The first Philippine Commission had managed, unfortunately, to reduce itself to an even greater degree of irrelevancy since the outbreak of war. Schurman and his colleagues had misread the situation in the spring months, egged on by midlevel officers who wanted Washington to send more troops, and had written home that Manila was “besieged” and the Americans were in peril of being swept into the sea.17 A more mistaken analysis would have been difficult to manage. Then things had gone from bad to worse. General Otis, worn by the stresses of campaigning, had erupted in a lengthy rant at one of the commission meetings, laying into the commissioners, Admiral Dewey, and even President McKinley. Dewey was present and had no hesitation in shouting right back at the general. Relations were further poisoned when Schurman had attempted to go around the general’s back by cabling McKinley and proposing a ceasefire and armistice with the Filipinos. McKinley’s rejection of this idea was leaked to Otis; Schurman reacted to the rebuff by announcing that he would return to the United States in early July. He did so, leaving behind the rest of the commission, and little else.
The U.S. effort had also said goodbye to another one of its leading figures. In June, Admiral Dewey was sent home and replaced by Adm. John C. Watson. This was something of a lucky stroke for Otis. As can be seen from the Philippine Commission meeting, he and Dewey had never gotten along well. Dewey, who so triumphantly started the American involvement in the archipelago, seems to have felt something of a proprietary interest in it, with the result that he was frequently unwilling to show the army the cooperation Otis required. He was a “blue-water” admiral, loaded with the visions of Mahan, of great fleets and great battles. The minutiae of supply, fire support, and “brown-water” gunboats patrolling rivers bored him. Watson, on the other hand, came to the admiral’s berth committed to brown-water operations, and after his arrival naval vessels did yeoman work supporting the army.
Perhaps the most important task the navy undertook during the summer and fall of 1899 was a general blockade of the Philippines. It could not prevent all movement, most particularly between the islands, but it could shut the Philippines off from the outside world. Using gunboats, some of which had been purchased from the Spanish, the American fleet effectively prevented the trade and movement of most contraband between the islands and with the larger world. Since contraband included many foodstuffs, the results of this interdiction included widespread shortages of food on many of the Philippine islands and a general economic crisis in the trading areas.
The effect of the blockade on the efforts of the Philippine Republic should not be underestimated. Aguinaldo’s great problem was the lack of cohesion among the revolutionary groups, and the isolation created by the U.S. Navy only exacerbated that. Further, it made it enormously difficult for the insurgent forces to get supplies, either from other areas of the Philippines or from outside countries. And finally, it gave the Americans a lever to use against the wealthy Filipinos, whose riches were, in many cases, created by or founded on trade. The blockade could thus be both a carrot or a stick, punishing those who resisted and rewarding those who did not.
Thus, Otis launched his offensive on October 9 already knowing that the Americans dominated the overall situation. Aguinaldo and his army were essentially confined to Luzon; it was unlikely that they would get support from the other islands, and both armies knew who had shown their military superiority in the spring. Otis believed that victory was inevitable. His attention thus turned to ensuring that the Army of Liberation suffered a heavy enough defeat that they would either be destroyed or so disheartened that they would give up fighting. Otis did not want them to retreat into the highlands of either east or west Luzon and continue the war from there. His “well-determined plan of operation” aimed to cut them off from either refuge and pin them in the lowlands between converging columns of American troops.18 Lawton would lead a column to the northeast, up the Rio Grande, and then over to the Lingayen Gulf. Wheaton would land at the southwest corner of that same gulf and then, when both were in a position to prevent the escape of Aguinaldo’s forces, MacArthur would push up the central railroad line from Angeles to Dagupan. This triple-pronged pincer movement, Otis hoped, would crush the Filipinos.
It was, to say the least, a confident plan. Splitting his army in the face of enemy forces is never high on a list of sensible things for a general to do, in whatever era. But Otis did not believe his enemy capable of taking advantage. He had their measure, he thought. They could not and would not react quickly and aggressively enough, and the Americans would crush them.
