The Utah Batteries: Volunteer Artillerymen in the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, 1898-1899

The Utah Batteries: Volunteer Artillerymen in the

Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, 1898-1899

By BRANDON JOHNSON

In April 1899, a knot of volunteer soldiers from Utah milled expectantly outside the fortified Filipino settlement of Malolos, waiting for the order to open fire on the town with their 3.2-inch rifled cannons. Malolos had been a buoyant place the previous autumn, welcoming a steady stream of constitutional delegates tasked with founding an independent Philippine Republic. Now, the city, perched near the azure curl of Manila Bay, was the new nation’s besieged capital, a highly symbolic target for the Utahns and their comrades in the U.S. Army’s Eighth Corps. The westerners’ eagerness for action apparently showed. According to one member of the unit, the artillerymen wended their way through “dense woods, bamboo thickets and over all manner of formidable obstacles” on the march to Malolos, trembling with the “excitement of expectation.” When they finally bivouacked for the night in sight of the trenches that ringed the town, “the battery boys” from Utah “threw themselves down anywhere for a good rest in preparation for the hot work which surely awaited the artillery in the morning.”1

Troops from Utah in Cuartel de Meisie, the Philippines, 1898.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The war the Utah men were waging was a crusade for empire. They and their compatriots had come to the Philippines as self-appointed liberators; they left having created a colonial regime ruled from Washington. For centuries, the cluster of islands named for Spain’s King Philip II had been a cog in the monumental Spanish imperial machine that, at its height, spanned a significant chunk of the Americas and stretched from the Pacific Rim’s western margins to the shores of Europe. Over the years, however, that oncepowerful engine wore down, leaving Spanish hegemony vulnerable to nationalist movements across the empire. While early nineteenth-century revolutionaries, including Simón Bolivar and José de San Martín, carved new nations out of Spain’s dying domain in the Western Hemisphere, the Filipino nationalist cause stayed weak and the Philippines remained bent under the Spanish yoke for nearly another hundred years. The revolution came slowly to the Philippines, and when the Filipinos finally imbibed the spirit of independence at century's end, they seemed unstoppable.

By mid-1898, the Filipino Army of Liberation, estimated at between 15,000 and 40,000 men and led by ardent nationalist Emilio Aguinaldo, had the Spanish bottled up in Manila. The last step for the insurgent leader and his ragtag band was to descend on the city and deliver the coup de grâce But Aguinaldo's revolutionary army would never have the chance to land their final blow. In July 1898, troops of the American Eighth Corps (including the Utah volunteers) landed near Manila, the vanguard of an expeditionary force bent on avenging what they believed was Spain’s surreptitious bombing of the U.S.S. Maine at Havana, Cuba, and, more important for the Filipinos, dismantling what was left of the Pacific flank of Spain's decrepit empire. (A few months earlier, on April 25, 1898, the United States Congress had passed a formal resolution declaring war on Spain.) The Americans muscled their way into the battle against the Spanish, and then once Spain was defeated, they turned on their erstwhile Filipino allies.2

The men of the artillery units known as the Utah Batteries played a crucial role in the wars against the Spanish military and Aguinaldo's insurgent government, yet their story is relatively unknown. After helping defeat the Spanish in the Philippines, they became key players in the military campaign against the Army of Liberation, fighting around Manila, on the Marilao River, and at Malolos alongside their fellow Americans.

A group of Utah soldiers during the Spanish-American War.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

For the Utah volunteers, however, the wars against the Spanish and Aguinaldo’s Filipino nationalists had an added importance. In 1898, their state—named the nation's forty-fifth on January 4, 1896—was a mere two years old, making the war against Spain (and then the war against the Army of Liberation) the first that Utahns could participate in as citizens of a bona fide state. This fact is made more significant by the intense internal strife that had rocked Utah over its near halfcentury history as a territory. Statehood only came after a period of intense social and political discord that pitted Mormon Utahns against federal officials and elements of Utah's non-Mormon population. Military occupation; a constantly revolving lineup of governors, judges, and federal officers; hotly contested elections; harsh anti-polygamy raids; and an increasingly well-known massacre of overland migrants by Mormon settlers at Mountain Meadows had marked the contentious territorial period. Over the years, the federal government closely monitored happenings in the Great Basin, going so far as to empower, under the authority of the Edmunds Act of 1882, a five-member Board of Registration and Election (otherwise known as the Utah Commission) to oversee voting in the territory. Under the national microscope, Mormons and non-Mormons both claimed the mantle of oppressed innocence: Mormons argued they were the victims of federal excesses and the machinations of “Gentile” schemers at home, while non-Mormons alleged that only the federal presence in the territory stood between them and their total subjugation at the hands of the Mormon majority. Statehood, when it came, reformatted Utah’s political landscape, brought Mormons and non-Mormons together into the prevailing national Republican and Democratic parties, soothed (if only briefly) federal angst over Utah's “Mormon problem,” and pushed the former territory into the arena of mainstream political and social discourse. Of course full reconciliation in Utah may not have been a truly realistic possibility, even after the compromises that led to statehood were finalized. Most Utahns at least seemed to recognize, however, that in addition to having to actually get along, they had a part to play together as participants in the grand American "pageant." And, once war came, what better way to signal the fledgling state's newfound national feelings, reasoned Utahns of all stripes, than to volunteer to fight for Uncle Sam.3

