American Datu

John J. Pershing and Counterinsurgency Warfare in the Muslim Philippines, 1899-1913

Ronald K. Edgerton

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780813188263, 9780813178936
• eBook ISBN: 9780813178967
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Asie

American Datu: John J. Pershing and Counterinsurgency Warfare in the Muslim Philippines, 1899–1913 provides a play-by-play account of a crucial but often overlooked period in the development of American counterinsurgency strategy. Tracing Pershing's military campaigns in the Philippines, Ronald K. Edgerton examines how Progressive counterinsurgency doctrine evolved in direct response to the first sustained military encounter between the United States and Muslim militants. Pershing de-emphasized so-called civilizing efforts and stressed the practicality of building relationships with local Moro leaders and immersing himself in Moro cultural practices. In turn, Moros elected him as a fellow datu, or chief, and Pershing came to realize a fundamental principle of counterinsurgency warfare: one size does not fit all, and tactics must be molded to fit the specific environment.

In light of Pershing's military success, this study calls for a reevaluation of the more invasive counterinsurgency methods used by US officers against Muslim militants today, and it addresses the important role the Philippine–American War played in developing modern US military strategy.

1

Pershing and Early Counterinsurgency among Maranao Moros, 1902

A few days after the Battle of Bayang, Capt. John Pershing received orders directing him to join Col. Baldwin as his intelligence officer at Camp Vicars.¹ Gen. Adna Chaffee, then visiting on a tour of southern stations, confided in Pershing that he desired “to avoid more fighting if possible without losing prestige.” He wanted the captain to help Baldwin do what he could to pacify the Maranao Moros without resort to arms. When Pershing asked “how he expected … [him] to do that with a fiery colonel in command,” Chaffee replied that he would “be placed in charge of Moro affairs and that orders would be given that no move should be made without … [Pershing’s] approval.”²

Both Chaffee and Gen. Davis had already ordered Baldwin “to cultivate friendly relations with the Moros.” “By fair, straightforward and kindly dealings,” he should “win their confidence.” Under no circumstances short of an attack by Moros should he “resort to active hostilities … without authority from” his superiors.³ Now they were sending a captain to ensure that the colonel followed their orders to the letter.

Pershing and Baldwin had worked together before, on Gen. Nelson Miles’s staff in Washington, D.C., in 1897, and they tried to make a go of this awkward situation. Nevertheless, the colonel did not appreciate having a captain look over his shoulder. Even more, he chafed under the obvious implication that his superiors harbored doubts about his judgment. Indeed, he and Pershing (and by extension Davis and Chaffee) did not agree on how best to deal with the Moros. Baldwin believed that, “having once warned the Moros, we should not hesitate to take action against any group that did not readily accept American sovereignty.” Looking out over the lake at the nearby cotta of Bacolod, where Moros were busily strengthening their defenses, he argued that “such preparations in defiance of American authority should not be permitted.” Pershing countered that such a course of action would prove “impossible without excessive bloodshed.” “With forbearance,” he felt certain that “irreconcilable chiefs [could be reduced in number] to a comparative few.” The colonel, in Pershing’s opinion, although being “a fine soldier with a long experience in handling Indians, … was inclined to be impetuous.” Unlike Baldwin, Pershing counseled patience in dealing with Moros, lest American troops “provoke a religious war.”⁴

If we can judge the situation from Pershing’s diary entries, he and Baldwin must have had a lively strategy debate. The latter’s point of view can be gleaned from Pershing’s journal rejoinders. In response to Baldwin’s repeatedly emphasized point that standard military practice called for decisive action before an adversary could build up his defenses, the captain replied: “To force an issue now would no doubt have some advantages from a strictly military standpoint.” But “we had the power at any time to punish them regardless of the kind of defenses they possessed.” Meanwhile, the Americans could themselves build up their supply base and transport connection with the coast. They “could afford to wait and exhaust every effort to establish friendly relations.” “Even though it takes a year or more to convince some of them, we should … realize that they have held this country as their own for centuries…. Being savages, they are slow to understand our motives.”⁵

Although many men at Camp Vicars took Baldwin’s side in this debate, Pershing prevailed when the colonel won promotion to brigadier general and departed from Mindanao. Capt. Pershing took over sole command of the 700 men at Camp Vicars on June 30, 1902. He faced a daunting task of convincing not only Maranao Moros but his own men that his more conciliatory strategy should be trusted.

