The Americans have come here [Mindanao] to teach and convince these people that all men are born free and equal and that there is no such thing as inherited caste or privilege. The working out of this doctrine and the enforcement of it means the upsetting of the whole system of tribal and patriarchal government among the Moros.

– 1902 report of General W. Davis, Commander of the Department of Mindanao and Sulu (quoted in Go and Foster 2005, 136)

During the early phase of the nearly fifty years of American experiment in colonial state building and administration in the Philippines, governance was exercised not through a single governing apparatus but three. These three apparatuses were designed to address three ethnogeographical or geoethnological segments of the general Philippine population:

1. The Philippine Commission. Representing the United States (US), the Commission worked with the all-Filipino Philippine Assembly elected in 1907, and administered all the regular provinces in the Christianized regions of the Philippines.

2. The Moro Province. This was formed in 1903 to embrace areas in Mindanao and Sulu with predominantly Muslim and pagan populations. The Moro Province was governed by the US Army with an autonomous authority.

3. The Special Government Provinces. These were formed by special legislation in 1905 to administer non-Christian tribes people and their territories, outside the supervision and reach of Filipino nationalists in the Philippine Assembly.

Of these three, the first was the central apparatus that became the present-day bicameral congress coequal with the executive branch of the Philippine government; the second evolved into the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM); the third included the old Mountain Province that inspired the movement for an autonomous Cordillera region. Kramer (2005) portrayed the Philippines as a “bi-furcated” state because he accepted the Spanish distinction between the Christian majority and the non-Christian minority. Abinales also recognized “two regimes,” one for the regular provinces and another for the special provinces (Go and Foster 2005, 149). I choose a tripartite division for Mindanao governance, at least from 1903 to 1913, because there were in fact three systems operating there during this period. These three were (1) the Moro Province; (2) the regular provinces of Misamis and Surigao; and (3) the special provinces of Agusan and Bukidnon. After 1913, Mindanao had a bifurcate regime—one for the regular provinces of Misamis and Surigao and the other, the Department of Mindanao and Sulu (the successor to Moro Province), for seven special provinces—all under the supervision of the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes. The outstanding and contested rights of non-Christian peoples and their ancestral domains continue to be the central concern of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA 1997) and of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP).

The burden of this paper is to reconstruct and explain why there were three governance systems for Mindanao; how they differed in their mission, operation, and transformation; how the shifting balance of military and civilian control shaped their evolution; and how all these questions were correlated with the restructuring of the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes, from the early “separatist” to the later “integrationist” agency. The key argument is that American colonial governance policies, practices, and structures were strategic executive responses to political mandates emanating from Washington, from Republican and Democratic leadership that differed in their fundamental stance towards the future independence of the Philippines.

Prelude to statebuilding

In their colonial statebuilding decisions, American colonial agents were guided by interimperial imperatives, anthropological theories, and racial ideologies. Political discourse in the Philippines between competing colonizers, then as now, engaged in unabashed racial stereotyping—negative against defeated Latins and positive for ascendant Anglo-Saxons. Exemplifying this stereotyping trend, the Englishman George Boxall wrote that “Anglo-Saxons ruled in the name of reason, fairness, and the public good; Latins ruled through passion, intolerance, and private gain” (Kramer 2005, 72). An undercurrent of “ethnological epistemology” ran through the debates on whether Filipinos were ready for independence. Using a racial paradigm, Worcester argued that the issue of Philippine independence was not a question of politics but “of ethnology.” There was also a counter current of assertive Filipino nationalism with mixed opportunist-collaborationist motives. Between these two forces of imperialism and nationalism, there intervened a robust American capitalism that wanted to exploit Philippine tropical resources for the global market. These three impulses were joined to create powerful crosscurrents in the three geoethnological divisions of the Philippines. Here colonizers and colonized fought over the outcome of military, political, economic, religious, and administrative issues in Mindanao in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

The US acquired the Philippines as a colony first through diplomacy at the 1898 Treaty of Paris and then through physical conquest. In the ensuing Philippine-American War, the US had two bloody encounters, earlier against the Christianized majority and later against the Muslim minority (Tan 2002). Some estimates put native casualties in these two wars at 13 percent of the Philippine population (Boudreau 2005, 262). Military rule was the dominant reality in the first few years of American “benevolent assimilation.” Between 1898 and 1902, the US War Department governed the newly acquired Philippine territory through a succession of five Military Governors. While military rule was in force, the US Congress also set in motion the beginnings of civilian rule. Things had sufficiently settled down that the office of the Military Governor was abolished on 4 July 1902, allowing Howard Taft to step in as the first Civil Governor that year; this title was changed to Governor General only in 1905.

American colonial statebuilders studied several models for governing native peoples. Among these models were: (1) American experience gained from the administration of Indian tribes in the American West: (2) Dutch and British methods of indirect rule over Malayo-Muslims in Indonesia, Malaya, and Borneo; (3) Spanish colonial administration and missionary work with Christian and non-
Christians peoples, and (4) the American doctrine of individualism and equality that in theory does not recognize the inherited status and privileges of royalty and nobility before the law.

The First or Schurman Commission (1899) laid the broad parameters of nation-building under civilian rule; the Second or Taft Commission (1900) carried out actual colonial governance on the basis of that blueprint. Statebuilding meant instituting basic structures to meet imperatives of formal political control—a police force to maintain order, administrative agencies to implement policies, personnel to collect revenue, a court system to administer justice, etc. Governance demanded actual implementation of organic acts through administrative departments and bureaus of government at the national and local levels (Go and Foster 2005, 10). The beginnings of civil government coincided with early elections at the municipal and provincial levels. The succeeding national election was limited to the regular, pacified provinces; it resulted in the 1907 Philippine Assembly that served as a legislative lower house to the American Commission functioning as the Senate. Legislative authority was delegated to this all-Filipino lower house while central policymaking and executive authority remained with senior American leadership in the Commission. An emerging Filipino civil service class was trained to staff the various governmental departments and bureaus, replacing Americans civil servants whose numbers declined through attrition or retirement. The process of election, representation, legislation, and administration in the “special provinces” and the Moro Province was to follow a different trajectory.

