Ilocos also demonstrated the value of another stratagem, that of starving the guerrillas of their food supplies. Young had made focused efforts to prevent the November rice harvest from making its way into the hands of the insurgents through strict control of the harvest and transportation of the rice, and the forced concentration of the farmers themselves into U.S.-controlled towns. The American effort was magnified in many places in 1900–1901 by an epidemic of rinderpest, a cattle disease that wiped out the domestic stock of the farmers and reduced the rice harvest. The risk of such stringent concentration of the population and control of the food supply was starvation and disease. People rudely pushed together in unfamiliar surroundings, with limited amounts of food, were terribly vulnerable to illness.
It was a winning military strategy, however. Results were showing by early 1901, as major guerrilla bands in Ilocos reported desperate shortages of food. The result was the surrender of over 20,000 guerrillas in the province in the first months of the new year, and the eventual surrender of the heads of the insurgent forces, including the brothers Juan and Blas Villamor on April 29. Manual Tinio, the general appointed to overall command in Ilocos by Aguinaldo, had actually surrendered to Gen. Franklin Bell the day before the Villamor brothers, but when learning of the brothers’ capitulation, asked Young to postdate his surrender to May 1. Bell bemusedly complied.3
As a reward for the success, Congress promoted MacArthur to major general on February 5, 1901. MacArthur, stuck so long at the rank of captain in the post–Civil War years, had advanced from colonel in under three years. But the success also planted the seeds of MacArthur’s supercession. Taft, as it became clear that the insurgency had been, at very least, tamped down, wrote home to Elihu Root, arguing that with normality again returning it was time for the Philippines to be run by a civilian authority.
MacArthur, who knew nothing of this, held a lavish reception on February 19, 1901, to celebrate his promotion and to introduce members of the new Federal Party to Manila. In what was a clear sign of his relief, he invited the members of the Philippine Commission and their wives to attend. The cold war between civilian and military sides thawed, at least for one night. The commissioners came, made polite conversation with MacArthur, and watched the cream of Manila society swirl around them. If a party could signal anything about the health of the occupation, this one did.
The Capture
What came next for the insurgents was disaster to compound catastrophe. Already reeling throughout the islands from the renewed American campaign, the insurrectos lost the man they believed more than anyone to be their representative and leader. Whatever his mistakes and frequent foolishness, Emilio Aguinaldo was, for many, the revolution personified. His armies might fall, but the Americans had been unable to kill or capture him—or even, after 1900, find him. As long as Aguinaldo stood, so stood the revolution.
He was not, however, to stand much longer. In early February 1901, Col. Frederick Funston, in San Isidro, received from one of his units a Filipino prisoner. The man—Cecilio Segismundo—claimed to be a courier for Aguinaldo, carrying encrypted messages. Funston’s men, at the colonel’s orders, encouraged the courier to reveal the meaning of the messages. How forceful this encouragement was remains ambiguous, but Segismundo revealed all he knew. Once translated and decrypted, the messages seemed to offer a spectacular intelligence windfall: the location of Emilio Aguinaldo. The president was hiding out in Palanan, in the northeast of Luzon, isolated from the rest of the Philippines by the desolate Sierra Madre mountain range. It was a good hiding place. The mountain passes were watched over by tribal warriors in the pay of the insurgents. They would warn of any force coming from that direction. In fact, exactly that had happened in 1899. An American column had marched through the mountains into Palanan. They found it deserted, for Aguinaldo and his men had fled quickly into the lower reaches of the mountains. The Americans, none the wiser, went on their way.
The sea was a different story, Funston realized. American control of the ocean gave him immediate and rapid access to the whole eastern coast of Luzon, despite the Sierra Madre. He could not steam directly into Palanan and hope to catch Aguinaldo. The smoke from the steam engines would give things away long before the Americans landed, and Funston did not want to repeat the experience of Young and Peyton back in March 1899, fruitlessly chasing Aguinaldo through a variety of terrain. But the ocean gave him the opportunity to be landed close to Aguinaldo and, if need be, taken off to safety immediately.
