At that point, Aguinaldo was the only credible insurgent leader. But that did not stop him from acting against his rivals. In those early summer months, reeling from the defeats and wandering the towns and cities of Luzon in search of a safe refuge, Aguinaldo focused on cementing his position. It may have been less important whom he acted against than that he acted against someone, and Antonio Luna was the chosen target.
In early June, Luna was invited to meet with Aguinaldo at San Isidro, where the government of the republic had washed up. But upon Luna’s arrival, he found the president absent and only the presidential bodyguards present. They and Luna cordially detested each other, as Luna had attempted to have the unit disbanded at an earlier date. Exactly what happened next is not clear, but somehow Luna and his aide de camp ended up dead. The claim afterward was that Luna grew angry and abusive. The findings of the Filipino military court make for wonderful reading, so tortured is the language needed to explain:
Therefore, the sentinel and the guards being insulted by the said General [Luna] and also kicked and cuffed by him and even having had revolvers discharged against them, not only by the General but also by his aide Colonel Francisco Roman, and being still much more wrought up over the gross insults and threats of death which both made against the Honorable President [Aguinaldo], who thank God, was absent in the field, the sentinel and other guards made use of their arms to repel the unjust aggression of General Luna and his aide, both of whom were instantly killed.48
No one seems to have given much credence to this version of events. The general belief seemed to be that, like Bonifacio, Aguinaldo had had Luna assassinated. The difference was that, unlike Bonifacio, Luna was not well liked and so his death passed without much protest.
Aguinaldo’s position was, as a result, as safe as it could be. The question was, what to do next? Preparing the Army of Liberation for another campaign against the Americans was likely an impossible task. Many historians have pointed out the impossibility of resupplying and rebuilding the army so as to make it effective against the United States, and criticized Aguinaldo for not turning to guerrilla war earlier.49 There is some merit in that criticism, but it should not be overdrawn. Fighting a conventional war against the United States was as much a political decision as a military one. Keeping a force in the field against the Americans asserted the continuing existence and organization of the Philippine Republic as a unitary and legitimate state. Turning to guerrilla war would splinter the army and government, send the leaders into hiding, and abdicate that legitimacy. Armies fought to assert legitimacy; guerrillas fought to deny legitimacy to their opponents. The difference was subtle but profound, and it was an issue that others before Aguinaldo—notably George Washington—had dealt with. It might sound like a highly theoretical question, but there were practical implications: Aguinaldo had to worry that, should he turn to guerrilla war, many of the officers and politicians might make the calculation that their interests were better served allying themselves with the Americans rather than pursuing a seemingly lost cause. Thus Aguinaldo, as had Washington, insisted on continuing the conventional campaign, despite a near-unbroken string of catastrophic defeats.
On the other side of the lines, Otis began to think about how to end the war. The string of American successes had made him—and most of the Americans—believe that a few more weeks or months of campaigning would do it. Otis launched a few more pushes out from the areas already conquered, but a concerted offensive would have to wait until fall. The monsoon season was starting, turning what had been difficult terrain impossible. In addition, the National Guard and volunteer units were finally being sent home, well after the technical end of their enlistments. As replacements, Otis was receiving both Regular Army units and U.S. Volunteers. They would fight the war to its conclusion in the fall of 1899, or so Otis devoutly hoped.
Four
A NEW ARMY ARRIVES
Recruiting for the new U.S. Volunteer units had gone briskly at home. Many of the men had taken their discharges from their state volunteer regiments and then joined up with a U.S. Volunteer regiment. Wilmer Blackett, a “ranch hand, circus hand, railroad hand” from South Dakota, had served with the First South Dakota on the “‘North line’ just outside of Manila” in February 1899. He returned home and almost immediately signed up with the Seventeenth U.S. Volunteers on May 15, 1899. He was still only seventeen years old.1 Blackett’s comrades included other veterans of the Battle of Manila, as well as veterans of Cuba: San Juan Hill, El Caney, and the encirclement of Santiago.
But many were newcomers. The flood of stories about the Far East had fired the imaginations of many young men back in the United States. As John D. LaWall, growing up in upstate New York, recalled it:
In the summer of 1899, I was greatly impressed by the opportunity of travel, adventure, and experience offered by joining one of the thirty new regiments which were being organized for service in the Philippines. So strongly did the desire to go and see for myself what these islands and their people were like, and to participate in such an unprecedented war, take possession of me, that I determined to enlist.
LaWall coyly remarked in his memoirs of service that before he managed to enlist (in the Twenty-seventh U.S. Volunteer Regiment) he was turned down twice by the army because “apparently I did not possess the physical requirements.” He did not say what physical requirements he did not meet, but did offhandedly mention that he was only fifteen years old when he enlisted.2
LaWall’s memory of basic training reveals that the army had not completely solved all the supply problems from the Spanish-American War. His first night at Camp Meade, Pennsylvania, he had to sleep on bare wood floors because there were no more straw mattresses available. “[T]his does not sound so badly, when you say it quickly, but in reality, it is a very uncomfortable way of enjoying a night’s repose.” His other privations do not sound particularly horrendous. He remembered sorrowfully having to do without butter, and having to get used to black coffee.3
LaWall and his unit crossed the United States by train, subsisting on beans, canned tomatoes, and corned beef. In Colorado, sympathetic residents brought fresh peaches to the train on its way through. The recruits were greeted warmly in San Francisco, a warmth which lasted until the first payday. The ensuing drinking spree soured the city’s residents on the new volunteers, and ended in a number of courts-martial and reductions in rank. LaWall, better behaved, or at least unconvicted, rose to corporal in the aftermath.