Why the Moro Province and the Special Provinces were established parallel to the regular provinces was a strategic response of two key policy guidelines coming from Washington. The first, from President William McKinley, instructed the Taft Commission that in dealing with uncivilized tribes the Commission should adopt the same course followed by Congress in permitting the tribes of our North American Indians to maintain their tribal organization and government; he counseled the Commissioners “to exercise due respect for all the ideals, customs, and institutions of the tribes  which compose the population” (Sullivan 1991, 64; my emphasis). The second, from President Theodore Roosevelt, circumscribed the powers of the Philippine Assembly, allowing it to share with the Philippine Commission “legislative power” for all of the Philippines, except those areas “inhabited by Moros or other non-Christian tribes”  (Sullivan 1991, 149-150; my emphasis).

Dean C. Worcester responded to these two directives by creating in 1901 the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes under the Department of Interior he headed. The Bureau’s mission was to systematically investigate the non-Christian peoples of the Philippines in order to ascertain the name of each tribe, the limit of its territory, the nature of its social organization, and the character of its language, beliefs, manners, and customs. All this was to be pursued “with special view to determining the most practicable means for bringing about their advancement in civilization and material prosperity” (Gowing 1977, 67). Part of the mission was to investigate and report upon the practical operation of legislation and statutes affecting the non-Christian peoples. Absent from the Bureau’s agenda was the goal of integrating them with the rest of the Filipino nation. Integration only became the main agenda in the successor bureau that was established by the Jones Law after 1916. It was Worcester who was instrumental in drafting the Special Provincial Government Act of 1905 and the companion Government Township Act. Through these statutes Worcester gave himself, as Secretary of Interior, “direct executive control over the government of the wild people of the Islands excepting the Moro Province” and the control over settlements in tribal areas (Sullivan 1991, 149).

Anthropologist David Barrows, the Bureau’s first director, made a special trip to the US to examine possible lessons gained from governing American Indian tribes and concluded they had little positive application to the Philippine situation. Although the Bureau would undergo several reorganizations, its primary objective remained constant, namely, to study the tribes people in support of legislation that would protect them and their resources from the greed of the majority lowlanders. Established first in 1901, the Bureau was renamed in 1903 the “Ethnological Survey for the Philippine Islands.” It was this agency that helped equip the Philippine participation at the St. Louis Centennial Exposition, where a spectrum of Filipino primitivism and progress was put on display. In 1905, the Survey was again redesignated as a “Division of Ethnology” within the Bureau of Education. In 1906, it was returned to the Bureau of Science and assumed its earlier designation as the Division of Ethnology. Here it continued its mission as a research agency, eventually designated as a Division of Ethnology in the Philippine National Museum. But the administrative and quasipolitical function of the .first Bureau, as distinct from its research function, remained in force until 1913 under Worcester’s personal control. It was through this Bureau that he succeeded in having the Philippine Commission create in 1907 the special province Agusan and the subprovince of Bukidnon under the administration of the Bureau. This arrangement remained unchanged until 1914 when they were designated provinces under the temporary Department of Mindanao and Sulu.

Worcester was the driving force behind the first Bureau until his departure in 1913.

During his long tenure as Secretary of Interior, the bureau remained his favorite agency and he used it to ensure that tribespeople and their territories did not fall under the administration of Filipino nationalists in the Philippines Assembly. He did not concede that Filipinos constituted a nation capable of governing itself; that Filipinos were just a series of tribes still needing to be civilized in the arts of self-rule. He constantly argued on ethnological grounds that the lowland Filipinos were distinct from the tribes people, and that the former had no rights on the territories and resources of the latter. “If there were serpents in this Eden [tribal areas of Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao], they were ‘Tagalogs’ or other lowlanders whose influence had to be extirpated” (Sullivan 1991, 149). He was, in short, explicitly and aggressively a separatist.

Anthropological thinking and ethnological theories informed the policies of the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes. Worcester’s idea of “civilizing” backwards tribes people was based on the prevailing assumption that Anglo-Saxons represented the highest level of civilization to which natives can aspire to over time. The Americans, as branches of the Anglo-Saxon race, have proven their superiority in war, industry, trade, and the science of government at home and overseas. The ruling evolutionary paradigm saw society as evolving along a gradient from savagery, through barbarism, to civilization. It was this architectonic paradigm of evolutionary succession that underpinned Worcester’s prototypes of “Negritos,” “Malays,” and “Indonesians” as composing the “Racial Hierarchy in the Philippines” (Sullivan 1991, 90-91). It was the same racial assumption that explains hyphenation in the term “semi-civilized” applied to Moros and Igorots in colonial reports. Hyphenation implied placement in a halfway stage between Savagery and Civilization (Kramer 2006, 123). Some natives were judged as either capable or incapable of evolving up this

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gradient. To become “civilized” requires tutorship in the science of self-government and the Americans were exceptionally endowed to introduce this into colonial administration.

Under the Jones Law of 1916, a “second” Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes came into force. Gowing (1977, 268) explicitly says that “this bureau is not to be confused with the first bureau of the same name established in 1901.” The earlier agency, under Worcester’s strong paternalistic control, had an explicit “separatist” agenda. The second Bureau had an explicit “integrationist” agenda—to facilitate the integration of all the inhabitants of the Philippines into a single Filipino nation. This divergence in purpose between the earlier and the later Bureau is, to my knowledge, a historical point that has not been sufficiently appreciated. The explicit mission of the later Bureau was adopted, almost word for word, and enshrined in the program of the Commission on National Integration (CNI), in effect making the Commission a reincarnation of the second Bureau. In Gowing (1977, 268), this mission was to

foster by all adequate means and in a systematic, rapid, and complete manner the moral, material, economic, social, and political development of the regions inhabited by non-Christian Filipinos, always having in view the action of rendering permanent the mutual intelligence between and complete fusion of all the Christian and non-Christian elements populating the Provinces of the Archipelago.

