After many promises and conferences extending over a period of forty days, during which hostilities were suspended, Ola broke off negotiations and withdrew his entire force and a large number of additional recruits that he had secured during the armistice.
Before Ola finally surrendered he is supposed to have had a total command ranging at various times from a thousand to 1500 men. And I think Colonel Bandholtz must have had in the field opposed to him, first and last, at least an equal number of native forces. Ola also makes an official reappearance in the report of the Governor of Albay Province for 1904.[12] It there appears that reconcentration was begun in Albay as part of the campaign against Ola and his forces, in March, 1903, and continued until the end of October of that year. Says this report of the Governor of Albay concerning reconcentration:
Naturally, the effect of this unusual volume of persons in a limited area was disease and suffering for want of food and ordinary living accommodations.
The Governor does not say how large the “unusual volume of persons” was that was herded into the reconcentration zones, nor does he furnish any mortality statistics. Nobody kept any. How much there was of the awful mortality and “clouds of vampire bats softly swirling out on their orgies over the dead,” that Senator Bacon’s army friend correspondent encountered in Samar does not affirmatively appear. The number of people affected by reconcentration in Albay and an adjacent province that caught the contagion of unrest and had to be given similar treatment, was about 300,000.[13]
In his report for 1903, in describing the Ola insurrection of 1902–3, Governor Taft says: “A reign of terror was inaugurated throughout the province.” He then goes on to state that to meet it he applied the reconcentration tactics. In the same report he describes what is to my mind the most humiliating incident connected with the whole history of the American Government in the Philippines, viz., Vice-Governor Wright’s visit to Albay in 1903, apparently in pursuance of the peace-at-any-price policy that the Manila Government was bent on. Governor Taft says of the civil government’s dealings with His Excellency, the Honorable Simeon Ola, the chief of the brigands, that General Wright and Dr. Pardo de Tavera, a Filipino member of the Commission, went down to Albay and “talked to the people,” the idea apparently being that those poor unarmed or ill-armed creatures should go after the brigands. This was to avoid ordering out the military, and summarily putting a stop to the reign of terror as became the dignity of this nation. I think these talks had something to do with the origin of the charge afterwards made that immunity was promised Ola and the men who finally did surrender with him. Of course General Wright made no such promises. But the idea got out in the province that the word was, “Get the guns,” the inference being that if Ola and his people would come in and surrender their guns they would be lightly dealt with. In his book Our Philippine Problem, Professor Willis, at page 140, gives what purports to be an agreement signed by Colonel Bandholtz, dated September 22, 1903, whereby Bandholtz promises Ola immunity, and also promises a number of other things which are on their face rankly preposterous. Ola was much on the witness stand before me during that term of court, and, everything “came out in the wash.” He was represented by competent, intelligent, and fearless Filipino counsel, and they did not suggest the existence of any such document. No proof of any offer of immunity was adduced before me. I think Ola simply finally decided to throw himself on the mercy of the government, on the idea that there would be more joy over the one sinner that repenteth than over the ninety and nine that are already saved. He was probably as much afraid that Governor Taft would order out the military as the wretched pacificos were that he would not. He immediately turned state’s evidence against all the men under him of whose individual actings and doings he had any knowledge, the prosecuting attorney making, with my full approval, a promise to ask executive clemency as a reward. This was in keeping with the practice in like cases customary in all jurisdictions throughout the English-speaking world.
The magnitude of the Ola insurrection may be somewhat appreciated from the financial loss it occasioned. Says Governor Taft, in his report for 1903:
The Governor [of Albay] estimates that hemp production and sale have been interfered with to the extent of some ten to twelve millions of dollars Mexican [which is equivalent to five or six million dollars American money].[14]
As the population of the province was about 250,000,[15] a loss of $5,000,000 meant a loss of $20 per capita for the six months or so of reconcentration during which the farms were neglected. This would be equivalent to a loss of $1,800,000,000, in the same length of time to a country having a population of 90,000,000, which is the total population figure for the United States according to the Census of 1910.
It was in the latter part of October, 1903, I believe, that Ola finally surrendered with some five hundred or six hundred men. I was sent to Albay about the middle of November, to assist the regular judge of the district, Hon. Adam C. Carson, now one of the justices of the Supreme Court of the Philippines, in disposing of the case arising out of the Ola performances. Conditions at the time were also very much perturbed in various neighboring and other provinces, and the courts and constabulary were kept very busy.
An incident recurs to memory just here which illustrates the state of public order. But before relating it a decent respect to the opinions of the reader requires me to state my own attitude toward that whole situation at the time. I am perfectly clear in my own mind that as society stands at present, capital punishment is a necessary part of any sensible scheme for its protection. I have no compunction about hanging any man for the lawless taking of the life of another. We owe it to the community as a measure of protection to your life and mine and all others. So far as public order was concerned in the country now under consideration in 1903, the “civil” government was simply a well-meaning sham, a military government with a civil name to it. When the constabulary would get in the various brigands, cut-throats, etc., who might be terrorizing a given district, some of them masquerading as patriots, others not even doing that, the courts would try them. None of the judges cared anything about any particular brigand in any given case except to find out how many, if any, murders, rapes, arsons, etc., he had committed during the particular reign of terror of which he had been a part. Wherever specific murders were proven, the punishment would always be “a life for a life.” And you have no idea how absolutely wanton some of the murders were, and how cruelly some of the young women, daughters of the farmers, were maltreated after they were carried off to the mountains. I would hate to try to guess how much more of this sort of thing would have had to occur in Albay in 1903 than did occur, to have moved Governor Taft to deprive Albay of “the protection of a benign civil government”—one of the pet expressions of contemporaneous official literature—and say the word to the army to take hold of the situation and give the people decent protection. But to come to the incident above broached. Shortly after I reached Albay, and set to work to hold Part II. of the district court, while my colleague, Judge Carson, held Part I. we had a call from a third judge, Judge Linebarger, of Chicago, who was on his way to some other perturbed region. I think that by that time, late in November, 1903, Governor Taft must have known he was soon to leave the Islands to become Secretary of War, and therefore was anxious to be able to make the best showing possible, in his farewell annual report as Governor, as to the “tranquillity” conditions. At any rate Judge Linebarger came to see us, for a few hours, his ship having touched en route at the port near the provincial capital of Albay. Judge Carson had had a gallows erected near the public square of the town, for the execution of some brigand he had convicted, whether it was for maltreating some poor farmer’s daughter until she died, or burying an American alive, or what, I do not now recollect. But in going around the town some one suggested, as we passed this gallows, that we go up on it to get the view. So we went—the three of us. Then each looked at the other and all thought of the work ahead. Then Judge Carson smiled and dispelled the momentary sombreness by repeating with grim humor, an old Latin quotation he happened to remember from his college days at the University of Virginia: Hæc olim meminisse juvabit (“It will be pleasant to remember these things hereafter”).