Timeline of the Filipino-American War
And US Colonial Rule in the Philippines
The Philippine-American War has been
described as the United State’s first
Vietnam War because of its brutality and
severity. According to the PhilippineAmerican War Centennial Initiative
(PAWCI), roughly 22,000 Philippine soldiers
and half a million civilians were killed
between 1899 and 1092 in Luzon and the
Visayan Islands, while one hundred
thousand Muslims were killed in
Mindanao.
The United States joined the ranks of
colonial powers in Asia with support from
American Expansionists and Protestant
missionaries, but over the objections of
domestic tobacco and sugar producers.
Strategic interests proved most decisive in
the age of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s treatise
on the necessity of naval power. The United
States was pursuing an “Open Door” policy
in China, and the possession of coaling
stations was imperative to a would-be
Pacific power.
Benevolent Assimilation
•
Imperialism was difficult to square with the
country’s republican tradition, as the noisy
Anti-Imperialist League kept reminding
Americans. US leaders also had to contend
with the likes of Mabini and other
ilustrados, despite the prevailing lens of
racism that tended to see Filipinos as
uncivilized or savage. This difficult reality
compelled the new colonizers to
demonstrate that their rule would be better
than Spain’s or that of any European power.
•
The result was President McKinley’s
“benevolent assimilation” – the American
promise to train Filipinos in democratic
governance until they were “ready” to
govern themselves. But the first order of
business was to achieve control over the
country.
1896
1897
1898
August 23
March 4
February 9
February 15
Philippine Revolution Begins
William McKinley inaugurated 25th President of the United States
De Lome’s letter came out of the press
The American battleship Maine exploded near the port of Havana. Out of the 350
passengers, 266 died and many others were wounded.
April 11
April 16
April 23
April 25
McKinley asked Congress to declare war.
Army began mobilization. Teller Amendment was passed in Congress stating that the
US would not annex Cuba.
McKinley issued call for 125,000 volunteers. Spain declared war
US declared war with Spain but made the declaration retroactive to April 22
April 27
Commodore Dewey’s squadron left Mirs Bay, China for the Philippines.
May 1
Dewey defeated the Spanish Armada in the Battle of Manila Bay.
May 19
May 25
Emilio Aguinaldo returned from exile.
McKinley issued a call for 75,000 more volunteers. The first army expedition left San
Francisco for Manila.
Aguinaldo issued a proclamation establishing a revolutionary government and a
message to foreign powers announcing that government.
June 18
June 30
August 12
The first batch of American soldiers arrived in Manila under the command of Brig.
General Thomas M. Anderson.
Spain and the US signed the peace protocol which ended the war.
August 13
September 15
December 10
Capitulation of Manila to the Americans.
Filipino Congress met at Malolos
US and Spain signed the Treaty of Paris
1899
1900
January 22
Malolos Constitution was promulgated
February 4
Filipino-American was began
March 31
Malolos fell into the hands of the Americans.
August 29
General Elwell Otis succeeded General Merritt in command.
May 2
The Schurman Commission arrived in Manila
November 13
Aguinaldo disbanded the organized army and resorted to guerilla warfare.
May 5
General Arthur McArthur succeeded General Merritt as commander of the American
army.
June 3
The Taft Commission arrived in Manila.
June 21
General McArthur issued a proclamation of amnesty to all who renounced the
Filipino aspiration for independence and accepted American rule.
1901
1902
March 10
The Taft Commission conducted provincial sorties in Southern Luzon. They visited 18
provinces and returned to Manila on May 3.
March 23
Aguinaldo was captured in Palanan, Isabela.
April 1
The Commission issued a decree that property and funds of the insurgents would be
confiscated if they did not surrender and that they be deprived of any position in the
government, “no peace no job.”
April 19
Aguinaldo swore allegiance to the US government.
July 4
Taft was inaugurated first civil governor of the Philippines and General Chaffee
replaced General McArthur.
August
The Taft Commission conducted another provincial sortie to establish civil government
in several towns in Northern Luzon.
August 21
The military transport S.S. Thomas arrived in Manila with 540 American school
teachers aboard.
September 6
President McKinley was shot in Buffalo, New York and died after eight days
(September 14)
September 28
Forty four American soldiers were massacred in Balangiga, Samar the worst blow to
the American campaign in the Philippines.
April 27
Vicente Lukban, the last recognized rebel leader was captured.
July 4
President Roosevelt declared the Philippines pacified and granted amnesty to rebels.
Military rule formally ended.
December 23
Taft left Manila to succeed Elihu Root as Secretary of War.