Imperialism Models for the Moro Province

The United States, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, was aware that it needed lessons in how to govern an overseas colony. Analysts consulted one important reference volume, Colonial administration, 1800-1900: Methods of government and development adopted by the principal colonizing nations in their control of tropical and other colonies and dependencies (US Treasury Department 1901). Policymakers expressed dissatisfaction with the previous method of Spanish imperialism and began to turn explicitly to other European models. The immediate need was for governing the Moros, perceived to be very similar to the Malayo-Muslims of Indonesia, Malaya, and Borneo who were governed through indirect rule. Hence the question uppermost in the minds of the military and colonial architects of the Moro Province was whether the province could also be governed through indirect rule or not. In the end, the military leadership opted for direct rule, via a hybrid politico-military apparatus.

British rule in Malaya was direct in legally British settlements, such as Singapore, but indirect in the Federated and Unfederated Malay States. Indirect rule in these latter states recognized the sovereignty of Malay rulers, allowing Malay identity, religion, culture, and language to flourish. Here the Malay rulers were firmly tutored to look up to

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the guidance of the resident British District Officer, whose “advice must be sought and acted upon” (Amoroso 2005, 119). The British recognized the distinction between chiefs and rulers, a distinction equivalent to the Moro distinction between datus and sultans. British colonial policy favored the sultans against the datus because this strengthened centralized control of Malay society without threatening overall British hegemony.

With this in mind, Jacob Schurman, head of the First Philippine Commission, visited Sandakan to observe British administration of North Borneo. General Leonard Wood and George Langhorne, first Governor and first Secretary of Moro Province respectively, toured Malay states in Malaya and Borneo. While Langhorne admired aspects of the British system, particularly the strategic cultivation of Malay royal pageantry, Wood was quite dismissive of them. A sense of “exceptionalism” has been a continuing theme in the history of American imperialism. General Wood perceived the British methods of administering colonies to “cut against the democratic grain.” He once wrote to a British friend, as quoted in Amoroso (2005, 139):

You are quite content to maintain rajahs and sultans and other species of royalty, but we [Americans], with our plain ideas of doing things, find these gentlemen outside of our scheme of government, and so have to start at this kind of proposition a little differently.

Writing in the same vein to a certain Alleyne Ireland, a respected authority on imperial systems, Wood stated the main difference between British and American philosophy of colonial governance (Thompson 1975, 43):

It has been a pretty tough proposition and it is hard, as I have often said to you, for a Britisher to appreciate the difficulties under which we Americans take up colonial work, inasmuch as we are precluded—as we think, very fortunately—by the nature of our institutions from utilizing the local sovereigns, reigning authorities, etc., in the manner and to the extent that you are able to do. This is one of the great points of difference. The other is that we always have to figure on eventually making the native an actual bona fide participant in the government.

So it is not surprising that in the design for the Moro Province, the Americans followed a pattern somewhat opposite to that of the British. Initially, Americans recognized the prerogatives of the Sultan of Sulu while the Bates Agreement was in force. In 1904, General Wood unilaterally abrogated the agreement; and in the 1916 Carpenter Agreement, the sultanate was finally terminated as a political institution. Americans rejected the idea of a protectorate for Sulu while the British encouraged it in the Malay states. Americans recognized the value of datus as potential “ward chiefs” representing American sovereignty rather than as traditional leaders representing the dignity of their people. Unlike the British who nurtured Malay identity through the use of the Malay language while restricting the learning of English, Americans enforced an English language policy in a general educational system applied to the emerging Filipino nation as a whole. In this educational system, unfortunately, Moro identity remained that of “minorities” because the underlying sociological framework of Christian/non-Christian, or majority/minority, was never sufficiently overhauled in political education and in social discourse.

The Exceptionalism of Misamis and Surigao

The second governance apparatus in Mindanao parallel to Moro Province was maintained in the regular provinces of Misamis and Surigao in northeastern Mindanao. The genesis and nature of this second system need deeper analysis and appreciation. Prior to 1903, the American military had always linked “Mindanao and Jolo” together in controlling southern Philippine affairs. In 1899, the US Army created the “Military District of Mindanao and Jolo,” which was renamed the “Military Department of Mindanao and Jolo” in 1900. In this second or departmental scheme, four “units” were identified—the first and second units were in mainland Mindanao, the third unit in Sulu Archipelago, and the fourth unit in Palawan. The “two units” for mainland Mindanao now appears to be the basis for the American decision to separate the first unit (Misamis and Surigao) from the second unit, the Moro Province (Gowing 1977, 40);

On May 15, 1901, the northern and eastern regions of Mindanao were separated from the jurisdiction of the [military] Department of Mindanao and Jolo and given civil governments as the Provinces of Misamis and Surigao. The Moros and the “wild people” living elsewhere on the island were not considered prepared for civil rule. They continued to be governed by military authorities. The status of regular provinces granted to Misamis and Surigao in 1901, however, was far from secure. Military administrators were under pressure from some American business interests to convert the whole of Mindanao into a new American frontier, a “White Mindanao.” In 1904, barely three years after Misamis and Surigao were declared regular provinces, General Wood wanted to include them within the Moro Province. A year later, the Zamboanga Chamber of Commerce, under its president Samuel DeRackin, passed a resolution “that all that portion of the Philippine Islands lying south of the Straits of Surigao should be created by act of Congress a territory of the United States” (Thompson 1975, 118). This move greatly alarmed the Christian leadership in Misamis and Surigao, because inclusion in the Moro Province would have automatically excluded them from participation in the incoming Philippine Assembly in 1907. In 1906, Manuel Corrales, Governor of Misamis, submitted to the Governor General a protest note signed by Misamis politicians opposing the plan. About 3,000 protesters gathered in front of the Provincial Building in a show of mini “people power.” Political leaders from Surigao sent their protest to President Roosevelt in Washington. The leadership of Dapitan, in northern Zamboanga, demanded to be separated from the Moro Province and placed instead within Misamis Province. Apparently, this vocal and timely opposition in Northern Mindanao succeeded in preserving the status of Misamis and Surigao as regular provinces, with full representation in the new Philippine Assembly.

Although the Moro Province was a distinctive governance apparatus, it was nevertheless oriented to approximate the system operating in the regular provinces:

Conceived as a transition from military to civil rule, the ostensible goal of the province was to bring its people under a form of control  approximating and finally attaining the method of control exercised  among the civilized peoples of the Philippines Islands (Amoroso 2005, 138; my emphasis).

