Richardson, Jim. "Roster of Katipuneros at Balintawak, August 1896." 2005.

Amidst all the debate about precisely when and where the revolution started, historians have often neglected to ask exactly who gathered in Balintawak or thereabouts in August 1896. In the absence of a complete roster – clearly an impossibility at this distance in time – the fullest listing is to be found in an interview given by the KKK veteran Guillermo Masangkay to the Manila newspaper Bagong Buhay in 1952.¹ In this interview, Masangkay recalled the names of 56 men who had met in Balintawak prior to the first encounters with Spanish forces. In the great majority of cases, he also recalled their occupations, and it is fascinating to note that nearly half the patriots on his list worked in some capacity or other for branches of the Spanish administration. The three 'government secret agents', it is presumed, had in the preceding months been supplying useful information to the Katipunan and misinformation to the Spaniards.

Masangkay’s list is reproduced below; the occupational descriptions have been translated into English from the original mix of Tagalog and Spanish, and in a few cases have been amplified. Since the list was reconstructed from memory more than fifty years after the event, erroneous inclusions are likely and omissions are inevitable. Any corrections or other comments will be most welcome.

Aguedo del Rosario Apolonio Cruz Alejandro Santiago Deogracias Fajardo Juan Fajardo Tomas Alegre Pio H. Santos Patricio Belen Crispulo Chacon Lorenzo Martinez Tomas Villanueva Procopio Bonifacio Rogelio Borja Isaac del Carmen Hilario Sayo Melecio Ruestra Pastor Santos Guillermo Masangkay Pedro Zabala Macario Sakay Salustiano Cruz Juan de la Cruz Emilio Jacinto Andres Bonifacio Nicomedes Carreon Miguel Resurreccion Vicente Leyva Cipriano Pacheco Briccio Pantas Teodoro Plata Jose Trinidad Hermogenes Plata Tomas Remigio Pantaleon Torres Vicente Molina Enrique Pacheco Faustino Manalac Calixto Santiago Restituto Javier Hermenegildo Reyes Valentin Lagasca Eugenio Santos Francisco Carreon Sarhento Marcelo Roman Ramos Tito Miguel Julio Navarro Alejandro Andaya Marcelo Badell Geronimo Cristobal Cosme Taguyod Rafael Gutierrez Estanislao Vargas Apolonio Samson Pio Valenzuela Ramon Bernardo

Printer at the Diario de Manila Printer at the Diario de Manila Printer at El Resumen Printer Printer Master cigar maker Master tobacco worker Tobacco worker Tobacco worker Tobacco worker Tobacco worker Railway baggage-master Mechanic Mechanic Mechanic Draftsman Draftsman Kuridor [meaning unknown] Kuridor [meaning unknown] Sales agent [personero] Master tailor Barber; playwright Student Warehouse employee at Fressel & Co. Salesman at Casa Chupre Grass (fodder) cutter Milkman Clerk Assistant to Court of First Instance judge Clerk, Mindoro Court of First Instance Clerk, Tondo Court of First Instance Court clerk Government treasury clerk Government treasury clerk Government treasury caretaker Manila city government clerk Manila port administration clerk Customs official Customs official Customs official Customs guard sergeant Customs guard sergeant Customs guard Customs guard Government arsenal employee Government arsenal employee Government secret agent Government secret agent Government secret agent Army corporal Fire Department lieutenant Fire Department captain Property owner Property owner Physician Municipal captain of Pandacan

¹"Unang sigaw, unang labanan sa paglaya," Bagong Buhay (25 August 1952).

Read more.

Taylor, John R. M. "The Philippine Insurrection of 1896-97." The Philippine Insurrection against the United States: A Compilation of Documents with Notes and Introduction. Pasay City: Eugenio Lopez Foundation, 1971 [1906]. 61-78.

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Chapter III

The Philippine Insurrection of 1896-97

The Filipino insurrection of 1896-97 was planned and carried out under the auspices of a society, local to the Philippines, called the Katipúnan. According to Spanish writers on the subject, this organization was the outgrowth of a series of associations, formed by what afterwards became the revolutionary clique with the expressed purpose of securing reforms in the government of the Philippines, but whose unexpressed and ultimate object was to obtain the independence of the archipelago. In order to accomplish this purpose, a systematic attack was made on the monastic orders in the Philippines to undermine their prestige and to destroy their influence upon the great mass of the population. Among the societies actively opposed to the friars and perhaps to Spain the first formed was the Tagálog Center of the Spanish Orient, lodges of which had been established in the islands some five or six years before this formidable insurrection by Miguel Morayta and others, who had used similar methods to combat the influence of the friars in the Spanish peninsula. The Spanish Orient, which has no affiliation with and is not recognized by English and American Masons, may be regarded as the source of that propaganda in the Philippines which afterwards developed into the sanguinary Katipúnan. A grand master of the Spanish Orient presided over the Carbonari of Italy. Its proselytes formed the Katipúnan of the Philippines.

The native, with all the oriental susceptibility to ritual and to secrecy, was attracted and held as he could have been in no other wav. The attraction of the Catholic influence was successfully neutralized. The rapid growth of the lodges of the Spanish Orient convinced the leaders of the movement that secret societies were the proper medium for disseminating their influence. Accordingly, José Rizal, the Filipino author and reformer, came into the islands and organized from among the more intelligent classes what was called the “Philippine League," a society whose platform consisted of the round and sonorous sentences usual in the announcements of Filipino propaganda and of customary vagueness. Generally speaking, a system of education and reforms was to be provided which should teach the Philippines to stand alone. Its ultimate purpose was stated by the Spanish Government, when shortly after its foundation its existence was

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discovered by the authorities, to be to secure the independence of the Philippines from Spain. Its president was deported. Rizal, himself, had already been exiled to Dapitan, a lonely village in the southern islands. The society dissolved, or, perhaps, better said, shrank back into the Tagálog lodges whence it had originated.

Marcelo del Pilar, Rizal's most formidable rival, set out to organize in the Philippines a similar society to work for the same end, but which he believed he could make more successful by limiting his recruiting to the less intelligent classes, who would form a more powerful and more easily wielded body than the one formed from the timid theorizers and wealthy half-Spaniards of the earlier project had proved to be. Only a few of the well-to-do middle class were admitted; its members believed in action and action of the most drastic character, and felt a fierce scorn for mere political agitation not backed up by the rifle and the knife. Thus in 1894 or in 1892 the Katipúnan was born. In two years its lodges were the controlling factor in every Tagálog town. Its officers, as well as members, were drawn from the uneducated classes. Its directorate passed from the control of one to another, until it was seized on the 1st of January, 1896, by the most powerful and radical member, one Andrés Bonifacio, a night watchman in a warehouse on the Pásig River, a man of little education, keen intelligence, passionate and courageous. The poor were to have their brother's wealth distributed among them; the native priests were to succeed their Spanish preceptors, and the native clerk his peninsular superior; the ambitious Spanish or Chinese mestizo would no longer have to give way to men of unmixed Spanish blood; out of race hatred and envy and blood lust there was to be born, by slaughter and pillage, a Malay republic.

The plans of Bonifacio were far-reaching. He attempted to negotiate with Japan. He brought all the other influential Filipino exiles into his fold and sought to win the support of Rizal. He sent an agent to the place of exile of that leader to aid him to escape and to ask him to return and lead the Katipúnan in open revolt. Doctor Rizal refused. He did not favor open and bloody revolt, and thought the Philippines were not yet ready for their independence. Bonifacio resolved to proceed without him.

The time was propitious. The army of the Philippines which, at the beginning of 1896, had consisted of 18,000 men, of whom only 2,000 were Spaniards, was to be increased to a force of 21,600 men, including the civil guard. The strictly military force was to be composed of 17,659 men, of whom 3,005 were to be Spaniards. This reorganization was being made. Apparently the increase was largely in the Spanish noncommissioned officers serving in native regiments, which must have caused dissatisfaction among the native soldiers, as it limited their opportunities for promotion. Such discontent caused by similar changes was at least one of the causes of the mutiny in Cavite in 1872. Bonifacio probably reckoned on such discontent increasing his adherents in the army, and assured his followers that when he gave the signal for the uprising the native troops would

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join him with their arms. What was of at least equal importance to the success of the plot was the fact that the army, as in 1872, was engaged in operations against the Moros in Mindanao. At the end of August, 1896, there were available for use in Manila only some 300 Spanish artillery, Spanish detachments amounting to some 400 men, including the sailors which could be landed from the ships of war in port, and about 2,000 native soldiers, the greater part of whom belonged to detachments of the regiments in the field. A force so constituted is hardly available for anything but guard duty, and in case of a serious outbreak a force so small would be immobilized by the necessity of preventing an outbreak in the city of Manila and an attack on the arsenal, the treasury, and the foreign banks.

Reports had been made to the Spanish authorities during the summer of 1896 of an extensive conspiracy among the natives, but that they did not consider it serious is shown by the fact that no troops were withdrawn from Mindanao. On August 19 a native denounced the plot to the Spanish parish priest of Tondo, one of the districts of Manila, and the next day documentary evidence of a far-reaching conspiracy was in the hands of the authorities. This time the evidence was of such a nature that it could not be ignored; link after link of the hidden chain of intrigue revealed itself to the investigators, and when the extent and murderous character of the plotting were revealed arrests and trials followed swiftly. Many Europeans in Manila, rightly or wrongly, believed that all men there of white blood had been marked for murder. Documents were captured which, if authentic, showed this. Bonifacio escaped. Hundreds of others marked by the local authorities for their membership in secret societies were forced to flee for their lives.

Bonifacio was thus able to commit a large faction to an openly hostile position, but the native troops, on the whole, stood firm. He fled to Caloocan to avoid capture. The Katipúnan came out from the cover of secret designs, threw off the cloak of any other purpose, and stood openly for the independence of the Philippines. Bonifacio turned his lodges into battalions, his grand masters into captains, and the supreme council of the Katipúnan into the insurgent government for the Philippines. He himself was dictator. The insurrection declared, he put himself at the head of those of his people whom he was able hastily to collect about him at Caloocan, and sent out order!; for a general uprising on August 29 throughout such portions of the island of Luzón as the Katipúnan had organized.

The governor-general, realizing that if the insurrection was not promptly crushed it would be joined by a constantly increasing number of the disaffected, on August 25 sent a small column to attack the rebels at Caloocan. The Spanish force in the city was so small that nearly half of this column was composed of sailors from the flagship. No decisive result was obtained; the rebels scattered only to unite again, and on August 30 made a daring attempt, under Bonifacio, to seize the powder magazine at San Juan del Monte in the suburbs of Manila, but

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were repulsed by the detachment which guarded it. They then attacked Santa Mesa, but the detachments of Spanish and native troops which had been hurried there succeeded in driving them back. Some leaders of the rebels were captured, brought before a military court and publicly executed. So few Spanish soldiers were available for this action that a body of 100 men was under the personal command of the Spanish general next in rank to the governor-general. This attack, in which the rebels had been led almost into the streets of the city, made the authorities realize how serious were the conditions by which they were confronted. The governor-general ordered troops from Mindanao, asked for reinforcements from Spain, called upon the Spaniards of Manila to volunteer for the defense of the country, and proclaimed 8 provinces of Luzón in a state of war .

[Scrawled at this point on the margin of the third proof is the following: Map No. 1 here.]

In Cavite, on August 31, the seacoast towns rose under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo, a young radical, who was already a recognized leader among the local disaffected. The Spaniards had not expected this outbreak in Cavite. Aguinaldo had personally assured the governor of the province of his devotion to Spain (p. --), and when it came isolated Spanish officers were killed and their families carried into captivity. A conspiracy was discovered in the town of Cavite to release the prisoners and kill the Spaniards. Thirteen men found to have engaged in it were at once tried and shot. By the middle of September Manila Province was in ablaze, and Cavite Province, beyond the walls of the port, was in the hands of the insurgents. The Spaniards had taken refuge in Manila and the town of Cavite, where they could be safe within the walls from the attack of the rebels, who, as yet, had few firearms, and were armed chiefly with lances and with knives. The difficulty of the situation was much increased by the fact that the defense of these two places -- until reinforcements arrived from Spain -- would be chiefly in the hands of native soldiers, among whom it was known that agents of the Katipúnan had been at work. The silence with which the propaganda of revolt had been carried on, and the success which it had met, must have filled the Spaniards with the gravest doubts of the fidelity of the native troops which, for nearly the first month of the insurrection, were the chief guarantee for their lives. The troops of the old native regiments -- the men who for years had followed Spanish officers -- were, on the whole, faithful, and it was largely due to them that Manila and Cavite were held until the arrival of reinforcements.