While the determined but poorly organized forces under President
Aguinaldo were defeated by superior military arms, the Filipino people’s
commitment to national independence was slowly drained by disease and
hunger.
To this was added the breakdown of the
revolutionary leadership. Once provincial
elites understood that the US was offering
them the opportunity to run a state free from
friar control – all that many had asked of Spain
– there was little to hold them to the goal of
independence. President McKinley dispatched
a Philippine Commission to Manila in 1900 to
meet with educated Filipinos and determine a
form of government for the colony. Many “men
of substance” testified before the committee on
the need for American sovereignty in this
country for the good of these “ignorant and
uncivilized people.” This first group of
collaborators soon formed a political party that
positioned itself as pragmatically nationalists.
UNITED STATES COLONIAL RULE IN THE PHILIPPINES
The United States exercised
formal colonial rule over the
Philippines, its largest overseas
colony, between 1899 and
1946. American economic and
strategic interests in Asia and
the Pacific were increasing in
the late 1890s in the wake of an
industrial depression and in the
face of global, interimperial
competition. Spanish
colonialism was simultaneously
being weakened by revolts in
Cuba and the Philippines, its
largest remaining colonies.
UNITED STATES COLONIAL RULE IN THE PHILIPPINES
The Philippine Revolution of 1896 to
1897 destabilized Spanish colonialism but failed
to remove Spanish colonial rule. The leaders of
the revolution were exiled to Hong Kong. When
the United States invaded Cuba and Puerto Rico
in 1898 to shore up its hegemony in the
Caribbean, the U.S. Pacific Squadron was sent to
the Philippines to advance U.S. power in the
region, and it easily defeated the Spanish navy.
Filipino revolutionaries hoped the United States
would recognize and assist it. Although American
commanders and diplomats helped return
revolutionary leader Emilio Aguinaldo (1869—
1964) to the Philippine Islands, they sought to use
him and they avoided recognition of the
independent Philippine Republic that Aguinaldo
declared in June 1898.
UNITED STATES COLONIAL RULE IN THE PHILIPPINES
In August 1898 U.S. forces occupied
Manila and denied the Republic’s
troops entry into the city. That fall,
Spain and the United States negotiated
the Philippines’ status at Paris without
Filipino consultation. The U.S. Senate
and the American public debated the
Treaty of Paris, which granted the
United States “sovereignty” over the
Philippine Islands for $20 million. The
discussion emphasized the economic
costs and benefits of imperialism to the
United States and the political and
racial repercussions of colonial
conquest.
UNITED STATES COLONIAL RULE IN THE PHILIPPINES
When U.S. troops fired on Philippine troops in
February 1899, the Philippine-American War
erupted. The U.S. Senate narrowly passed the
Treaty of Paris, and the U.S. military enforced its
provisions over the next three years through a
bloody, racialized war of aggression. Following
ten months of failed conventional combat,
Philippine troops adopted guerrilla tactics,
which American forces ultimately defeated only
through the devastation of civilian property, the
“reconcentration” of rural populations, and the
torture and killing of prisoners, combined with
a policy of “attraction” aimed at Filipino elites.
While Filipino revolutionaries sought freedom
and independent nationhood, a U.S.-based
“anti-imperialist” movement challenged the
invasion as immoral in both ends and means.
UNITED STATES COLONIAL RULE IN THE PHILIPPINES
Carried out in the name of
promoting “self-government” over an
indefinite but calibrated timetable,
U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines
was characterized politically by
authoritarian bureaucracy and oneparty state-building with the
collaboration of Filipino elites at its
core. The colonial state was
inaugurated with a Sedition Act that
banned expressions in support of
Philippine independence, a Banditry
Act that criminalized ongoing
resistance, and a Reconcentration Act
that authorized the mass relocation of
rural populations.
UNITED STATES COLONIAL RULE IN THE PHILIPPINES
In the interests of “pacification,” American civilian
proconsuls in the Philippine Commission, initially led by
William Howard Taft (1857-1930), sponsored the
Federalista Party under influential Manila-based elites. The
party developed into a functioning patronage network and
political monopoly in support of “Americanization” and,
initially, U.S. statehood for the Philippines. When the
suppression of independence politics ended in 1905, it gave
rise to new political voices and organizations that
consolidated by 1907 into the Nationalista Party, whose
members were younger than those of the Federalista Party
and rooted in the provinces. When the Federalista Party
alienated its American patrons and its statehood platform
failed to win mass support, U.S. proconsuls abandoned it
for the Nationalista Party, which over the remainder of the
colonial period developed into a vast, second party-state,
under the leadership of Manuel Quezon (1878-1944) and
Sergio Osmena (1878-1961).