After a few weeks, the Twenty-seventh was loaded onto troop transports and shipped to Manila. LaWall, who had never been to sea before, discovered that there was little sympathy for his seasickness. “A favorite question to put to a seasick comrade is, ‘Wouldn’t you like a piece of fat bacon tied to a string and drawn up and down your throat?’ ” During the trip they lost a man overboard, a “poor despairing wretch left behind to combat with his puny strength the vast, inexorable, deep, relentless ocean.” When they arrived in Manila Bay in late October, the “battered hulks” of the Spanish fleet were still visible. They were issued a hundred rounds of ammunition, loaded on lighters, and motored up the Pasig River, disembarking upstream near a statue of Ferdinand Magellan.4 They had arrived, part of Otis’s new army.
Among the units arriving was the Twenty-fifth Infantry Regiment, an African-American unit that reached the Philippines on July 31, 1899. As they landed, a white onlooker is said to have yelled, “What are you coons doing here?” to which several soldiers replied: “We have come to take up the White Man’s Burden.”5 The arrival of the Twenty-fifth Regiment, and shortly thereafter the Twenty-fourth Regiment and the Tenth Cavalry, all African-American units, highlighted a noteworthy political and cultural conundrum that the American presence in the Philippines was causing back home. African-Americans had, since the end of the Civil War, voted overwhelmingly Republican. Even as the Grand Old Party had moved away from the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, Democratic reliance on the Solid South strategy and Jim Crow laws ha
d kept African-Americans in the Republican camp. The 1890s marked the consolidation of the anti-Reconstruction structure of American government and society. America, North and South, had agreed that Jim Crow should reign supreme. “We have made friends with the Southerners,” remarked one Northern politician. “They and we are hugging each other. … The Negro’s day is over. He is out of fashion.”6 African-Americans feared that the actively virulent racism that was to a certain extent confined to the South after the Civil War was, as a result of the Spanish-American War and a growing sense of American self-confidence, spreading to the rest of the country. “Negrophobia” seemed all the rage.7 The rise of scientific racism, as exemplified by Social Darwinism, and the increasing allegiance of the Republicans to a colonial and imperialist mind-set, combined with Democratic opposition to the annexation of the Philippines, put many African-Americans into a quandary.
African-Americans were particularly concerned with events in Cuba and the Philippines. American imperialism in those nations seemed to echo the race relations at home, and the black press discussed the issue furiously through 1898 and 1899. Why, many African-American observers asked, was the United States so focused on the Philippines, exerting energy that could be better spent at home? “[T]he government [is] acquiescing in the oppression and butchery of a dark race in this country and the enslaving and slaughtering of a dark race in the Philippines,” wrote John Mitchell, editor of the African-American newspaper the Richmond Planet. “We think it is time to call all missionaries home and have them work on our own people.” How could the Philippines allow themselves “to come under the sheltering wing of a country which has repeatedly demonstrated its inability to protect the lives and property of its own citizens a stone’s throw from the seat of government?” thundered the Indianapolis Recorder. The sense grew in the United States that if foreign natives of darker hues could not be trusted with self-government, but had to be ruled justly but firmly by Americans taking up the “White Man’s Burden,” then did that not justify similar and even increased restrictions back home? Jim Crow found his justification written in the annals of imperialism.8
And events in Cuba and the Philippines seemed to be influencing events at home. The jingoistic fervor, it appeared to many African-Americans, led to a similarly violent fervor in domestic affairs. Racial violence rose after the Spanish-American War. A series of gruesome lynchings, including that of Sam Hose in Georgia, where the son of the lynched man was given his father’s severed finger as a warning to leave town, was taken as evidence that white America had forgotten the antipathies of the Civil War and reunited as one racist and imperialist nation. African-Americans had been left behind. “What a spectacle America is exhibiting today,” said William Lewis, an African-American politician in Boston. “Columbia stands offering liberty to the Cubans with one hand, cramming liberty down the throats of the Filipinos with the other, but with both feet planted upon the neck of the negro.”9
Some African-Americans, however, remained steadfastly supportive of McKinley’s policies. The political calculation of such motives was sometimes readily apparent: to support the Filipinos, said Calvin Knox, the editor of the Indianapolis Freeman, was “suicidal” for African-Americans. But much of the language echoed the general pro-annexation language of redemption, often with a personal twist. As Gurley Brewer put it in the fall of 1899: “the natives in these faraway islands in the Pacific are now being offered the same boon that was offered the American Negro in 1861. … The future that Lincoln offered the Negro is being fulfilled.”10
The sending of African-American soldiers to the Philippines created the deepest of ambiguities. Soldiering had long been a valuable and valued career path for African-American men cut off from most other economic and career pursuits. The African-American community fought zealously to protect that path, and reacted furiously to slights, perceived and otherwise, on the vigor and valor of African-American soldiers. For example, in April 1899 Theodore Roosevelt, who had been seen as something of an ally up to then, published an article in Scribner’s Magazine that impugned the actions of black soldiers at San Juan Hill. The outrage among African-Americans over this “malicious slander” was immediate and long-lasting.11 In the Philippine situation, the War Department was initially reluctant to consider African-American volunteer regiments, especially ones officered by African-Americans. An unnamed department official wrote:
I doubt whether half-disciplined Negroes, under the command of Negro officers, if brought face to face with their colored Filipino cousins, could be made to fire upon them or fight them. If the Negro understands the Filipinos are fighting for liberty and independence, ten chances to one they would take sides with them.12
African-American leaders, whatever their feelings about the Asian conflict, pushed the government to reconsider this notion. They might not like the war, but it would not be an excuse further to reinforce the second-class status of African-Americans within the military and without. The result was that African-American units were sent to the Philippines and that a few African-Americans were promoted to officer ranks.