By the end of September all the troops which could be spared from the south had been concentrated in Manila and Cavite, but Governor-General Blanco, although he probably had some 6,000 men, did not consider himself strong enough to move against Cavite Province, which was rapidly being turned into an intrenched camp [44]; the towns, rivers, defiles, and a multitude of positions in the interior were being fortified by more or less united works, depending upon the strategic loca-

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tion of each point, while an infinite number of parapets and every kind of obstacle were being thrown up to render the roads of communication useless. Two lines of trenches, one continuous and one with intervals, occupied the frontiers. Intrenchments were constructed on the banks of streams and such places where roads and defiles leading into the interior could be enfiladed, and usually there were several parallel lines of intrenchments, those in the rear commanding those in their front. Within these exterior lines the towns were defended by intrenchments constructed at points commanding the roads leading to them; pitfalls were dug and barricades were built in the streets. The defensive possibilities of stone buildings were made use of and increased. Sluices in the dams across the rivers were contrived so as to produce inundations when desired. A continuous line of intrenchments was built along the seacoast, and at intervals there were casemates where the defenders, the sentinels, and even the fishermen could take refuge from the fire of Spanish war ships.

All of these preparations greatly increased the defensive strength of the province, whose natural features are such as to render difficult the operations of any but native troops [41]. It abounds in rivers which run parallel to each other at short distances, their beds being the bottoms of deep ravines, which present excellent positions for defense. The roads are few and bad. In many places troops would be forced to move upon trails and foot paths. The trails and roads alike are crossed at frequent intervals by streams and bordered by dense growth, affording opportunity for the ambush of small parties. There were a number of well-constructed bridges in the province, but on the approach of the Spaniards these were partly or wholly destroyed by the insurgents. Cavite Province was the center of the insurrection. With its reoccupation by Spain organized resistance could be crushed down.

The population of Cavite Province was about 141,250. According to the system of organization employed by the insurgents, everyone of these people had his place in the scheme of defense. For military purposes, the territory was divided into five parts, called zones of war, having as capitals Siláng, Imus, Bacoor, San Francisco de Malabon, and Alfonso. Each of these zones was defended by an army, which was divided into an active and a volunteer force, the former comprising all the fighting men and the latter all those engaged outside of the ranks in works of a mechanical character. The active army was organized into regiments, companies, and batteries, performed duties in the trenches, towns, and on the roads, and also patrolled the territory to check desertions and disaffection. In turn, the companies were divided into soldiers with firearms and those without, the duty of the latter -- in the proportion of some five to each rifleman -- being to keep themselves close to the rear of the firing-line and secure the guns of men who became disabled, it being also required that such reserves should be provided with spears and bolos (a native knife), to attack with the riflemen when the order was given to charge the Spaniards. To the batteries were committed duties pertaining to the care and use of the rude na-

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tive cannon, or "lantakas," the firing of mines and fougasses, and the preservation of the gunpowder. According to Spanish writers, the insurgents had obtained their firearms from deserters, from the detachments which they had overpowered at the outbreak of the insurrection, by capture, and by purchase. The statement has been made that at the beginning of 1897 they had 15,000 of all descriptions. The estimate is probably too high. Gen. Primo de Rivera stated that at the close of that year he did not think that they had more than 1,500, which estimate is undoubtedly too low [45].

The function of the volunteer army was the gathering and storing of food supplies and obtaining iron and copper from every possible source for the construction of arms. It was also their duty to search the surface of the fields for projectiles which, fired by the navy at the trenches along the coasts, had failed to explode; to carry food to the troops on guard or on duty in the defenses, and with those of the active army; and the women and children; since when works of this kind were concerned neither age, sex, nor condition could procure exemption, to strengthen daily the defenses and throw up others on suitable sites.

Some Spanish writers on the subject think that, owing to the influx of the disaffected from other provinces, there were 105,000 men in arms in Cavite Province. The estimate is high, but it is undoubtedly a fact that the Spanish forces operating there were opposed, not by an army, but by a people in arms.

Within these lines the men of greater intelligence dreamed of a government to be conducted for their exclusive benefit under the name of a republic. The great mass of the people who had gathered there knew nothing of a republic. There is no word for it in Tagalog, Bicol, Visayan, Ilocano, or any of the languages which the natives speak, and which the far greater part of them speak alone. The longing of this great mass was to be rid of the restrictions and the centralized form of government established by Spain. They wanted to be free, which meant that they wanted to go back to the wild life of the hills. The Malay of pure blood is not a dweller in large towns. If left to himself, he builds his house -- in many cases hardly more than a shelter -- upon some stream, and gathering his family about him, lives upon what fish he has caught in his own nets and the crop he has raised with his own hands. But even then he must have a leader -- a man who can speak to him in his own tongue and awaken that longing to obey, that lust of devotion which smoulders in his soul. These men -- the "taos" -- form the great mass of the people. Many of them have lived for generation after generation upon the same land, and when not under the control of the friars, under the domination of that class of natives who call themselves “ilustrados" (enlightened men), whose blood is, in almost every case, partly Spanish or partly Chinese. The supremacy of the friars was passing, and men of this class intended to be, in all things, the heirs to their domain. The control exercised by this class of “ilustrados" is absolute, and it is outside of the law. It is not possible for an American to understand why it is that a Filipino who happens to be rich and to know

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Spanish and to have been educated in Manila, is, from the possession or those advantages, able to exact absolute and willing obedience, from the men who live about him, an obedience which extends in many cases to a perfect willingness to commit murder, under the conviction that the "ilustrado" is responsible and not the murderer, who has done his mere duty in passively obeying the orders of the man whom he looks up to, and who, in some things at least, seems to have succeeded to the absolute and paternal power of the tribal chiefs who now rule in Mindanao and Joló, and who, prior to the coming of the Spaniards, ruled on all the seacoasts of the wide-flung Archipelago.

The idea of forming a republic or of adopting the titles appropriate to a republic to designate the functionaries of a Malay despotism was an afterthought. The men who, in August, 1896, raised the standard of revolt, the fighting men like Bonifacio and Aguinaldo, did not know enough of the outside world to realize its expediency. Aguinaldo learned it when he was joined by men who had been better trained than he in Spanish methods of thought, and who had read the history of France and Spain. They found it was expedient to cover their system of absolutism with the name of a republic. It was probably a republic as they understood it, but there seems no reason for doubting that in September, 1896, Vito Belarmino, one of the most prominent of the insurgents, called himself Vito, viceroy of Siláng, one of the largest towns of Cavite Province, and to the very end of the so-called Filipino Republic the "royal family" was a common form of reference to the mother and wife and child of Emilio Aguinaldo, and over and over again the orders of the President of the Republic were spoken of by his followers as "royal decrees."

Such a blind devotion to their leaders on the part of the great mass of the people does not make for the security of government. There is always the probability of the appearance of a new enchanter able to weave a more powerful spell, and such men did appear in 1898 and 1899, whose opposition to Aguinaldo had to be suppressed by arms at a time when it was of the utmost importance to the group about him to show that they, and they alone, represented the aspirations of the Filipino people.

A republic is a government founded upon the consent of the governed. To be anything more than a name it must embody, in working form, the aspirations of the people. To found one it is not sufficient to juggle with words and call the grant of such rights as a clique in power finds it expedient to bestow upon the people whom they rule the establishment of a republican form of government. Republics are the result of a slow growth. To exist in anything more than name they are the expression of the aspirations of the whole people to be partners in the State; the establishment of a republic in fact is something more than a feat of political legerdemain.

By the end of September, 1896, the government within the insurgent lines was in the hands of Emilio Aguinaldo, who called himself the “generalissimo;" next in rank was Andres Bonifacio, “el supremo" (the supreme master) of the Katipúnan, who, as delegate of the generalis-

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simo, ruled the three districts into which Cavite Province had been divided -- the vice-royalty of Siláng, a district with a capital at Imus, and a district with its capital at San Francisco de Malabón. Each of these districts had a head. assisted by a council of government, among the members of which were many of the future generals of the Filipino Republic.

Until the 1st of November General Blanco did not consider himself strong enough to take the offensive, but the few troops in Manila and Cavite did not remain inactive. They made some reconnaissances in the vicinity of those cities, but their numerical inferiority exposed them to checks which increased the audacity of the insurgents. In a short while it was seen that the only possible thing to do was to wait, and in the meanwhile restrain the people of Manila and Cavite, who were being excited by insurgent emissaries.

Although the nature of the territory in the hands of the insurgents was favorable to defense, yet the manner which that territory lay with respect to the surrounding provinces made it comparatively easy to isolate Cavite Province and the portions of Laguna and Batangas provinces to which the insurrection had spread. The Spaniards were masters of the sea and of Lakes Taal and Bay. General Blanco had the town of Cavite put into a condition of defense and works were constructed on the neck connecting it with the mainland. Two passages from the insurgent territory were partly barred by the Pásig and Pansipit rivers, which connect Lakes Bay and Taal with the sea. General Blanco established a line from Lian to Balayan, intended to cut off from the insurgents the eastern part of Batangas Province. Then he strongly occupied Taal and Saint Nicolas in order to guard the passage of the Pansipit. North of Lake Taal, where the country was more difficult to observe, he garrisoned San Domingo and established in advance of it the line Calamba-Tanauan-Bañadero, intended to protect the provinces of Laguna and Batangas.

On the side of, Manila he had the Pásig patrolled and further covered the approach to the capital by placing in a state of defense the line Parañaque-Las Piñas.
Daily reconnaissances were made from the points thus occupied; on their side the rebels made constant attacks on the circle which enclosed them. The capture of Nasugbu, the defense of Lian, combats at Pansipit and to the north of Lake Taal, the capture of Talisay by the insurgents, attacks on Bilog-Bilog and on San Domingo, are the principal military events during this period of expectation.

Reinforcements arrived from Spain and, little by little, grew accustomed to the war. The daily operations developed cohesion in the different commands, in which the commanders and soldiers, taken right and left in the Peninsula, had not had time to know each other. By the end of October, when General Blanco must have had a force of 6,000 Spanish troops and 3 native regiments available for active operations against the insurgents, the latter were in possession of Cavite Province and the immediately surrounding territory, and the insurrection had spread to all the central provinces of Luzón, where, however, the rebel

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forces were widely scattered and deficient in organization and equipment, only a few having firearms of any description. Nevertheless, under Llanera, they were able to gather as many as 5,000 men to raid along the railroad and the towns about Manila, plundering and burning. A small column was kept moving against them, but although it usually scattered the bands it attacked, they came together again to resume their marauding expeditions.

On November 1, 1896, General Blanco decided to assume the offensive in Cavite Province. He collected considerable quantities of supplies at Dalahican, a village on the peninsula of Cavite, where he had established his camp, and at Calamba.

He formed the forces concentrated at these points into three columns. The first one, under command of General Rios, marched from Cavite on Noveleta; the second, transported by sea to Binacayan, was to take possession of that village. and the third, that of Calamba, was composed of 1,500 men under the command of General Aguirre, commanding in the provinces of Laguna and Batangas. The duty of the latter was to march on Siláng by Talisay, and to join there a column then formed at Bañadero. These operations began on the 9th. They were not successful. The command which bad moved on Binacayan was forced back with heavy losses, and the column directed upon Noveleta failed to take possession of the trenches covering the approaches of the town, and also lost heavily. The heaviest losses in these engagements were the Seventy-third, a native regiment. The two columns had to fall back on Cavite. Talisay was taken on the 12th, but the, check which he had suffered near Cavite decided General Blanco to suspend the movement, and General Aguirre was ordered to return to Calamba, from which place he proceeded to Santa Cruz to suppress an uprising which had just taken place. Laguna Province was pacified in a few days, and on December 1 the command was again concentrated at Calamba and Santo Domingo, where a camp for 4,000 men was
prepared; General Rios’s brigade was reorganized in Cavite on December 1 and was also ready to take the offensive.

