Los Hijos del País v4: A Philippine TL

[Metempsychosis]

Philippine Culture and Society during the early Liberal Supremacy (1850s)

“There can be no tyrants where there are no slaves!” – Marcelino Florentino y Quema, 1851 speech to the Assembly

As the paradigm of the Philippine Republic shifted away from its almost monomaniacal focus on nation-building and economic development of the Patriotic Regime to other vital but less urgent issues, so too did the nation’s cultural concerns shift away from simple survival towards a focus on a coherence of vision for the Philippine nation. The 1850s fracturing of the Sons of the Country into the Liberals, Conservatives, and Nationalists – among other parties – led to a cultural divide and discourse between the two dominant strands of the nascent nation’s culture, between its sense of being part of a new world-spanning order and its nostalgia for the old and parochial Catholic order, with its simpler days and the old virtue of its monastic supremacy.

Of course, said monastic supremacy was itself a point of contention, with vanishingly few seeking a complete return to the old days of “being chained to a corpse”, as some Filipino nationalists would say of Bourbon Spain and its archaic and corrupt monastic orders, and not even the Pope had denied the degeneration of the Catholic Church in the Philippines and the wider Hispanic world in the days before independence, but the more pious Catholics of the country certainly did not feel comfort in the myriad socio-economic changes caused by independence and some of the more liberal and virulently anti-clerical policies of the republic.

Appealing to the Pope in Rome had helped the republic break the friar orders, but of course there were those who thought the secularization of the Catholic Church in the Philippines and the separation of church and state went too far, and the entrance of foreign non-Catholic missionaries into the republic was something met with backlash and no small amount of antipathy against this “many-faced horde of schismatics and heretics, inimical to the traditions of the Holy Mother Church”, in the words of a conservative thinker. And naturally, the liberals and the still relatively few converts to Protestantism (chief among them the famed satirist Osias Buenaventura) during the Patriotic Regime met this backlash with their own vitriol, finally coming to a head with the divisive mid-1850s reign and policies of President Florentino over the country.

Even with the divisive reputation of Florentino’s administration being a turning point, many of these cultural struggles and contentions found their beginnings in the late 1840s. And these struggles were bound up in various national and societal issues for the country, such as the expansion of the republic’s influence across Asia and the tensions that came with it, like the separation of church and state, the slow spread of various non-Catholic Christian churches in fits and starts, and above all the flood of Chinese migrants that deeply affected the Philippine Republic and its society to the point of disruption. Thankfully for the country, however, these tensions did not for many years erupt into all-out rebellion and civil war: instead, the culture wars took the place of direct civil unrest, and in place of riots and rebellions, the Philippine Republic saw a flowering of the arts and sciences, and the creation of the many separate strands of 19th century Filipino culture.

The Liberals, though later fragmenting into a number of factions ranging from radical utopians to pragmatists who sought to establish a united country, were united by a desire to establish a Philippine identity outside of the Catholic faith. As Chinese migrants had begun to flood the Philippines during the Taiping Revolution’s twists and turns, many native Filipinos – from all ethnicities and walks of life – felt a need to build up the newborn Filipino identity as both a “civilized” country and as a genuinely Asian nation with its own history.

Men such as Balagtas and Zorilla had already begun the native-language movement of Tagalismo with their writings and participation in the Liga Tagalo, and the years since Balagtas wrote his stories saw the rise of a new generation of poets to build up a genuinely Philippine mythology and literature. Beyond the Roman tales of Balagtas and the Biblical tales of Zorilla (among which is born the name and idea of Ofiria, the idealized pre-Hispanic Filipino polity), there was an increasing desire to learn more of the Malay race and its own past, and the historian Balduino’s writings were followed and responded to by many others.

With this desire, new scholars also took their first steps towards studying the native tongues of the country in a bid to construct a better understanding of Filipino culture before the Spaniards and thus – in an indirect way – to “prove” the worth of the Filipino nation. Grammarians and philologists made studies of not only Tagalog but the regional languages, and even the languages of the non-Christians of the archipelago such as those of the highlanders of the Cordilleras and the Moros of Sulu and Maguindanao. Alongside them, ethnographers and anthropologists studied the cultures and bodies of folklore of the various cultures of the Philippines, using newfangled European methods to analyze and understand all of these. This generation of scholarship would come to be a foundation for many later ideas and schools of thought, with later scholars seeing the affinity of the Philippine languages to not only the tongues of the south, but also the aboriginal tongues of the Mandate of Formosa. This latter affinity would have consequences in later years.