Once they were there, however, the African-Americans found disturbing parallels in the relationships between the Filipinos and the white soldiers. It was an easy step for white soldiers, steeped in the nineteenth century’s easy racism, to bring patterns of behavior abroad. The word “nigger” soon came to be used freely, and racist attitudes reemerged. What one black private of the Twenty-fourth Regiment called “home treatment” soon began to provoke resentment among the native Filipinos.13 The difficulties were profound for African-American soldiers; their duty was to fight against an enemy with whom they had some sympathy, and live among a people becoming victims of the same “diabolical race hatred”14 that African-Americans experienced at home. One African-American infantryman said that
I feel sorry for [the Filipinos] and all that have come under control of the United States. I don’t believe that they will be justly dealt by. The first thing in the morning is the “Nigger” and the last thing at night is the “Nigger.”15
The Philippine situation, so distant from the fetid viciousness of the Jim Crow South, shined a light on the bizarre complexity of that racism. African-Americans were not the only ones to object to or notice the use of the word “nigger.” So too did officers from the old Confederacy, who insisted that the term be used only to describe African-Americans. Identifying the Filipinos as “niggers” would imply that those same Southerners were committing a terrible social error by socializing at all with the locals.16
In the summer of 1899, with the war still conventional and the enemy still visible and distinct, such issues mattered less. But should the war turn shadowy and an increasing importance come to be put on civilian-soldier interaction, then the “home treatment” was likely to cause military as well as social problems.
Such “home treatment” was also likely to become a problem as the United States brought more and more of the Philippines under its direct control. But as American forces pushed outward from Manila, they gained territory that had to be organized and supervised. By the summer of 1899, Otis was becoming increasingly concerned with how to administer the conquered areas. The challenges were no longer simply military. Instead, they were military, political, and social.
Renewing the Campaign
By October 1899 the rains had begun to ease a bit, and both Americans and Filipinos could begin to think about renewing the fight. The last campaigns of the spring and the experience of small-scale fighting over the summer had illuminated new threats for the Americans. The terrain was difficult enough, but adding in the wildly varying climate—heat and rain not the least—made the Philippines a geographic nightmare for campaigning. In addition, a range of diseases attacked the American soldiers, including typhus, cholera, smallpox, malaria, and typhoid fever. The casualties from such diseases were often worse than those from combat. The First North Dakota, returning to Manila in May 1899 after the spring campaign, had four men with gunshot
wounds, twenty with malaria, and eighteen with dysentery. Disease was less of a problem on campaign than it was when the units were in garrison, but the physical effort of campaigning was much higher. Between the physical strain of campaigning and the diseases, American regiments—even without experiencing significant casualties from enemy action—could melt away in a space of weeks.
There had been some notable American successes over the summer. General MacArthur, using an armored train to supply fire support, pushed his lines up to Angeles, several miles north of Calumpit. In the south the sultan of Sulu signed the Bates Agreement with the United States on August 20, 1899, in which he submitted to U.S. control, in return for his continued status as local ruler and the allowance of slavery within Sulu. Most of the American energies, however, had been turned to building up supplies and ammunition in the north, behind MacArthur’s lines, preparatory to a general offensive in the fall that would occupy central Luzon and, Otis hoped, end the war once and for all. Fighting that campaign would be a mix of regulars and U.S. Volunteers, roughly 20,000 strong.
Otis had also started creating another force: native auxiliaries. Recruiting amongst Filipinos in Luzon and elsewhere, Otis began setting up units, both military and police, that consisted of Filipinos officered by Americans. Understanding the culture, language, and terrain, these new forces, Otis hoped, would provide advantages that American army units could not. He kept them close to home at first. The initial unit was a small group of native policemen for the city of Manila. Serving there would allow them to use their cultural knowledge to full advantage while simultaneously freeing up American soldiers for the front lines.
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