Aguinaldo promptly met General Otis’s proclamation of January 4th by a counter-proclamation put out the very next day, in which he indignantly protested against the United States assuming sovereignty over the Islands. “Even the women,” says General Otis (p. 70), “in a document numerously signed by them, gave me to understand that after the men were all killed off they were prepared to shed their patriotic blood for the liberty and independence of their country.” General Otis actually intended this last as a sly touch of humor. But when we recollect Mr. Millet’s description ([Chapter IV]. ante) of the women coming to the trenches and cooking rice for the men while the Filipinos were slowly drawing their cordon ever closer about the doomed Spanish garrison of Manila in July and August previous, fighting their way over the ground between them and the besieged main body of their ancient enemies inch by inch, while Admiral Dewey blockaded them by sea, General Otis’s sly touch of humor loses some of its slyness. “The insurgent army also,” he says (p. 70), “was especially affected * * * and only awaited an opportunity to demonstrate its invincibility in war with the United States troops * * * whom it had commenced to insult and charge with cowardice.”
The benighted condition of the insurgents in this regard was directly traceable to the Iloilo fiasco. It was that, principally, which made the insurgents so foolishly over-confident and the subsequent slaughter of them so tremendous. Further on in his report General Otis says, with perceptible petulance, in summing up his case against the Filipinos:
The pretext that the United States was about to substitute itself for Spain * * * was resorted to and had its effect on the ignorant masses.
Speaking of his own modified version of the Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation, General Otis says (p. 76):
No sooner was it published than it brought out a virtual declaration of war from, in this instance at least, the wretchedly advised President Aguinaldo, who, on January 5th, issued the following
—giving the reply proclamation in full. No man can read the Otis report itself without feeling that if he, the reader, had been playing Aguinaldo’s hand he would have played it exactly as Aguinaldo did. To General Otis the government at Malolos—“their Malolos arrangement,” he used to call it—seemed quite an impudent little opera-bouffe affair, “a tin-horn government,” as Senator Spooner suggested in the same debate on the treaty, in which he called his rugged and fiery friend from South Carolina, Senator Tillman, “the Senator from Aguinaldo,” and immediately thereafter, with that engaging frankness that always so endeared him to his colleagues on both sides of the Chamber, removed the sting from the jest by admitting that neither he (Spooner), nor Tillman, nor anybody else in the United States, knew anything about Aguinaldo or his government. But in the calmer retrospect of many years after, we have seen, through the official documents which have become available in the interval, that said government was in complete and effective control of practically the whole archipelago, and had the moral support of the whole population at a time when our troops controlled absolutely nothing but the two towns of Manila and Cavite. Therefore, when we read in the Aguinaldo proclamation such phrases as, “In view of this, I summoned a council of my generals and asked the advice of my cabinet, and in conformity with the opinion of both bodies I” did so and so; “My government cannot remain indifferent to” this or that act of the Americans assuming sovereignty over the islands; “Thus it is that my government is disposed to open hostilities if” etc.; they do not sound to us so irritatingly bombastic as they did to General Otis, distributed under his nose as the proclamation containing them at once was, by thousands, throughout a city of which he was nominally in possession, but nine-tenths of whose 300,000 inhabitants he was obliged to believe in sympathy with the insurgents.
“My government,” says the Aguinaldo proclamation, “rules the whole of Luzon, the Visayan Islands, and a part of Mindanao.” Except as to Mindanao, which cut absolutely no figure in the insurrection until well toward the end of the guerrilla part of it, we have already examined this claim and found by careful analysis that it was absolutely true by the end of December, 1898.
After a rapid review of how he had been aided and encouraged in starting the revolution against the Spaniards by Admiral Dewey, and then given the cold shoulder by the army when it came, Aguinaldo’s manifesto says:
It was also taken for granted that the American forces would necessarily sympathize with the revolution which they had managed to encourage, and which had saved them much blood and great hardships; and, above all, we entertained absolute confidence in the history and traditions of a people which fought for its independence and for the abolition of slavery, and which posed as the champion and liberator of oppressed peoples. We felt ourselves under the safeguard of a free people.
That this statement also was authorized by the facts is evident from the minutes of the Hong Kong meeting of May 4th, already noticed, presided over by Aguinaldo, and called to formulate the programme for the insurrection he was about to sail for the Philippines to inaugurate, in which, after much discussion among the revolutionary leaders it was agreed that while they must be prepared for all possible contingencies, yet,