The Conservatives had much the same concerns as the previous group, yet unlike the Liberals, the League of the Pious and its affiliates were as far from anticlerical as one could get in the early republic, and with the rise of religious rivals they were deeply invested in keeping Catholicism the dominant religion, even as they sought less direct intervention from the central government in Manila. Their views regarding the faith were more orthodox and less tolerant of “the thousand heresies and misconceptions that had slowly come to infest the Filipino mind”, as yet another prominent conservative writer of Manila had put it, and they sought to build up a vision of their own for the nation, based upon the faith of their fathers. With the government detaching itself from being an arm of the faith as it once was, conservatives rose in the place of the regular clergy to argue for and defend the Catholic idea of the nation.

In their quest to do so, the conservatives built up their own cultural sphere and media, with the most prominent of their houses being the publishing house known as Ang Dating Daan, The Old Way. Through them were published many works of conservative literature of all kinds in Tagalog and Spanish, and translations of the classic works of the Western canon. Said works were given in their original Latin and Greek by the Church and Jesuit order as gifts to strengthen the Christian faith on the Philippine islands against the ruthless and relentless attacks of the anticlerical partisans of the country.

And finally, the Nationalists, being mostly moderates and pragmatists of many stripes, cared little in truth for the culture wars that had become increasingly common over the course of the 1850s, preferring instead to continue focusing on the economic development of the country inside their borders and the maintenance of diplomatic balance and expansion of Philippine influence outside of them.

Still, the Nationalists were not completely rational and pragmatic, though such was their usual reputation, and their methods and policies from the beginning were often calibrated to cleave to pragmatism and the prosperity of the country. The party of the Patriotic Regime still had a vision for the country, as a nation strong enough to stand on its own against its rivals and possible enemies, and they sought to achieve this regardless of the ideals of the two extreme ends of the political spectrum.

Many who cleaved to the Nationalists were not interested in the culture wars waged by the conservatives and liberals, and the scholars among them were more interested in works of the sciences and the classical professions of law and medicine than they were in less practical and far more experimental academic subjects such as the social sciences and humanities which were pushed more heavily by the liberals and their wild theories.

With all this, the nation at the time of the mid-1850s was set for further developments.

 

[Metempsychosis]

The Rule and Fall of the Liberal Ascendancy (1858 - 1870)

The Administration of Jose Aurelio Tuason (1858 – 1866)

If the nightingale won’t sing, wait for it. – attributed to Tokugawa Ieyasu

The ousting of President Florentino – the father of Philippine Liberalism – in most other situations would have been a disaster for the party he founded and the country as a whole. The previous president had pushed too hard, however, and his party has another leader waiting in the wings, a more flexible and less ideological man, trained in the ways of diplomacy by virtue of his heritage as a businessman and a descendant of the Chinese diaspora: Jose Aurelio Tuason y Florentino, a son of the wealthy Tuason family, descended from the 18th century Chinese merchant Son Tua, whose conversion to Catholicism gave him the name Don Antonio Tuason and whose loyalty to Spain half a century before had rewarded him with land and made him the richest man in the Spanish East Indies.

Born in 1818 near the apex of secular Philippine wealth and power, Jose Aurelio was born the eldest child to Don Juan Severino Tuason – one of the younger sons of the hidalgos of Mariquina – and the Ilocana Paula Florentino, a daughter of Ilocos and a kinswoman of the previous president. As a younger son of the house of Tuason and a Filipino patriot, Juan Severino joined up with the Sons of the Country in its early days, and did much to contribute to its growth while his father and elder brothers stood more aloof of the nascent nationalist movement, organizing meetings for the organization and building connections between the sons of various prominent families. Even with all the work he was doing for the movement, however, the elder Tuason found time to marry a woman from Ilocos and raised with her a family of three children (Jose Aurelio, born 1818; Saturnina, born 1820; and Nicanor, born 1822) by the time of the revolution.

When Bloody February came around and loyalists to the Spanish regime were driven out of Manila, Juan Severino was among the younger civilian leaders who assembled behind the Palmero brothers to help build a government and administration for the new state. Though his family stood neutral regarding the revolution, Jose Aurelio’s father wholeheartedly contributed to the cause – to the point of being seen as a radical patriotic firebrand – and he was rewarded handsomely for it, gaining for himself a position in the government, connections with the prominent families of the country, and clemency for the rest of his family, who only truly supported the new government as the dust was settling down.