Charles R. Mabey, Utahʼs governor from 1921-1925, in his Utah National Guard uniform during his service in the Spanish American War.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

For the state's Mormons especially, such feelings were new. Prior to the war against Spain, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints had practiced what D. Michael Quinn has termed “selective pacifism,” choosing to respond to calls for military mobilization on a case-by-case basis. In the 1840s, Brigham Young had allowed Mormon men to enlist in the war against Mexico, but when the Civil War broke out less than twenty years later, Young resisted any involvement of Utah's Latter-day Saint population in the conflict, due in no small part to James Buchanan's heavy-handed 1857 dispatch of an army of occupation to Utah. This “Utah War” effectively propelled the LDS church into embracing pacifism; there was no way the Mormons would fight for a government that had sought to control them at the point of a bayonet.4 Later, when Brigham Young finally acceded to Abraham Lincoln’s request to have armed Mormons at least guard the overland mail routes while civil war raged in the East, the Latter-day Saint prophet pointedly declared that “all this does not prove any loyalty to political tyrants.”5 Statehood in 1896 and the political sovereignty that came with it, however, radically modified the way Utah Mormons perceived their civic responsibility to mobilize for war. Though some Mormon leaders, including apostles Matthias Cowley and Brigham Young, Jr., viewed the possibility of war with Spain with more than a little anxiety, the church’s official stance was for its members to stand with the nation and fight alongside their non-Mormon neighbors. 6 Pro-war feelings ran strong among ordinary Utahns of all backgrounds. Schools were closed, “Old Glory” was unfurled and flown “in every conceivable place,” and when troops posted to Utah's military installations began leaving for distant battlefields, “refined ladies passed through the [troop] trains, grasping [the soldier’s] hands with fervor and giving them words of praise and encouragement.” Citizens of the Union's youngest state seemed to rediscover their identity as Americans, and their “pent-up” nationalist feelings “at last found a vent and the fire of patriotism flamed high in every soul.”7

Utah soldiers on the firing line near Caloocan, the Philippines, 1898.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Utah was undergoing a surge of nationalist sentiment not unlike what the rest of the country was experiencing. The Spanish-American and Philippine-American conflicts were the first full-scale wars the United States waged since the Civil War had pitted American against American. For good or ill, the overseas conflicts provided a patriotic pretext for national reunion. Exuberant citizens cheered the soldiers marching to battle and heartily hailed Commodore George Dewey’s resounding defeat of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on May 1, 1898. In the words of one historian, “it was war again, with all the thrills, few of the promised perils, and, to universal satisfaction, with the blue and gray reunited.” Another scholar has put the reunifying potential of the war even more starkly. War against Spain (followed by war against the Filipinos) “was uniting the American people in a way they had not known in more than a generation. It promised to erase the last scars of the Civil War and Reconstruction.” He was clearly overstating the curative power of armed conflict; the wounds inflicted by slavery, civil war, and racism were far too deep for a relatively short foreign war to heal. Nevertheless, Americans from every region and section fought side-by-side in the new national conflict, and President William McKinley did go out of his way to appoint a few high-profile former Confederates— including Fitzhugh Lee (nephew of Robert E. Lee and a general in the Confederate cavalry) and Joseph Wheeler (also a Confederate cavalryman and general in the Civil War’s western theater)—to senior military posts, perhaps hoping to help along the project of national reunification.8

The patriotic flame sparked by the war burned brightly among Utah's men. President McKinley issued a call on April 23 for 125,000 volunteers from “the several States and Territories,” apportioned according to population and committed to two years of service, to augment the regulars already deployed to fight the Spanish. Utah’s quota, according to Secretary of War Russell A. Alger, would be one troop of cavalry and two batteries of light artillery. (Several other units later increased the original allocation.)

Obediently, Governor Heber Wells put out the call for 500 men from around Utah to fill the quota, instructing the state’s National Guard to fill as much of the requirement as it could; he also appointed a handful of recruiting officers to canvass the state and make up the difference. Religious leaders, including the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, encouraged followers to join up, and by May 5, a scant few weeks after McKinley issued his call for volunteers, the work of recruitment in Utah was done. Governor Wells declared that “the patriotism of the State was so aflame that there were on the grounds of the mustering rendezvous … more than twice as many volunteers as were needed to fill the quota designated.”9

Wells was only half right, though, when he suggested that national feeling was the reason his fellow Utahns enlisted to fight in a foreign war. History has repeatedly shown that men—particularly young men—can be attracted to war for a variety of reasons beyond patriotic fervor, including a hankering for adventure, heroic ambition, the desire to prove one’s “manliness,” or to defend an ideal. In the case of the war against the Spanish and Filipinos there were also ideological reasons for conflict, particularly reasons rooted in racial and ethnic doctrine. White AngloSaxon America represented the force of world progress, wrote Utah editor A. Prentiss in his volume on the state's volunteer soldiers, while the Spaniard’s character was marked by such unenviable and backward traits as “bloodimindedness” and “militarism.” No doubt Prentiss was echoing the thoughts of more than a few of Utah's volunteers when he wrote that

“when two such human antagonisms as Spanish and American character” found themselves on opposite sides of the controversy over Spain’s rule in Cuba and the Philippines, “a conflict was as inevitable as is the production of a spark by sharp contact between flint and steel, and the fierceness of that conflict would be in exact ratio to the intensity of the difference in the nature of the two elements.”10