Camp Vicars had the distinction of being perhaps “the most remote station ever held by American troops.” Known as “the camp above the clouds,” it looked out over Lake Lanao from an elevation of 2,800 feet, approximately 500 feet above the lake itself.⁶ What a lovely spot. In Pershing’s own words, “the landscape, with its graceful undulations, dotted with rice fields and rising from the shores of the lake to the low hills and the timbered mountains beyond, was always beautiful, especially in the rich southern lighting of the sky at early morning and evening.”⁷ From their camp, troops could see all the way to Illana Bay to their west. And looking out over the 134-square-mile lake, they could see villages and cottas all around the shoreline, inhabited by some 78,000 Maranao (People of the Lake) Moros, who fished, tilled their rice fields, and grew camotes, maize, coffee, sugarcane, cacao, coconuts, tapioca, tobacco, cotton, and many fruits. Thanks to their industriousness, the fertile volcanic soil they had to work with, and the sixty to eighty inches of annual rainfall that turned the slopes around Lake Lanao into a glorious green, they produced a surplus of rice, which they exported along with abaca to Iligan and Malabang. They also wasted little time in making a profit by selling their commodities to American troops.⁸

The Maranao people were one of three principal cultural-linguistic groups of Philippine Moros, the other two being the Maguindanao of Cotabato and the Tausug of Sulu. These groups, together with the Samal, Yakan, Jama Mapun, and Badjao, made up approximately 99 percent of the Philippines’ Muslim population.⁹ Each group lived independently from the others, not recognizing a common sultan, language, or economic nexus. For that matter, they did not even acknowledge a common history. Only in their shared adherence to Islam and alienation from Christian Filipinos did they acknowledge a common purpose. Threaten their religion, as the Spanish had done, and they pulled together to fight tenaciously in the centuries-long Moro Wars. Back off and leave their religion alone, and they tended to pull apart and fight separately or not at all.

In his “Report on Moro Affairs,” written in October 1901, Gen. Davis commented that the Maranao Moros had the distinction of being the only Moro group never to have been “subdued” by the Spanish.¹⁰ Whether the other groups had, in fact, been subdued remains an open question, but by the late 1890s the Spanish had finally put an end to Maranao isolation, if not resistance. With a force of some 4,000 Filipino infantry led by 116 Spanish enlisted men, the Spanish managed with great difficulty to occupy Marawi and deploy four gunboats on the lake, shelling Maranao cottas at will and disrupting the local economy. They did not, however, hold Marawi very long, and they had virtually no impact on Maranao culture. The Treaty of Paris ended Spanish rule over the Philippines in December 1898. As surprised and elated Maranaos watched, the occupying Spaniards suddenly evacuated the lake country and scuttled their boats.¹¹ When Americans marched on Bayang more than three years later, the Maranaos remained, in Davis’s opinion, “comparatively the most isolated and least touched by external influences of [all] the major [Moro] groups.”¹²

If Pershing also regarded Maranao Moros as “isolated and least touched,” his visit with Amai Manibilang in early 1902 altered that impression. His host greeted him warmly in a “massive” house “built of hewn timbers, with plank floors and a high, steep roof, heavily thatched.” Inside the home, he noted that “Moros did not veil and seclude their women like Mohammadans of the Near East.” A “real spirit of affection seemed to exist in the families.” He never noticed “a Moro wife or child abused in any way” and commented that “if cases of ill-treatment existed they were at least exceedingly rare.”¹³ All in all, these people seemed remarkably gentle and gracious, not to mention skilled at winning Capt. Pershing’s favorable impression of them.