As the war of independence came to its conclusion and the Patriotic Regime of Palmero began, Juan Severino’s wife bore a few more children (Elena, born 1827; Juan Alfonso and Maria Concepcion, born 1830; Trinidad, born 1831), and the elder Tuason himself raised his children as loyal citizens of the republic. Jose Aurelio himself was among the first to be educated at the recently established Manila Athenaeum, where the young man studied the arts and sciences of the day, and built his reputation as a studious and intelligent – if somewhat boisterous and lively – student. Despite his wild reputation and somewhat flamboyant persona, Jose Aurelio was a hard and resourceful worker, a patient and reliable man with a sense of propriety, astute in both his studies and his dealings with people. Many times thus had he been called upon by his fellow students to defuse tensions between clashing cliques within his school, listening to their grievances and helping to facilitate dialogues between them and the professors. This task saw his rise as a leader to his fellow students, and developed his skill in diplomacy and sense of politics early.

Graduating from the Athenaeum in the early 1840s with his Bachiller en Filosofia, Jose Aurelio went on to work for his family and its rising business empire for a time, working alongside Chinese immigrants and his relatives to build up the Casa Tuason and its many branch offices. During this time, he worked hard, learning the lives of his family’s employees and the workings of the company’s various businesses. As he worked under his uncles, he solidified his reputation for building lasting contracts and deals with the workers and his family’s business partners alike, forming lasting connections and partnerships that would come to be useful in his later career. In addition to this, the Tuason scion looked for a wife during this time, and married a certain Matea Maria Lacson, a Chinese mestiza and daughter of a prominent clan from the Visayas.

As the months and years wore on, however, the younger Tuason turned his mind towards politics, and by 1846 left business behind to serve the nation alongside his father, who had already been serving in government as a representative of Mariquina. Still a relatively young man when he entered the increasingly divided political arena, Jose Aurelio followed his father’s lead for a while to learn the ropes of the Assembly, but eventually he took his own path and joined up with the nascent Liberal Party led by the fiery leader Marcelino Florentino, with whom he formed a complicated partnership, serving as a stabilizing and moderating force to the party’s radical character.

When the strong-willed Florentino rose to the presidency, Tuason rose with him, serving as a close advisor to the new president and a conciliator to keep the radicals in check and maintain the cohesion of the coalition that made up the Liberal Party. He worked various positions thus over the course of the Florentino administration, usually in those that required a delicate and diplomatic hand, struggling with all his might to smooth over the radical reforms of the new president and keep the various disputes within the Liberal Party and within the Republic from spiraling out of control.

Thankfully for the country, Tuason was skilled at dealing with people, and with his management, foreign policy remained untouched and the Philippines continued to remain cordial with the various Chinese factions and European powers that came to trade in the great ports of the country like Manila. In addition, Tuason and his subordinates continued to build up the country’s infrastructure and economy, gathering investors and experts from the chaos that yet engulfed the West.

Unfortunately, not even the energetic Tuason could do everything all at once, nor could he in his positions completely restrain the increasingly authoritarian and anti-clerical tendencies of his president. When the Cristeros rose up and the president declared martial law to suppress them, more and more of the Liberal Party’s leaders turned against Florentino and his radicals, seeking to sideline the president. Among them was Tuason himself, who had slowly fallen away from compromising and smoothing things out to enforce the president’s will and had established himself as a political force in his own right, becoming leader of the more moderate and conciliatory wing of the Liberal Party.

With Tuason – who had been a major pillar of the Liberal Party second only to the president himself, and had served as one of its most effective administrators – striking out against the Florentino administration, the firebrand president had lost most of his effective authority to the moderate wing of his own party. Thus, by the election year of 1857, the president and the more radical elements in the party who yet supported him had been politically isolated, their increasingly ineffective proclamations blocked by Tuason’s faction. And so, Tuason himself became the Liberal Party’s new leader and candidate for the presidential elections, which he won handily against the Nationalists and various conservatives who yet struggled to gain ground.

For despite all the controversies of the Florentino regime, public opinion yet remained behind the Liberal Party, and the rise of a more moderate faction within it gave many hope that the public disturbances could be resolved peacefully. Florentino saw that he was beaten, and left office with as much grace as his predecessor did, not wanting to fight against his countrymen and cause any more chaos that could be exploited by foreigners to their advantage.

And so, Jose Aurelio Tuason is sworn in as the fifth president of the Philippine Republic at the beginning of the year 1858, now leader of a country dealing with many issues old and new, not the least of which was the civil strife of the Cristero rebels.

The new president begins his work immediately by looking to end the Cristero insurgency in a more peaceful manner than his predecessor had planned, granting amnesty to those rebels who would surrender immediately and seeking to re-establish a relationship between the Philippine government and the Catholic Church that had been stretched almost to breaking by the chaos of the past handful of years under the previous administration.

