“The cohesion of Filipino society in behalf of insurgent interests is most emphatically illustrated by the fact that assassination, which was extensively employed, was generally accepted as a legitimate expression of insurgent governmental authority. The individuals marked for death would not appeal to American protection, although condemned exclusively on account of supposed pro-Americanism.”[62]
As a matter of fact, plenty of people appealed to the Americans for protection and got it. I have seen document after document each recommending some individual to American officers everywhere as worthy of protection, and as needing it on account of services rendered to Americans. Relative to this matter, Taylor says:—
“Among the papers of the insurgents there are a few letters to American officers asking for protection against the insurgents. They represent a protest against conditions which were rapidly becoming unbearable; but most of them must have been sent without copies, for in case they fell into the hands of the guerillas they would have served as death warrants for the men who signed them. From early in 1900, they were much more frequent all over the archipelago than the number which have survived, either in the official records of the American army in the Philippines, or among the papers of the insurgents, would lead the investigator to believe. Those which were sent to the commanders of American detachments were not kept as a rule, for a small detachment has few records. As early as March, 1900, the head of the town of Passi, Panay, asked American protection against robbers and insurgents.”[63]
General MacArthur had a fixed idea that all Filipinos were against us, but he was wrong.[64]
In very many cases our efforts to furnish protection were necessarily futile. It is easy enough to protect a town from an open attack. It is often excessively difficult to protect an individual against an assassin who proffers him one hand in assumed friendship and stabs him with the other.
We shall never know how many men were murdered in accordance with the orders which I have cited, and other similar ones.
On February 10, 1900, General P. García wrote to General Isidoro Torres advising him to inform the inhabitants of Bulacan, among whom it was understood that the Americans were about to establish municipal governments, “of what occurred in the Island of Negros where two hundred men have been shot and forty more have been cast into the water for having accepted the American sovereignty, and because they were suspected of not being adherents of the cause of the independence of our country.”[65]
In reviewing the sentence of the Taytay murderers, General Adna R. Chaffee, who, as the ranking military officer in the Philippines, was closely in touch with the situation, made the following statement:—
“The number of peaceful men who have been murdered in these islands at the instigation of the chiefs, while impracticable of exact determination, is yet known to be so great that to recount them would constitute one of the most horrible chapters in human history. With respect to these chiefs, the commanding general has, therefore, no other recourse than to invoke the unrelenting execution of the law upon them and to appeal to the intelligent and educated among the Filipino people to aid him by renewed efforts to end a reign of terror of which their own people are the helpless victims.”[66]
Taylor has made the following summary of the facts:—