Historically, however, the creation of local governments in the regular provinces was part of the Christianization process. Thus a practical problem confronts a historian or social anthropologist: how then would governance in the Moro Province approximate a Philippine model based on Christian evangelization, which Muslims had rejected over centuries of resistance? Since governance does not operate in a vacuum, it is well to review how the American master plan for Mindanao was superimposed on an earlier Spanish master plan. On 30 July 1860, Queen Isabel II of Spain issued two organic decrees: the first was to assign the Mindanao missions to the Jesuits who had just returned to the Philippines in 1859; the second was to create six politico-military districts for governing Mindanao (Schreurs 1994, 19-20). These six were: (1) District of Zamboanga; (2) District of North Mindanao; (3) District of East Mindanao; (4) District of Davao (5) District of Central Mindanao; and (6) District of Basilan. These divisions later appear in a Spanish map of 1890 with five distritos (minus Basilan) with their local names and capitals as follows:

#1 Distrito de Zamboanga            Zamboanga
#2 Distrito de Misamis                    Cagayan
#3 Distrito de Surigao                      Surigao
#4 Distrito de Davao                        Davao
#5 Distrito de Cotabato                 Cotabato

The five-district territorial framework of 1890 is a crucial context for understanding the scope of Moro Province having five administrative “districts”—Zamboanga, Davao, Cotabato, Lanao, and Sulu. The first three were from the Spanish five-district framework of 1890. Lanao was excised from the Spanish “segundo distrito de Misamis.” And Sulu had always loomed as a distinct administrative region, being identified with the Sulu Sultanate.

Coastal Misamis and Surigao already had town centers and municipios (townships), which began as Christian mission stations of the Jesuits and the Recolletos. The Jesuits had their first successful mission in Butuan in 1596 but left shortly after to concentrate on work elsewhere. In 1622, the Augustinian Recollects arrived in Tandag, Surigao and established mission stations and local governments in “the coastal towns of Agusan, Surigao, Davao Oriental, and the eastern part of Misamis Oriental” (Bernad 2004, 56). The division of Mindanao missions between Jesuits and Recollects was formalized in 1624 with an imaginary line that extended from Punta Sulauan on northern Mindanao to Cape San Agustin at the southernmost point of Davao Gulf. East Mindanao was assigned to the Recollects, and west Mindanao to the Jesuits.

In the Spanish model of imperialism, evangelization a.id governance were integrated. Missionaries were integral partners with civilian administrators and military officers in expanding colonial control. The missionary policy was summed up as reducir, civilizar, cristianizar (Lynch 1956, 249). Small, scattered, seminomadic tribal groups first were “reduced” or induced to settle in larger community clusters—the better to teach and service them, to extract tribute and compulsory labor from them. This was the origin of the system of rancheria-visita-cabecera. A roving missionary based himself to a cabecera or head settlement from where he moved out to convert and service people in outlying hamlets. The system was later described as sitio-barrio-poblacion. On this local base grew the municipio and early provinces, earlier designated as alcaldia mayor and corregimiento (See Table 1 below for the summary).

Table 1. Local governance units in Hispanized regions of the Philippines

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As reconstructed by Phelan (1959) in The Hispanization of the Philippines, pre-Hispanic datus as heads of barangay were coopted and recognized as cabezas de barangay. While their inherited status exempted them from tribute and compulsory labor, they also had the duty to organize the collection of tribute from other members of the barangay. Above the cabezas de barangay, the Spaniards created the elective position of gobernadorcillo as the representative of the central government at the village level. This “democratic arrangement in which all married males voted was replaced by a more oligarchical franchise” had the retiring gobernadorcillo, twelve senior cabezas de barangay, and the parish priest nominating the three candidates for the successor gobernadorcillo (Phelan 1959, 125). The ,local magistracy included the gobernadorcillo as well as “his dewy, a constable, an inspector of palm trees, an inspector of rice fields and a notary” (Phelan 1959, 126). All these local leaders constituted the
principalia. The parish priest kept an eye on the principalia, since he played the role of “petty viceroy” of the Spanish king in his parish. The principalia stratum played a critical intermediary role between Manila and the natives in the surrounding provinces. On the Spanish achievement, Phelan (1959, 16-27) wrote with mixed admiration:

Although the Philippines did not achieve self-government on the national scale until very recently, the Filipinos had had extensive political experience on the level of local government since the late sixteenth century. New political practices introduced by the Spaniards such as the principles of hereditary succession, representation, election to office, and rotation in office, were meticulously observed. The system of local administration was oligarchical rather than democratic. Political office was monopolized by a small group of “bosses” in each community. Venality, widespread but petty, flourished. In the Hispanic world this system has come to be known as “caciquism.”

Najeeb Saleeby was an Arabic-speaking Lebanese-American official with the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes who was assigned to the Moro Province as Superintendent of Schools. Not in favor of direct rule, he argued instead for the. formation of —datuship councils’ among the Moros.” He believed that such councils would “eventually approximate  the municipal councils of Christian Filipinos” (Go and Foster 2005, 138; my emphasis). These proposed datuship councils appear structurally similar to Phelan’s native principalia responsible for local governance in the regular provinces that evolved under Spain. In point of fact, early American attempts at reinstituting municipal governments and conducting local elections relied on Spanish precedents. With critical collaboration from Filipino ilustrados, a provisional scheme of municipal government was approved, one that was based on a Spanish model outlined in the Maura Law of 1893. The English version of this adaptation was later translated into Tagalog and disseminated. The Americans’ early success in reintroducing municipal governments is attested to by the creation of “more than 1,035 municipal governments and 31 provincial governments” (Abinales 2005, 151). As reconstituted by the Americans, a municipal council consisted of a president and a representative from each ward or barrio. Its responsibilities included police, school, sanitation, lighting, local commercial regulation, and the collection and disbursement of local taxes and revenues (Sullivan 1991, 77-78).