Pershing counted approximately 400 rancherias (settlements) around the lake, ruled by about 150 sultans, each claiming to be of royal blood.¹⁴ Some of these sultans had large followings numbering in the thousands, whereas others could claim no more than two or three families as their followers.¹⁵ No supreme leader ruled over the Maranaos, but there existed what one scholar has called “a confederation of independent principalities (pat a pangampong).”¹⁶ Individual sultans tended to align with one of three power centers (pangampong), each said to have been organized by a mythical ancestor. Those on the lake’s northern shore and numbering approximately forty-eight clans generally considered themselves part of the Bayabao network centered in Marawi. Those inhabiting the southern shore from Madumba to Sauir (at least twenty-nine clans) regarded themselves as Onayans. With their center at Bayang, most of the Maranaos who fought and died against Baldwin’s troops belonged to this network. Finally, the Maciu group (at least eleven clans), claiming to be the most ancient, held sway in the fertile lands along the lake’s eastern and southeastern shores.¹⁷ It may be that the Bayabao and Onayan people had once been under Maciu, but they had long since ceased to accept the latter’s overlordship. By 1902, in fact, none of the networks even accepted the absolute leadership of one of their own sultans. To be sure, some leaders, such as Amai Manibilang, enjoyed more prestige and power than others, but even he exercised “very limited control over” his network of sultans.¹⁸ His “shadowy overlordship” lacked enough authority to keep individual Bayabao leaders from raiding and fighting against each other.¹⁹

Under each sultan came datus, or chiefs, men lacking in claim to royal blood but sometimes more respected and powerful in their kinship-based communities (agama) than their supposed overlords. Chosen informally by their clan (bangon) based on their wealth, education (in the Qurʾan and sharia law), courage in warfare, and fairness in settling disputes, datus stood tall in their agama, but they rarely enjoyed sufficient power to bestow the right of automatic succession on their sons. “It frequently happened that an uncle or other powerful relative, or some charismatic or heroic or shrewd ‘commoner’ achieved the datuship by consensus of the old datu’s followers.”²⁰ Powerful datus could withhold their support from a sultan, making him little more than a titular leader. That’s exactly what happened in the Bayabao settlement of Bacolod. There the sultan desired to live in peace with the Americans. One of his datus, however, desisted, and that datu proved “strong enough to prevent the sultan from making terms of submission.”²¹

Kinsmen usually made up the core of a datu’s sakop (followers), who regarded him as their leader, arbiter, and commander in battle. They worked and fought for him, and if he suffered insult or injury, so did they. In return for their allegiance and tribute, “the datu protected them in war and peace, gave them food and shelter in economically critical times, provided for their annual religious feasts, counseled and led them.” In keeping with “the formal law of Islam and the customary law” (adat), he settled disputes among his sakop and helped to do so between agama. A strong datu would often catch the attention of disaffected Moros, who might shift their allegiance from their current weak or inept datu to him. In this way, he could amass a larger and larger following, so that no other chief or sultan would dare challenge his autonomy and military clout. As Pershing would soon discover, few sultans had the power to compel datus to comply with a treaty or other agreement, meaning that negotiated settlements sometimes had to be renegotiated with each datu. But what proved an irritation in governing Maranao Moros turned out to be a boon for successful counterinsurgency. This decentralized polity, this confederation of virtually autonomous rulers, could be subjugated and controlled with a divide-and-rule policy.²²

Two other characteristics of Maranao society, marat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1. Pershing and Early Counterinsurgency among Maranao Moros, 1902
• 2. The Mailed Fist of Progressive Counterinsurgency: Pershing’s Lake Lanao Campaigns, 1902–1903
• 3. Seeking Balance in the Scaffolding of Progressive Counterinsurgency
• 4. Leonard Wood and Counterinsurgency in Lanao and Cotabato
• 5. Comparative Counterinsurgency and the Moros of Jolo
• 6. Hard War in Jolo
• 7. Learning to Live with Accommodation
• 8. John Pershing and Full-Spectrum Counterinsurgency in Moro Province, 1909–1913
• 9. Declaring Victory
• 10. Progressive Counterinsurgency and COIN
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index