Or so Otis hoped. Things turned out differently on the ground. The problem was not so much the Army of Liberation as it was the geography and climate, combined with frequent logistical breakdowns. By leaving the Manila region, the U.S. Army also left the only thing that resembled a truly developed transportation network in the Philippines. Moving into the central plains of Luzon left the Americans dependent on narrow, unpaved roads and paths that frequently crossed ravines and valleys over fragile bridges. If it rained, the roads turned to mud and swallowed up man and beast alike, and it often rained. Off these routes, the terrain was blanketed with either forest or densely planted crops. The only reasonably enduring transportation routes were the railroad or the sea. While Wheaton’s troops would move by sea at first, once they were ashore in the Gulf of Lingayen, they would be dependent on road and river. Only MacArthur’s column would remain with a reliable method of transportation.
It quickly turned out that this road and river network was incapable of supporting the rapid movement of thousands of soldiers and, most critically, their supplies. The result was an offensive in trouble almost from the start. Lawton’s column, pushing north along the Rio Grande, found itself fighting the environment as much as the Filipinos. What were supposed to be roads on the map turned out to be dirt trails, cut by fast-running streams that were often completely unmarked on the charts. The flooded rice paddies of Luzon agriculture presented their own difficulties. Combined with the leftovers of the monsoon season, these hurdles wore down Lawton’s soldiers and severely hampered his supply column. Wheels stuck in the mud, mules died of overexertion, wagons slid into rivers and were swept away. By the end of October the leading elements of the offensive, a brigade under Brig. Gen. Samuel Young, had made it to Cabanatuan, perhaps forty miles north of their starting point. The main column, under Lawton, was still stuck back at San Isidro, short of supplies and, in Lawton’s case, temper. On the twenty-fifth he sent a message to Manila summarizing his situation: “Everything quiet. Rains over. Roads impassable. River has risen some 8 or 10 feet. Is bank-full. Small streams high and unfordable.”19 At times Lawton’s reports crept over into the plaintive. After a bridge collapsed, he gravely informed Manila, “This is no pleasure excursion.” Faced with impassable roads, the fuming general wrote that this was “about the worst proposition I ever tackled.”20
On October 31, however, the Americans got some choice intelligence. A captured Filipino document revealed that Aguinaldo had decided to vacate the insurgent headquarters at Tarlac, retreat eastward into the mountains, and set up shop at the upland town of Bayombong. This was exactly what Otis had been hoping to block. The general faced a dilemma: could the Americans cut off the fleeing Tagalog president? He decided to try. Otis ordered Lawton to send Young’s force northward to San José, one of the major passes into the mountains. Meanwhile, Wheaton, whose troops were preparing to land on the Lingayen Gulf coast, would push southeastward and close the door from the north.
Chasing Aguinaldo
Unfortunately for Otis’s plan, Wheaton’s landing on the shores of the Lingayen Gulf ran into difficulties. The initial landing on November 6 went smoothly. Supported by naval gunfire, Wheaton was able to put his troops ashore at the town of San Fabian and scatter its defenders. But then difficulties in getting supplies ashore and the inopportune interference of a typhoon on November 12 all conspired to prevent Wheaton from marching southward. Further, Wheaton believed tha
t units of the Army of Liberation were gathering near San Fabian. To spread out his forces in a marching column would entail a grave risk, and the general decided against it.
In doing so, Wheaton ignored the lessons of the past year’s fighting. It had been constant aggression, both on the tactical and strategic levels, that had won the Americans their successes; constant aggression that had kept the insurrectos on their back feet and inflicted heavy casualties on them, while keeping American casualties light. Wheaton made the safe, traditional military decision, and it is hard to criticize him. But it was not a decision prompted by the events of the war so far.