Elements of the Utah batteries in action near Chinese Church in the Philippines on February 10, 1899.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Evidence that this worldview bled over into how the Utahns understood their subsequent war against Aguinaldo’s Army of Liberation can be found in the words of Richard Young, senior officer in the Utah Batteries. The Filipinos, he sniffed, “are absolutely incapable of self-government, being half barbarous, and each tribe considers every other one its natural prey.” Young concluded that American troops had come to the Philippines to put down Spanish militarism, but they had stayed to civilize the place. “If we should recall our forces,” he asserted, “they [the Filipinos] would destroy each other in the race for supremacy, millions [in] American and foreign capital would be lost, and hundreds of foreign residents would be massacred.” Editor Prentiss agreed with Young. The Filipinos were like children, he argued. It would “be about as sensible to expect [them] to establish and maintain a genuine republic, as it would be to demand of the primary department of one of our public schools the establishment and maintenanceof a daily newspaper.”11

Volunteers from every walk of life and every corner of the state rushed to join the batteries. According to one source, “Mormon, Gentile and Jew, Republican, Democrat and Populist; high, low, rich and poor” filled the batteries’ ranks. The officers in both artillery units, many of whom came over to the Utah Batteries from service in the National Guard, hailed mostly from Salt Lake City (all of them in Battery A and three-fourths of them in Battery B), though when it came to non-commissioned officers and other enlisted men, the makeup of the two units diverged. Battery A was almost evenly split between residents of Salt Lake City and men from other parts of the state; two-thirds of its sergeants were Salt Lakers, but only around a half of its other enlisted men hailed from the state's capital city. In Battery B, by contrast, two-thirds of the sergeants were from communities other than Salt Lake City, while more than four-fifths of the other enlisted men were from outside Utah’s capitol city. (Places like Provo, Ogden, Mercur, Ephraim, Gunnison, Bountiful, and Park City were well represented in Battery B.)12

Making their way to Salt Lake City and a makeshift camp on Fort Douglas’s lower parade ground, the volunteer artillerymen mustered-in on May 3. The mass of greenhorns who lined up at the camp surgeon’s door for their induction physical, wrote Charles Mabey, a corporal in Battery A and Utah's future governor, was a mixed bag of “farmers fresh from the plow, cowboys from the plain, miners from the mountains, blacksmiths from the forge, students, teachers, doctors, [and] bookkeepers.” Nowhere near ready to go to war, the raw recruits needed training, and drilling began immediately on the camp's parade ground. (Shortly before the sinking of the Maine, the Utah National Guard had acquired eight 3.2-inch B & L rifled cannons, the core of the batteries' weaponry, giving them a chance to practice their gunnery skills.) In the end, though, the training regimen was cut short. The men took their military oaths after a mere six days in camp and became soldiers. Only seventeen days after mustering they were on their way to Camp Merritt near San Francisco to prepare for shipping overseas. Throngs of well-wishers greeted them on the city’s streets and jammed the platforms at the railroad depot. To the tune of “My Country ’Tis of Thee” and other patriotic songs, the still green artillerymen stepped aboard a heavily-decorated train and set out for the West Coast.13

The ranking officer in Battery A was Richard Whitehead Young to whom Governor Wells had awarded a captaincy. By Utah Mormon standards, Young possessed a pedigree second-to-none: as Brigham Young’s grandson, he possessed a cachet few others in the state could claim. He also was no military neophyte, having graduated fifteenth in his class from West Point and having served on the staff of Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, who was perhaps best known for temporarily commanding Union forces at Gettysburg in 1863. For a time, Young also served as acting Judge Advocate for the army’s Department of the East. (A letter of recommendation for the position characterized him as possessing “high legal accomplishments, sound judgment, rare industry and a clear perception of legal principles.”) And the new captain knew his way around big guns, thanks to a stint with a frontier artillery detachment. In 1889, he left the military for civilian life—first to practice law and then to accept the editor’s post at the Salt Lake Herald—but he immediately volunteered to return to the army when war with Spain erupted. His light moustache, thin mouth, and penetrating eyes projected martial seriousness—a gravitas Mormon historian and theologian B. H. Roberts paid homage to when he wrote that Young, “conducted himself as a knight sans peur et sans reproche [without fear and without reproach].”14

Young’s counterpart in Battery B, Captain Frank A. Grant, was neither a Mormon nor a native Utahn. Born in Canada, Grant hailed from Kingston, Ontario, which he eventually left for Detroit, intent on making a new life for himself in the United States. In Detroit, he became an American citizen, and worked as a steamship pilot on the Great Lakes, before moving west to settle in Utah. Like Young, he, too, was no newcomer to military affairs, having graduated from Canada’s Kingston Military College and having served as a colonel in the Utah National Guard. His men liked him. One private in Battery B exclaimed that “if a fellow was in trouble, or wanted any favor, even if it was to borrow a dollar, some one would always say ‘Go to … Grant, and he will fix you up.’ He will do anything for the boys.”15

Supporting the two captains was a cadre of experienced lieutenants. In Battery A, the three junior officers were George W. Gibbs, whose service in the national guards of Massachusetts (where he was an infantryman), Montana (as captain of a cavalry troop), and Utah (as a major of artillery) meant he was a particularly seasoned officer; William C. Webb, an immigrant from England; and Ray C. Naylor, who eventually earned a promotion to the Battery B executive officer slot.16 Grant’s original junior officers in Battery B were Edgar A. Wedgewood, John F. Critchlow, and Orrin R. Grow, all veterans of the Utah National Guard. (When Young was promotedto the rank of major and given overall command of both batteries, Wedgewood took his place at the head of Battery A, while Critchlow ended the war as Battery B’s captain when Frank

