War's End

The men James left behind marched on.

From Calumpit, General Arthur MacArthur set his division’s sights on San Fernando, ten miles north along the railroad. It would be the furthest point the Montanans advanced. By then their supply lines were unreliable and their numbers depleted—wounded, hungry, exhausted, and sick. Few had enough strength left to lift a rifle.

By early May 1899, General Otis was under immense pressure from Congress and the American public to bring the 16,000 state volunteers home. They had enlisted to fight a war against Spain—and that war had ended the previous December.

The Montana regiment was down to 477 men and eight officers. Only 112 were still fit for combat. Worse still, the southern lines they had fought so hard to secure only extended the front and proved strategically unimportant.

For the next three months the Montanans were assigned to garrison duty in Manila and Cavite, guarding the roads to Malolos and San Fernando. In July and August, forty-six inches of rain fell across the city. Roads turned to mud pits. Streams became torrents. There was no staying dry—uniforms rotted, boots filled with mud, and every wound risked infection. With bodies already weakened by poor rations and sleepless nights, deadly diseases spread fast.

Rumors of going home swept through the camps for weeks before orders finally arrived. By then most men were too sick or numb to celebrate. When the rains subsided, General MacArthur gave the order: the Montana men would go home.

At the end of August, the bodies of thier dead were taken from their temporary graves. The survivors boarded two transports at the end of August.

They were formally mustered out[1] in San Francisco on October 17. James A. Callahan's body was buried at the Presido in San Fransisco and six days later his comrades were welcomed home in Butte, and awarded a state medal for their service.

Regulars replaced the volunteers, but the U.S. fighting force remained small—even as the war dragged on. In November 1899, Filipino forces shifted to guerrilla tactics, far more effective than open battle. Aguinaldo was captured on March 23, 1901. The war was officially declared over on July 4, 1902. But resistance continued long after banners were rolled up and newspapers moved on.

While American soldiers fought and died abroad, the policy that would define the nation’s new empire was taking shape in Washington.

In an 1899 meeting with Methodist church leaders, President William McKinley defended the annexation of the Philippines:

“Before you go I would like to say just a word about the Philippine business…

I didn’t want the Philippines, and when they came to us, as a gift from the gods, I did not know what to do with them…

That we could not give them back to Spain—that would be cowardly and dishonorable…

That we could not leave them to themselves—they were unfit for self-government…

There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them…”

It was a speech born of the racial and religious assumptions of the age, and it set the tone for an openly expansionist American policy.[2]

On September 6, 1901, President McKinley was shot while receiving the public at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. He died eight days later, on September 14th, from gangrene that developed around a bullet surgeons had failed to remove. His vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, was sworn in almost immediately.

Roosevelt inherited not only McKinley’s office but also the Philippine War—a conflict he had supported throughout, with the same confidence in expansion and national destiny that had defined McKinley’s foreign policy. Though later remembered as a conservationist, reformer, and trust-buster, Roosevelt was also—and unapologetically—an imperialist of his era. He believed that American control of overseas territories would strengthen the nation politically, morally, and militarily. In that spirit, he moved quickly to consolidate U.S. authority in the islands and bring the long, bitter guerrilla fighting to a formal close.

Before issuing a final proclamation of peace, Roosevelt publicly acknowledged that major hostilities had ceased. The War Department reported that organized resistance was broken, most Filipino commanders had surrendered or been captured, and remaining insurgent groups were scattered and unable to operate as a unified force. With political pressure rising at home to end the war and establish civilian rule, Roosevelt prepared a formal gesture to close the conflict.

On July 4, 1902, he issued the following proclamation:

The United States would retain possession of the Philippines until 1946, when independence was finally granted—though not without strings attached.

American losses in the Philippine War totaled around 4,200—1,500 killed in action and 2,700 more lost to disease.

The cost to Filipinos was far greater and can never be precisely counted. Official American tallies record 20,000 Filipino soldiers killed in action and 34,000 civilians killed due to combat. Another 200,000 died from famine and disease. Modern estimates place the total death toll at over one million.

James A. Callahan was one of thousands who never came home from a war that history barely remembers. But in the rain and heat of Luzon, every man knew what it cost.

NOTES

[1] Mustered out was the formal process by which volunteer regiments were discharged from service. Soldiers returned government-issued equipment, received final pay, and were officially released from their enlistment.

[2] President McKinley’s “prayer” account was first recalled by Methodist minister James Rusling in 1903, several years after the fact. Historians debate its accuracy—whether McKinley spoke those exact words or whether Rusling embellished— the story became the most quoted justification for U.S. annexation of the Philippines.