The Philippine-American War (February 4, 1899 - June 15, 1913), also known as the Philippine Insurrection, was a war between the United States and First Philippine Republic fought after the Spanish-American War, in which the United States, with the help of Philippine nationalists, acquired the Philippines from Spain. The main phase of the war was fought from 1899 until the collapse of the First Philippine Republic in 1902; however, pockets of resistance continued for another decade. Due to some of the unsavory actions and motives of the United States during this war, it is often overlooked in both American and Philippine history classes, being a particularly dark chapter in the histories of both countries.
After the United States declared war on Spain, the Americans sent a delegation to Singapore, where they met with Filipino nationalist leader Emilio Aguinaldo and asked him to help them in fighting the Spanish by overthrowing Spanish rule in the Philippines. Aguinaldo, who was in exile after having been defeated by Spain in the Philippine Revolution, was more than eager to jump on the opportunity to fight against the Spanish again, this time with the full diplomatic and military support of another great power.
In May 1898, Aguinaldo and his nationalist force returned to the Philippines to continue their revolt against Spanish rule, occupying much of the main island of Luzon. Aguinaldo proclaimed the independence of the Philippines on June 12, 1898, appointing himself as dictator. By August of 1898, the Philippine nationalists had Manila surrounded. Spain, not wanting to surrender to the Filipino rebels, decided to make a secret agreement with the United States that would allow the Americans to take control of Manila. A "mock" battle between American and Spanish forces was held, which the United States "won", seizing Manila and preventing Aguinaldo's forces from entering the city.
Meanwhile, American and Spanish diplomats had convened in Paris for peace talks. The victorious Americans were more focused on taking Spain’s colonies in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and less focused on the Philippines, only initially wanting to take Manila and part of the main island of Luzon in order to avoid a conflict with Aguinaldo’s rebels. However, diplomats from other European nations who were present at the Paris conference were quick to bring up another concern: Imperial Japan. After its surprising victory against China in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, Japan had taken possession of Taiwannote and the Liaodong Peninsula, and had expanded its sphere of influence over Korea. European diplomats warned that Japan was planning to build an empire across Asia and the Pacific, and that if the United States did not annex the entire Philippine archipelago, the islands would soon fall into Japanese hands.
President William McKinley, having already been goaded into declaring war on Spain by the American press, was also reluctant on seizing the Philippines, which he allegedly couldn’t point to on a map. Nevertheless, he too was eventually convinced to annex the islands, not just due to fears of Japan taking them if America didn't, but also because he believed the Filipinos must have been uncivilized pagans, and therefore decided that the United States must pursue a policy of “benevolent assimilation” to spread civilization and Christianity note to the islands. On December 10, 1898, the United States ratified the Treaty of Paris, purchasing the Philippine Islands from Spain for a total of twenty million dollars.
Needless to say, Aguinaldo was absolutely furious by this, and decided to pick a fight with the United States. And he had good reason to believe that he could win; his nationalist army, despite being outgunned by the Americans, was nonetheless greater in numbers, and knew the terrain, with many officers and soldiers in his army being veterans of the recent Philippine Revolution. Furthermore, the few guns that the Filipinos could get their hands on; namely Spanish Mausers as well as a few Japanese Arisakas that had been smuggled in, were technologically superior to the Americans’ Trapdoor Springfield and Krag-Jorgensen rifles. Furthermore, the United States had no experience with jungle warfare, and prior to its war with Spain had not truly been at war since 1865. Aguinaldo's forces continued to surround Manila, hoping to provoke an American attack; eventually, on February 4, 1899, the Americans retaliated by firing upon Filipino troops, and fighting in Manila soon erupted, with American forces under the command of General Arthur MacArthur (father of General Douglas MacArthur) able to repel Aguinaldo’s forces from the city and go on the offensive.
After losing the skirmish in Manila, Aguinaldo’s hopes that he could overcome the Americans began to diminish. He attempted to surrender to the United States, but General Elwell Otis, commander of American forces in the Philippines, rejected it, insisting that order in the Philippines could not be assured until Aguinaldo's rebels were completely wiped out. While Aguinaldo’s forces were able to hold Luzon for the time being, Otis requested that the U.S. government authorize sending more troops and ships to the Philippines in order to suppress the insurrection. Aguinaldo, hoping to beat the Americans in conventional battles, soon found that he was outmatched due to the Americans' use of battleships to fire upon his forces from afar.