Contrast Wheaton’s caution with the reactions of Lawton and Young. Both, upon getting Otis’s orders, felt them entirely too passive. Young, in fact, suggested to Lawton that the general give him permission to take a small force of mixed infantry and cavalry and push north, leaving behind the majority of his supply wagons. It was aggressive and daring, and in some small way an echo of Sherman’s abandonment of the railway line to march through Georgia and the Carolinas during the Civil War. Lawton gave permission, and on November 7 Young and the Twenty-second Infantry Battalion, a group of the native Macabebe scouts, and the Cavalry Brigade struck out from Cabanatuan. Their goal was to push as far north as they could, and hopefully capture or kill Aguinaldo in the process. It was a remarkably bold move. Should Young get cut off by the insurrectos, he was “without the possibility of support reaching them immediately,” as Lawton put it.21 Essentially, Young risked being isolated and cut to pieces by a sufficiently aggressive insurgent force. But it was a move in tune with the lessons the Americans had learned: push hard and the enemy would either crumble or, at least, fail to take advantage of your potential vulnerabilities.
Meanwhile, as might be guessed, Emilio Aguinaldo’s situation was dire. The renewed conventional war of October had only reinforced to the Americans the complete inferiority of the insurgent army. An attack on the American lines south of Manila in mid-October had failed with heavy casualties, and another attack on MacArthur’s forces at Angeles had also been repulsed with catastrophic results. On November 5, MacArthur and his forces left Angeles and began moving northward along the railroad line toward Tarlac. Even had Aguinaldo chosen to stay, there was no real possibility that the insurrectos could have held them back.
Their destination was particularly telling. Bayombong was high in the mountains, difficult to reach except by a few select passes and roads. In moving there, out of the lowlands, Aguinaldo was essentially declaring that it was simply not possible for the army of the Philippine Republic to defend its government and that, instead, the government would have to rely on geography for a measure of safety. He cemented the symbolic import of that decision on November 13 by deciding, as he left central Luzon, that the Filipinos should give up on conventional warfare and instead turn to guerrilla war to fight the Americans. As the War Department report (based on captured documents) summarized it:
The insurgent forces were incapable of further resistance in the field, and as a consequence it was decided to disband the army, the generals and the men to return to their own provinces, with a view to organizing the people for general resistance by means of guerilla warfare.22
It was a sensible decision, given everything that had happened, but it was crushing to Aguinaldo. He had brought the republic to the point of controlling nearly the entire Philippines. He had penned the Spanish into Manila. For just that brief moment, they had tasted the sweetness of victory. Now, it was ashes. Now, it was not even clear that he himself would remain at liberty.
He did, but only just barely. Moving north and east to try and get into the mountain passes and reach Bayombong, Aguinaldo found himself, on November 14, just moments ahead of elements of Young’s column, which had dashed quickly north. That night, at the town of Pozorubio, Aguinaldo’s mother and son were captured, and the president himself had to make a quick escape northward. “If Young does not catch Aguinaldo, he will at least make him very unhappy,” General Lawton wired back to Otis.23 The general was right; Aguinaldo at this point was deeply unhappy, desperately searching for a getaway route.
He gave up on reaching Bayombong and instead headed northwest, over the southern end of the mountainous Cordillera Central. Getting across the Cordillera would put him on the coastal road heading into northern Luzon, where he could safely hide in a number of places. Aguinaldo’s medical officer, Simeon Villa, kept a diary of their movements and on November 15 wrote of the hardships of crossing the mountains:
The rain was incessant and there was a great deal of mud. The hard wind and the cold made us shiver. We continued the ascent of the mountain, and, as we had already reached an elevation of 500 meters, it seemed that we were at a great altitude and pretty close to the sky.24
The American columns were close behind, and several units coming up to serve as Aguinaldo’s rearguard were scattered before they could reach the president. On the nineteenth he dispatched Simeon Villa to go to the coastal town of San Fernando, meet with Gen. Manuel Tinio, and organize a further escort. Villa took his horse and rode to San Fernando. As he was riding, “he [Villa wrote in the third person] did not see an American vessel that was lying off the shore until it fired several cannon shots at him. The shooting continued, the Americans perhaps believing that Villa was a general or colonel because he was on horseback. For fear he would be wounded he dismounted, left his horse, and got in the midst of the cogon [a weed] patches.” He made it into San Fernando and met with General Tinio, who had also had difficulties reaching the town:
The two, being utterly worn out through hunger and fatigue, went to sleep. About 3 o’clock they suddenly awoke, startled by the firing of guns inside the town itself. As it kept up, they went out into the streets to see what it was. Great was their astonishment on finding that the American cavalry was passing and firing on the town. Tinio and Villa escaped by running away immediately; but they had the misfortune to be seen by the enemy, who pursued them. They went up into the mountains and hid.25
It was a cavalry unit, led by General Young. Despite the falling away of most of his command, either to sickness or to the end of their endurance, Young had not given up. He gathered as many healthy cavalry troops as he could find and dashed off to San Fernando. There, the general defeated the insurgent garrison with a few hundred men and the help of a navy gunboat, much to Villa’s and Aguinaldo’s discomfort.