The Exceptionalism of Agusan and Bukidnon

The administration of Agusan and Bukidnon constituted the third governance apparatus for Mindanao. In 1907, the Americans created, out of Misamis and Surigao, the special province of Agusan and the subprovinces of Butuan and Bukidnon. According to Hontiveros (2004, 219),

Butuan took in the whole Agusan River valley as far south as the eight parallel of latitude, and east and west to the crests of the two watersheds. It also included some territory on the west coast of northern peninsula of Mindanao. Bukidnon included all of the territory inhabited by the people of the same name, and that of some wild Manobos in central Mindanao.

The boundary line between Agusan and Bukidnon was clear. But the western, southern, and northern boundary of Bukidnon was only vaguely indicated. Act No. 1693, the original statute that created Agusan and its two subprovinces, simply said that Bukidnon’s southern corner intersects “the eighth parallel of north latitude; and from this point shall extend in such a way as to separate, as far as may be practicable, the territory inhabited by non-Christian tribes in the Province of Misamis” (Lao 1985, 242). The town and municipality of Malaybalay was declared the seat of Bukidnon’s government; and the town of Butuan the seat of the government of Agusan. Agusan and its two subprovinces came under the mandate of the Special Province Government Act of 1905 and were administered directly under the Philippine Commission through the Department of Interior and the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes rather than through the Philippine Assembly.

The Spanish-era “distrito de Misamis” and the “distrito de Surigao” were extensive territories that accounted for nearly 40 percent of Mindanao, a pretty large chunk of real estate. Even though they were organized as regular provinces in 1901, local governance was limited to only a few population centers along the coast, such as Cagayan, Butuan, Surigao, and Tandag. Here, there was a semblance of town life organized around a church and a town plaza representing local government. Outside the towns, life still followed the traditional patterns of the Manobos, Bukidnons, Higaonons, and other non-Christian tribes. In both Misamis and Surigao, a pattern of exploitation through unfair trade badly damaged the communal life, culture, and health of the Manobos and Bukidnons in the hinterlands. It was a classic case of negative reciprocity where the strong oppress and exploit the weak through indebtedness. Evidence of such exploitative trade is found in several historical sfudies of Misamis and Surigao, such as Lao (1985, 49-50) below:

In business, the Bukidnons were exploited by the oppressive and cunning Filipino and Chinese businessmen from the coast …. The trick was to sate the native Bukidnons with wine, before buying at ridiculously low prices the latter’s farm products (cacao, coffee, hemp and the like). They resorted to this trickery in spite of the government ban on drinking hard liquor by members of the non-Christian tribes . . .. To ensure a continued monopoly and profit from a lucrative trade, businessmen from Cagayan, Agusan, and Gusa divided Bukidnon into spheres of business interest.

Hontiveros (2004, 221) writes:

In the Agusan River valley conditions were nearly as had. The people along the mainstream were for the most part broken-spirited Manobos. Their settlements had been parceled out among the members of the municipal council of Butuan to be plundered. The activities of these ‘Christian’ gentlemen had been such that a number of Manobo villages were already completely abandoned, while the people of others were gradually betaking themselves to secure hiding-places in the trackless forests which stretch east and west from the banks of the Agusan.

It was to stop or mitigate this trend that the Philippine Commission established the new jurisdictions of Agusan and Bukidnon. The system of Special Provinces came late to Mindanao because Worcester’s early focus was on northern Luzon. Starting with municipal elections in 1901, he brought together sixteen townships to form the special province of Benguet. Using the Benguet precedent, he established similar special provinces in Lepanto-Bontoc, Nueva Vizcaya, Mindoro, and Palawan. To further consolidate his work in the highlands, the Philippine Commission established in 1908 the Mountain Province, a multitribal governance system whose components were the subprovinces of Benguet, Amburayan, Lepanto, Bontoc, Kalinga, Apayao, and Ifugao. A military lieutenant governor exercised strong control in each of these seven subprovinces, just like the army lieutenant governors who administered the five districts of Moro Province. Worcester insisted on their separation from the rest of the Philippines. He vigorously opposed the idea of Filipinos being a single nation deserving a unified country of their own (Sullivan 1991, 150-151):

The Filipinos had no ‘just claim’ to tribal territory, whether it be the Igorot’s Luzon mountains or the Muslim south. The integration of tribal regions into a Philippine nation-state was neither possible nor desirable. Instead, he clearly implied, they should remain as American territory.

Worcester succeeded in placing his ‘non-Christians,’ whom he estimated at one-eighth of the population of the archipelago, beyond the control of the imminent Philippine Assembly [19071. Of at least equal significance was the land they occupied, whose  area he calculated at almost half that of the Philippines. His justification centered on the supposed congenital incapacity and inhumanity of lowland Filipinos. These elements, he claimed, had been predominant in the past behavior of the lowlanders towards tribal people, producing an “insurmountable barrier” of ‘hatred’ between the two groups (my emphasis).

The 1907 creation of Agusan and Bukidnon antedated the inauguration of the Philippines Assembly, and thereby deprived it of control over tribes people and their territories. Administration in Agusan and Bukidnon followed the pattern Worcester had earlier developed in northern Luzon. He placed his own trusted men to run the special provinces he created. Usually, these were ex-Army men who had decided to serve in the Philippine Constabulary to consolidate American civilian control in the hinterlands. Worcesteri appointed as the first governor of Agusan . Captain Frederick Johnston of the Philippine Constabulary, who had gained much experience dealing with natives during his earlier deployment in Moro Province. Johnston served the longest in Agusan and  was succeeded by John R. White, who in turn was succeeded by Frederick Lewis. The latter started as Lieutenant Governor of thesubprovince of Bukidnon where his assistant was ManuelaFgorirctuicihti. This founder of the Fortich political family in Bukidnon was also an ex-Constabulary officer who Worcester befriended and who became a trusted facilitator for Worcester’s ranching venture in Bukidnon. When Bukidnon was promoted from the status of a subprovince to that of a full special province parallel with Agusan, Fortich b governor and was instrumental in promoting ranching, and government service in Bukidnon. The hierarchy of administrative) supervision was patterned after that of the ‘regular provinces.’ The province was headed by a governor assisted by a provincial board. below the province were municipalities and municipality districts administered by mayors; and within the municipalities were barrios supervised by barrio lieutenants.

