A Brief History of America and the Moros p1

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A Brief History of America and the Moros

1899–1920

The tribes which inhabit the island of Mindanao and…Sulu…have attracted much attention because of their warlike character and their distinction as the only Mohammedan wards of the United States. As a governmental factor they are most embarrassing. The wild men [pagan tribes] are good raw material, and the [Christian] Filipinos are easily influenced in favor of good government, but the Moros, encased in the armor of Islamism, present a much more difficult problem. - Charles Burke Elliott, 1917

The Empire of Spain and the Moros (1565-1899)

Like two large, opposing tectonic plates grinding against one another, the westward push of Christianity collided with the eastward thrust of Islam over 440 years ago in the islands we now call the Philippines. Although first claimed for Spain by Ferdinand Magellan in 1521, it was not until 1565 that the Spanish conquistadores, with cross in one hand, sword in the other, began a conquest of the islands. Their goal was to extend the realm of their king, Philip II (whom they named the islands after), find riches, and save souls. To their consternation and rage, they discovered that many of the people they sought to subjugate were Muslims, believers in the same religion as that of their ancient and bitter enemies, the Barbary Moors of North Africa (present day Morocco). Only seventy-five years earlier, in a revolt lasting over hundreds of years, the newly-united Spanish kingdoms of Castile and Aragon had overthrown the nearly seven-hundred year long rule of Muslim invaders over the Iberian Peninsula. Thereafter they referred to any practitioner of Islam as a “Moro” (or Moor), considered a hereditary enemy of their nation and religion, a target for their vengeance and destruction. But after 330 years of trying, by 1898 the Spanish had failed to fully conquer and subdue the southern Muslim homelands, known as La Tierra de el Moros, “The Land of the Moros”. Despite extravagant claims to the contrary, by the time the Spanish were forced to abandon the Philippine Islands by the United States they had only come to control a handful of small, fortified port cities. Spanish sovereignty never extended beyond the parapets of these few miserable and remote outposts.

The Spanish-American War (1898)

In the pivotal year of 1898 war broke out between Spain and the United States as the result of a long-simmering feud over the island of Cuba. Improbably, the first battle of that conflict took place half-way around the world in Manila Bay, when on May 1 a small U.S. flotilla led by Commodore George Dewey sank or captured most of the Spanish Far East squadron and their naval station at Cavite. The motive had been purely tactical, to destroy the Spanish fleet and then either blockade or seize the capital city of Manila, holding it as a bargaining chip for expected peace talks after the war. The original objective of the war was to remove Spanish power from Cuba, not the Philippines. Nevertheless an expeditionary force of 20,000 men was assembled and dispatched in stages to reinforce Dewey, creating an American beachhead on Manila Bay which would have future consequences.

The war with Spain, the shortest and least costly in U.S. history, ended only 3 ½ months after it had begun; the fighting limited to two one-day naval battles and two-days of storming of Spanish defenses at the city of Santiago in Cuba. No ground fighting took place between Spain and the U.S. in the Philippines other than a sham, pre-arranged “battle” in which the Spanish garrison turned over the capital city of Manila to the Americans in order to avoid surrendering to Filipino revolutionaries. A truce was declared the next day, August 12, 1898, and a peace treaty signed December 10, 1898. Puerto Rico and Guam were ceded to the United States and Cuba was granted independence, although subject to two-year “transitional rule” by the Americans. But a last-minute, surprise demand from President William McKinley was made for the cession of the Philippine Islands to the U.S. McKinley was unequivocal: the Spanish must either sign over all their claims to the archipelago or go back to war. With great reluctance and bitterness Spain capitulated. America’s new venture in the Philippine islands would signaled its entry onto the world stage and usher in an infatuation with the idea of building a new kind of empire by creating an entirely new nation in an American image.

The Philippine-American War (1899-1902)

The Philippine-American War began February 4, 1899, two days before the Senate narrowly ratified by one vote the treaty ending the Spanish-American War. Unlike the conflict just ended, the Philippine-American War (a.k.a. Philippine Insurrection) ranks among the nation’s longest (3 ½ years) and nastiest. The point of contention was straightforward. Who would become the ruler of the former colony in the wake of Spain’s departure? The United States or the Philippine Revolutionary Government (PRG)? The PRG was dominated by the largest ethnic-language grouping (Tagalog) and the largest island, Luzon? The President of the PRG and commander of its armed force, the Army of Liberation, was 29-year old General Emilio Aguinaldo and most of its civilian and military leadership were drawn from the “illustrado class”, the country’s landed and educated elite.

Eventually the United States prevailed but in doing so more than 126,000 American soldiers would be “cycled through” the Philippine conflict (the peak strength in 1900 was just over 71,000) in order to subdue the 30-40,000 man Army of Liberation, the military arm of the PRG. It was truly the first of the many of the “wars of national liberation” that would follow in the 20th Century in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and in being such would set the pattern and provide the lessons for the multitude of conflicts that followed.

American Troops arrive in Moroland (May 19, 1899)

In an exquisite irony, both the United States government and the Philippine Revolutionaries were agreed upon two major points. First, their stated end objectives were the eventual establishment of the first “democratic form of governance” in Asia, based on the principles embodied in U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution. They disagreed however, and were willing to go to war over how that should come about and under whose control. Second, both sides sought to build one large, unitary future nation, comprising all the islands in the archipelago. But given 7,000 separate islands and enormous cultural and language diversity, many other peoples in the islands opposed this vision and sought to control their own destinies. Whether one lived in a colony controlled by a foreign power or one controlled by Manila, it was still subservience. Nowhere was this attitude stronger and more certain to cause grief to whomever prevailed than in Moroland—primarily a legacy of the long and bitter enmity between Muslims and Christians that had been a hallmark of the Spanish era and could not be easily put aside.

On May 19, 1899 as the war between the U.S. and the Filipino revolutionaries began in earnest, two battalions of the 23rd Infantry, 775 officers and men commanded by Captain Edward B. Pratt, were landed at the walled and fortified city of Jolo on the island of Jolo, to replace the Spanish garrison. The Spanish flag was ceremoniously hauled down and the Stars and Stripes “unfurled to the breeze” amongst weeping Spanish officers and jubilant Americans. The Spanish garrison was by then, because of desertions, down to 824 men, a fraction of its original size. In low spirits they trudged up the gangplank and left. The next day the equally depleted Spanish garrison at Zamboanga, on the island of Mindanao, was evacuated as well. But no American troops could be spared to occupy the city and Zamboanga was abandoned to a well-armed Christian Filipino militia aligned with Aguinaldo. Captain Pratt had been informed that in the event of hostilities his small command was “not to expect any relief or reinforcements as none were available.” What he was to do in the eventuality of trouble on an island of 40,000 armed inhabitants was left unanswered.