Two Flags Over Manila

When Commodore Dewey annihilated Spain's Pacific squadron in Manila Bay in May 1898, the Filipinos thought they knew what it meant. Emilio Aguinaldo, the exiled leader of the 1896 revolution against Spain, was brought back aboard an American vessel; American consuls had talked warmly of independence; and Aguinaldo's reborn army swiftly liberated province after province, besieging the Spanish in Manila itself. On June 12, from the window of his house in Kawit, Aguinaldo declared the independence of the Philippines. By autumn his government had convened a congress at Malolos and drafted the first republican constitution in Asia.

The Americans saw it differently. The August capture of Manila was choreographed with the defeated Spanish so that Filipino troops — who had done the besieging — were kept out of their own capital. In Paris that December, Spain ceded the entire archipelago to the United States for twenty million dollars, a transaction in which no Filipino had any voice. President McKinley, who admitted he could not have placed the islands within two thousand miles on a map, announced a policy of 'benevolent assimilation.' Rudyard Kipling addressed 'The White Man's Burden' to America, urging the new empire on.

Through the winter the two armies faced each other along a sixteen-mile line around Manila — nervous men in trenches close enough to trade insults. Mabini and Aguinaldo played for time, hoping the U.S. Senate would reject the treaty; anti-imperialists at home, from Andrew Carnegie to Mark Twain, argued that a republic could not own colonies. The margin was genuinely in doubt.

On the night of February 4, 1899, Private William Grayson of the 1st Nebraska challenged a Filipino patrol near the San Juan del Monte bridge, then fired. Fighting rolled down the whole line by morning; American artillery and Dewey's naval guns shattered the Filipino trenches, and some three thousand Filipino soldiers were killed or wounded in two days — against 238 Americans. Two days later, with the news from Manila in the newspapers, the Senate ratified the Treaty of Paris by one vote more than the required two-thirds. The war for the Philippines had begun as a war against Filipinos.