Albay, December 28, 1903.
The foregoing order contains fifty-seven names. As already indicated, the second order was like the first. It contained the names of sixty-three other deceased prisoners, as follows, to wit:
These lists were printed in an article by the author which appeared in the North American Review for January 18, 1907, which article was reprinted by Hon. James L. Slayden, of Texas, in the Congressional Record for February 12, 1907. There can be little doubt that President Taft saw the article, and that if it had contained any inaccuracies they would long since have been noticed. So that in the Albay jail in 1903 we had a sort of Andersonville prison, or Black Hole of Calcutta, on a small scale.
If the military authorities had had charge of the Albay insurrection and of the prisoners in the Albay jail in 1903, it is safe to say that the great majority of those who died would have lived. But to have ordered out the troops would have been to abandon the official fiction that there was peace.
Of Ola’s five or six hundred men, Judge Carson and I, assisted by the chief prosecuting attorney of the government, Hon. James Ross, turned several hundred loose. Another large batch were disposed of under a vagrancy law, which allowed us to put them to work on the roads of the provinces for not exceeding two years, usually six to twelve months. Most of the remainder, a few score, we tried under the sedition law, and sent to Bilibid, the central penitentary at Manila, for terms commensurate with their individual conduct and deeds. The more serious cases were sent up for longer terms under the brigandage law. We indulged in no more maudlin sentiment about those precious scamps who had been degrading Filipino patriotism by occasionally invoking its name in the course of a long season of preying upon their respectable fellow-countrymen than Aguinaldo or Juan Cailles would have indulged. I am quite sure that either Aguinaldo or Juan Cailles would have made much shorter shrift of the whole bunch than Judge Carson and I did. It was only the men shown to have committed crimes usually punished capitally in this country that we sentenced to death—a dozen or more, all told. Ola was the star witness for the state. He held back nothing that would aid the prosecuting attorney to convict the men who had followed him for a year. He was given a sentence of thirty years (by Judge Carson), as a sort of expression of opinion of the most Christian attitude possible concerning his real deserts, but his services as state’s evidence entitled him to immunity, and for that very good and sufficient reason Judge Carson, Prosecuting Attorney Ross, and myself so recommended to the Governor.
Ola could read and write after a fashion, though he was quite an ignorant man. But to show what his control must have been over the rank and file of his men, let one incident suffice. On the boat going up to Manila from Albay, after the term of court was over, Ola was aboard, en route for the penitentiary. But, as he was a prospective recipient of executive clemency, though the guards kept an eye on him, he was allowed the freedom of the ship. One night on the voyage up, the weather being extremely warm, I left my stateroom sometime after midnight, carrying blanket and pillow, and went back to the storm steering-gear at the stern of the ship, to spend the rest of the night more comfortably. Waking sometime afterward for some unassignable cause, I realized that the crown of another head was tangent to the crown of my own, and occupying part of my pillow. It was Ola, the chief of the brigands. I raised up, shook the intruder, and said: “Hello, Ola, what are you doing here?” He wakened slowly. He had no idea of any first-class passenger being back there, and had taken it for granted that I was one of the ship’s crew, when he decided to share my pillow. As soon as he realized who I was, he sprang to his feet with profound and effusive apologies, and paced the deck until morning, perhaps thinking over the possible effect of the incident on my recommendation concerning himself.
After I had recovered the use of all my pillow I went back to sleep for a spell. About dawn I was wakened by some of the guards chattering. But I heard Ola, who had apparently been keeping watch over my august slumbers in the meantime, say in an imperious tone to the guards, his keepers, “Hush, the judge is sleeping.” They looked at the brigand chief, and cowed, obeyed.