CHAPTER IX

THE ILOILO FIASCO

The King of France with forty thousand men Marched up the hill and then marched down again.

Old English Ballad.

We have already seen how busily Aguinaldo occupied himself during the protracted peace negotiations at Paris in getting his government and people ready for the struggle for independence which he early and shrewdly guessed would be ultimately forthcoming. General Otis was in no position to preserve the status quo. The status quo was a worm in hot ashes that would not stay still. The revolution was a snow-ball that would roll. The day after Christmas, General Otis at last sent an expedition under General Marcus P. Miller to the relief of Iloilo, but when it arrived, December 28th, the Spaniards had already turned the town over to the insurgent authorities, and sailed away. When General Miller arrived, being under imperative orders from Washington to be conciliatory, and under no circumstances to have a clash with the insurgents, the Administration's most earnest solicitude being to avoid a clash, at least until the treaty of peace with Spain should be ratified by the United States Senate, he courteously asked permission to land, several times, being refused each time. With a request of this sort sent ashore January 1, 1899, he transmitted a copy of the proclamation set forth in the preceding chapter. The insurgent reply defiantly forbade him to land. Therefore he did not land--because Washington was pulling the strings--until after the treaty was ratified. "So here we are at Iloilo, an exploded bluff," wrote war correspondent J. F. Bass to his paper, Harper's Weekly.

By the time the treaty was ratified the battle of Manila of February 4th had occurred, and the pusillanimity of self-doubting diplomacy had given way to the red honesty of war. [159]

As was noticed in the chapter preceding this, by the end of December, 1898, all military stations outside Luzon, with the exception of Zamboanga, in the extreme south of the great Mohammedan island of Mindanao near Borneo, had been turned over by the Spaniards to the insurgents. When General Miller, commanding the expedition to Iloilo, arrived in the harbor of that city with his teeming troop-ships and naval escorts on December 28th, an aide of the Filipino commanding general came aboard the boat he was on and "desired to know," says General Miller's report, [160] "if we had anything against them--were we going to interfere with them." General Miller then sent some of his own aides ashore with a letter to the insurgent authorities, explaining the peaceful nature of his errand. They at once asked if our people had brought down any instructions from Aguinaldo. Answering in the negative, General Miller's aides handed them his olive-branch letter. They read it and said they could do nothing without orders from Aguinaldo "in cases affecting their Federal Government." The grim veteran commanding the American troops smoked on this for a day or so, and then asked a delegation of insurgents that were visiting his ship by his invitation--they would not let him land, you see--whether if he landed they would meet him with armed resistance. The Malay reverence for the relation of host and guest resulted in an evasive reply. They could not answer. But after they went back to the city they did answer. And this is what they wrote:

Upon the return of your commissioners last night, we * * * discussed the situation and attitude of this region of Bisayas in regard to its relations and dependence upon the central government of Luzon (the Aguinaldo government, of course); and * * * I have the honor to notify you that, in conjunction with the people, the army, and the committee, we insist upon our pretension not to consent * * * to any foreign interference without express orders from the central government of Luzon * * * with which we are one in ideas, as we have been until now in sacrifices. * * * If you insist * * * upon disembarking your forces, this is our final attitude. May God forgive you, etc."

Iloilo, December 30, 1898. [161]

This letter is recited in General Miller's report to be from "President Lopez, of the Federal Government of Visayas." General Miller then wrote Otis begging permission to attack on the ground that upon the success of the expedition he was in charge of "depends the future speedy yielding of insurrectionary movements in the islands." War correspondent Bass, who was on the ground at the time, also wrote his paper: "The effect on the natives will be incalculable all over the islands." But General Otis was trying to help Mr. McKinley nurse the treaty through the Senate on the idea that there weren't going to be any "insurrectionary movements in the islands," that all dark and misguided conspiracies of selfishly ambitious leaders looking to such impious ends would fade before the sunlight of Benevolent Assimilation.

Cautioning Otis against any clash at Iloilo, Mr. McKinley wired January 9th: "Conflict would be most unfortunate, considering the present. * * * Time given the insurgents cannot injure us, and must weaken and discourage them. They will see our benevolent purpose, etc." [162]

The Iloilo fiasco did indeed furnish to the insurgent cause aid and comfort at the psychologic moment when it most needed encouragement to bring things to a head. It presented a spectacle of vacillation and seeming cowardice which heartened the timid among the insurgents and started among them a general eagerness for war which had been lacking before. In one of his bulletins [163] to Otis, General Miller tells of two boats' crews of the 51st Iowa landing on January 5th, and being met by a force of armed natives who "asked them their business and warned them off," whereupon they heeded the warning and returned to their transport. This regiment had then been cooped up on their transport continuously since leaving San Francisco November 3d, previous, sixty-three days. They were kept lying off Iloilo until January 29th, and then brought back to Manila and landed, after eighty-nine days aboard ship, all idea of taking Iloilo before the Senate should act having been abandoned.

The Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation was received by cable in cipher, at Manila, December 29th, and as soon as it had been written out in long hand General Otis hurried a copy down to General Miller at Iloilo by a ship sailing that day, so that General Miller might "understand the position and policy of our government." But he forgot to tell Miller to conceal the policy for the present. [164] So the latter, on January 1st, not only sent a copy of it to the "President of the Federal Government of Visayas," Mr. Lopez, [165] but in the note of transmittal he "asked," says his report, "that they permit the entry of my troops." [166] What a fatal mistake! Here was a proclamation representing all the "majesty, dominion, and power" of the American Government, signed by the President of the United States, in terms asserting immediate, absolute, and supreme authority, and the natives were "asked" if they would "permit" its enforcement. General Miller's report says that he also had the proclamation "translated into Spanish and distributed to the people." [167] "The people laugh at it," he says. "The insurgents call us cowards and are fortifying at the point of the peninsula, and are mounting old smooth-bore guns left by the Spaniards. They are intrenching everywhere, are bent on having one fight, and are confident of victory. The longer we wait before the attack the harder it will be to put down the insurrection." This is especially interesting in the light of President McKinley's justification of the wisdom of temporizing--on the idea that delay would weaken the insurgents and could not hurt us. "Let no one convince you," writes Miller to Otis on January 5th, "that peaceful means can settle the difficulty here."

The appeal to Otis to permit commencement of operations was without avail. Otis was the Manila agent of the Aldrich Old Guard in the Senate, in charge of the pending treaty. He would simply send the disgusted Miller messages not to be hasty, assuring him that the firing of a shot at Iloilo would mean the precipitation of general conflict about Manila and all over the place, and that this would be "most disappointing to the President of the United States, who continually urges extreme caution and no conflict." [168]

The Administration was counting senatorial noses at the time, and that its anxiety was justified is apparent from the fact already noted, that on the final vote whereby the treaty was ratified it had but one vote to spare. So General Miller sat sunning himself on the deck of his transport, and watching the insurgents working like ants at their fortifications, and vainly wishing his 2500 men could get ashore at least long enough to stretch themselves a bit. John F. Bass, correspondent for Harper's Weekly, left Iloilo, returned to Manila, and wrote his paper on January 23d: "I returned to Manila well knowing that there was nothing more to be done in Iloilo until the Senate voted on the Treaty of Peace."

On the eighth day after General Miller had asked permission of the Iloilo village Hampdens to enforce the orders of the President of the United States, the "Federal Government of the Visayas," through its President, Senor Lopez, finally deigned to notice Mr. McKinley's proclamation. It said under date of January 9th:

General: We have the high honor of having received your message, dated January 1st, of this year, enclosing letter of President McKinley. You say in one clause of your message: "As indicated in the President's cablegram, under these conditions the inhabitants of the island of Panay ought to obey the political authority of the United States, and they will incur a grave responsibility if, after deliberating, they decide to resist said authority." So the council of state of this region of Visayas are, at this present moment, between the authority of the United States, that you try to impose on us, and the authority of the central government of Malolos.

Then follows this remarkable statement of the case for the Filipinos:

The supposed authority of the United States began with the Treaty of Paris, on the 10th of December, 1898. The authority of the Central Government of Malolos is founded in the sacred and natural bonds of blood, language, uses, customs, ideas, (and) sacrifices. [169]

General Otis was fond of throwing cold water on any particularly eloquent Filipino insurrecto document he had occasion to put in his reports by saying that Mabini was "the brains of" the Malolos Government--meaning the only brains it had [170]--and that he probably wrote such document, whatever it might be. But here is a piece of real eloquence, originating away down in the Visayan Islands, as far away from Malolos as Colonel Stark and his "Green Mountain Boys" were from Washington and Hamilton in 1776 and after. What then is the explanation of composition so forceful in its impassioned simplicity, and in the light of subsequent events, so pathetic? There is but one explanation. It came from the heart. It was the cry of the Soul of Humanity seeking its natural affiliations. It was the language of what Aguinaldo's early state papers always used to call the "legitimate aspirations of" his people--legitimate aspirations which we later strangled. The reason of the writer's earnestness is that a few months later he helped do some of the strangling. Thirteen years afterwards, a thorough acquaintance with the Filipino side of the matter, derived from an examination of the information which has been gradually accumulated and published by our government during that time, causes him to say, "Father forgive me, for I knew not what I did." The 35,000 volunteers of 1899 knew nothing about the Filipinos or their side of the case. We were like the deputy sheriff who goes out with a warrant duly issued to arrest a man charged with unlawful breach of the peace. It is not his business to inquire whether the man is guilty or not. If the man resists arrest, he takes the consequences.

