They used to come aboard my ship and take my time, and finally I would not see them at all, but turned them over to my staff.
Now the lack of a tooth-brush is hardly a valid excuse for not going into battle, however great a convenience it may be in campaign. But the absence of orders from your commanding officer stands on a very different footing. Aguinaldo had not yet arrived. Three hundred years of Spanish misgovernment and cruelty is not conducive to aversion to fictitious excuses by the lowly in the presence of supreme authority. The answer was amusingly uncandid, but disproved neither patriotism nor intelligence.
Aguinaldo arrived at Hong Kong from Singapore a day or so after Admiral Dewey had sailed for Manila. Of the battle of May 1st, no detailed mention is essential here. Every schoolboy is familiar with it. It will remain, as long as the republic lasts, a part of the heritage of the nation. But the true glory of that battle, to my mind, rests, not upon the circumstance that we have the Philippines, but upon the tremendous fact that before it occurred the attitude of our State Department toward an American citizen sojourning in distant lands and becoming involved in difficulties there had long been, “Why didn’t he stay at home? Let him stew in his own juice”; whereas, since then, to be an American has been more like it was in the days of St. Paul to be a Roman citizen.
May 16th, our consul at Hong Kong, Mr. Wildman, succeeded in getting the insurgent leader and his staff off for Manila on board the U. S. S. McCulloch by authority of Admiral Dewey. Like his colleague over at Singapore, Consul Wildman was bent on the rôle of Warwick. Admiral Dewey was quite busy there in Manila Bay the first two or three weeks after the battle, but yielding to the letters of Wildman, who meantime had constituted himself a kind of fiscal agent at Hong Kong for the prospective revolution in the matter of the purchase of guns and otherwise, the Admiral told the commanding officer of the McCulloch that on his next trip to Hong Kong he might bring down a dozen or so of the Filipinos there. The frame of mind they were in on reaching Manila, as a result of the assurances of Pratt and Wildman, is well illustrated by a letter the latter wrote Aguinaldo a little later (June 25th) which is undoubtedly in keeping with what he had been telling him earlier:
Do not forget that the United States undertook this war for the sole purpose of relieving the Cubans from the cruelties under which they were suffering, and not for the love of conquest or the hope of gain. They are actuated by precisely the same feelings for the Filipinos.[5]
And at the time, they were.
“Every American citizen who came in contact with the Filipinos at the inception of the Spanish War, or at any time within a few months after hostilities began,” said General Anderson in an interview published in the Chicago Record of February 24, 1900, “probably told those he talked with * * * that we intended to free them from Spanish oppression. The general expression, was ‘We intend to whip the Spaniards and set you free.’”
The McCulloch arrived in Manila Bay with Aguinaldo and his outfit, May 19th. Let Admiral Dewey tell what happened then[6]:
Aguinaldo came to see me. I said, “Well now, go ashore there; we have got our forces at the arsenal at Cavite, go ashore and start your army.” He came back in the course of a few hours and said, “I want to leave here; I want to go to Japan.” I said, “Don’t give it up, Don Emilio.” I wanted his help, you know. He did not sleep ashore that night; he slept on board the ship. The next morning he went on shore, still inside my lines, and began recruiting men.
Enterprises of great pith and moment have often turned awry and lost the name of action for lack of a word spoken in season by a stout heart. Admiral Dewey spoke the word, and Aguinaldo, his protégé, did the rest. “Then he began operations toward Manila, and he did wonderfully well. He whipped the Spaniards battle after battle * * *.”[7] In fact, the desperate bravery of those little brown men after they got warmed up reminds one of the Japs at the walls of Peking, in the advance of the Allied Armies to the relief of the foreign legations during the Boxer troubles of 1900. Admiral Dewey told the Senate Committee in 1902 that Aguinaldo actually wanted to put one of the old smooth-bore Spanish guns he found at Cavite on a barge and have him (Dewey) tow it up in front of Manila so he could attack the city with it. “I said, ‘Oh no, no; we can do nothing until our troops come.’”