Young was about out of soldiers and supplies. He was forced to borrow $2,500 from an American tobacco company in San Fernando to buy food for the men he had left. He pleaded with General Wheaton to send reinforcements but Wheaton refused. Young turned to the navy, and managed to get the gunboat Oregon to go to Vigan, near the northern end of Luzon, and occupy the city.
That put Americans to the north and south of Aguinaldo along the coast and forced him to turn inland and go through the Tirad Pass and into the mountains. On November 30 Aguinaldo’s party arrived in Cervantes, up the pass. Villa, again: “As this town offered good conditions for defense, an abundance of food, and a beautiful view, the honorable President decided to stay there for a long time and defend himself.”26
There was little Young could do to pursue Aguinaldo. He simply did not have the men. Here fate intervened. On November 26 a battalion of the Thirty-third “Texas” Regiment, the “Fighting Thirty-third,” commanded by Maj. Peyton J. March, caught up with Young. Young immediately sent March and his men to chase Aguinaldo up the Tirad Pass. The battalion, which had seen some sharp fighting at San Jacinto but had not undergone the severely draining marches that Young’s command had, raced forward enthusiastically and quickly worked its way into the pass.
In Cervantes, Aguinaldo got the bad news about March’s unit on December 1 from the twenty-two-year-old prodigy in command of his rearguard, Gen. Gregorio del Pilar. As Aguinaldo escaped to the east, del Pilar had his force of sixty men build fortifications across the trail through the pass and waited for the Americans. The insurgents held their
fire until the Americans were close, and then opened such a barrage that the first two companies were driven to ground. March ordered most of his men to hold their positions and sent another company to flank del Pilar. Flanking, in this case, meant climbing up steep cliffs in order to find their way around the defenders. But the soldiers managed, using whatever came to hand, to make ropes: blankets, belts, straps, and so on. When, after several hours, they had struggled their way around to the side, they opened a withering fire from above on the insurgents at the same time that the rest of the battalion charged. Del Pilar was killed as he looked above the wall to measure the situation, and the Americans overwhelmed the rest of the insurrectos. Only nine out of sixty Filipinos escaped.
March resumed the chase, but Aguinaldo’s lead was too great and he could not catch up with the president. “Aguinaldo,” March reported, “has been driven to the mountains, a fugitive without a command.”27 It was there in the mountains that Aguinaldo would hold that desperate meeting described at the beginning of Chapter 1, a meeting that ended with his continued flight for safety and refuge. Sitting there in the darkness Aguinaldo may have felt himself shifting from president to prey. Simeon Villa certainly did: “Corporeal fatigue prostrates us; darkness terrifies us; yet we continue our journey, almost crawling,” he wrote on December 21 of climbing a mountain at night.28 The words could have applied to the whole journey. Aguinaldo fled and the army and government of the Philippine Republic fled along with him.
It had been ten months since the war started, and the Philippine Republic had essentially ceased to exist. American power, military and otherwise, had proven overwhelming. Aguinaldo’s fall from grace was the fall of many; they had gone from victors to hunted. The native government could no longer assert sovereignty over the islands with any conviction. Now all that remained to them was to dispute America’s claim to rule. Whether they could do that with any conviction, success, or endurance remained to be seen. In December of 1899, the possibility seemed remote.
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