On the second day after the above defiance of the President of the United States was served up to General Miller, that gallant officer having dutifully swallowed it, sent an officer ashore on a diplomatic mission. The name and rank of this military ambassador were Acting Assistant Surgeon Henry DuR. Phelan, who clearly appears to have been a man of keen insight and considerable ability. His written report to General Miller of what transpired is a document of permanent interest and importance to the annals of men's struggles for free institutions. [171] It states that at the meeting the spokesman of the Filipinos, Attorney Raimundo Melliza, began by saying that "all the Americans owned was Manila." That was unquestionably true, so our ambassador, it seems, did not gainsay it. Dr. Phelan suggested that the Americans had sacrificed lives and money in destroying the power of Spain. The spokesman, Attorney Melliza, replied that "they also had made great sacrifice in lives, and that they had a right to their country which they had fought for, and that we are here now to take from them what they had won by fighting; that they had been our allies, and we had used them as such." Dr. Phelan's report goes on to say: "I replied that military occupation was a necessity for a time, * * * and that as soon as order was assured it would be withdrawn * * *. They smiled at this." Well they might. Fourteen years have elapsed since then, and the law-making power of the United States has never yet declared whether the American occupation of the Philippine Islands is to be temporary, like our occupation of Cuba was, or permanent, like the British occupation of Egypt is. True, Dr. Phelan said "military" occupation, but the smile was provoked by the suggestion of temporariness. After the committee smiled, they remarked:

We have fought for independence and feel that we have the power of governing and need no assistance. We are showing it now. You might inquire of the foreigners if it is not so.

Dr. Phelan's report proceeds:

They stated that their orders were not to allow us to disembark, and that they were powerless to allow us to come in without express orders from their government.

In regard to the Treaty of Paris, the spokesman, Lawyer Melliza, said:

International law forbids a nation to make a contract in regard to taking the liberties of its colonies.

Lawyer Melliza was wrong. If he had said "the law of righteousness," instead of "international law," his proposition, thus amended, would have been incontrovertible. On September 19, 1911, one of the great newspapers of this country, the Denver Post, sent out to the members of the Congress of the United States, and to "The Fourth Estate" also, the newspaper editors, a circular letter proposing that we sell the Philippine Islands to Japan. A member of the United States Senate sent this answer:

I do not favor your proposition. Selling the Islands means selling the inhabitants. The question of traffic in human beings, whether by wholesale or retail, was forever settled by the Civil War.

About the same time a leading daily paper of Georgia had an editorial on the Denver Post's proposition, the most conspicuous feature of which was that Japan was too poor to pay us well, should we contemplate selling the Filipinos to her, so it was no use to discuss the matter at length.

No; Lawyer Melliza's proposition has no standing in international law yet. But it has with what Mr. Lincoln's First Inaugural called "the better angels of our nature," if we stop to reflect.

Another interesting feature of the Phelan report to General Miller is the following:

I asked Lawyer Melliza if Aguinaldo said we could occupy the city would they agree to it. He replied most emphatically that they would.

At that time, in January, 1899, while the debate on the treaty was in progress in the United States Senate, there was hardly a province in that archipelago where you would not have encountered the same inflexible adherence to the Aguinaldo government.

Dr. Phelan's report closes thus:

At the conclusion of the meeting it was said that as this question involved the integrity of the entire republic, it could not be further discussed here, but must be referred to the Malolos Government.

There is one other statement made by the spokesman of the Filipinos, at their meeting with Dr. Phelan, which arrested and gripped my attention. That it may interest the reader as it did me, it will need but a word or so as preface. In the fall of that same year, 1899, when my regiment, the 29th Infantry, U. S. Volunteers, reached the Islands, it was supposed that the insurrection had about played out, i.e., that it had been "beaten to a frazzle," because the Filipinos no longer offered to do battle in force in the open. Yet all that fall, and all through 1900 and after, a most obstinate guerrilla warfare was kept up. Anywhere in the archipelago you were liable to be fired on from ambush. At first we could not understand this. Later we found out it was the result of an order of Aguinaldo's, faithfully carried out, not to assemble in large commands, but to conduct a systematic guerrilla warfare indefinitely. We learned this by capturing a copy of the order, which was quite elaborate. Dr. Phelan's report says:

I told him [Melliza] that the city was in our power, and that we could destroy it at any time * * *. Lawyer Melliza replied that he cared nothing about the city; that we could destroy it if we wished * * *. "We will withdraw to the mountains and repeat the North American Indian warfare. You must not forget that."

Later, they did.

On January 15th, General Otis wrote General Miller [172] again cautioning him against any clash at Iloilo, and saying of conditions at Manila and Malolos: "The revolutionary government is very anxious for peaceful relations."

Three days later Senator Bacon saw the situation with clearer vision from the other side of the world than General Otis could see it under his nose, and said on the floor of the Senate on January 18th concerning the conditions at Manila and Malolos:

While there is no declaration of war, while there is no avowal of hostile intent, with two such armies fronting each other with such divers intents and resolves, it will take but a spark to ignite the magazines which is to explode. [173]

The spark was ignited on February 4, 1899, by a sentinel of the Nebraska regiment firing on some Filipino soldiers who disregarded his challenge to halt, and killing one of them. War once on, General Miller was directed on February 10th, after he had lain in Iloilo harbor for forty-four days, to take the city. So at last he gave written notice to the insurgents in Iloilo demanding the surrender of the city and garrison "before sunset Saturday, the 11th instant" and requesting them to give warning to all non-combatants. [174] Thereupon the insurgents set fire to the city and departed.