Tribal groups in Agusan and Bukidnon received special development assistance more than they would have enjoyed had they remained under Misamis and Surigao. The most remarkable improvements were in (1) public works and transportation—roads in Bukidnon and improved river transport up and down Agusan River; (2) town planning, sanitation, and health education; (3) agricultural and industrial schools; (4) government stores and exchanges where natives could dispose of their produce and buy supplies without being cheated; and (5) increased participation in local government. Bukidnon continued to grow and prosper under the Department of Mindanao and Sulu where it was treated on par with the older districts of the former Moro Province.

Transition: From Military to Civilian, Special to Regular

Worcester’s ethnicity-driven and separatist logic turned out to be unsustainable. The overarching premise of American policy on the Philippines was preparation for eventual independence. Even though the Republicans favored longer retention and the Democrats were for rapid Filipinization, ultimately both agreed that American presence in the islands was temporary. It is this larger American logic that explains the transitional structure of the Moro Province, the Special Provinces, the Department of Mindanao and Sulu, and even that of the Philippine Commonwealth, the latter being a preparation for full independence in 1946.

The American military command in the Philippines and the Philippine Commission collaborated on the blueprint of the Moro Province. They saw the advantage of combining military presence and power with the establishment of civil institutions and procedures. The overall mission was “the pacification of dissident elements, the establishment of law and the preparation of the Moros for their proper place in the body politic of the Philippines.” The Americans took a page from the Spanish book on governing the “unpacified regions” of the Philippines and in effect created a sort of politico-military province—i.e., the Moro Province. Philippine Commission passed Act No. 787 on 1 June 1903; it took effect on 15 July 1903. It was entitled

“An Act Providing for the Organization and Government of the Moro Province.” The framers considered it “a governmental framework  within which transition from military to civil rule in Moro land would  take place wherever and whenever the duly constituted authorities felt  it was indicated” (Gowing 1977, 73; my emphasis).

Moro Province had administrative positions that had civilian functions but staffed by US Army officers. The governing body consisted of six officials—a Provincial Governor assisted by a Secretary, Treasurer, Attorney, Engineer, and Superintendent of Schdols. The six formed the Legislative Council that had legislative and executive functions separate from but under the supervision ultimately of the Philippine Commission. Within Moro Province were established five districts—Davao, Cotabato, Lanao, Sulu, and Zamboanga—which were governed by five District Governors who were military officers and subordinate to the Provincial Governor. The first three governors of Moro Province were General Leonard Wood (1903-1906), General Tasker H. Bliss (1906-1909), and General John J. Pershing (1909-1913)—all were concurrently commanding generals of the Department of Mindanao of the US Army in the Philippines (Thompson 1975).

Moro Province had legislative and executive functions that covered all aspects of governance. The civilian administrative functions concentrated on improving public health, public education, public works, courts of justice, taxation, public administration, and economic development in the major sectors of transportation, trade, agriculture, and industry. General Wood is generally credited with major successes in law enforcement, General Bliss with great strides in public education, and General Pershing with accelerating economic development. It was during Pershing’s term that a Department of Commerce and Industry was established. When he took over as governor in 1909, American army officers held practically all key positions in the province. The six district governors, except one, were army officers. In the six-member Legislative Council, three military officers occupied the position of Governor, Secretary, and Engineer. By 1913, however, only two army officers were left—the Provincial Governor and the Provincial Health Officer, All six districts had civilian governors, except Lanao. In Lanao the positions of District Governor and District Secretary were turned over to the Constabulary, which was considered a civilian agency. Another innovation noted during Pershing’s term was the appointment of seven Moro chiefs as Deputy District Governors —three in Sulu, two in Lanao, and one each in Cotabato and Zamboanga.

The changing proportion of military and civilian personnel is a useful index for understanding the transition from military to civilian governance in Mindanao. The number of US Army troops deployed in the Philippines fell dramatically—from 71,528 in 1901 to 17,746 in 1903. There was a corresponding increase in the number of native constabulary soldiers recruited partly as state police to secure peace and order and partly as auxiliary to the remaining regular US Army. In 1904, about 7,000 constables were under the command of 345 US officers (Boudreau 2005, 265), A large proportion of those US Army troops that stayed in the Philippines were assigned to the Moro Province, because this was the largest territory where the US Army continued to be actively involved in military and civil affairs.

It is important to note that the US military created two armed organizations in the Philippines, both organizations having a mixture of American soldiers and native recruits headed by American officers. The first was the Philippine Scouts, created in 1899 by the US War Department, apparently before the inauguration of the Philippine Commission. As a special unit of the regular US Army, the Philippine Scouts saw action in Luzon fighting Filipino revolutionary forces, in Mindanao and Sulu during the Moro campaigns, and against the Japanese during World War II. After the Pacific War, units of the Philippine Scouts were absorbed into the regular US Army. The organization itself was decommissioned. The other organization was the Philippine Constabulary founded in August of 1901 by the Philippine Commission. This organization was conceived as an Insular Police Force and therefore was structurally different from the Philippine Scouts organized as a unit of the US Army. The Philippine Constabulary’ remained an instrumentality of the Philippine government even after the US Army left the Philippines (Jose 1992, 13-22).

Both Constabulary and Scouts served actively in all five districts of the Moro Province. By 1904, the Province had seventeen Constabulary officers, “all of whom were Americans or.Christian Filipinos, and 353 enlisted men, one third of them Maros” (Gowing 1977, 150). Their main function was police work outside the better organized towns and in tribal wards. They carried out such routine police activities as “investigating murder and other crimes of violence; catching thieves and recovering stolen property; establishing peace among rival Moro factions; protecting the hill people from Moro exploitation; pursuing slavers and smugglers; and controlling piracy and banditry” (Gowing 1977, 149). The US Army was held in reserve for more serious military operations. Philippine Scouts and Constabulary units joined regular US Army troops in the two major Moro encounters in Sulu, first at Bud Dajo in 1906 under General Wood and at Bud Bagsak in 1913 under General Pershing. A Moro Constabulary unit proudly donned a uniform with red fez in recognition of their Muslim background. At the level of the municipalities, a separate organization of local police was used for maintaining community peace and order.