Weeks had passed, and the insurrection held its own. Blanco was the subject of bitter attack by the clerical party for his previous protection of Rizal, for his alleged connection with Masonry, and for his too great leniency in punishing the rebels. The Spanish press was filled with complaints of his inactivity, and finally an order was issued for his relief by General Polavieja, then on his way to the islands. Some days before the order was issued this telegram was published in the Madrid press. The immediate result suggests the influence of the friars in the conduct of Philippine secular affairs at Madrid.

Hongkong, October 31.

Dominicos, Madrid:

Situation growing more serious. Rebellion spreading. Apathy of Blanco inexplicable. In order to avert danger immediate appointment of a commander necessary. We agree in this.

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General Polavieja assumed the supreme command on December 13, 1896. The force at his disposal for operations against the insurgents must have been nearly 13,000 Spanish soldiers and probably three native regiments. It is probable that the remainder of the native regiments were retained in their usual garrisons to prevent outbreaks at new points. The new governor-general proceeded to carry out the plans of his predecessor. He intended to strongly occupy the lines which shut off the center of the insurrection in the province of Cavite in order to finish with the scattered centers in the neighboring provinces. After that he intended to employ the majority of his command in Cavite Province to finally trample out the insurrection there.

In consequence he changed the assignment of troops in Laguna, Batangas, and Tayabas provinces and formed a division under the command of General Lachambre composed of two brigades in Laguna Province and one in Batangas Province, while Cavite was held by an independent brigade and another occupied Manila and covered the line of the Pásig. Numerous light columns rid the provinces of central Luzón of the scattered groups of insurgents which occupied them. The rebels were held in about Cavite in spite of their repeated attacks upon the lines which confined them. Attacks on Santo Domingo and Las Piñas and a daring offensive movement toward the line of the Pásig followed by a hasty retreat on Pamplona were the principal manifestations of the activity of the enemy. General Polavieja laid a heavy hand upon the men charged with aiding and abetting the insurrection. A permanent court-martial sat in Manila charged with their trial. A number were shot, and by the end of December about 1,000 men, many of them rich and influential, had been tried and deported to various penal settlements and their property seized. On December 30 José Rizal was shot in Manila for conspiracy against the State.

As reinforcements continued to arrive, the month of January, 1897, was one of great activity, and constant combats took place in the center of Luzón, the most important of which was an attack upon the insurgent leader Llanera in Bulacán, who was forced to take refuge in Nueva Écija, while the majority of his followers availed themselves of an amnesty proclamation and surrendered. By the end of the month Bataan, Zambales, and Batangas provinces were reported free of insurgents. The time was fast approaching when it would be possible to move upon Cavite Province.

Spain, by February 1, 1847, had succeeded in transporting to the Philippines 15 battalions of infantry, 4 battalions of marine infantry, the men necessary to increase the companies in each battalion of infantry from 6 to 8, one battery of artillery, 9 cm. guns, and one squadron of cavalry. In all, some 25,000 officers and men had been sent to the Archipelago since the beginning of the insurrection, but the resources of the Peninsula were being severely tried by the war in Cuba, and the troops sent to the Philippines were young conscripts -- boys of 18 or 19 in most cases. Spain. exhausted by two rebellions, was drawing upon her last reserves.

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Nearly all of the reinforcements received from Spain, the Seventy-fourth Regiment and battalions of the Sixty-eighth, Seventieth, and Seventy-third native regiments, a small force of cavalry, three batteries and some 2,000 native volunteers, raised in provinces remote from the centers of insurgent activity, were available for an attack upon the insurgent positions. The period of preparation had passed and the governor-general prepared to engage in offensive operations.

The staff had been informed of the dispositions of the enemy by spies and frequent reconnoissances. The three principal centers were known to be Siláng., Nov[e]leta, and Imus. General Polavieja resolved to finish first with Silang. At the same time he had to hold the insurgents at the other points by means of vigorous demonstrations.
General Polavieja, captain-general, and as governor-general in supreme command, organized the following commands, which on February 7 were stationed as follows:

Division of La Laguna, Batangas and Tayabas, Major-General Lachambre. Under his immediate command were 16 guns, 200 cavalry, and organizations of volunteers and the civil guard, which gave him a force of under his personal command of 1,363 men. His three brigades were as follows:

First brigade. -- Brigadier-General Cornel; 4,001 men; headquarters at Calamba.

Second brigade. -- Brigadier-General Marina Vega; 3,913 men; headquarters at Biñang,

Third brigade. -- Brigadier-General Jaramillo; 1,645 men and 2 guns; headquarters at Taal, Batangas Province. It had also detachments along the line Lian-Taal, in Batangas Province, which amounted to 1,095 men.

The first and second brigades had detachments amounting to 1,563 men on the lines Santa Cruz-Calamba and Tanauan-Bañadero. These dispositions gave General Lachambre a total force of 13,580 men, of which 10,922 were available for the offensive. These commands were composed of infantry.

A fourth brigade under Brigadier-General Galbis, operating under the immediate command of the governor-general, with a strength of 100 cavalry, 5,869 infantry, and 14 guns, was extended along the northern bank of the Zapote River. The lakes of Bay and Taal were guarded by launches and small craft, while the gunboats of the squadron patrolled the seacoast.

Brigadier-General de los Rios held Cavite and Dalahican with a force of about 3,812 infantry and 100 cavalry, and Major-General Zappino held Manila and Morong provinces with a force of about 2,754 infantry, 216 heavy artillery, 200 cavalry, the Manila volunteers, and the civil guard of his provinces. His command included the city of Manila.

On February 14, General Lachambre, with Cornel’s and Marina Vega's brigades, moved on Siláng, which he took on February 19 and put in a condition of defense. On February 26, the division took Dasmari-

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ñas, which was defended by Aguinaldo in person. After beating off incessant attacks, the division moved on Salitrán, which it occupied on March 8. On February 16 Jaramillo took Bayuyuñgan and drove the insurgents from their intrenched positions in Batangas. On February 15, Galbis took Pamplona. On March 7, the first line of works about Imus was taken, but the resistance met was of such a nature that it was not considered advisable to attack the main position without reinforcements, and the troops which had occupied them were withdrawn.

On March 10, 1897, the division marched for the Zapote River and effected contact with the Fourth Brigade, then commanded by General Barraquer. On March 24 the division moved on Imus from Salitrán with a force of about 12,000 combatants, obtained by adding the Fourth Brigade and detachments to the First and Second brigades. By evening the first line of works about Imus had been taken; the next day the town was occupied and garrisoned. On March 26 General Polavieja offered amnesty to all who would surrender their arms before April 11. The same day the insurgents abandoned Bacoor on the approach of the Spanish troops, and an attack was delivered on Binacayan which failed, and the brigade making it fell back on Bacoor. On March 30 the division was concentrated at Imus, which it left next day, directed upon Noveleta, which was taken, and the insurgents abandoned Binacayan and Cavite Viejo. On April 6 Lachambre moved on San Francisco de Malabon, which he took after an obstinate resistance by the insurgents under the command of Bonifacio, head of the Katipúnan. Santa Cruz and Rosario were occupied without resistance, and the natives flocked jn from every direction to take advantage of the amnesty offered by the governor-general. Organized resistance in Cavite Province had been broken. The campaign had lasted fifty-two days, 57 combats had taken place, and the division had lost 15 officers and 168 men killed, and 56 officers and 910 men wounded. Probably a larger number had died or been invalided from disease.

It is impossible to say what the insurgent casualties were; the Spanish reports give their dead as about 3,450, which was probably as exaggerated as such estimates usually are. Reports of killed and wounded drawn up by the force which has suffered losses in action are accurate, as the men are known and must be accounted for on rolls of some form. No one in the victorious army has any personal interest in the dead of the enemy. The estimates of their number are influenced by the natural tendency to exaggerate the effect of fire directed by the officer making the report, even if it is not considered expedient to exaggerate the estimate for its effect upon the people of the country of the enemy when published. Even when count is made of the enemy's dead it is usually done in a perfunctory manner. There are other and more important things to be attended to after an action, and the totals are obtained by adding the reports and estimates of many men, who frequently report the same dead which have been reported upon by others. In these actions the insurgents evidently fought gallantly and lost heavily. The loss which, with a most imperfect armament, they had inflicted upon the Spaniards shows that they fought well. Nearly 12

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per cent of casualties in the attacking force, during operations lasting less than two months, shows a capable resistance on the part of the defense. They fought well; almost as well as the people of Achin, a Malay tribe which for thirty years has, from their hills and intrenchments, defied a Dutch force almost as large as that which the Spaniards employed against Cavite Province.

On April 25 General Polavieja, who had applied to be relieved from his command on account of illness, was succeeded by Gen. Primo de Rivera as governor-general of the Philippines. At the time of this change in the supreme command the insurrection had been almost extinguished in the provinces north of Manila, as, with the exception of a few hundred insurgents who had taken refuge in the mountains, all armed resistance had disappeared. In Batangas and Cavite provinces the eastern part had been pacified, but in the mountainous western part the insurgents still held the towns in the foothills of the Sierra de Tagaytay and the towns of Ternate and Naic, near the seacoast, and prevented the inhabitants of the neighboring towns from appearing to take advantage of the amnesty, although elsewhere in Cavite, on April 13 alone, 24,000 had presented themselves for that purpose.

Among the insurgent leaders the pressure of common adversity was not sufficient to destroy old rivalries. At the end of April they broke out into sudden flame and the band of Bonifacio fired upon the band of Aguinaldo. Bonifacio was taken and stripped of his rifles, his wife narrowly escaped rape by one of his rival's leaders, and after trial he was sentenced to death for conspiracy against the life of the president. On May 8, 1897, Aguinaldo commuted the sentence to solitary imprisonment for life, but since that time no man has seen the supreme leader of the Katipúnan. Aguinaldo later stated that he had had him shot. His action upon the sentence must have been for the purpose of avoiding the alienation of the adherents of Bonifacio. He could say in public that he had spared his life, as proven by a written record (Exhibit 30), while some secret emissary, under private instructions, made away with his rival. While the leaders were thus struggling for the mastery of the Katipúnan the Spanish authorities were preparing to sweep their bands from the towns which thev still held.

Shortly after his arrival Gen. Primo de Rivera issued a proclamation of amnesty, to run until the King’s birthday, May 17, and proceeded to Cavite Province to take the field in person. On May 1 operations began by the three brigades of that province moving forward in concert, while the fourth brigade in Batangas was charged with preventing the beaten force from taking refuge on the precipitous slopes of the Suñgay and Tagaytay mountains. In two weeks the last intrenched insurgent positions were occupied with but small loss, and Cavite Province was declared conquered and pacified.

The governor-general drew up a plan by which troops were to be so stationed and such measures were to be taken as would prevent the recrudescence of the insurrection. This plan was never put into effective operation, probably because men could not be spared, and the

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troops, without having remained long enough in their stations to accomplish anything permanent in the way of tranquilizing their various districts, were withdrawn to Manila on May 18, leaving a single battalion under the orders of the governor. As the province was thus stripped of troops the members of the Katipúnan, seeing the time opportune, renewed their activities and formed plans to revive the insurrection.

Aguinaldo, conquered in Cavite Province, took refuge in the almost inaccessible mountains which divide it from Batangas, and gathered about him the insurgents who had refused to avail themselves of the amnesty granted by the governor-general. As he had rid himself of his ablest rival, his authority seems to have been everywhere recognized by the insurgents, who saw that in his hands were now the formidable powers of the Katipúnan.

In the districts bordering on Cavite and Manila provinces, the insurrection, in place of dying out, revived. In Bulacán many insurgents appeared in arms and frequent encounters took place between them and the Spanish forces, which were kept moving incessantly. On May 30 Malvar took possession of Talisay, on Lake Taal, and had to be driven out from the intrenchments which he had built.

On June 10, 1897, Aguinaldo, with some 500 men, crossed the Pásig River almost within sight and hearing of Manila, proceeded to Biac-na-bató, some 60 miles from the capital in the foothills of the mountains of Bulacán, where he was joined by other bands. On June 14 a Spanish column had to withdraw with heavy loss from the northern part of Manila Province.

From his mountain fastnesses, Emilio Aguinaldo, now installed as president of the revolutionary government, with the additional title of generalissimo of the army of liberation, proceeded to perform various acts of supreme authority, and appointed as vice-president Mariano Trias. who remained in Batangas and Cavite provinces at the head of a small force.

