10 THE POLITICS OF INTERVENTION
reconcentration conjured up all manner of horrors: "Butcher"
Weyler herding Cuban men, women, and children into crum
bling towns to die by the thousands of typhoid and starvation.
Across the Atlantic, so the papers said, the British Army was
penning thousands of suffering Boers behind barbed wire.
This was the kind of military barbarism Americans had gone
to war to end in 1898. Yet suddenly from the Philippines
came news that reconcentration was part of the price of
bringing freedom to the Filipinos. This revelation was a
shock, and provided an explosive political issue.
The Army officers in the Philippines knew the necessity
of reconcentration in ending the insurrection, but the short
age of troops and logistical support, plus their awareness of
the probable American reaction, restrained them. In Decem
ber, 1900, however, continued resistance in the provinces of
Batangas and Tayabas, Luzon, forced General J. Franklin
Bell, the local commander, to round up the rural population
and resettle them in closely guarded camps. An estimated
ten thousand active supporters of the revolt were thus segre
gated from the insurgents.^18 On Samar in 1901, as Brigadier
General Robert P. Hughes testified in Senate hearings, some
one hundred and fifty thousand natives were forcibly re
settled.^19 In both instances the Army made an effort to keep
individual deprivation to a minimum, but there were the
inevitable deaths from disease. The Army indeed provided
security for the Filipinos, but reconcentration was not the
kind of freedom Americans understood.
With the political stakes high and a sincere desire to
provide the Filipinos something more than war, and with
the Army apparently unable to make headway in pacification,
President McKinley sent the Second Philippine Commission
in 1900 to begin the political and economic development of
the islands.^20 The Commission's president, William Howard
Taft, became the civil governor with complete authority over
the pacified third of the Philippine provinces; and Taft, as
his control gradually replaced Army rule throughout the
islands, did much to conciliate the Filipinos. He worked hard