American Soldiers in the Philippines, 1899. American soldiers fire their rifles
from behind a makeshift barricade at the West Beach Outpost in San Roque
during the Philippine insurrection that followed the 1898 Spanish-American
War.
UNITED STATES COLONIAL RULE IN THE PHILIPPINES
Following provincial and municipal
elections, “national” elections were held
in 1907 for a Philippine Assembly to serve
under the commission as the lower house
of a legislature. The 3 percent of the
country’s population that was given the
right to vote swept the Nationalistas to
power. The Nationalistas clashed with U.S.
proconsuls over jurisdiction and policy
priorities, although both sides also
manipulated and advertised these conflicts
to secure their respective constituencies,
masking what were in fact functioning
colonial collaborations. Democratic Party
dominance in the United States between
1912 and 1920 facilitated the
consolidation of the Nationalista partystate in the Philippines.
UNITED STATES COLONIAL RULE IN THE PHILIPPINES
When Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), a
Democrat, was elected president in 1912, he
appointed as governor-general Francis Burton
Harrison (1873-1957), who, working closely with
the Nationalistas, accelerated the
“Filipinization” of the bureaucracy and allowed
the Philippine Assembly to assume additional
executive power. When Democrats passed the
Jones Act in 1916, which replaced the
commission with a Philippine senate and
committed the United States to “eventual
independence” for the Philippines, Quezon
claimed credit for these victories and, despite
his own ambivalence about Philippine
independence, translated them into greater
power. During the 1920s, Quezon dominated the
Nationalista Party, using clashes with Republican
governor-general Leonard Wood (1860-1927) to
secure his inde-pendista credentials.
UNITED STATES COLONIAL RULE IN THE PHILIPPINES
Under pressure from protectionists, nativists,
and military officials fearful of Japanese
imperialism, the U.S. Congress passed the
Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1934. The act
inaugurated a ten-year ”Philippine
Commonwealth” government transitional to
”independence.” While serving as president of
the commonwealth in the years prior to the
1941 Japanese invasion of the Philippine Islands,
Quezon consolidated dictatorial power. Colonial
political structures, constructed where the
ambitions and fears of the Filipino elite
connected with the American imperial need for
collaborators, had successfully preserved the
power of provincial, landed elites, while
institutionalizing this power in a countrywide
”nationalist” politics.
UNITED STATES COLONIAL RULE IN THE PHILIPPINES
In economic terms, American colonial rule in the
Philippines promoted an intensely dependent,
export economy based on cash-crop agriculture
and extractive industries like mining. American
capital had initially regarded the Philippines as
merely a ”stepping stone” to the fabled China
market, and American trade with the Philippine
Islands was initially inhibited by reciprocity
treaties that preserved Spanish trade rights.
When these rights ended, U.S. capital divided
politically over the question of free trade.
American manufacturers supported free trade,
hoping to secure in the Philippines both
inexpensive raw materials and markets for
finished goods, whereas sugar and tobacco
producers opposed free trade because they
feared Philippine competition. The Payne-Aldrich
Tariff of 1909 established ”free trade,” with the
exception of rice, and set yearly quota limits for
Philippine exports to the United States.
UNITED STATES COLONIAL RULE IN THE PHILIPPINES
American trade with the Philippine
Islands, which had grown since the war,
boomed after 1909, and during the
decades that followed, the United States
became by far the Philippines’ dominant
trading partner. American goods
comprised only 7 percent of Philippine
imports in 1899, but had grown to 66
percent by 1934. These goods included
farm machinery, cigarettes, meat and
dairy products, and cotton cloth. The
Philippines sold 26 percent of its total
exports to the United States in 1899, and
84 percent in 1934. Most of these exports
were hemp, sugar, tobacco, and coconut
products.
UNITED STATES COLONIAL RULE IN THE PHILIPPINES
Free trade promoted U.S. investment, and American companies
came to dominate Philippine factories, mills, and refineries. When
a post-World War I economic boom brought increased production
and exports, Filipino nationalists feared economic and political
dependence on the United States, as well as the overspecialization
of the Philippine economy around primary products, overreliance
on U.S. markets, and the political enlistment of American
businesses in the indefinite colonial retention of the Philippine
Islands.