When Aguinaldo reached Biac-na-bató, resistance had not ceased but its character had changed. Guerrilla warfare had been adopted by the insurgents, and the Spanish commands were forced to follow an enemy who was never dangerous to large bodies, but who always was to small ones -- an enemy who, wearing no uniform, upon the approach of a large body, became peaceful laborers in the fields along the road, ready to pick up their rifles or bolos and use them against a small party or a straggler. The leaders had not been killed or captured, and, although the result of the campaign in Cavite had been to sweep the organized insurgents from that province, yet, in spite of their heavy losses, enough were left to act as centers for the guerilla warfare which continued to extend from that province as from a single point of infection. The Spaniards had cut wide and deep, but they had not cut wide and deep enough.

Men who adopt the methods of guerrilla war thereby abandon the restrictions which international law has placed upon indulgence in

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the more base and cruel passions to which war gives rise, and have decided to cross the line of delimitation, which the public sense of civilized nations has drawn between the belligerent and the noncombatant; or else the men who adopt these methods have never heard of international law, and are guided by no sense except that of apparent immediate expediency. And yet guerrilla warfare is not a warfare of despair. Its cruelty is a calculated cruelty, and its adoption, except by savages, is a conscious and willful return to savag[e]ry. It or submission was the only choice left to Aguinaldo, and he did not choose it without some hope, for Spain had sent her last reinforcements. General Polavieja at the close of his campaign in Cavite had asked for 20 battalions to garrison the places which he had captured and to complete the pacification of the disaffected provinces. Spain had no more reinforcements for the Far East, and his request had been refused. Upon his arrival, Gen. Primo de Rivera had informed the Spanish authorities that he would need no reinforcements and had disbanded the Spanish volunteers. Aguinaldo must have realized that, although he had lost heavily in men and arms, yet the Spaniards, too, had lost, and that unless the country was won over to them their loss of men could not be replaced, while his could. He, however, could replace his loss in firearms and ammunition only by capture from the Spaniards, while they could draw upon Spain.

Failure to adopt the methods of guerilla warfare is almost always due to a desire to avoid the suffering which it inevitably causes among noncombatants. In Aguinaldo's theory of war there were no noncombatants. Although there could have been no reasonable expectation that the prolongation of the conflict would secure the recognition of the independence of the Malay States these men hoped to found, yet by adopting it there was a reasonable expectation of obtaining such measure of recognition as, in fact, they did obtain. Whatever they may have fought for at first, the leaders were fighting now for their own safety. From their point of view their policy was a wise one. The Spanish force in the Philippines could not be increased until the chances of the campaign in Cuba permitted the withdrawal of troops from that island. Until troops could be withdrawn from there it would be impossible to compensate for the diminution of the effective strength of the army in the Archipelago caused by [ca]sualties and disease, which Gen. Primo de Rivera said amounted to nearly 40 per cent a year, a drain which would be inevitably increased by the necessities of guerrilla warfare, forcing the divisions of the command into smaller and ever smaller detachments, difficult to supply, and with diminution in size exposed to increasing danger of attack by a hostile population. And then Aguinaldo probably reckoned upon an increase in his force from the acts of retaliation which accompany guerrilla warfare, and, which, when permitted by subordinate commanders, are so ill advised, for every village which is burnt and whose people are allowed to remain unfed sends its men to join the guerrilla bands. But Gen. Primo de Rivera had commanded before in the Philippines, where he was personally popular, and knew the country well. He saw the

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expediency of treating with humanity the population not openly engaged in hostilities, and by degrees won it over to himself and the Spanish cause, enabling him to fight Filipinos with Filipinos.

He himself said (46) that it was not sufficient for an army to triumph over guerrilla bands; to conquer the support of the country itself is necessary. Unless this is obtained, even when the country is occupied by soldiers, the war continues and grows. It is not sufficient to kill and to destroy; a desert is not necessarily at peace. A people who have risen in arms submit only of their own will, and only when the majority has been induced to believe that their property and their lives are safer in the hands of the leaders of the conquering army than in the hands of the leaders who have called them to the field.

In the month of July, 1897, no actions of importance were fought. Miguel Malvar exercised command over the Batangas insurgents, while Llanera was the principal chief in Central Luzón. In August Spanish troops had to disperse insurgents in Cavite Province, showing that the fires of insurrection were still smoldering there. Aguinaldo and Llanera made repeated attacks upon the town of San Rafael, Bulacán, but were repulsed, while in Batangas the insurgents had to be driven from an intrenched position near Lake Taal. In Laguna bands of insurgents armed with Remington and Mauser rifles went about attacking small towns and isolated "haciendas," but were usually overtaken and dispersed. On September 4 some 5,000 insurgents attacked Aliaga, Nueva Écija, and the small garrison there succeeded in holding its position only owing to the exhaustion of the attacking force. There were engagements in Pampanga, Tayabas, Laguna, and Batangas provinces, and a serious plot was discovered in Manila. By October the zone of guerrilla activity had spread to Pangasinán, Tarlac, Nueva Écija, and as far as Principe Province.

By this time the necessity of additional troops to take the place of those unfit for service was apparent. As the governor-general was not able to obtain troops from Spain, he was compelled to again resort to native volunteers, who, indeed, he said were to be preferred to the raw recruits which had been sent from the Peninsula. These by a decree of October 16, 1897, were called for from the provinces of Luzón, the Visayas, and the Christian parts of Mindanao. The decree called for two classes of volunteers --local and mobilized. The local volunteers were to be employed in the defense of their own towns and for patrol service. When in service they were to receive the same pay and allowances as native troops. The mobilized volunteers were to be armed, equipped, and fed by the Government, and were to act in combination with the regular troops. They were to receive slightly greater pay and allowances than the native troops, and those who remained in the ranks for more than six months were to be entitled to certain privileges, including exemption of themselves and their first-born sons from military service, exemption from the payment of taxes in kind, and from payment for “cédulas" or certificates of identity. Land bounties were provided for both classes of volunteers, and medals to commemorate their serv-

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ice. The call for volunteers wa[s] everywhere responded to with enthusiasm. Gen. Primo de Rivera says that he used all possible precautions to see that these volunteers were volunteers in fact, for only then could he feel secure of their fidelity. When 22,000 men or both classes had been enrolled enlistment was stopped. According to the governor-general there were only 5 desertions from this force prior to his departure from the islands, when he left 4,400 men of the mobilized militia. [45] Thus by degrees the devotion of the people drifted away from the insurgent leaders, who were forced to adopt measures of spoliation to live, and in December Gen. Primo de Rivera assembled a force of 8,000 Spanish soldiers, with which he invested the insurgent stronghold of Biac-na-bató, where were assembled Aguinaldo and many of his leaders.

In order to obtain this force the governor-general replaced the Spanish troops with volunteers in the positions from which the former had been withdrawn. The archbishop of Manila cooperated in the investment by placing at the disposal of Gen. Primo ,de Rivera between 20,000 and 30,000 men to carry supplies to the besieging army. These men were adherents of the church and were led to offer their
services through the exercise of the influence of the archbishop upon the parish priests. In fact, the rapidity with which volunteers were obtained was probably largely due to the influence of the parish priest, and as these volunteers were of great value to Spain in crushing out the embers of the insurrection it is evident that the friars had given another reason for their hatred by the class of natives represented by Aguinaldo. It must have been evident to them that they still stood between them and their control of the masses of the people. Their attack upon the Spanish clergy the following year was largely inspired by the desire to succeed to their influence upon these masses, an influence which the followers of Aguinaldo desired to exert and to exert untrammeled and alone.

Read more.

Ileto, Reynaldo C. Excerpts from The Diorama Experience: A Visual History of the Philippines. Makati City: Ayala Foundation, 2004. 84-93.

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Katipunan Initiation Rites
Manila, 1892

The arrest and exile of Jose Rizal convinced many Filipinos of the need for more radical measures to attain equality with, if not independence from, Spain. Andres Bonifacio, an admirer of Rizal and a member of La Liga Filipina (the Philippine League), proceeded to organize a secret society named Kataastaasan Kagalanggalang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan (The Highest and Most Venerable Association of the Sons and Daughters of the Nation). The Katipunan, as the KKK was commonly referred to, was a small confraternity, numbering only three hundred from 1892 to 1895. It drew its inspiration from European Freemasonry as well as from confraternities or sodalities approved by the Catholic Church.

Bonifacio was a native of Tondo, a warehouseman, apart-time actor in vernacular dramas or komedya. Although proficient enough in reading Spanish, he wrote and spoke Tagalog almost exclusively. In his writings, he spoke of history and revolution in terms that the common people could understand. This is evident in his manifesto, Ang Dapat Mabatid ng Mga Tagalog (What the Tagalogs Should Know).

Bonifacio pictured the pre-colonial past as one of great abundance and prosperity. Everyone -- men and women, young and old -- Could read and write in their own language. Good relations were maintained with Japan and other neighboring lands. But the Spaniards came and seduced the natives into becoming their allies.

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The relationship with Spain was sealed by means of a pact which, Bonifacio wrote, "consisted of taking blood from each other's veins, mixing and drinking it as a sign of genuine and wholehearted sincerity in pledging not to be traitorous to their agreement. This was called the 'Blood Compact' of King Sikatuna and Legazpi, the representative of the King of Spain." This pact marked the beginning of the "fall" from an age of pre-Spanish wholeness into a dark age of oppression.

Bonifacio spoke of the people's duty to redeem the country in order to bring forth a condition called kalayaan. While routinely translated as "independence," the meaning of kalayaan runs deeper: it stems from the word layaw, meaning childhood bliss, bodily pleasure, and the satisfaction of necessities. The revolutionists coined the term kalayaan to define independence not just in terms of political autonomy from Spain but also as a general condition of well-being, abundance, and happiness -- a return of the golden age.

This proved to bean attractive appeal to the working classes of Manila and its environs. After Bonifacio's manifesto and similar writings appeared in the newspaper Kalayaan in mid-1896, the Katipunan's membership rose sharply to 30,000, and by early 1897 this had grown to hundreds of thousands.

The Katipunan's ideology was brought home to each member through the society's initiation ritual, an adaptation of the Catholic Easter Vigil ceremony enhanced by Masonic symbols. In a dark room with only a single point of illumination (patterned after the Easter candle), the neophyte was made to answer a series of questions, like those asked in baptismal ceremonies. However, instead of repudiating the devil in order to be reborn in the Catholic Church, the new Katipunero had to repudiate the dark age of friar domination in order to be reborn in a new community of the children of the Motherland (Inang Bayan).

The final step of the ritual was the signing of membership papers with the Katipunero's own blood. This signified not just his or her willingness to shed blood, or even to die, in freeing the Motherland but also the repudiation of the original blood compact between Sikatuna and Legazpi. The new blood compact would unite the sons and daughters of the Motherland who would call each other kadugo, "of the same blood."

While effective in ensuring commitment to the cause owing to its underlying themes of death and rebirth, the Katipunan initiation rite was too cumbersome and time-consuming as mass mobilization went fully underway in 1897. It was soon replaced by a simple oath-taking ceremony.

Aguinaldo abandoned the secret society mode of organization altogether when he formed a revolutionary government. Nevertheless, the Katipunan form of organization with its associated rituals survived in many areas under little-known leaders, sometimes assuming the characteristics of religio-political sects. And during the difficult guerrilla war with the United States, Aguinaldo himself would attempt to revive the Katipunan in order to keep the spirit of resistance alive among the lower classes.


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The Revolution Against Spain Begins
Manila, 1896

The Manila Katipunan was composed of workers, servants, petty clerks and traders, militiamen, and even seamen in cargo ships who spread the society's message to other parts of the archipelago. Some Filipino workers returning from abroad joined as well.

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Candido Iban and Francisco del Castillo, who worked as seamen and divers in Australia, were lucky enough to win in the Australian lottery and brought their winnings back to Manila. Joining the Katipunan in 1895, they donated four hundred pesos of their prize of one thousand pesos for the purchase of a printing press, which was used to print the newspaper Kalayaan, They then returned to Capiz to organize the Katipunan among their province mates.

Most wealthy and prominent Filipinos stayed away from the Katipunan. They saw it as a movement of the lower-middle class and gentes ordinarias (commoners) that lacked the armaments and skills to overcome Spanish state power. Bonifacio, however, managed to implicate the "better classes" in various ways in order to secure their financial and professional help. Even after Rizal refused to join, for example, his name and portrait were incorporated in Katipunan ceremonies.

