Emilio Aguinaldo

Emilio Aguinaldo led Filipino forces against Spain and then against the United States between 1896 and 1901, and headed the short-lived First Philippine Republic, which Filipinos count as their first presidency. A national hero who proclaimed independence and introduced the national flag, he is also a contested figure, linked to the deaths of two rival revolutionaries and to collaboration with Japan during the Second World War. He lived to the age of 94.

He was born on 22 March 1869 at Cavite el Viejo, now Kawit, in the province of Cavite, into a well-off family; his father served as the town's appointed head. A cholera outbreak cut short his schooling in Manila. By the age of 25 he was himself municipal head of his town. In 1895 he became a Freemason and joined the Katipunan, the secret society founded by Andrés Bonifacio to win independence from Spain by force.

When the Philippine Revolution, inspired in part by the writings of José Rizal, broke out in August 1896, Aguinaldo's men in Cavite won a series of battles that briefly cleared the Spanish from much of the province, while rebels around Manila were driven to guerrilla war. Rivalry between his Magdalo faction and Bonifacio's supporters came to a head at the Tejeros Convention of March 1897, which elected Aguinaldo president of a new revolutionary government. Bonifacio rejected the result; he and his brother were arrested, tried by a council of war and shot on 10 May 1897. Aguinaldo had first commuted the sentence to exile, then withdrew the commutation under pressure from his generals, and responsibility for the killing remains debated.

Spanish offensives pushed him north to Biak-na-Bato in Bulacan. In December 1897 he signed a pact there with the Spanish, agreeing to end the fighting and go into exile in Hong Kong in exchange for an amnesty and a payment of 800,000 Mexican pesos, half of it paid on departure.

After the Spanish–American War began in April 1898 and the American navy destroyed the Spanish squadron in Manila Bay, an American ship brought Aguinaldo back to Cavite in May. He raised the new Philippine flag after a victory at Alapan and on 12 June proclaimed independence from his house in Kawit. His forces besieged Manila, but in August the Spanish surrendered the city to the Americans alone. The First Philippine Republic was inaugurated under the Malolos Constitution in January 1899 with Aguinaldo as president.

Fighting with the Americans broke out in February 1899, opening the Philippine–American War. As defeats mounted, his government kept moving. In June 1899 Antonio Luna, a highly regarded general often at odds with Aguinaldo, was cut down by soldiers of the Kawit Battalion at the president's headquarters in Cabanatuan, where he had gone after a telegram from Aguinaldo; Aguinaldo always denied ordering it, though one general later claimed he had. Aguinaldo was captured at Palanan in March 1901 by an American force, and in April swore allegiance to the United States and called on Filipinos to stop fighting.

Under American rule he mostly kept out of politics, campaigning for veterans' pensions. He ran for president of the new Commonwealth in 1935 but won only about 17.5 per cent of the vote against Manuel Quezon. During the Japanese occupation he urged American and Filipino troops on Bataan to surrender in 1942 and took part in Japanese-sponsored bodies. Arrested in 1945 and charged with treason, he was covered by a general amnesty for collaborators in 1948 and never tried. In 1962 President Diosdado Macapagal moved Independence Day to 12 June in honour of his 1898 proclamation. He died in Quezon City on 6 February 1964 and was buried at his home in Kawit, now a national shrine.

Our 1880 map shows the Philippines under the Spanish Empire, and the 1900 map shows the islands passing to American rule during his war; the modern state is covered on the Philippines page.