That would not be enough if Funston could not get to Aguinaldo before the president was warned and fled. Here another letter offered a possible way. The missive relayed a request to Aguinaldo’s cousin Baldomero Aguinaldo to send reinforcements to Palanan. The president was short of troops.
Funston was due to be relieved within a few weeks, but this he could not ignore. What, he thought, if the troops coming in, acting as reinforcements, were actually disguised American forces? Could they capture Aguinaldo? Obviously, American soldiers would not do, but the buildup of native troops gave Funston another alternative.
He asked for permission from MacArthur for a daring attempt. He would take eighty-one native soldiers—scouts from the town of Macabebe in central Luzon—and dress them in captured insurgent uniforms. Then, along with himself and four other American officers pretending to be their captives, he would have this disguised force dropped by American gunboat on the east side of Luzon, near the town of Casiguran, twenty-seven miles north of the farthest American outpost at Baler. The force would march another hundred miles north along the coastline to Aguinaldo’s location and attempt to capture the president and bring him back to Manila.
It was beyond daring. It was suicidal. But aggression and risk-taking by American officers had so long been rewarded that MacArthur hardly blinked an eye. He gave permission and off Funston went to plan. They were ready to go on March 6, 1901, sailing on the steamer Vicksburg. MacArthur saw Funston off at his Manila office with the encouraging words, “Funston, this is a desperate undertaking. I fear I shall never see you again.” The Kansas general was not dissuaded.
Along with the Macabebe scouts, Funston had two brothers, Capt. R. T. Hazzard and Lt. O.P.M. Hazzard, both of the Eleventh Cavalry, U.S. Volunteers. In addition, and most crucial to the plan, Funston had a number of ex-insurgent officers, all of whom had been captured or surrendered, and all had come over to the American side. Perhaps most critical of these was Capt. Lasaro Segovia, an insulare who had fought in the Spanish army, then in the Army of Liberation, and finally, after giving himself up in May 1900, as a guide for the American army. Segovia had long experience in the archipelago and spoke both Spanish and Tagalog. The native courier, Segismundo, came with them to serve—either voluntarily or not—as a guide.
Funston’s plan originally called for the expedition to find or purchase native boats to use in the landing. They did find some two-masted bancas at another town to use. Unfortunately, the bancas, while being towed behind the Vicksburg, sank in a storm, and Funston was forced to use the ship’s boats instead. He landed at night, in hopes that no one would notice the American lines of the boats.
The landing went smoothly, and the Vicksburg sailed away, lurking offshore until a scheduled rendezvous off Palanan on March 25. Funston’s force marched north through extremely challenging terrain. The mountains of the Sierra Madre sometimes descended directly into the ocean, forcing the American unit to scale cliffs and edge along precipices. It rained continuously and they were low on food.
But of all the things that could have gone wrong, the most important did not. The column managed to fool every insurgent they met, Funston relying heavily on the quick-witted Segovia to talk their way through the encounters. They reached Palanan about 3 p.m. on March 23 to find an honor guard of insurgents awaiting them. Segovia was with the lead party, while Funston and the other Americans were coming up behind them, to avoid causing suspicion on Aguinaldo’s part. After some confusion, Segovia managed to get
into the main headquarters and find Aguinaldo. He yelled at the Macabebes to open fire and raced upstairs to take the president prisoner. Funston recalled what followed:
The Macabebes were so excited and nervous that their fire was very ineffective. But two of the insurgent soldiers were killed and the remainder in their flight threw away 18 rifles and 1000 rounds of ammunition.