UNITED STATES COLONIAL RULE IN THE PHILIPPINES
Meanwhile, rural workers subject to the
harsh terms of export-oriented development
challenged the power of hacienda owners in
popular mass movements. While some
interested American companies did lobby
against Philippine independence, during the
Great Depression powerful U.S. agricultural
producers—especially of sugar and oils—
supported U.S. separation from the
Philippines as a protectionist measure to
exclude competing Philippine goods. The
commonwealth period and formal Philippine
independence would be characterized by
rising tariffs and the exclusion of Philippine
goods from the U.S. markets upon which
Philippine producers had come to depend.
Protectionist Empire
Trade, Tariffs and US Foreign Policy
1890-1914
Abstract
• 25 years before WW1, US
involved itself in international
politics acquiring overseas
colonies, building a battleship
fleet and intervening
increasingly often in Latin
America.
• It believes that foreign markets
were necessary for the
prosperity of US.
• It protects home market from
foreign competition
Abstract
• Republican party strongly
committed to Trade protection.
• Republican policy makers focus
on less developed areas of the
world that would not export
manufactured goods to the US
rather than on wealthier
markets in Europe.
• US seeks exclusive unilateral or
bilateral trade concessions with
individual trading partners
instead of accepting multilateral
arrangements that would have
resulted in lower tariffs.
25 years before WW1
• Remembered as the era when the US
became a major power in international
politics.
• The scope of American foreign policy
ambition greatly increased
• US acquired colonies in the Philippines,
Guam and Puerto Rico in 1898 as a
result of Spanish-American war.
• American presidents broadened their
interpretation of the Monroe
Doctrine’s injunction against European
intervention in the American while
taking diplomatic and military actions
in other countries.
25 years before WW1
• US military and diplomatic bureaucracy
expanded
1890 – 76 employees in Washington
1910 – 234
1890 – army/navy – 39,000 soldiers and sailors
1914 – 166,000
• What role did the Americans take in
international trade play in shaping
foreign policy?
Noted historians William Williams,
Watler LaFebes and others have argued
that there was an elite consensus on the
need for foreign markets.
25 years before WW1
• Americans worried about the social
and political implication of the falling
prices and the periodic economic
crisis of the late 19th century.
• Rapid economic growth after the
Civil War was producing more than
the home market could consume at
price levels that provided reasonable
profits to producers.
• Americas solution was to find foreign
markets for their ‘surplus
production’
• The challenges of insuring access to
markets in Asia and Latin America
explain much of American foreign
policy during this period.
25 years before WW1
• American policy makers preferred to rely on
diplomatic and economic instruments but
willing to use force when necessary to
overcome resistance from economic
nationalists in less developed countries on rival
major powers seeking to create exclusive
economic and political empires for themselves.
• 1890-1914 period saw the political importance
of overseas markets. Tariff was critically
important political issue. It was critically
important and divisive political issues.
Republicans favored a protective tariff on
manufactured goods. Democrats prefer lower
barrier to imports.
• Unlike the search for export markets, the
import side of the story is not one of
consensus but of partisan political conflict.
25 years before WW1
• Alongside the demand for foreign
markets, the dominant Republican
Party’s commitment to
protectionism influenced the policy
choices its leaders made.
• It prompted them to emphasize
markets in less developed areas that
would not export manufactured
goods to the US.
• American empire of this period was
a Protectionist Empire.
• Brook Adams, one of the most
prescient (visionary) writers of this
period did not simply downplay
security concerns in favor of
economic interest.
25 years before WW1
• They argued that economic concerns
defined security threats and interests.
• International political conflicts were
fundamentally quarrels over
economic stakes, especially access to
markets.
• Elite discourse about the role of
foreign markets in insuring internal
social stability in the face of
‘overproductions’ and falling prices
were extensively documented.
• Control of international commerce
was crucial for US domestic
economy’s need for foreign markets.
25 years before WW1
• Whether based on concern about
domestic political and social stability or
international competitiveness, the
bottomline was that the US needed
access to foreign markets.
• In late 19th century, access to foreign
markets was not simply a private
concern for traders and investors. It also
had major foreign policy implications.
• The imperialism of Trade, the politicomilitary control over market access for
US citizens.
• American leaders’ interest in increasing
the country’s exports led them to adopt
a policy of political and military
intervention overseas.
Reference:
Escalante, Rene R. The Bearer of Pax Romana: The Philippine Career of William
H. Taft, 1900-1903. New Day Publishers. Quezon City. 2007.
Abinales, Amoroso. State and Society. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc.,
Lanham, MD. Anvil Publishing Inc., 2005. Manila.
Photo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Philippines_(1898%E2%80%931946)