After the secret society was exposed on August 19, 1896, Manila and other major towns became the scene of a massive manhunt in which about five hundred prominent Filipinos were arrested and tried for conspiracy and sedition before a special court. Spain's overreaction to the Katipunan's discovery lost her the allegiance of many among the indio and mestizo elite and their families who were unjustly persecuted.

The Katipunan's numerical strength lay in the suburbs of San Francisco Neri (today's Mandaluyong), San Juan de los Montes, and the barrios beyond, where the predominantly farming population had been recruited into the society. In one such stronghold, Balintawak, Bonifacio secretly gathered his men for the inevitable confrontation with the Spanish Army.

One of Bonifacio's close associates at Balintawak was an old remontado (rebel) named Laong, who wore a salacot (gourd) hat ornamented with silver, with a knob of the same metal. The missionaries labeled remontados those indios who had abandoned the towns and the Christian faith to live outside the control of Spain. Laong is said to have "attracted, catechized and initiated out-of-hand" many peasants in the fields surrounding Balintawak. He was one of those privileged to carry a revolver, of which the Katipunan had precious few. Laong led a group of remontados and peasant fanners in an attack on the Chinese and their stores in Caloocan and other places in the vicinity.

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Propertied Filipinos, including most ilustrados, would certainly have frowned upon such actions perpetrated by the "rabble," as Bonifacio's motley followers were sometimes called.

At Balintawak, the Katipunan code, which had been deciphered by the Spanish authorities, was changed. From there, the Katipuneros moved to Barrio Kangkong and eventually to Barrio Pugadlawin. At Pugadlawin, Bonifacio asked his men whether they were prepared to fight to the end. They all responded in the affirmative. Bonifacio then urged everyone to tear up his or her tax certificate (the infamous cedula personal), a symbolic gesture signifying the end of servitude to Spain. They did so amidst cries of "Long live the Philippines! Long live the Katipunan!" The gatherings at Balintawak and Pugadlawin were also occasions for communal meals, which brought the "children of the Motherland" together prior to battle.

As the Pugadlawin scene clearly shows, the Katipuneros were armed mostly with bolos and knives. Despite the defection of a few native militiamen with their arms, the Katipunan was no match for the Spanish forces. After a major defeat in Pinaglabanan, Bonifacio retreated to the hills of Morong province (now Rizal). Montalban was of special significance to him because it was in the cave of Pamitinan, abode of the legendary King Bernardo Carpio, that he and his associates had solemnly declared the independence of the country in April 1895. Perhaps it was the example of the remontado Laong that inspired Bonifacio to admit that in the case the Katipunan failed, he would remain an outlaw and never return to the Spanish fold.


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The Execution of Jose Rizal
Manila, 1896

Jose Rizal had been exiled to Dapitan in Mindanao because of suspicions that he was a revolutionary. But when he applied to serve as a volunteer physician in Cuba, the application was approved. His plan was to sail for Spain and go from there to Cuba. Before he could reach Spain, however, orders reached the ship's captain that Rizal was to be arrested and sent back to the Philippines.

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When Rizal was thrown into prison in November 1896, one of the first things he did was to design and send to his family a little sketch of "The Agony in the Garden," beneath which he wrote, "This is but the first Station." With him in his cell were a Bible and a copy of Tomas a Kempis's On the Imitation of Christ. By sending his family the Biblically-inspired sketch and note which would later come to the attention of more and more people together with his poem Mi Ultimo Adios, Rizal was obviously patterning his final days upon the familiar story of Christ's passion and death.

The publicized trial was a farce, but it fitted the scenario perfectly. The prosecutor called Rizal "the soul of this rebellion" whose countrymen render him "liege homage and look up to him as a superior being whose sovereign commands are obeyed without question." The Office of the Governor General submitted a document to the court that described Rizal as "the great agitator of the Philippines who is not only personally convinced that he is called to be the chosen vessel of a kind of redemption of his race, but who is considered by the masses of the native population to be a superhuman being."

Faced with such charges, Rizal could only plead that he had nothing to do with political affairs from July 1892 to June of that year and that he was opposed to the armed conspiracy. But the Judge Advocate General refused to allow publication of Rizal's manifesto condemning the uprising because, in effect it "said in substance: 'Let us subject ourselves now, for later I shall lead to the Promised Land.'" At the trial's end, news of Rizal's impending execution quickly "spread everywhere, producing a deep impression."

Rizal refused to be brought to the execution site in a military wagon, as was customary. He preferred to walk instead. Whether he intended it or not, everything about

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his final hour was public, subject to rumor and interpretation. Entering the square formed by a company of soldiers who were his executioners, Rizal maintained an "amazing serenity," taking firm steps as if on a stroll. A Spanish doctor, wondering at his calmness, took his pulse and found it perfectly normal.

Despite his objections, Rizal had his back to the firing squad, but he was prepared with his special stance and suddenly twisted around in death, to fall face upwards. And sure enough, after uttering loud and clear his last words, "Consummatum est!" which was followed by a barrage of musket fire, Rizal lay dead facing the breaking dawn.

Rizal's mode of death, publicized in the Spanish and vernacular newspapers and repeated by word of mouth, was an event that could be comprehended at least by all Christian Filipinos. It enabled a greater number of people, regardless of regional, linguistic, and class differences, to discover a common identity by empathizing with Rizal and even following his example. It sparked the rapid growth of the Katipunan and religio-political sects in Luzon and the Visayas during the early months of 1897. A common feature of these diverse movements was their rallying cry, "Viva Rizal!"

The 1898 Republican government further encouraged the interpretation of Rizal as a national martyr. Toward the end of 1898 and in January 1899, the revolutionary newspapers La Independencia and El Heraldo de la Revolucion carried descriptions of the commemoration of Rizal's death in various towns.

Rizal himself had said, "the day the Spanish inflict martyrdom... farewell, pro-friar government, and perhaps farewell, Spanish government."


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Court Martial of Andres Bonifacio
Cavite, 1897

The Katipunan uprising began in Manila and was fairly quickly suppressed, but in the surrounding provinces, events progressed in different ways, depending on the specific characteristics of each locale. The Katipunan leaders in Cavite tended to come from merchant and landowning families that had come to dominate municipal politics. Most had a Spanish education and the mayors (gobernadorcillos), in particular, could boast of some experience in warfare through leading their local police forces against bandit gangs. They were better situated to win battles against Spanish forces and liberate some towns, while Bonifacio was suffering one setback after another in the vicinity of Manila.

As Santiago Alvarez of San Francisco de Malabon writes of the experience of independence during the latter days of September 1896: "The people were truly happy, free to enjoy life in all sorts of ways. Food was plentiful; all things were cheap; there were no perversities, no robberies, no thefts, no pickpockets. Everyone had love for his fellow men, and in every place the Katipunan's teaching of brotherly love held sway." Rumors of the victories of Emilio Aguinaldo, a former mayor of Kawit, soon spread to other locales. A foreign journalist described people from Manila, Pasay, and Morong towns, "thousands of them, men and women, young and old, carrying their possessions, hurrying to place themselves under the Little Republic of Cavite." Early in December, Bonifacio, whose wife Gregoria de Jesus had relatives in Cavite, accepted an invitation to transfer his operations there.

Upon arriving with his wife, his brothers, and twenty men, Bonifacio found himself caught in the crossfire between two rival Katipunan factions, the Magdalo and the Magdiwang, and became

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identified with the latter. The Tejeros convention, held on March 22, 1897, was an attempt to solve these internal problems. A revolutionary government replaced the Katipunan society, and Aguinaldo, the head of the Magdalo, (in fact Magdalo, or Magdalene, was his nom de guerre) was elected president. The new government took over the house that served as the Magdiwang headquarters and placed a trooper at Bonifacio's door to curtail the Supremo's activities.

Andres Bonifacio's defeat at the Tejeros election was facilitated by comments of the opposition that he lacked education, could not handle Spanish, and was not truly a republican because people in the streets hailed him as "Hari ng Katagalugan" (King of the Tagalogs), not to mention his use of the controversial title "Supremo." Some went to the extent of calling him a leader of bandits called "Katipungoles" and derided his alleged claim that the mythical Bernardo Carpio would come down from Mount Tapusi to help his struggling forces.

All of these criticisms actually point to Bonifacio's ability to render the struggle meaningful to the common people and the disdain with which many members of the "better classes" regarded such behavior. One criticism seems valid though: Bonifacio was a poor military strategist compared to the likes of Aguinaldo.

Perhaps owing to the unfair and insulting manner in which the Magdalo leaders treated him, Bonifacio refused to accept the results of the Tejeros election. He gathered his loyal followers and left with his wife and two brothers, intending to return to his hideouts in Morong. Aguinaldo, interpreting this as insubordination and a cause of disunity in the revolutionary camp, ordered the arrest of the Bonifacio brothers. In the skirmish that ensued, one of Bonifacio's brothers, Ciriaco, was killed and the other brother, Procopio, wounded. Andres was brought back to Naic, a prisoner of the revolutionary government. He and Procopio were court-martialed, found guilty of sedition, and sentenced to death.

The final decision was left to Aguinaldo, and there is a document proving that Aguinaldo commuted the penalty to indefinite exile. But perhaps his fellow commanders overruled him. Andres and Procopio Bonifacio were executed by a platoon of soldiers under Major Lazaro Macapagal's command in Mount Buntis, Maragondon, on May 10, 1897. The question of ultimate responsibility for this act, which demoralized a great number of Katipuneros, still remains unresolved.

Read more.

Richardson, Jim. "Ileto's Indeterminacies." 2005.

Pasyon and Revolution and other pieces by Ileto, it is not entirely flippant to suggest, might be seen as akin to the pasyon itself, as texts capable of generating multiple, even contradictory, meanings. These diverse meanings stem not just from the diverse interpretations of individual readers, but also from Ileto’s own inconsistency.

Perceptions or empirical realities?

Ileto, it has been said (BfB, 287), is interested principally in perceptions rather than behavior or attitudes, and indeed this statement can be supported by a host of quotes. The tenets of traditional empiricist historiography, Ileto maintains, - cause-and-effect, objective truth, common sense, the author-centric fixation of meanings etc. - are outmoded, and need to be rejected in favor of structuralist and phenomenological approaches that focus on collective discourses, mentalities and perceptions.

On the other hand, Ileto by no means forswears addressing traditional concerns. When analyzing the popular movements of the period 1840-1910, he makes innumerable statements about the character, attitudes and behavior of individuals as well as collectivities. This, one might argue, smacks strongly of what he scorns in other passages as fuddy-duddy, old-style history. He indicates, for example, that his purpose in examining literature like the pasyon, awit and poems is largely instrumental; he is seeking to complement conventional sources and to shed fresh light on the trajectories and ideologies of "concrete struggles", not merely on how they were perceived (P&R, 14-5; CI, 95; 103).

Bonifacio's "real" character and intentions: chimerical and irrelevant or sufficiently knowable and relevant for the historian to offer a view?

This inconsistency is illustrated very clearly when Ileto discusses the KKK Supremo, Andres Bonifacio. He claims that, "like a ‘text’, Bonifacio cannot be pinned down to a particular meaning and truth. He could only operate within the prevailing social structure and mode of discourse of his time" (BTSS, 25). Ileto wishes to call attention not to “the historical content of Bonifacio's work but its form and language” (P&R, 103, emphasis added). “Bonifacio's psychological make-up”, he writes, “is never discussed in [my book] Pasyon and Revolution”..…Whether or not Bonifacio intended (his trip with other Katipuneros to Mount Tapusi in 1895 to evoke associations with the legendary giant Bernardo Carpio) "is irrelevant to the web of meanings in which his gestures were located" (CI, 96). "Whether Bonifacio was a Mason or a Catholic is irrelevant here…. " (P&R, 103)

On the other hand, Ileto by no means forswears imparting "facts" and judgments about Andres Bonifacio. "They called him an ignoramus, an outsider from Tondo, a poor military strategist, a Mason, a monarchist, a tulisan (bandit) even. But beneath these accusations, most of which are valid...." (P&R, 137, emphasis added).

Bonifacio's "real" character and intentions: closer to the ilustrado propagandistas or to the Tagalog millenarian tradition?