Filipino soldiers captured at Calcoon.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Grant was advanced to the rank of major.)17 The Utahns’ stay in California was shortlived, but they seemed to make the best of it. Red Cross volunteers gave the batteries “a royal welcome” when they arrived.18 And, of course, the soldiers had time to hone their martial skills by drilling. But they were also given liberty to explore Camp Merritt and its surroundings. Isaac “Ike” Russell, a private in Battery A, and a friend of Charles Mabey, had enough free time to collect seashells and mail them to his sisters in Utah. “Tell Sam [his brother] to give you one of them, and tell him to be careful of the one in the envelope for it will break if you look at it,” Russell instructed. “Tell him also to keep the rocks safe as they are fossils I don’t want to lose.” (The young soldier seemed oblivious to the dangers that awaited him in the Philippines; he was too preoccupied with the “very pretty things” he was going to send home once he got there.) Almost as soon as they arrived at Camp Merritt, however, the men of the batteries were on their way again, this time halfway around the globe. On June 15, 1899, after loading their guns, caissons, limbers, and other gear on the three ships that would carry them to the Philippines—the Colon, the China, and the Zealandia—Batteries A and B of the Utah Light Artillery sailed to war.19

Ike Russell had received a letter from his brother Sam just prior to the convoy setting sail. His lengthy response to the note, which he wrote from the Colon, provides us with an evocative glimpse into the emotional distress and physical deprivations he and his fellow soldiers suffered on the way to the Philippines. “I read yours [the letter from home] just as the ship pulled out of San Francisco and have just finished reading it,” he wrote to Sam. “Reading it the thirteenth time in search of a little more news—drinking it down and licking the cup as it were. We are now riding along just out of sight of land. A dense fog is coming up from the west and covering the ocean. It is concealing the ships one from another and it gives me a feeling of misty blueness which conceals my soul from myself.” The melancholia Russell felt was surely compounded by the physical suffering inherent in riding the waves across the fickle Pacific Ocean. On one occasion, motion sickness overtook Russell and “he double timed it to the edge of the deck. First my supper went over to the fish, then my dinner, then ten minutes intermission (I hoped it was over), and up came everything within me— gastric juice—bile everything—having nothing left to throw up I threw up my job and went to bed on starvation rations. O the misery of those two days!!” He was at the mercy of the ship’s movements: “I lay on my bed with my feet proped [sic] against the sides and my hands firmly clenching the railing above. The ocean outside roared and rocked in good stile [sic]. A fierce rain storm fell continually and—! Well you can guess the rest. It tossed the little ship like it were a shingle. It rolled and rocked and plunged and jumped and reared and rose and fell.” At one point the ship’s rocking became so unbearable that Russell contemplated jumping overboard—or so he wrote in his letter from the Colon. Sickness, however, was only one of many trials Russell and his compatriots had to tolerate. According to one historian, men slept on moldy straw mattresses, ate spoiled food, and endured ill-fitting uniforms and shoddy underclothes. (Army Quartermaster General Marshall Ludington had issued lightweight canvas uniforms to the Eighth Corps, which the men swore were nearly as hot as the regulation blue wool shirts and pants.)20

Spanish American War volunteers from Bountiful. Seated on the left is Charles R. Mabey who donated photographs and other materials relating to Utahʼs involvement in the Spanish-American War to the Utah State Historical Society.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

A little more than a month after leaving port, the transports carrying the artillerymen and their colleagues in the Eighth Corps’ advance party rode at anchor off the shores of Cavite, southwest of Manila. The Americans skulked around the barracks at Cavite until they were finally moved July 29 to a series of trenches the Filipino rebels had dug around Manila. Having convinced the Filipinos to shuffle to their right, the Eighth Corps—made up of regular infantry units and volunteer regiments from Utah, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Oregon, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Kansas, California, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Washington, Wyoming, Tennessee, and Iowa— shouldered into a narrow southern stretch of the line sandwiched between Manila Bay and a humid, festering swamp. Conditions were terrible. Mud, rain, heat, snipers, and Spanish raids made life in the trenches hellish; clothes rotted on the soldiers' bodies. Opposite the Americans lay Blockhouse 14 and Fort San Antonio de Abad, two fortified nodes on the Spanish defensive line. All the Americans appeared able to do was to stare at the seemingly impenetrabledefenses; Admiral Dewey, who had so artfully put Spain’s Pacific fleet on the bottom of the bay in May 1898, now claimed he lacked the firepower to support an advance against Manila.21

On August 19, 1899, Utah Governor Heber M. Wells presented to Major Richard W. Young 355 medals like the one shown in this photograph. The medals were then presented to Utahns who had served in the Philippine Campaign. Each medal carried the engraved name of the recipient.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