However, the Filipinos did have an advantage in a general by the name of Antonio Luna. Knowing that the United States had outmatched Philippine forces on the battlefield, Luna became an advocate of guerrilla warfare, and began leading ambushes that overwhelmed American forces. Furthermore, Luna’s troops were the best-equipped, being armed with rifles, whereas many of Aguinaldo's troops not under Luna's command were armed with knives, spears, and makeshift firearms. The effectiveness of Luna’s tactics in intimidating American troops even won him the respect of some American officers, who saw him as the most skilled Filipino general, and one who could actually outsmart them. Luna believed that guerrilla warfare would put Filipino forces at an advantage and succeed in tiring the Americans; however, Aguinaldo refused to listen to Luna, preferring conventional battles which, as expected, only resulted in defeat for the Filipino forces. Eventually, Aguinaldo, frustrated with Luna’s constant defeats and insubordination, had him assassinated. Naturally, this further disadvantaged the Filipino army, and gave the Americans a sigh of relief.
As Aguinaldo’s forces retreated further into the Philippine countryside and mountains, the Americans began employing more and more brutal tactics in attempting to crush the insurgency. Reports of atrocities by the U.S. Marine Corps such as the torching of villages, killing of unarmed civilians, and methods of torture such as waterboarding were common. Most infamously, following an ambush on American troops by insurgents in the town of Balangiga in Samar province, General Jacob Hurd Smith gave an order for Marines to shoot at any boy who was old enough to carry a gun, an order so heinous that his own men refused to follow it, and Smith was eventually Court-Martialed. Meanwhile, in the provinces of Batangas and Laguna, General James Franklin Bell ordered the rounding up and detainment of Filipino civilians into concentration camps, where over 11,000 died from diseases such as Smallpox, Cholera, and Bubonic Plague. Filipino troops also engaged in their own share of atrocities, such as rape, crucifixions, live burials, and even cannibalism.
When news of the horrors of the war reached the American press, it caused an outrage amongst the American public, and a group known as the American Anti-Imperialist League, made up of powerful figures such as Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, and William Randolph Hearst, denounced U.S. Imperialism as being against American principles of democracy and self-determination. Furthermore, the Anti-Imperialists feared that annexation of the Philippines would lead to an influx of Filipino immigrants, whom the Anti-Imperialists saw as an inferior race they believed would never assimilate into American society. General MacArthur, who had since placed the Philippines under martial law, tried to prevent reports of offenses from getting to the press, but the Anti-Imperialist Movement had grown extremely influential in shaping public opinion at home, and eventually Congress led an investigation into the military’s conduct. General MacArthur was relieved from his post as military governor, and a new civilian administration under William Howard Taft took power in the Philippines, tasked with transitioning the islands to civil authority and establishing a path to Filipino majority rule.
By this point, the war seemed to be winding down. In March 1901, General Frederick Funston led an expedition that captured Emilio Aguinaldo, who swore allegiance to the U.S. and ordered all his remaining officers to lay down their arms. His generals, however, refused to yield, continuing their armed struggle against the Americans. The primary phase of the war ended in April 1902 when the last nationalist general surrendered, leading President Theodore Roosevelt to declare victory. However, the war was still not over. Pockets of lingering anti-American resistance remained a problem in the Philippines for another decade, and these skirmishes were usually deemed acts of local banditry or brigandage. The American colonial authorities began phasing out U.S. troops, replacing them with a new national police force known as the Philippine Constabulary to deal with localized insurgencies.