Having succumbed to the temptation to proffer "facts" and judgments, Ileto gives a portrayal that is not just ambivalent - as indeed might befit Bonifacio's character - but self-contradictory. It is tempting here to jest that Ileto gets hoisted by his own post-modernist petard. Due to an excess of theoretical purity, in other words, he is so reluctant to "privilege" one contending "truth" or "meaning" (as divined either by contemporary observers or by historians) over another that he accepts and endorses a variety of "truths" and "meanings", even when they appear mutually exclusive. But presumably this cannot be the case, because the post-modernist purist would always present contending views as the perceptions of others rather than adopting them as his own. The real source of contradiction, it appears, is the opposite of theoretical purity. Ileto cannot, in the end, entirely shake off the shackles of traditional historiography or abjure the view "from above".

(a) Close to the propagandistas

Ileto, contends Glenn May (IH, 143), "essentially eliminated the Propaganda Movement from the history of the Philippine Revolution, linking Bonifacio not to a reform program shaped by European liberal ideology but to a tradition of home-grown popular uprisings." Perhaps this overstates the case. Ileto criticizes those who he says have convinced "themselves of the essentially bourgeois ideology of the Katipunan as a whole" (BTSS, 26), but he does not deny that the ideology of some or all of the Katipunan's leaders might be termed "essentially bourgeois". The foundation of the Katipunan he likewise describes as having been "excessively" attributed to ilustrado influence, but he does not deny that influence altogether (P&R, 98). The middle class origins of the leadership in both city and countryside, he acknowledges, are "obvious" (BTSS, 26). Historians, he accepts, have been right to assume that Bonifacio's manifesto "Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog" was "inspired by the writings of ilustrados like Rizal" (P&R, 103).

So, the Katipunan did have some ancestry in the Propaganda Movement and 1896 was in some degree the culmination of a nationalist tide that stemmed from heightened Westernization (P&R, 97). The primitive-to-modern construct adopted by previous historians, Ileto thinks, exaggerates these linkages and conceals the linkages with the folk millenarian tradition, but he does not totally reject the conclusions drawn from this construct, and even acknowledges the "usefulness" of the construct itself for certain purposes (CI, 100).

The pasyon language, Ileto writes, is outside the subject, in society, delimiting the individual construction of meaning for those immersed in its world. The "ilustrados, on the other hand, could stand apart from it and 'use' it" (CI, 96, emphasis added). The Katipunan supremo, Ileto suggests in some passages, belonged with the ilustrados in this regard. He and "other Filipino nationalists of some education", for example, are seen as finding in the Bernardo Carpio story "a popular perception of events on which to hinge their separatist ideas" (P&R, 126, emphasis added). Similarly, "Bonifacio was so adept at tapping popular feelings to serve his revolutionary ends that he was unavoidably incorporated into the folk view of events" (P&R, 137, emphasis added). Surely the reader must infer from these passages that Ileto has concluded Bonifacio's nationalist, revolutionary ideas and ends were somehow more "modern" than the ideas and ends of the Tagalog masses.

(b) Close to the Tagalog millenarian tradition

And yet, as Glenn May suggests (IH, 155), Ileto does situate Bonifacio firmly in the Tagalog millenarian tradition. By this I presume May means not merely that Bonifacio’s personality and appeals were so perceived by sections of the "pobres y ignorantes" (which is indisputable, and not in the least incompatible with the position that "Bonifacio was close to the propagandistas"), or that he consciously tailored his appeals to a pasyon-attuned audience (almost certainly he did), but that he actually shared in large measure the millenarians' world view.

That Ileto does take this latter view can again be supported by a number of quotes. “There was something about Bonifacio's mentality that a believer in enlightenment liberalism like Carlos Ronquillo found disturbing, and decried as a ‘dark underside’” (BTSS, 28, emphasis added). Bonifacio, like the millenarians but apparently unlike Aguinaldo, believed that spiritual preparation was as important as military preparation in gaining victories on the battlefield (P&R, 176). His downfall at the hands of the Caviteño elite can be traced to his pre-occupation with "sacred ideals" and moral transformation. He conceived of national unity as each citizen's rebirth in a society of liwanag (P&R, 135-7).


The pasyon idiom: politically neutral or radical?

No reliable evidence, Glenn May concludes (IH, 161-3), links Bonifacio to the pasyon and the Philippine millenarian tradition. Again, I presume the issue here is whether Bonifacio actually shared the millenarians' world-view. If so, I believe May’s verdict would still hold good even if all the “Bonifacio texts” of dubious provenance turned out to be genuine.

The pasyon, says Ileto, cannot be regarded as an "ideology", an "articulation of ideas", an "inspiration" or a "cause" (CI, 95-7). To argue otherwise is to confuse structure with content. Ileto might even object to May’s formulation “pasyon tradition" (IH, 155). Rather, says Ileto, the pasyon offered units of meaning; it was a language, an idiom, a modality of social discourse.

The pasyon story, Ileto initially observes, can be construed politically from diametrically opposed standpoints. On the one hand Christ may be seen as a subversive figure, a man “poor and lowly" who attracted his followers mainly from the common people, drew them away from their families and from subservience to their wealthy masters, gave them special powers and formed them into a brotherhood that proclaimed mankind's salvation. But alternatively the scriptures might be used to inculcate loyalty to Spain, Church and the status quo; to encourage resignation to worldly injustice and suffering by promising the poor, meek and humble their reward in the afterlife. Pasyon language might equally be employed to define either a conservative, orthodox religious fraternity or a radical heresy (P&R, 15).

As his discussion moves on to the popular movements themselves, however, Ileto all but forgets these crucial points and increasingly delineates the pasyon idiom as inherently radical, as properly belonging to the dissident tradition alone. When discussing the early 1900s, for example, Ileto says that for Macario Sakay and other leaders of the revived Katipunan "nothing was more infuriating than the abuse of the term kalayaan. The word was alienated from its original, full meaning by collaborators and plain politicians who sought to justify their behavior to a populace with fresh memories of the revolution….One can imagine the surprise and disbelief of the revolutionaries at such co-optation of their language by collaborators in the towns"(P&R, 219-20, emphasis added). Ileto might counter this point by saying he was representing Sakay's views rather than his own, but at the very least it is clear that he strongly empathizes with those views. In any event, if Sakay and his colleagues were so indignant about pacification rhetoric, why did they twice succumb to it? In 1901 they accepted positions in a Nacionalista Party founded on a platform of peace, order and independence "in opportune time…under the protectorate of the United States", and in 1906 they were persuaded to surrender after the ilustrado politician Dominador Gomez had promised them that the establishment of a Philippine Assembly would be "the gate of kalayaan". Partly, Ileto notes, the surrender showed regrettable naïveté. Nevertheless, he suggests, it also reflected the idea found in the dissident folk tradition that kalayaan could not be realized until Filipinos had proven themselves worthy of it (P&R, 240-2).

The pasyon idiom: the rightful property of the Tagalog masses or pretty much ubiquitous?

But the notion that moral upliftment was an essential prerequisite for liberty, of course, was not confined to the dissident tradition. It is a recurrent and prominent theme in the works of the propagandistas. The liberties he desired for the country, Rizal wrote in his manifesto condemning the revolution, "I made conditional on the education of the people, so that by means of learning and work they would have their own personality and make themselves worthy of (such liberties)".

The language and structures of the pasyon, it can be demonstrated, were employed by the elite before 1896 as well as subsequently. Ileto himself makes this point, but periodically fails to keep it in mind. "Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog", he notes, is ordered in a Lost Eden/ Fall/ Redemption sequence - a structural feature of the pasyon. "Is this merely Bonifacio," he asks, "or have we not begun to discuss the masses?" (CI, 104). But the same "Lost Eden" theme, Ileto acknowledges elsewhere, can frequently be found in the writings of Rizal and other ilustrados (NLE, 133).

This brings us back, finally, to the distinction Ileto makes between those whose construction of meaning was delimited by pasyon language (the "masses") and those who could stand apart from it and “use” it (the elite) (CI, 96). How do we know where to draw the line between these two groups? How do we know whether an individual employing pasyon language and structures actually shares mass perceptions? We don't. Ileto, once again, seems ambivalent and inconsistent on this point himself, for in certain instances he suggests that members of the elite did not always "stand apart" from mass perceptions and beliefs. He contends that, "for Rizal", martyrdom by firing squad was "the culmination of his pasyon" (P&R, 312, emphasis added). Aguinaldo was not only "an effective orator in the traditional idiom of struggle", but to protect himself against misfortune reportedly added to his entourage an individual with potent special powers.

But in Ileto's view others who definitely did stand apart from Tagalog folk culture, like Governor General Harrison, could employ pasyon structures unwittingly, and evoke a passionate response from a Tagalog audience almost accidentally (OC, 100). This is because Harrison too came from a Catholic background, Ileto might counter. What then, about the lengthy passages on "liwanag" in the Tagalog translation of the Koran, it might be asked - elements of the pasyon idiom can be found wherever you look for them.

If Glenn May is right that Jose P. Santos "made the crucial linguistic choices" (IH, 161) when crafting a Tagalog version of "Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog", it therefore seems to me that those choices would have been accorded a deep significance and resonance by Ileto whatever they had been.

Indigenous categorization: valuable or let's not bother?

As May very aptly observes: "In Pasyon and Revolution, Ileto adopted a text-building strategy that might best be described as discursive blurring - by which I mean that he constructed his text in such a way as to blur important distinctions and link things that should not necessarily be linked" (IH, 146). The trouble with Ileto's one dimensional "from below" approach, to put it slightly differently, is that all the various movements he studies finish up cast in the same millenarian mould. Instead of suggesting criteria that might replace the orthodox, elite-defined constructs, it appears, the perception categories of folk Christianity reduce the political spectrum to a monochrome blotch.

At one point Ileto suggests he may offer alternatives to the elite-defined constructs: "'That religious/secular categories can be applied to 19th century Philippines is not self-evident and can be done only within critical limits. Or better still, why not derive categories from within the socio-cultural milieu itself?”(CI, 99). But once more he cannot make up his mind, because he also half-agrees with Foucault that any system of categorization amounts to an attempt to domesticate what should be exotic and unique. "For Foucault, the task is one of disordering, destructuring, unnaming - an extreme view, yet so relevant to our present situation" (BTSS, 27). This latter view must be the one upon which he finally settled, because the projected alternative categorization has not so far materialized.


Abbreviations

BfB Glenn Anthony May, The Battle for Batangas: a Philippine province at war (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991)

BTSS Reynaldo C. Ileto, "Bonifacio, the Text and the Social Scientist", Philippine Sociological Review, 32 (January-December 1984), pp.19-29.

CI Reynaldo C. Ileto, "Critical Issues in 'Understanding Philippine Revolutionary Mentality'", Philippine Studies, 30 (First Quarter, 1982), pp.92-119.

IH Glenn Anthony May, Inventing a Hero: the posthumous re-creation of Andres Bonifacio, (Madison: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1996).

NLE Reynaldo C. Ileto, "Outlines of a Non-Linear Emplotment of Philippine History" in Lim Teck Ghee (ed.), Reflections on Development in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1988), pp.130-59.

OC Reynaldo C. Ileto, “Orators and the Crowd: Philippine Independence Politics, 1910-1914” in Peter W. Stanley (ed.), Reappraising an Empire: new perspectives on Philippine-American History (Cambridge, Mass.: Committee on American-East Asian Relations of the Department of History in collaboration with the Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984), pp.85-113.

P&R Reynaldo Clemeña Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: popular movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979).

Read more.

Fast, Jonathan, and Richardson, Jim. "The Katipuneros: Revolutionary Leadership in City and Province." In Roots of Dependency: Political and Economic Revolution in 19th Century Philippines. Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1979. 67-74, 129-30.