It was not long before the Utahns, ensconced in the trenches, had their first taste of combat. Around 11:30 on the night of July 30, Spanish infantry raided the American line, their German-made Mauser rifles, according to one source, “singing venomously.” The men from Utah, joined by elements of a regular infantry unit and the Tenth Pennsylvania Infantry, returned fire. Gunners from Battery A, led by Sergeant J. O. Nystrom, sprayed the Spanish ranks with shrapnel, firing fifty-seven shells in all. According to one historian, Corporal Charles Varian, shirtless and “sweating like a man who was working for his life,” coolly “managed his piece like a veteran.” Only one Utah man was wounded and none were killed. A few weeks later, on August 13, Major General Wesley Merritt (who commanded Eighth Corps until he was relieved of command in late August and replaced by Major General Elwell Otis) ordered a general attack on Manila. Dewey’s cruisers and gunships in the bay unexpectedly came through with an hour-long supporting barrage, as did the Utahns’ light guns. In the space of a few hours, the American infantry, enduring the lashing fury of a tropical rainstorm, swept over the enemy’s fortifications and through Manila’s suburbs into the city itself, where they were pleased to encounter a white flag. The short First Battle of Manila was over.22

There was a second battle for Manila to come, this time fought by the Americans and Filipinos—once allies, now turned enemies. General Merritt had instructed Emilio Aguinaldo to stay out of Manila when the Americans went in, a directive the Filipino leader ignored. As the American troops moved forward, so too did elements of the Army of Liberation, racing to beat the Eighth Corps into the city they had nearly captured on their own. In the end, the competing forces forged an informal agreement: the Americans would occupy the city proper while the Filipinos, stunned and feeling betrayed, would be allowed to control the suburbs. Elsewhere around the world, in Spain’s far-flung outposts, U.S troops had been equally successful, and within a few months the Spanish were fully subdued, opening the way for American policymakers to broker a peace from a position of immense strength. But with peace came questions, including what to do next with the Philippines.23

Although President McKinley’s administration had not resolved to annex the Philippines prior to sending American troops to the islands, the mounting influence of American expansionist ideology in the 1890s gave McKinley and others the political cover they needed to advocate for long-term occupation of the archipelago. For expansionists there was ample precedent for America looking to the Pacific to “fulfill” her colonial aspirations. In 1893, a scant few years before the war against Spain, white planters, with ties to the American sugar industry, had overthrown Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani and then sued to join the United States; five years later, Congress obliged them by passing a joint resolution that made Hawaii an American territory.24 The Philippines were on the road toward a similar fate. Now that the United States held Manila (in spite of the continued presence of Aguinaldo and his revolutionaries ringing the city), McKinley and other policymakers decided that the logical next step would be to subdue the rest of the island cluster. Advisors had warned McKinley that his party—the Republicans—stood to lose the 1898 congressional elections if the president incurred the public's wrath by letting the Filipino people go their own way. So on October 25, 1898, McKinley cabled American diplomats in Paris who were working to cement a treaty with Spain. “My opinion,” he wrote, “is that the well considered opinion of the majority believes duty requires we should take the Philippines.”25 Not surprisingly, Aguinaldo would have none of it, and quickly turned his army against his country’s new occupiers.

For good or ill, the Utah artillerymen were fully engaged in advancing America's expansionist policy in the Philippines. At first, both sides settled down and watched each other, wary of potential treachery. Boredom and disease stalked the American troops inside Manila, while anger and frustration infected the Filipinos outside. Isolated skirmishes became the norm, and each side grew to detest the other. According to Corporal William Riter, the Utah volunteers “began to form a strong dislike” for the Filipino soldiers, “a dislike so strong that the men were only too glad to relieve the monotonous life of guard duty by meeting them in combat.” They got their wish on the night of February 4, 1899, when the Filipinos rose up against the Americans. The majority of the Utah men had stayed in Manila since the Spanish capitulation; only a few detachments, including a platoon from Battery A under William Webb, had been sent out on the defensive line that ringed Manila. (The batteries were no longer segregated units: the previous August, army higher-ups had brought them together under a single battalion commander, Richard Young.) Now, the men of the battalion, hearing the clatter of Mauser rifles around the city, found themselves hitching up their guns and rushing off to key points on the front line. Young took one detachment north in the direction of Caloocan, while another group under E. A. Wedgewood rumbled off toward the eastern suburb of Sampaloc.26

Some of the worst fighting swirled around Webb and his detachment at Santa Mesa, northeast of Manila. Webb’s platoon, with its two 3.2-inch guns, had joined the First Nebraska Infantry on what was perhaps the most vulnerable section of the American line. Not only did the San Juan River surround the position on three sides, but the Filipinos also held both the high ground around it and two blockhouses on its left flank. The Nebraskans and Utahns were terribly exposed. When the fighting started on February 4, the Filipinos rapidly infiltrated the American lines, forcing the artillerymen to keep from firing their guns for fear of hitting their own men in the dark. At morning’s first light, though, they let loose with their cannons, stopping a Filipino advance across the San Juan Bridge. Charles Mabey wrote that at this point, “the position of the artillery became perilous” because the Filipinos around the bridge, along with riflemen in the blockhouses and a nearby convent, “centered a galling fire on the big guns.” Their “leaden missiles rained” down on the Americans, killing two of the artillerymen—Corporal John Young, who was shot through the lungs, and Private Wilhelm L. Goodman, who was hit in the head.27

