emirates—the United States prided itself (truthfully or not) in having created itself in a virgin territory. Where Spain seemed simply to be fighting to preserve the remnants of empire, the United States believed that it had a manifest destiny to expand and dominate the American continent.

  The second half of the nineteenth century for the United States had been dominated by the most catastrophic war in American history, the Civil War of 1861–65. That conflict, a sectional struggle over the peculiar institution of slavery, had killed more than 600,000 Americans, devastated large areas of Pennsylvania, Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas, and seen gallantry and horror in large measures. For a moment in 1865, the United States stood as one of the world’s great military powers, with an experienced army over a million strong and a large and advanced navy. The victorious Union could stand with any of the great nations of Europe, a position confirmed when, in a quarrel with the French over their Mexican puppet emperor, Maximilian, the threat of American military power forced the emperor Napoleon III into a humiliating retreat.

  But that military power evaporated almost immediately after the end of the war. Both army and navy shrank dramatically. The ships were mothballed or scrapped. The soldiers were demobilized and sent home, their equipment destroyed or stored. By 1875 the U.S. Army could muster about 25,000 men. The French army was twenty times larger, the British seven times, and even the Belgian army was twice as large. This military served a nation that simply was not interested in matters martial. It was a nation in which upon being introduced to an army officer in 1885, a woman could reply: “What, a colonel of the Army? Why, I supposed the Army was all disbanded at the close of the war!”17

  For both enlisted men and officers, pay and conditions in that “disbanded” army were execrable. The wage for soldiers was low and infrequently raised. Equipment was antiquated. Food and supplies were second-rate; pilfering was common. Soldiers were usually stationed in isolated forts, without recreation or distraction. The answer to most of this was alcohol, and both officers and men imbibed large quantities. In 1886, when George Duncan, who had just graduated from West Point, reported for duty at Fort Wingate, he found that the entire fort was in the middle of a five-day drinking spree.18

  Such neglect meant that men enlisted to serve only out of desperation, whether by “absolute want,” as Col. Richard Dodge put it in 1885, or because they were recent immigrants and could find no other work. They were “a terribly rough, tough lot,” as George Marshall remembered them, and they deserted frequently. From 1867 to 1891, one-seventh of the army deserted every year.19

  Career prospects for officers were terrible. They had come into the army together during the Civil War. Because of this, generals were frequently the same age or only a bit older than those they ranked. In 1893 the average captain was only four years younger than the average general. Without casualties, without expansion, and with few retirements, officers were frequently stuck in their rank for decades. Arthur MacArthur had been promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel during the Civil War. At the end, he had reverted to first lieutenant. Promoted to captain shortly thereafter, he remained a captain for twenty-three years, and did not attain his old rank until the 1890s. One officer, John Bigelow, said of the situation:

  What an inglorious way of advancing, that of merely replacing those who topple over, and what an unfortunate line of aspiration that leads to self-congratulations at the death of a friend.20

  Bigelow’s point was well taken: promotions in the Seventh Cavalry jumped after the slaughter of George Custer and his command.

  The army’s situation began to change a bit in the early 1890
s. As the frontier disappeared, posts in the West were closed up and consolidated. There were 175 such forts in 1870. By 1894 there were only 80. In addition, under President Benjamin Harrison, a program of gradually modernizing army equipment and organization was begun, though slowly and in fits and starts. Bringing in new blood could hardly be avoided; the Civil War generation of soldiers was beginning to age, and younger officers, like Archibald Campbell in 1889, started making unkind remarks about their superiors “tottering around in their dotage.” Campbell could be forgiven, as his commanding officer was a veteran not only of the Civil War but of the Mexican War of 1846–48.21 But the reform did not excite the imagination of the nation. The only wars that the United States might plausibly be expected to fight were in the western hemisphere, and its potential opponents there did not seem particularly threatening. Because of this, there was little push to create a modern army from the civilian side. The single exception to this, beginning in the 1890s, was a growing effort to modernize the coastal defense system with modern fortifications and artillery.

  There was, however, more of a push from within the army itself. Led by, among others, Gen. William T. Sherman of Civil War fame, the army began to create a structure for professionalization. This included the rationalization and organization of officer training and the establishment of advanced schools for officers at places like Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The effect was to create the structure and organization for a much larger and more professional army, if only the funding and will could be found to create one. The alterations were drastic enough that in 1890, the inspector general of the army could say that “one year enforces changes as great as a century once caused.”22 He was perhaps optimistic, but not delusional.