Segovia shot two insurgent officers in the room with Aguinaldo and held the president captive until Funston arrived.4
It was the day after Aguinaldo’s birthday, and the end of his war. The rendezvous with the Vicksburg went off without a hitch, and Funston shared the captain’s mess with Commander Barry and Aguinaldo on the trip back to Manila. When they reached the city, Funston went directly to MacArthur’s headquarters to announce the capture. MacArthur was overjoyed by the news. How best, he wondered, to take advantage of the coup? It was a military triumph, and could also be a political victory if he could use Aguinaldo against the remaining insurrectos. MacArthur’s ideas ranged from the sensible, such as interrogating Aguinaldo and trying to get him to issue a proclamation of surrender, to the somewhat silly, such as having Aguinaldo go on a speaking tour of the United States.
Aguinaldo was a model guest. Though he thought Funston had played an “ungentlemanly and unsportsmanlike ruse,” he was too worn down by the yearlong flight and the isolation of Palanan to offer much resistance.5 The ilustrado took quickly to the comfort of his life of captivity. MacArthur put him in a cozy set of rooms to live in; from his second-story window he could watch American soldiers bloody themselves in impromptu games of football on the parade ground below.6 He attended dinners with important Americans and Filipinos and his captors worked to convince him that further resistance was useless.
From Aguinaldo’s insurgent comrades, the response was overwhelming dismay. In combination with the surrenders of other generals, his capture seemed a disastrous capstone. “We find ourselves, therefore, without a chief and without several of our old comrades. We who remain, shall we continue the struggle? Ought we to continue it? Can we continue it?” wrote the junta from Hong Kong on April 9.7
The Surrender
The insurgents had hardly had time to come to grips with the capture of Aguinaldo before the release on April 19 of a shattering message from their dictator-president. He had come around to MacArthur’s point of view. We should spare a moment’s sympathy for Aguinaldo. He had spent over a year on the run, frequently just barely ahead of the forces chasing him; he had seen his family members captured and taken away from him; and he had experienced the surrenders of his closest generals. Aguinaldo sensed grimly that the revolution was melting away from him:
My capture, together with the treachery and betrayal that accompanied it, left me deeply angered, then distressed, then almost completely numbed. … I was overwhelmed by a feeling of disgust and despair.8
Vain, paranoid, militarily mostly incompetent, but with a keen sense of political survival, he decided that the best thing for Emilio Aguinaldo to do was to cooperate. “I also felt relieved. I had known for some time that our resistance was doomed to failure. … Now, it was over and I was alive.”9
And cooperate he did, writing a general proclamation to his fellow insurrectos that the time had come to give up. “The complete termination of hostilities and a lasting peace are not only desirable but absolutely essential to the welfare of the Philippines,” he wrote. “By acknowledging and accepting the sovereignty of the United States throughout the entire Archipelago, as I now do without any reservation whatsoever, I believe that I am serving thee, my beloved country.” MacArthur had it published in English, Spanish, and Tagalog, and disseminated widely throughout the islands. It was capitulation. Aguinaldo, despite his lack of “reservations,” would wear until his death in 1964 a black bow tie as a symbol of mourning for the Philippine Republic: a small enough tribute, perhaps.
The interesting thing is that it is not clear, for all his isolation, that Aguinaldo was wrong. The revolution was, in fact, melting away in spring 1901 under the high heat of the American offensive and continuing efforts at pacification. The insurgents had not been able to sustain their offensive of the fall, the election of 1900 had been a shattering blow to their morale, and American efforts had caused their supplies, most particularly food, to become extremely low. Aguinaldo’s capture and surrender was not the turning point of the war, as many have argued. Rather, it was the final element of a turnaround that had started in December 1900.