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9

The Katipuneros: Revolutionary Leadership in City and Province

Rizal's view of the lowly character of the Katipunan was widely shared in ilustrado circles. In the opinion of Felipe Calderon, a plantation-owner and successful lawyer, the insurrection was “organized by the most ignorant element of the people.”¹ The first Filipino historian of the Katipunan, the propagandist Isabelo de los Reyes, stressed in a pamphlet published in 1900 that the revolutionary association was a “plebeian society,” whose members "belonged to the workmen and peasant classes" and among whose founders "there was not a single rich man, nor one of a learned profession."² Behind such observations lay either distaste or condescension. Later accounts, however, have often echoed this uncomplicated analysis of the Katipunan's composition more approvingly, presenting the insurrection as a salutary popular reaction against ilustrado gradualism and prevarication. The elaboration of this argument forms the central theme, for instance, of Teodoro Agoncillo's The Revolt of the Masses, which since its publication in 1956 has been generally accepted as the most authoritative study of the subject. The Katipunan, Agoncillo asserts at the outset, was a "distinctively plebeian society."³ Objectively, he writes, the "middle class" reformists had proven themselves "the bulwark of the Spanish reactionary party,” too concerned with their own position and consequently too cautious to make any real impact on the nature of colonial rule.⁴ Through their failure to provide effective leadership, their inability to understand the common people's aspirations and their snobbish aloofness they had won "the hatred of the masses" and direction of the nationalist cause had passed into other hands."⁵ The sentiments of the Katipuneros, Agoncillo agrees with Isabelo de los Reyes, were that "where there are learned men everything is brought to naught by discussions.” For this reason, they "did not want to admit the learned" into the association.⁶

Apart from their more militant and immediate commitment to separation from Spain, to what extent did the Katipuneros' ideas and aspirations differ from those of writers such as Rizal, Lopez-Jaena and del Pilar? Historiographical opinion on this question has undergone an evolution similar to that on the place of the Katipunan within Philippine society. Having observed that the association had been organized "from below,” many ilustrados felt that the revolutionaries had departed from the enlightenment liberalism of the propagandists. The Spanish accusation that "upper class

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Filipinos" were the true financiers and directors of the Katipunan was clearly unfounded, Felipe Calderon asserted, because the association was "socialistic."⁷ Florentino Torres, a prominent magistrate, testified that "the socialist character of the revolution of 1896… is a patent and positive fact."⁸ The ultimate goal of the Katipuneros, according to Isabelo de los Reyes, was the establishment of a "communistic republic."⁹ Such comments sowed the seed of historical orthodoxy. The officially approved chronicler of the American occupation, James LeRoy, saw in Katipunan propaganda "an element of resentment toward the wealthy" and expressed his agreement with the judgment of Calderon.¹⁰ The Filipino historian, Gregorio Zaide, in his monograph on the association, accepts without comment that the Katipunan's final objective was the "communistic republic" mentioned by de los Reyes.¹¹ But again it is Agoncillo's The Revolt of the Messes that develops the hypothesis at greatest length. The Katipunan, Agoncillo writes, was "fundamentally a mass idea based on utopian soclalism."¹² While the "middle classes" wanted to preserve their privileged position in Philippine life, the masses, symbolized by the Katipunan, wanted to overthrow the existing social order.¹³ Hostile to the "landowning class," Agoncillo asserts, the association aimed to abolish the basis of cacique power through the implementation of agrarian reform.¹⁴ Independence achieved and the grip of the "ruling class" destroyed, it would establish an economic democracy.¹⁶

Despite the weight of historical opinion behind them, the interpretations of Katipunan composition and purpose outlined above present a seriously distorted picture of the revolutionary association's character. Over-simplication and looseness of terminology have often compounded their error. One major source of confusion, pointed out by the historian Cesar Majul in a comment on the remarks of Florentino Torres, is that the mass character of the revolution per se has occasionally been taken as evidence of a "socialist" nature.¹⁶ Some observers have failed to appreciate, in other words, that although class and ideology are clearly related, they are nevertheless essentially distinct. To avoid repeating this mistake, therefore, and for the sake of greater clarity, the respective questions of composition and purpose will here be discussed individually.

The customary point of departure for proponents of the thesis that the insurrection was organized by "the most ignorant element" of the Filipino people has been the figure of Andres Bonifacio, popularly commemorated as the "Great Plebeian,” founder of the Katipunan and its President at the outbreak of the 1896 revolution. Agoncillo, for instance, despite his own evidence to the contrary, contends that Bonifacio was "almost illiterate" and "belonged to the lowest class."¹⁷ Even from the scanty information available on Bonifacio's life, it is certainly clear that the Katipunan Supremo was not of the "lowest class" of Philippine society.

The first of six children of Santiago Bonifacio, a tailor, and Catalina de Castro, a Spanish mestiza, he was born in the district of Tondo in 1863. His father had at one time served as the district's teniente mayor.¹⁸ The circumstances of the family are not recorded, but the parents were able to send Andres to private tutors in the locality and provide him with a sound elementary education.¹⁹ His studies were supplemented in the home, it is said, by a

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"learned and patriotic aunt."²⁰ However, his formal schooling was curtailed when he was orphaned at the age of fourteen and obliged to start work to help support his younger brothers and sisters. While still young he made and sold walking sticks and paper fans and, being a gifted calligraphist, designed advertising posters.²¹ Seeking more regular employment in his late teens, he joined Fleming & Co., a firm dealing in goods such as rattan and tar, afterwards transferring to another foreign commercial company, Fressel.& Co., where he remained until the outbreak of the revolution. Although traditionally presented as the decisive verification of Bonifacio's lowly proletarian credentials, the Supremo's occupational status in these two firms has apparently never been precisely determined, descriptions of his various positions ranging from "night watchman"²² and "warehouse-keeper"²³ through "clerk messenger"²⁴ to the distinctly less modest appellations of "agent"²⁵ and "broker".²⁶ Whatever the exact duties involved, however, employment in the capital's foreign houses offered good opportunities for advancement, and was much sought after. "The fathers of many who at this day figure as men of position and standing,” commented a British observer of Manileño society, “commenced their careers as messengers, warehousekeepers, clerks etc. of the foreign houses."²⁷

Circumstantial evidence that 8onifacio's fortunes were indeed on the rise is provided by his marriage in 1893 to Gregoria de Jesus, the daughter of a gobernadorcillo of the town of Caloocan, a few miles north of Manila. His bride's upbringing had been far from impoverished. Looking after family interests with her sister "to enable our two brothers to study in Manila", Gregoria recounted later in a memoir, "I had to go out in the country to supervise the planting and harvesting of our rice and to supervise our tenants and laborers and also to pay the wages of my father's workers on Sunday mornings."²⁶ It is also worth noting that although Gregoria's father hesitated before consenting to the marriage with Bonifacio, his initial reluctance was not based on any suggestion that his daughter's intended partner was beneath her station or that she would find it difficult to adjust to a less comfortable way of life. His objection, Gregoria recalled, was that Bonifacio was a freemason and therefore an enemy of the Church and likely to fall afoul of the authorities.²⁹ This points to another inconsistency in the view of the Katipunan leader as a simple plebeian. The majority of Filipino masons in the late nineteenth century were men of some substance and education, and masonry constituted the principal organizational focus for the domestic following of the expatriate ilustrado propagandists. When Rizal, himself a mason, returned to the Philippines in 1892 wishing to launch a new association for the "study and application of reforms" it was to the leading officers of Manila's lodges that he first turned for assistance.³⁰ The association resulting from this initiative was the Liga Filipina. According to Agoncillo, it "personified the middle class", to whom "it was inconceivable that the unlettered masses should be given the privileges of their respectable group.”³¹ In establishing the Liga, he asserts, the intellectual and wealthy gradualists "set up a sort of caste system from which the unlettered commoners were contemptuously excluded."³² Yet Bonifacio was one of Liga's founding members.

The foregoing discussion is not intended to infer that Bonifacio belonged

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to the same social stratum as men like Rizal. Educationally he was excluded from true ilustrado status by his unfinished schooling, and financially he probably was one of the least affluent of the original Liga members. But the relative modesty of Bonifacio's circumstances in this company should not disguise the fact that he occupied a position closer to the centre of the social pyramid than to its base, closer to the petty-bourgeoisie than the proletariat. His principal associates in the early Katipunan moved in much the same milieu. Among those who joined Bonifacio in founding the Katipunan in July 1892, for instance, was Teodoro Plata, then a court clerk in the Manila district of Binondo and later at the court of first instance in Mindoro. Plata was a first cousin of Gregoria de Jesus and subsequently married one of Bonifacio's sisters.³³ Together with Bonifacio and Plata in the first Katipunan "triangle" was Ladislao Diwa, a court clerk in the district of Quiapo, Manila. From his home province of Cavite, where his father was a master carpenter in charge of a workshop at the Spanish naval yard, Diwa had first come to Manila as a working student. After graduating from San Juan de Letran he enrolled in law at the University of Santo Tomas, where he first encountered Bonifacio, then clandestinely distributing propaganda literature to the students. The two became firm friends and for a while Diwa lived as a boarder in Bonifacio's house.³⁴

Elected president of the first supreme council of the Katipunan established late in 1892, was Deodato Arellano, brother-in-law of Marcelo H. del Pilar and himself an active figure in various groups that supported the expatriate writers and worked for the reformist cause at home. When the Liga Filipina was launched by Rizal, he was chosen council secretary. Arellano worked as a clerk in the arsenal of the Spanish artillery corps.³⁵ His successor as President of the Katipunan Supreme Council, elected in February 1893, was Roman Basa, who occupied a similar clerical position in the Spanish naval headquarters. Introduced to the association by Ladislao Diwa, a town-mate from San Roque in Cavite, Basa served as Katipunan president for two years, finally being replaced by Bonifacio himself.³⁶ During his incumbency a number of organization changes were made that sought to improve and systematize recruitment to the association, including the formation of district branches known as popular councils. Assigned to head the popular council of Santa Cruz, Manila, was Restituto Javier, son of a Tondo property owner and compadre and fellow-employee of Bonifacio.³⁷ Assigned to build Katipunan support in the Manila district of Trozo was a half-brother of Javier, Jose Turiano Santiago, who also held the position of secretary to the Katipunan Supreme Council. A graduate of Santo Tomas, Santiago made a living as an accountant and commercial agent.³⁸

Aside from Santiago and Ladislao Diwa, at least two other Supreme Council officers -- Pio Valenzuela and Emilio Jacinto -- had attended the Islands' only University. Valenzuela, whose parents "belonged to the local aristocracy" of Polo, Bulacan, was a fourth year medical student when he joined the Katipunan. Another compadre of Bonifacio, he served as fiscal and physician on the Council.³⁹ Jacinto, who had enrolled at Santo Tomas after graduating from San Juan de Letran, was first elected to the Supreme Council in 1895, soon after his nineteenth birthday. Despite his youth, he thereafter

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became the closest of all Bonifacio's associates and the association's leading publicist and theoretician. To comply with the Katipunan principle of using only the vernacular, it is interesting to note, Jacinto had first to make himself proficient in Tagalog. The son of a well-known Tondo merchant, he had grown up more accustomed to using a corrupt form of Spanish then current among those Manileños "who had some visible means of livelihood and those who pretended to be among the ilustrado,"⁴⁰

The antecedents, education and careers of men like Plata, Diwa, Arellano, Basa, Javier, Santiago. Valenzuela and Jacinto thus indicate that none of the most prominent Manila-based Katipuneros, any more than Bonifacio, could be classified as either “ignorant" or typically proletarian. On the contrary, the most striking link among those named is that they all occupied intermediate positions in Philippine society, more especially positions which brought them into direct contact, in a variety of contexts, with the institutions, policies and representatives of Spanish colonial rule. Those who had studied at the clerically-administered colleges and university felt, as Rizal had a decade earlier, that despite the prestige attached to attending such institutions the instruction they provided was anachronistic in both style and content, an affront to Filipino dignity and aspirations. Bonifacio and Javier, as employees of a foreign business firm, could witness at first hand the difficulties and frustration caused by the restrictive and complex legislation that surrounded overseas trade. The trend toward greater protectionism, they would be aware, not only endangered the chances of trade-based prosperity but also posed an immediate threat to the living standards of Filipinos in all walks of life by raising the prices of basic imported commodities. Plata and Diwa, court clerks, and Arellano and Basa, employees of the military, had an inside view of the actual machinery of colonial administration and control. The prejudice, corruption and injustice that pervaded the insular bureaucracy would form an integral part of their daily experience. In the absence of information on the individual motives underlying the separatist commitment of the Katipunan's directors, therefore, their common proximity to the educational, economic or administrative aspects of Spanish sovereignty itself seems to offer a partial explanation. The main burden of colonial rule may have fallen on less fortunate shoulders, but few were better placed to understand its workings and consequences than the leading Katipuneros.

