"Although insignificant in appearance, they are fierce fighters," wrote General Anderson to the Adjutant-General of the army in July. [93]
General Merritt states in his report that Aguinaldo had "proclaimed an independent government, republican in form, with himself as President, and at the time of my arrival in the Islands the entire edifice of executive and legislative departments had been accomplished, at least on paper." [94] Of course at that time we were still officially declining to take Filipino aspirations for independence seriously, and preferred to treat Aguinaldo's government as purely a matter of stationery. As a matter of fact, an exhaustive examination of the official documents of that period, made with a view of ascertaining just how much of that Aguinaldo government of 1898 was stationery fiction and how much was stable fact, has absolutely surprised one man who was out there from 1899 to 1905 (the writer), and I have no doubt will be interesting, as mere matter of political necrology, to any American who was there "in the days of the empire" as the "ninety-niners" called it.
Early in the spring of 1899, Mr. McKinley sent out the Commission of which President Schurman of Cornell University was Chairman, to try to stop the war. They bent themselves to the task in a spirit as kindly as that in which we know Mr. McKinley himself would have acted. They failed because the war was already on and the Filipinos were bent on fighting for independence to the bitter end. But they learned a good deal about the facts of the earlier situation. Speaking of these in their report to the President [95] with especial reference to the period beginning with Aguinaldo's landing at Cavite in May, after describing how the Filipino successes in battle with the Spaniards finally resulted in all of them being driven into Manila, where they remained hemmed in, they say:
While the Spanish troops now remained quietly in Manila, the Filipino forces made themselves masters of the entire island except that city.
"For three and one half months," says General Otis in describing the facts of this same situation a year later, "the insurgents on land had kept Manila tightly bottled [meaning while Admiral Dewey had been blockading the place by water] * * * and food supplies were exhausted." [96] "We had Manila and Cavite. The rest of the island was held not by the Spanish but by the Filipinos," said General Anderson, in the North American Review for February, 1900. "It is a fact that they were in possession, they had gotten pretty much the whole thing except Manila," said Admiral Dewey to the Senate Committee in 1902. [97]