As Ike Russell discovered, violence had also broken out in the heart of Manila. Russell had been living a life of relative ease in the city, following a January discharge from the army. The night of February 4, he was at the theater “when the noise of battle rang through the place,” he wrote in a letter home. “I rushed for barraks [sic] and found the city as I sped through the streets, all arush with our men.” Revolutionary agents had infiltrated the city’s neighborhoods, arming and training secret militias that Aguinaldo planned to use against the Americans. The scene on Manila’s streets was chaotic. Buildings were burning out of control; knife-wielding guerrillas were rushing sentries, and well-hidden snipers were picking off American soldiers brave enough to venture outside. “The rocks of the road,” Russell wrote, “glistened where bullets hit them, the tin roofs rattled where bullets plowed through them.” Making his way through the tumult, he soon realized he was not the only American trying to deal with the surprise insurgency. Men from the Thirteenth Minnesota Infantry were “taking their station” and preparing to tamp down the revolt, while the First Kansas Infantry was falling in and “double timing” for a local district. Finally, Russell found himself outside the barracks that housed the Utah artillerymen. Nearly deserted, they were held only by a small guard contingent led by Lieutenant George Gibbs. “I … ran to my old bunk,” Russell recalled, “where my soldier clothes were still lying. In a moment I was a soldier again and out in the road. My arms had been turned in. I had only a

[R]emington rifle which I had saved from the taking of Manila, and my pockets full of ammunition.” Eventually he met up with Lieutenant George Seaman and made his way to the northern stretch of the front line near Caloocan. He spent the rest of the day running wounded to the rear and carrying ammunition to the men on the line.28

This welcome home arch in honor of Utahʼs Spanish-American War volunteers was constructed of papier-mâché and located on Salt Lake Cityʼs Main Street at Second South.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

There was a stark brutality to much of the fighting swirling around Manila, as both sides embraced a no-holds-barred style of combat. Filipino soldiers with bolo knives charged the American lines, cutting and slashing as they went. In one case, a knife-wielding Filipino, only steps away from Ike Russell's position, “sliced” a Kansas volunteer’s arm to the bone, while another Filipino grabbed the man around the neck and “stabbed for his heart.” Russell was also wounded in the fray. When he finally caught up to the Kansan, he saw that the severely wounded man was “a pretty sight of carved humanity.” It was clear the Kansas soldier was bleeding to death, so

Russell secured the injured man a ride to the hospital. Later, Russell himself went to the rear to have his own wound dressed. The hospital was nearly empty when he arrived, but casualties from around Manila soon came pouring in. “The gutters ran red all day,” wrote Russell, “and a force was continually flushing them to stop them from being clogged up.” In the nearby house that served as a makeshift army morgue, “the bodies piled up. Men in red drenched browns, not khaki but just brown jeans, laid [sic] in stiff lines along the floor. The chaplains tried to close their eyes and fold their hands but they came in numbers too great.”29

Not even non-combatants were spared in the carnage. Russell watched as women and children "ran helter skelter for our lines, stooping and praying every time a shell shrieked over them." One especially ill-fated Filipino woman, recalled Russell, "appeared in the road directly in front of one of our guns just as it was fired. It took both her legs off at the knees." Major Richard Young and Sergeant Harry Young, a second cousin and Battery A's quartermaster, walked out in the midst of the firing, picked the injured woman up, and sent her to the rear. (Harry Young had been a physician in civilian life and could tend to her wounds.)30

One of the key positions the Americans were eager to take lay just up the road from Santa Mesa. Months before, Aguinaldo's forces had shut down the Marikina waterworks, Manila’s key source of water. Now, elements in the Eighth Corps were keen to get the works up and running again, if only to make the city more livable. Webb and Gibbs joined their commands for the offensive on the works. The fighting was fierce. A passage from Webb’s logbook reveals both the aggressive tactics he employed to strike the Filipino line near Marikina and the racially-charged language he used to describe the native army: “February 6th, Monday, at 1:30 p.m., the First Nebraska, [Lieutenant George] Gibbs and my guns started to advance on the pumping station. We (the artillery) just went along with the firing line, and now and then opened fire on the niggers [Filipinos] to start them running, and we just took the works (the pumping station) without losing a man, and the niggers lost eighty-five dead.” Rather than bombarding the Filipinos from emplacements in the rear, as contemporary military doctrine seemed to dictate, Webb put his men and guns directly on the firing line. The artillerymen would unleash a few rounds, and then drag their guns forward as the infantry advanced and fired again.31

Among the casualties in the Marikina battle was Harry Young. He had been shot and stabbed, and his body had been stripped. A gash, presumably inflicted with a bolo knife, extended from his arm all the way to his waist. Ike Russell, who was not about to let the minor wound he suffered earlier in the day keep him in the hospital, was searching for his fellow Utahns along the front lines near Marikina, when he encountered a group of Americans who wanted to “take a dead officer to town.” Surrendering his wagon to them, Russell saw them "pack a small, dark body, almost naked" into the back of the coach before he realized that it was the doctor. “I was no longer brave,” Russell later confessed. “Harry Young was dead. It was hardly possible.”32

Utah veterans of the SpanishAmerican War march during a homecoming parade on August 19, 1899.

UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

On the other end of the battle line, near Caloocan, elements of the Utah artillery force were providing support to an attack engineered by Brigadier General Arthur MacArthur, father to Douglas MacArthur, famed World War II-era defender of the Philippines. The Filipinos rushed the American line at Caloocan, coming to within 150 yards of breaching the position. But they were no match for the “awful thunder of the big guns.” The Utahns stood their ground, pounding the rushing native waves with captured Spanish Nordenfelt cannons. “At times,” Charles Mabey wrote evocatively, “the powder-begrimed Utahns were in advance of the main line, carrying death into the very teeth of the foe.” In his official report on the Caloocan battle, Major Young commended his officers and men “most heartily and without distinction” for their work. “The amount of labor done by them,” he gushed, “in dragging guns and constructing earthworks has been prodigious and it has always been done cheerfully. All have been fearless. Compelled to advance along open roads, usually in plain view of the enemy, without the opportunity of concealment, they have unshrinkingly served their guns. It has, too, been a feature of these operations that in every advance the guns have gone forward practically on the line of skirmishers.”33

The Second Battle of Manila raged for two weeks, but finally subsided in late February as the Americans drove Aguinaldo and his army north out of the city. The battle was a clear victory for the Eighth Corps; one historian characterized the Filipino defeat as a shock to the system of the Army of Liberation. But the fighting had exacted a high toll in human lives and destroyed property. By the time the American provost guard finally pacified Manila on February 23, wide swathes of the city and suburbs were little more than smoldering ruins, and American commanders were already looking forward to launching a spring offensive against the bloodied and demoralized Filipino army.34

The new post-winter campaign focused on destroying Filipino resistance and occupying the politically significant Malolos; the town, though, did not lend itself to easy capture. It lay only about ten miles north of Manila along the coastline railroad, but, as historian Brian McAllister Linn has pointed out, to take the capital the Americans would have to “advance against a natural defensive position dotted with villages, scrub thicket, bamboo, marshes, and rice paddies; it would cross six major rivers, several without bridges, as well as innumerable creeks, gullies, and estuaries.”35 Undeterred, the Americans jumped off on March 25, 1899, sweeping northward through San Francisco de Monte, where Raymond Naylor led his artillery detachment in a dramatic charge unsupported by infantry. Next Bagbag fell, then Polo; bone-tired, worn out by incessant combat, the Utah artillerymen slept among the gravestones in the La Loma churchyard. Days later, the Americans breached the line of the Marilao River, thanks in part to the Utahns’ cannons. When a squad of Kansans successfully flanked the enemy, it was the westerners’ big guns that pounded the opposite shore and covered their assault. (In Brian Linn’s estimation, what should have taken days—namely the breaking of the Filipinos’ Marilao defenses—took only hours.) By April 28, a little more than a month after opening the campaign, the men of the Utah Batteries and their fellow soldiers stood on the outskirts of Malolos, waiting to deliver their own coup de grace. 36

After the long, intense fight for Manila and the early battles of the spring campaign, the clash at Malolos must have felt like something of an anticlimax to the Utah battery men. During the night, the men of the Eighth Corps dug in and the Utahns carefully emplaced their 3.2-inch B & Ls, their captured Nordenfelts, and their Hotchkiss revolving guns to have the greatest effect in the morning's battle. With first light, the artillery opened up on the Filipino entrenchments, the “yawning big guns” roaring “over the plain.” The response from the Filipino side was feeble, motivating the American infantry to move forward and clear the trenches. According to Mabey, “all morning a long curling line of smoke could be seen from the distance arising from the heart of the city. When the artillery swept into the city side by side with the rigid column of infantry they found half the place in ruins.” The streets were virtually empty, and the church, which earlier had doubled as a congressional hall for the fledgling Filipino republic was burning. When the men of the Utah Batteries reached the central plaza, they parked their guns and were accorded the singular honor of raising the American flag over the battered Filipino capital. Malolos had fallen quickly. The Utah men moved on to a series of smaller actions in the nearby towns of Quingua, Santo Tomas, San Fernando, Candaba, and Morong. But they would not stay on far beyond the Malolos battle. By July 1, 1899, they found themselves on the transport Hancock , bound for home via Yokohama, Japan.37

The Hancock nosed into San Francisco Bay on July 29, and the men of the battalion were given quarters in the Presidio. Back in Utah, plans had hurriedly been made to send a few members of the governor's staff to meet the troops, and a citizens’ committee had arranged for a special train to bring the artillerymen back home. After mustering out in mid-August, the Utah men boarded their eastbound train and made their way home to expectant family and friends. Governor Heber Wells, joined by a jubilant crowd, welcomed them to Ogden on August 19, and then accompanied them south to Salt Lake City, where the celebration over their return reached fever pitch. Pulling into the capital city, the former soldiers “saw flaming streamers, flags fluttering and hats waving; they heard the diaphanous shriek of the steam whistles, the blaring of bands and the din of thousands cheering—all mingled in one chorus of praise and rejoicing.” Descending from the train, the men marched to Liberty Park, passing under a “gayly [sic] decked” arch specially-made for the occasion. At the park, dignitaries made their obligatory speeches and each volunteer received a silver medal commissioned by the legislature to commemorate their service in the Philippines. Then the men of the Utah Batteries, one by one, fell out and went home to swap stories with loved ones. According to Charles Mabey, when the Utah artillerymen “slept that night there were in their dreams no spectral visions of distant battlefields. All that was closed.”38

Mabey had it wrong. For Utah’s battery men the Philippine-American War was hardly a “closed case.” True, they had been physically delivered from the battlefield, but the war ground on, consuming more American and Filipino blood, and taking on a darker, more sinister cast. Defeated on the conventional battlefield, Aguinaldo and his army took to the jungle as guerillas, and the American military naturally pursued them. But as the conflict extended into 1900, then 1901, and finally 1902, a new style of warfare emerged, marked by summary executions, the practice of imprisoning Filipino civilians in concentration camps, and the dreaded “water cure” (a form of torture not unlike the “waterboarding” of our own time). The Utahns had truly been lucky to avoid these later years of the conflict. Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that all the Utah men slept soundly at night following their tour in the Philippines. Some of them certainly paid a high psychological price for their time in the service, and undoubtedly suffered tremendously on their return home; the war they had fought was violent and bloody enough to stalk their dreams and conjure unwanted visions of red-tinged battlefields. For that price, however, they (and by extension, Utah) had moved a long way toward joining the American cultural and political mainstream. They had eagerly answered Uncle Sam’s call, fought alongside their fellow citizens, and abetted the extension of their nation’s “new empire” into the Pacific. For that, they could finally be welcomed fully into the national fold.