In provincial areas where the Katipunan gained support the association's leaders occupied a position very much comparable to that of their counterparts in the capital. Again they belonged to intermediate social strata, and again they lived and worked at the interface between colonial power and the population. Many already held positions of prestige and influence in their respective towns prior to gaining distinction as revolutionists. Several were members of the principalia, the group formally recognized as the leading citizens of a town from whom the chief functionaries of pueblo and barrio government were elected. Others worked for the principalia as secretaries and interpreters. School teachers were also well represented. As a correlation between contact with the colonizers and revolutionary involvement existed in geographic as well as personal terms, the strategic position of Katipunan leaders at the forefront of local affairs and conflicts is perhaps best Illustrated by the example of Cavite, a

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province immediately south of Manila where both the secular and clerical aspects of Spanish rule were particularly conspicuous, and where the Katipunan gained its firmest organizational foothold.

Before reviewing some of the personalities who headed the Katipunan in Cavite, however, it is necessary to refer briefly to the structure of the colonial local government apparatus with which a large proportion were associated. The principalia who administered the affairs of each town and its related outlying settlements traced their origins to pre-Spanish community leaders whose authority had been recognized by the colonizers and utilized as the cornerstone of a system of indirect rule. From the conquest until the eve of Spanish rule the two key functionaries of this system were the cabezas de barangay and the gobernadorcillo. At the foot of the bureaucratic ladder and the immediate link between government and people, the cabezas de barangay had jurisdiction over a barrio or other unit of equivalent population. By far their most important function was tax-collection, first in the form of tribute and later as a cedula payment. In addition they were in charge of assigning the adult males within their jurisdiction to local public works projects in compliance with the requirement that every year each man should render forty days labor service to the community. Until 1893, it was past and present cabezas alone who constituted the principalia. As such, by a process of indirect election, they chose one of their number to hold the office of gobernadorcillo, known after 1890 as capitan municipal.

The prime duty of the gobernadorcillo was to supervise and coordinate the work of the cabezas with regard to tax collection and the assignment of community labor, but he had besides a wide range of additional responsibilities. These included the maintenance of peace and order; the exercise of judicial authority in petty civil and criminal cases; administration of the postal service; upkeep of the local jail; providing for the needs of travelers; and ensuring that the inhabitants had gainful employment and were good Catholics. To assist him in these multifarious tasks the gobernadorcillo had a host of elected, appointed and drafted assistants, among whom might be mentioned the tenientes mayors, fellow principales, variously designated to look after police matters, the boundaries of cultivated lands and the branding of livestock; a corps of cuadrilleros or constables staffed on a rotation basis from among the townsmen; and a directorcillo, usually a person with some college education and a knowledge of Spanish who worked in a paid capacity as interpreter and municipal clerk.⁴¹

Subsequently by far the most famous of the Caviteño principales who played a leading role in the Katipunan was Emilio Aguinaldo. In March 1897 Aguinaldo was to be elected president of the Revolutionary Government that succeeded the Katipunan as the directorate of the insurrection. His father, Aguinaldo recounted in his Memoirs, had been "regarded as one of the learned of the times and a brilliant lawyer."⁴² He was also a landowner and had served several times as town gobernadorcillo. After his elementary education, Emilio enrolled at San Juan de Letran, joining a number of brothers and sisters already studying in Manila. Before completing his college course, however, he returned to his home town of Cavite Viejo to help his widowed mother manage

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the family interests. Aguinaldo first entered the ranks of the principalia at the age of seventeen, becoming a cabeza de barangay, he later recalled, primarily because his mother saw the position as a means of avoiding military conscription.⁴³ After about eight years as a cabeza, in January 1895, he succeeded his elder brother Crispulo (who was also to become a revolutionary general) as a capitan municipal of his town. Emilio joined the Katipunan later the same year, travelling to Manila for initiation by Bonifacio and taking the nom de guerre of Magdalo, a name subsequently also applied to the Katipunan council which incorporated Cavite Viejo and other municipalities of eastern
Cavite. In late 1896, once the guardia civil had been cleared from a number of these towns, the Magdalo council was reorganized as a sub-provincial insurgent government, headed by a form of cabinet.⁴⁴ Elected as Magdalo president at this time was Baldomero Aguinaldo, a cousin of Emilio. Also a native of Cavite Viejo, Baldomero had attended the Ateneo Municipal and the University of Santo Tomas. Prior to the revolution he had worked in various capacities for the municipal bureaucracy, holding in succession the positions of registrador de titulos, directorcillo and justice of the peace.⁴⁶ At least two of the Aguinaldos' principal associates in the Cavite Viejo Katipunan, Candido Tirona and Santiago Dario, served under Emilio as cabezas de barangay.⁴⁸ Tirona, interestingly enough, came from a family long regarded as the chief rivals of the Aguinaldos in Cavite Viejo politics, but as more vital matters claimed their attention as well as that of their respective followers the petty factionalism of the past was set aside.⁴⁷ Shortly after the revolution began, Tirona was acclaimed as Emilio's successor, under revolutionary conditions, as capitan municipal. He was also appointed Minister of War in the reorganized Magdalo council. Another former cabeza in this council was Pio del Pilar, later a celebrated general.⁴⁸

In addition to Crispulo and Emilio Aguinaldo, a third member of the Magdalo Cabinet, Vito Belarmino, had had experience of the senior office of pueblo government, having held the post of gobernadorcillo in the town of Silang. His background was remarkably similar to that of Emilio Aguinaldo. His father, too, had in his time presided over the town tribunal and he also had for a time attended San Juan de Letran. Belarmino's formal education also had been cut short, in his case by recurrent outbreaks of cholera that disrupted life in the capital in the early 1880's. Prior to his election as gobernadorcillo he gained a wide knowledge of Silang affairs both as a cabeza and secretary of the tribunal.⁴⁸

Principales and men of comparable, social position also dominated the leadership of the Magdiwang, the Katipunan council that in the early months of the revolution acted as the sub-provincial insurgent government in the municipalities of western Cavite. Elected Magdiwang president was Mariano Alvarez, capitan municipal of Noveleta, the town in which the council was originally based. An uncle of Bonifacio's mother-in-law, Alvarez was one of the oldest of the revolutionary leaders of 1896, having been born in 1831.⁵⁰ Prior to joining the Katipunan his association with the cause of reform had spanned over at least two decades. In the same way as Emilio Aguinaldo and Vito

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Belarmino, he had acceded to municipal office virtually as a matter of family tradition, his father having served as Noveleta gobernadorcillo. His other qualifications for office, education at one of the friar-administered colleges in Manila and an apprenticeship in town politics as directorcillo, also conform to a now familiar pattern.⁵¹ By profession a school teacher, Alvarez was one of many of this calling who were active in the Cavite Katipunan. A second school teacher in the Magdiwang cabinet was Artemio Ricarte, a graduate of Letran and the Jesuit Escuela Normal.⁵²

As in the Manila sections of the Katipunan and in the Magdalo council in eastern Cavite, a number of Magdiwang leaders were linked by ties of kinship. Santiago and Pascual Alvarez, a son and nephew of Mariano, respectively held the posts of Magdiwang General-in-Chief and Secretary-General.⁵³ Two brothers from an "Illustrious family" of the town of Maragondon, Emiliano and Mariano Riego de Dios, both men with an extensive formal education, respectively occupied the positions of Minister of Commerce and Brigadier-General.⁵⁴ Completing the Magdiwang cabinet were Ariston Villanueva, a past gobernadorcillo of Noveleta, as Minister of War; Mariano Trias, a sugar planter and graduate of Letran, as Minister of Welfare and Justice; and Diego Mojica as Minister of Finance.⁵⁶

In one important respect the urban Katipuneros differed significantly from their provincial counterparts. The contrasting backgrounds of Bonifacio and Aguinaldo illustrate this point fairly well. However prominent Bonifacio might have become in the various merchant houses for whom he was employed, by the very nature of their operations advancement to positions of senior responsibility in such firms was all but precluded. Moreover, Bonifacio did not own land which was still the standard measure of wealth and power in the Islands. Aguinaldo, on the other hand, was an important landowner in his district and accordingly, had no social superior in his cultural and political milieu. Simply put, the advancement of Bonifacio's career depended largely upon his willingness and ability to carry out orders: Aguinaldo's class matrix demanded that he give them.

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[Notes]

(1) Calderon, Felipe G., "Memoirs of the Philippine Revolution” in Galang, Zoilo M. (ed.) Encyclopaedia of the Philippines (Manila, Exequiel Floro) 1957, Vol. XV, p. 215.

(2) de los Reyes, lsabelo, La Religion del “Katipunan"(Madrid, Tip. Lit. de J. Corrales) 1900, pp. 30, 37.

(3) Agoncillo, Teodoro, The Revolt of the Masses (Quezon City, University of the Philippines Press) 1956, p. 1.

(4) Ibid, p. 283.

(5) Ibid, p. 282.

(6) de los Reyes, Isabelo, La Sensacional Memoria de Isabelo de los Reyes sobre la Revolution Filipina de 1896-97 (Madrid, Tip. Lit. de J. Corrales) 1899, p. 80, quoted in Agoncillo, Op. Cit. p. 106.

(7) El Renacimiento, August 11 and 18, Sept. 1 and 18, Oct. 1, 1906, quoted in LeRoy, Jamas A., “The Philippines 1860-1898 -- Some Comment and Bibliographical Notes” in Blair, Emma H., and James A. Robertson, The Philippine Islands 1493-1898 (Cleveland, Arthur C. Clark Co.) 1903, Vol. III, p. 185.

(8) Florentino Torres evidence submitted before the Second (Taft) Philippine Commission Report, p. 191.

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(9) de los Reyes (1899) Op. Cit. p. 78; (1900) Op. Cit. p. 37.

(10) LeRoy, Loc. Cit.

(11) Zalde, Gregorlo F. History of the Katipunan (Manila, Loyal Press) 1939, p. 12.

(12) Agoncillo, Op. Cit. p.115.

(13) Ibid, pp. 107, 287.

(14) Ibid, pp. 107, 284-85.

(15) Ibid, pp. 116, 307.

(16) Majul, Cesar Adib, The Political end Constitutional Ideas of the Philippine Revolution (Quezon City, University of the Philippines Press) 1967, p. 135.

(17) Agoncillo, Op. Cit. pp, 283-84.

(18) Eminent Filipinos (Manila, National Historical Commission) 1965, p. 63; Zaide, Gregorio F. Great Filipinos in History (Manila, Verde Bookstore) 1957, p. 105. Constantino, Renato, A Past
Revisited (Manila, Tala Publications) 1976, p. 162.

(19) Agoncillo, Op. Cit. p. 66; Manuel, E. Arsenio, Dictionary of Philippine Biography (Quezon City, Filipiniana Publications) 1955, Vol. I, p. 253.

(20) Zaide, Op. Cit. p. 14.

(21) Agoncillo, Op. Cit. p. 66.

(22) Taylor, John R.M., The Philippine Insurrection Against the United States (Pasay City, Eugenio Lopez Foundation) 1971, Vol. 1, p. 62. This is the description used in Taylor's introduction.

(23) Olegario Diaz, Commander of the Manila detachment of the Guardia Civil, "Report Upon the Insurrection Against Spain," Oct. 28, 1896. In Retana, Wenceslao E. (ed.), Archivo del Bibliofilo Filipino (Madrid, X Minuesa de los Rios) 1897, p. 342.

(24) Agoncillo, Op. Cit. p. 66.

(25) Ibid, p. 66.

(26) de los Santos. Epifanio, The Revolutionists: Aguinaldo, Bonifacio, and Jacinto (Manila, National Historical Commission) 1973, p. 85. De los Santos, born in 1871, was studying in Manila at the time of the revolution. The essays on Bonifacio and Jacinto were first published in 1917-18.

(27) Foreman, John, The Philippine Islands, third ed. (London. Kelly & Walsh) 1906, p. 258.

(28) de Jesus, Gregoria, "Mga Tala ng Aking Buhay,” in Alzona, Encarnacion (ed.) Julio Nakpil and the Philippine Revolution (Manila, n.p.) 1964, p. 166.

(29) Ibid, p. 166.

(30) Guerrero, Leon Ma., The First Filipino (Manila, National Historical Commission) 1971, p. 315.

(31) Agoncillo, Op. Cit. p. 106.

(32) Ibid, p. 282. Here again Agoncillo seems to be following the account given by Isabelo de los Reyes, C.f. Sensacional Memoria, Op. Cit. p. 80.

(33) Manuel, Op. Cit. pp. 351-53.

(34) Ibid, pp. 154-56.

(35) Ibid, pp. 59-61.

(36) Ibid, pp. 92-94, Zaide, Op. Cit. p. 4.

(37) Manuel, Op. Cit. pp. 234-35.

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