Meanwhile, in the southern Philippines, the Muslim Moro people, who had never quite been conquered by the Spanish and did not ally themselves with Aguinaldo, began their own rebellion against the Americans. The Moros' frequent cattle raids, kidnappings, and slave trading earned the ire of American authorities, who sought to end these practices. Following Aguinaldo’s surrender, U.S. Marines were sent to pacify the Moro Province and ensure order and stability. The Moro warriors were so strong and relentless in their fighting that normal revolvers could not stop them; the USMC ended up adopting the M1911 .45 caliber just to take one down. During this phase of the war, another uproar occurred in the press in March 1906 after Marines under the command of General Leonard Wood destroyed a Moro encampment, resulting in the deaths of nearly 1,000 Moros, many of them civilians.
With hostilities petering out on the main islands, the new civil government under Governor-General Taft initiated a series of sweeping reforms in the Philippines. Public schools were established, and English became the new official language. Catholicism was abolished as the state religion, and land was bought out from the corrupt Catholic Church and redistributed amongst Filipino citizens. The Philippines held its first-ever democratic elections in 1907, electing a Filipino-run legislature and establishing majority rule on the islands, which further blunted the cause for rebellion. Despite still being under U.S. “protection”, the new Philippine government, in conjunction with the United States, began working on a plan to prepare the Philippines to attain complete independence from U.S. rule. As all this was going on, armed resistance on the islands was collapsing. The last insurgents in Luzon were captured by the Philippine Constabulary in 1906. In the Visayas, most resistance groups had surrendered by 1911. In the Muslim south, the last resisting Moro forces were annihilated in June 1913 at the Battle of Bud Bagsak by a punitive expedition by U.S. Marines under the command of General John J. Pershing.
The Philippine-American War soured the United States on the prospect of imperialism. The conflict killed several thousand American and Filipino soldiers, as well as up to 200,000 Filipino civilians from famine and diseasenote . The enthusiasm for colonies shown throughout the late 19th century cooled, and was one of the primary reasons why the United States chose not to annex any new territories following World War I. Due to the conflict, U.S. foreign policy became more focused on brief military interventions and the installation of pro-U.S. regimes in countries it wished to influence as opposed to direct territorial expansion; this strategy of maintaining and expanding a sphere of dominance became the primary objective of America’s foreign policy throughout the following Banana Wars in Latin America and, eventually, the Cold War. As for the Philippines, following the war the country became a self-governing U.S. protectorate, eventually gaining complete independence by 1946.
Historically the war was known as the "Philippine Insurrection", but due to the term being U.S.-centric, Filipino historians post-1946 gradually began using "Philippine-American War" or "Filipino-American War", which the U.S. government eventually recognized (for instance, the Library of Congress reclassified its "Philippine Insurrection" materials under "Philippine-American War"). But the older term lingers in the American education system.
Compare The Vietnam War and The War on Terror, both with similar underlying problems (a long controversial war in a foreign country involving guerrilla fighting and increased U.S. troops with public outrage over reported atrocities and a movement against involvement in the conflict) - although the difference is the United States actually won this war.
Depictions in fiction
- The Filipino biopic Heneral Luna (2015) revolves around the life and campaigns of General Antonio Luna, one of the major leaders in the Philippine-American War.
- And its sequel, Goyo: Ang Batang Heneral (2018), about the "Boy General" Gregorio del Pilar, one of the right-hand men of the Filipino revolutionary leader, and republican president, Emilio Aguinaldo.
- Amigo (2010) is an indie production about a "typical" battle of the Philippine-American war, featuring a village head torn between collaborating with the American invaders and assisting his brother who has joined La Résistance.
- Balangiga: Howling Wilderness (2017): An arthouse film by Khavn dela Cruz set during the aftermath of the Balangiga incident.
- El Presidente (2012): A biopic about the life of General Emilio Aguinaldo, who is given a Historical Hero Upgrade in the film.
- Sakay (1993): A film about the Filipino insurgent leader Macario Sakay, who continued anti-American guerilla activities for years after the main phase of the war was over and is portrayed in the movie as a heroic Rebel Leader.
- The Real Glory (1939): An old Western film set in the Philippines during the Moro phase of the war, starring Gary Cooper. The film was banned during World War II due to its depiction of the Moros in a negative light, as the Moros were currently fighting for the Americans in the war.
- The Sultan of Sulu (1902): A musical play written by George Ade, set in the backdrop of the Moro phase of the war.