NOTES

Brandon Johnson lives in Virginia and works in Washington, D.C. He wishes to thank his father, Hal Johnson, for his research assistance on this article.

1 A. Prentiss, ed., The History of the Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War and in the Philippine Islands (Salt Lake City: W. F. Ford, 1900), 295.

2 Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War, 1899-1902 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000), 18-23, 42.

3 The story of Utah’s territorial era is complex, and historians have spilled a lot of ink telling it. See Gustive Larson, The "Americanization" of Utah for Statehood (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1971); E. B. Long, The Saints and the Union: Utah Territory during the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Edward Leo Lyman, Political Deliverance: The Mormon Quest for Utah Statehood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); and David L. Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847-1896 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1998).

4 D. Michael Quinn, "The Mormon Church and the Spanish-American War: An End to Selective Pacifism," Pacific Historical Review 43 (August 1974): 342.

5 Journal of Discourses, X, 107 (discourse delivered on March 8, 1865), quoted in Quinn, "Mormon Church and the Spanish-American War," 351.

6 Quinn, "Mormon Church and the Spanish-American War," 357.

7 Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 24-25.

8 Frank Freidel, The Splendid Little War: The Dramatic Story of the Spanish-American War (Short Hills, NJ: Burford Books, 1958), 27; and G. J. A. O'Toole, The Spanish War: An American Epic—1898 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 196.

9 Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 25-30.

10 Ibid., 14-15.

11 Ibid., 214, 220.

12 Ibid., 29-30, 394-402. These numbers are drawn from the units' original muster rolls and were included in the Prentiss book.

13 Charles R. Mabey, The Utah Batteries: A History (Salt Lake City: Daily Reporter Company, 1900), 120-30; Salt Lake Tribune, May 21, 1898.

14 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 102-103; Richard W. Young to the President of the United States and Jeff Chandler to William C. Endicott, Richard Whitehead Young Papers, Box 1, Folder 3, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City; Prentiss, 369-71.

15 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 103-105; Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 375-78.

16 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 178, 108-10, 112-13; Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 39092.

17 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 19, 105-108, 110-11; Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 37981, 388-89.

18 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 19.

19 Isaac Russell to his sisters, Isaac Russell Papers, Box 1, Folder 1, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City. (Isaac K. Russell Papers hereafter referred to as IKRP.)

20 Linn, Philippine War, 14; Graham A. Cosmas, An Army for Empire: The United States Army in the SpanishAmerican War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971), 202; Isaac Russell to Samuel Russell, June 5, 1898, Box 1, Folder 2, IKRP.

21 David J. Silbey, A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 44-49; Linn, Philippine War, 22-23.

22 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 22-23; Linn, Philippine War, 23-24; Silbey, War of Frontier and Empire, 48; Ivan Musicant, Empire By Default: The Spanish-American War and the Dawn of the American Century (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998), 567-71.

23 Linn, Philippine War, 25.

24 Silbey, War of Frontier and Empire, 50.

25 Quoted in Silbey, War of Frontier and Empire, 56.

26 Linn, Philippine War, 26-41; Silbey, War of Frontier and Empire, 59-66; Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 219, 405-407; Mabey, Utah Batteries, 38-39.

27 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 39-40; Linn, Philippine War, 44-48.

28 Isaac Russell to Samuel Russell, March 5, 1900, Box 1, Folder 7 IKRP; Linn, Philippine War, 58. It is not entirely clear why Russell was discharged from the army in January 1899, though it appears that it probably had something to do with his editing of the American Soldier, a Manila newspaper, and that it may have been a disciplinary measure. According to his March 5, 1900, letter to Samuel recounting his exploits in the Philippines, he closed the American Soldier down on January 5 under "orders from my commanding officers, the result of statements published in America over my signature." The Filipino insurrection started barely a month later in February, suggesting that though Russell was no longer in the army, he had dragged his feet in cleaning his belongings out of the barracks and his officers had not pushed the issue.

29 Isaac Russell to Samual Russell, March 5, 1900, Box 1, Folder 7, IKRP.

30 Ibid.

31 Webb quoted in Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 238; Linn, Philippine War, 56.

32 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 42; Isaac Russell to Samuel Russell, March 5, 1900, Box 1, Folder 7 IKRP.

33 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 45; Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 250-51.

34 Silbey, War of Frontier and Empire, 98; Linn, Philippine War, 59-60.

35 Linn, Philippine War, 92.

36 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 59-62; Linn, Philippine War, 93-97.

37 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 63-76; Linn, Philippine War, 99; Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 295-98, 356.

38 Mabey, Utah Batteries, 97-101; Prentiss, Utah Volunteers in the Spanish-American War, 358-68.