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.[1]
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,[2] “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.[3]
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.”[4]
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[5] 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.[6] So the latter, on January 1st, not only sent a copy of it to the “President of the Federal Government of Visayas,” Mr. Lopez,[7] but in the note of transmittal he “asked,” says his report, “that they permit the entry of my troops.”[8] 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.”[9] “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.”