The creation of a “Moro Constabulary” was not unprecedented in the sense that other native troops were recruited in Luzon and the Visayas to join the Philippine Scouts, a policy guided by both practical strategy and “ethnolOgical epistemology.” The first Luzon natives to be recruited were the Macabebes of Pampanga; the first company was formed as early as 4 September 1899 while the US Army was still fighting Aguinaldo and the remnants of the Katipunan. The early hires were civilian contract workers—as guides, or boatmen, and occasionally as fighters. Very quickly, other companies were formed into fighting units, all identified in tribal terms, under the existing ethnological epistemology. According to Jose (1992, 14):

By July 1, 1901 the separate units totaled thirty-four companies: seven Macabebe, eleven Ilocano, four Cagayano, one Boholano, one Cebuano, two Negrense, and eight in Panay …. Although the scouts were officially listed as civilian employees and paid as such, they were de facto soldiers with khaki uniforms and Springfield carbines, who fought battles in the front lines. Many of the scouts had served in the Spanish colonial army and had already received some military training; several had feared reprisal from the revolutionary forces for having sided with the Spaniards, and had felt it safer and more practical to join the U.S. forces.

The value the US military saw in forming a Moro Constabulary must have been similar to what it saw in establishing native troops as units in the Philippine Scouts. As long as their loyalty to their US officers was unquestioned, these native troops were valuable assets able to “distinguish friend from foe, speak the language” and “knew the terrain intimately” (Jose 1992, 14).

General Pershing, the last military governor of Moro Province, believed that general peace in Mindanao and Sulu could be maintained only by a continuance of American control; that Maros realized that they had experienced great prosperity under the American Government; that they did not desire the reins to pass into other hands (Gowing 1977, 255). Nevertheless, it was during his term that Moro Province was dissolved and absorbed into the [civilian] Department of Mindanao of Sulu under Frank Carpenter as civil governor.

Integration of the Three Modes of Governance

The same year 1913 when the Moro Province was dissolved, the military Department of Mindanao and Sulu was also abolished. US Army units were pulled out, and Constabulary soldiers were substituted to carry on the work of maintaining peace and order. The name “Department of Mindanao and Sulu” lost its military reference and assumed a fully civilian connotation under Governor Frank Carpenter. This new departmental governance, just like Moro Province, was designed as a temporary apparatus, scaffolding that eventually was pulled down when its seven constituent provinces could stand forth and function as regular provinces like those in the rest of the Philippines. A self-destruct proviso was built into the Organic Act No. 2408 entitled “An Act Providing a Temporary Form of Government for the Territory known as the Department of Mindanao and Sulu, Making Applicable Thereto, with Certain Exceptions, the Provisions of General Laws Now in Force in the Philippine Islands, and for Other Purposes” [my emphasis]. Its Preamble explicitly states that the Commission is firm in its purpose to abolish the departmental government as soon as the several districts of said region [Moro Province and Special Provinces shall have been converted into regularly organized provinces  (Gowing 1977, 261; my emphasis). The Department was in operation for six years, from 1914 to 1920. By 5 February 1920, the process of regularization was officially completed and the Department of Mindanao and Sulu, just like the Moro Province in 1913, passed into history. It should be pointed out that even after the Department scaffolding was removed, the provinces of Cotabato, Lanao, Sulu, and Zamboanga still carried the label “special provinces,” although now directly linked to the central government, without the Department apparatus as an intermediary. Governor Carpenter stayed on as Governor until 1918, the year he took over the administration of the new Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes. Replacing Carpenter as Department Governor was Teofisto Guingona, the Department’s Secretary Guingona served formerly as Governor of the Special Province of Agusan. After the Department was abolished, he also moved up to be Director of the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes, following Carpenter.

Changes made under the Department of Mindanao and Sulu are evident in the new nomenclature used to designate administrative units. The former “districts” became “provinces” and “district governors” became “provincial governors.” The term “municipality” remained unchanged, but “tribal wards” became “municipal districts.” The latter were expected to evolve and “mature” into regular municipalities (See Tables 2 and 3). Substantive changes behind the change in nomenclature were also evident. The Department had yielded to the central government the legislative and administrative authority with respect to public works, public health, public education, civil service, the administration of justice, bureau of lands, bureau of forestry, bureau of internal revenue, and economic development. During the Moro Province period, policy decisions on these concerns were initiated and legislated by the Legislative Council of the Moro Province. In the succeeding Department, a new Administrative Council replaced the old Legislative Council. The Administrative Council enjoyed only advisory power, since legislative function was now vested in the Philippine Commission in Manila. The members of the Administrative Council were the Governor, Department Secretary, Department Treasurer, Department Attorney, and Department Delegate (an appointive representative to the Philippine Legislature). The Department Governor, however, kept control over the Constabulary.

Changes were also evident at the provincial level. Here, the Provincial Governor was assisted by a Deputy Provincial Governor and by a Provincial Board, which had lawmaking and administrative functions comparable to those of the ‘regular provinces.’ The Provincial Board consisted of the Provincial Governor, the Provincial Secretary-Treasurer, and a “third member.” The last element was an innovation because the position was to be elective,, thus allowing the will of the electorate to be expressed in provincial governance.

Table 2. Organization of the Moro Province (1903-1913)

[Refer to the Original Copy]

Table 3. Organization of the Department of Mindanao and Sulu (1914-1920)

[Refer to the Original Copy]

Initially, the Provincial Governor and other province-level officials were appointed by the Department Governor with the final approval of the Governor General in Manila. Over time, these positions were also made subject to electoral choice, and the increasing number of elective positions compared to appointive ones was the measure of how close the province was to the standard of the regular provinces of the Philippines.