That is not to say that much did not remain to be done after the spring of 1901. But the momentum had shifted clearly to the American side, and there was a growing sense within the U.S. administration, both in Manila and in Washington, D.C., that the civilian side of things—pacification and organization—would now dominate the Philippine effort. Even MacArthur recognized it. His dealings with Taft and the Philippine Commission had gone much more smoothly after the success of the winter-spring campaign. With the capture of Aguinaldo, MacArthur admitted to Taft that it was time for the commission to take over. He himself preferred not to remain as the military leader in that case, and between him, Taft, and Elihu Root, a compromise was worked out. The military would hand over supreme governing authority in the Philippines in July 1901 to the commission. Taft would become governor of the Philippines. At the same time, MacArthur would be relieved and brought home to the United States and replaced by Brig. Gen. Adna Chaffee, a veteran of the Civil War, the Indian Wars, and the China Expedition. Unlike MacArthur, Chaffee had risen from the ranks to his commission. The “mustang,” as such officers were known, was blunt and plainspoken, unlike the departing general, whose circumlocutions had often been the source of mirth in Washington, D.C. Chaffee’s office, Root made clear to all concerned, would be subordinate to Taft’s except in provinces where the insurgency still flamed.
The Pacification Campaign
Before moving on to the middle of 1901, however, it is worth stopping a moment to look at the course of the pacification. American success and Filipino defeat in the guerrilla war came about as much because of the actions of hundreds of small units of soldiers and civilians in far-off isolated areas of the Philippines, as it did because of aggressive military campaigning. This was “small war” with a vengeance. American soldiers organized a civilian infrastructure on the ground that could run the Philippines effectively and, most critically, convince Filipino civilians that they should support American rule or, at least, not actively support the insurgents.
There were few grand victories in this campaign, few battles, and few dramatic turning points. Instead, the pacification campaign took place day by day and person by person. To get a sense of it, let us take a look at one of the people waging that war: Herbert Reddy, a corporal in the Sixth U.S. Volunteer Infantry Regiment in Mindanao.
During the spring of 1901, Corporal Reddy was told to train a squad of Filipinos. They spoke no English and he spoke nothing else. One of them, whose name Reddy reports as “Diablo,” spoke a bit of Spanish. Reddy appointed him corporal of the squad for this language facility as well as for the fact that when Diablo read the attendance list, he, unlike Reddy, could pronounce their names. Training was difficult. The soldiers soon learned the English words for a variety of basic commands, and Reddy learned to turn his back to them when he showed them an element of the drill. If he faced them to demonstrate, for example, a salute, they would use the hand on the same side (left rather than right).10
After three months the squad was ready. The soldiers took the oath of allegiance, and, with Reddy still commanding, were sent to garrison a small port in northern Mindanao. There he was the law. He “was in charge of camp, postoffice, sanitation, and also captain of the port. When a boat came in, just any kind of boat, the owner or captain had to bring his log to me to show from where it came, and what it carried. To make sure, I had to check the cargo.” But few boats stopped by.11
Reddy reports participating in no battles or combat. He and his men served as a gua
rd for a group of Moros evacuating their wounded after a battle between them and a group of Christian Filipinos. After their return, Reddy decided that his men “deserved something other than the hard tack and canned beef we’d been living on,” so he took his native guide and set out to find some fresh meat. On their travels, they came across a tiny, impoverished settlement:
We came into a little clearing in which, near the center, some trees had been left standing. In them were some crude nests—I couldn’t call them huts—in which we found three families. The poor little frightened black people had nothing to eat except what they garnered from the jungle.
The families were scared of him until he “made [them] understand that we were in search of food, not of them, and went on.” Eventually, he found some villagers who agreed to butcher a cow and sell him the meat. From them, Reddy acquired strips of beef and fresh eggs to bring back to his men. On his way back he stopped in the clearing again and gave the poor tree dwellers some of the beef. And, he said proudly, “my men feasted.”12
One day during Reddy’s stint, a boat showed up in the harbor and landed two men with “heavy suitcases.” They were teachers sent by Manila to open a school of English for the local children. But there was no place for them to stay in the village. Reddy offered them a room in the house being used by the troops, at the discount price of twenty-five dollars per month “in advance.” The teachers accepted, and when Reddy got the first month’s rent, he “went to the Chinese store and purchased two dozen porcelain plates, cups, and saucers, and also knives, forks, and spoons. Twenty four mess kits went into haversacks and were hung on the wall.”13
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