At the municipal level, innovations were also introduced. The municipal executive was the Municipal President (now Municipal Mayor), assisted by a Municipal Council composed of the Vice President (Vice Mayor) and a Councilor each from the component barrios of the municipality. The Provincial Governor appointed the Municipal President while the Vice President and the councilors were elected. Eventually, the Municipal President was also elected. Again, the number of officers chosen by election was used as a measure of approximation to the standard of the regularly organized provinces and municipalities. The overall objective was “the extension thereto [the seven provinces of the Department] of the general laws of the country and of the general forms and procedures of government followed in other provinces” (Gowing 1977, 261). Understandably, the personnel in the Department of Mindanao and Sulu increasingly became more civilian than military, more Filipino than American. When Carpenter started as Governor in 1914, there were twenty-six Americans in the Department, but this number went down to six the following year. The number of Filipino employees went up from seventeen to thirty-seven during the same period (Abinales 2000, 34). The inclusion of Moro personnel in appointive and elective positions did not happen as fast as the Moro leadership had expected. In the Constabulary’s Filipinization program, only five Maros achieved officer ranks during this period. In the Philippine Legislature, however, as it was in the previous Philippine Assembly, there were more Moro leaders representing Mindanao and Sulu. In the inauguration of the new bicameral congress, Governor General Harrison appointed five Moro delegates to the Lower House—among them Datu Benito of Lanao and Datu Piang of Cotabato—and Hadji Butu to the Senate (Abinales 2000, 38).

Conclusion and Reflections

The three divergent governance apparatuses for Mindanao between 1903 and 1913 were major executive responses to mandates from President McKinley and President Roosevelt to ensure that non-Christian peoples in the Philippines are governed differently, according to their distinctive cultural conditions. The US War Department had much say in effecting the shift from military to civilian governance, succeeding more quickly in the pacified provinces and more slowly in the territories occupied by tribes people and Moros. The governance arrangement designed for the non-Christian groups was the Philippine Commission’s way of delegating to the US military the responsibility of helping pagans and Moros transition to a civilian life comparable to the prevailing system in the rest of the Philippines. When the US Army began to physically withdraw from Mindanao and Northern Luzon, it also delegated its administrative function to civilian authorities and its law enforcement function to the Constabulary. When American officers in the Constabulary were recalled to regular army duties, Filipino officers began to move up the Constabulary command hierarchy, Hence, even the US military establishment was responsive to political developments in Washington.

Washington party politics was the ultimate controlling variable in delaying or hastening the transition from military to civilian rule and, from temporary to final, nationwide forms of governance. The incoming Democratic administration under President Woodrow Wilson started in 1912 to reverse previous Republican policies on future Philippine independence and mandated accelerated Filipino participation in their government. Radical changes followed in the central government in Manila and in local governments in the provinces. Jones Bill, which was passed in 1916, was entitled “An Act to Declare the Purpose of the People of the United States as to the Future Political Status of the people of the Philippine Islands, and to Provide a More Autonomous Government for Those Islands.” Jones Law was responsible for abolishing the Philippine Commission, for establishing a Senate, and for inaugurating a fully bicameral Philippine Legislature—with both in the hands of Filipino nationalists. The new legislature did away with the triple governance apparatus that heretofore prevented the central government from having legislative control over tribes people and Moros. It established a new Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes under a new Secretary of Interior to administer them. The second Bureau looked similar to the first Bureau, in that both were placed under the Department of Interior. The difference was that the second Bureau was set up after Jones Law and was therefore under the legislative control of the Philippine Congress, whereas before it was under the Philippine Commission but outside the Philippine Assembly.

Worcester’s career is instructive for understanding the connection between the governance question explored in this paper and economic history. He himself had transitioned from being “king of the Special Government Provinces” to being a dominant and successful American entrepreneur in the Philippines. Sensing that he would be losing his government job under the incoming Democratic administration, in 1912 he submitted a proposal to the Bureau of Insular Affairs in Washington to create a new position for him—”special commissioner for the non-Christians”–a role that would allow him “to spend all of my time on the work for the wild people.” He believed he could “accomplish more for Filipino people out of the service than in it under Ethel coming administration” (Sullivan 1991, 163-64).

This proposal assumed he could exercise his powers outside the Assembly, subject only to the Governor General. As it turned out the proposal failed. Worcester resigned from government service finally in June 1913. Underneath his “attachment” to the non-Christians was a deep-driving and systematic interest in business ventures. After leaving government service, he successfully leveraged his knowledge of tribal territories with powerful capitalists and investors in the American-Philippine Company. Having secured with Worcester’s help large tracts of undeveloped land in Bukidnon, the company formed three subsidiaries; the Bukidnon Plantation Company, the Insular Transportation Company, and the Visayan Refining Company. The American-Philippine Company appointed Worcester as “general administrator” in the islands; and he had executive responsibility for the three subsidiaries. The oil refining operation metamorphosed to become the Philippine Refining Corporation, of which Worcester was Vice President. As a valuable corporate policy adviser and executive, Worcester earned annual salaries ranging from USD15,000 to USD35,000 (Sullivan 1991, 201), most probably more than what he earned as Secretary of Interior in the Insular Government.

Two of Worcester’s largest and most successful business ventures were in a coconut plantation in Agusan and a cattle ranch in Bukidnon. The San Miguel Estate in the Agusan Valley was the largest and most efficient coconut plantation in the Philippines, with 250,000 trees in 1937. It was American-owned but developed and managed by Worcester under the Agusan Coconut Company. Further, Worcester’s Diklum Ranch in Bukidnon had 6,000 heads of cattle. Between this and Fortich’s 2,000-head Star Crescent Ranch, the two dominated and pioneered Bukidnon’s ranching industry in 1920. It surely was not a coincidence that Worcester’s success in coconut farming and cattle raising were situated in Agusan and Bukidnon, the two territories he transformed into Special Government Provinces in 1907. He continued to flourish as a valuable corporate player until his death in 1924. In retrospect, President McKinley’s famous declaration—”The Philippines are not ours to exploit, but to develop, to civilize, to educate, to train in the science of self-government”—has to be interpreted within the larger economic and industrial history of the Philippines in which American businesses benefited as much as, if not more than, the Philippine inhabitants. Quoting Boudreau (2005, 266):

From 1901 onward, as the coercive American presence declined, the shock troops of U.S. colonialism arrived in robust numbers: Newspapermen, entrepreneurs, bankers, and lawyers flooded Manila and streamed into the provinces. They took charge of a massive effort to meet greatly expanded Western demand for tropical products such as sugar, copra, and abaca. They established the great sugar centrals, mapped out strategies for broader fruit production for export markets, and accelerated timber and mining operations. In these efforts, they worked hand in hand with the landed provincial elite who had been gathering power and productive resources during the last years of Spanish rule.