With this and other policies such as the exile and resettlement of some of the more intractable rebels to the south and the allowances made towards the Catholic Church in exchange for land reform and continued secularization of the Church, most of these first-wave Cristeros are slowly brought back into the fold. A few continue their rebellion and cause some incidents – most notably assassinating Florentino himself on the road to Vigan in 1861 – but these weaken and fade over the course of the president’s administration, with Florentino’s assassination itself being among the last incidents linked to the first Cristero rebellion. And indeed, barely a year and a half after this incident, the last major Cristero group surrenders to the government, laying down their weapons.

As the rebels are dealt with and a compromise hashed out with the Church regarding the place of the Catholic religion and of other religions in the republic (a compromise solidified into the controversial set of laws known as the 1859 Concordat, which in itself would spark a debate regarding religion in later years), Tuason deals with another set of issues regarding a people near and dear to his heart thanks to their common ancestry: the Chinese immigrants, of whom there have been increasingly many in the country since the beginning of the 1850s and the strife plaguing the country in the north.

The immigration of so many refugees has been both a boon and a bane to the Philippine nation and its development, for with the cheap labor came a boom in the country’s economic development and infrastructure, much strife between the ‘native’ Filipino laborer and the Chinese laborer, and the exploitation of the latter in the name of progress. The proud and foreign ways of the richer Chinese immigrants also caused much debate regarding the Philippine nation and its own culture. And indeed, the late 1850s and early 1860s see the rise of a wave of literature in Spanish, Tagalog, and even the Chinese languages regarding all of this from various perspectives, whether it be biting satires of and realist literature describing Chinese and Filipino life of the period (such as Osias Buenaventura’s 1860 titanic magnum opus Eikonoklastes, the working-class Tagalog indio Atanasio Banaag’s (1830 – 1898) 1863 work Ang Bagong Gehenna, or The New Gehenna, or the vast realist oeuvre of the Chinese immigrant Tancredo Tan (1827 – 1901)), or nostalgic literature regarding less complicated days.

For his part, Tuason – despite his name, his paternal ancestor’s original heritage, and his past work under his family business – is a native son of the Philippines first and foremost, and so struggles with the contentious question of Chinese immigration and labor, wanting the Chinese immigrants to assimilate into the country and its culture as soon as possible, while at the same time seeking to protect their natural rights. It does not help that these questions and debates regarding citizenship go back and forth in the two houses of the Assembly, causing more than a little tension and strife about the laws these congressmen are increasingly forced to contemplate.

Ultimately, despite his disagreements with his predecessor, the president upholds the Bill of Rights established by Florentino and wrangles some compromises to give protections to Chinese immigrants and ease the process of their naturalization as citizens of the republic. Even so, President Tuason can only do so much, and still favors the cultural assimilation of these immigrants and their integration into Philippine society, notably banning the practice of footbinding among the refugees. There are other points of contention that emerge among the Chinese diaspora, and some depart from Manila and other Philippine cities to make their fortune in other regions of Southeast Asia.

Beyond continued economic development and the various internal reforms and policies regarding the Cristeros and the Chinese, Tuason also deals with foreign policy and works to build up the republic’s prestige among the nations of the world. Under his first term, Filipino diplomats participate in the 1861 Convention of Shanghai and gain much from the negotiations, most notably establishing the Mandate of Formosa as essentially a Philippine protectorate, though ostensibly run jointly by the European powers. This triumph of foreign policy during election year, alongside the continuing improvements of the Philippine nation, wins Tuason a second term and more time to implement the Liberal Party’s mandate.

More importantly than the Convention of Shanghai, Tuason’s administration begins reorganizing and dealing with its southern frontier which had remained in a somewhat ambiguous and disorganized state since the days of President Araneta. Between the various Chinese Kongsi republics in Borneo and Muslim sultanates and pagan chiefdoms that had gravitated to or had been slowly driven into the arms of the government in Manila, and the string of trading outposts and Christian missions and other Filipino settlements established to spread the influence of the republic, this little collection of miscellaneous protectorates and possessions south of the Philippines proper had been left mostly to its own devices, held together only by inertia and the hard work of an understaffed section of the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs. Under Tuason, this mess of a system (loosely referred to as the Manila Pact) is given a more cohesive shape as the president invests more time and effort and wealth into managing these regions with a more able hand. Through various edicts and laws and policies established by President Tuason over the course of the early 1860s, the Manila Pact is formalized and developed. More and more able envoys are sent from Manila to oversee the republic’s protectorates in the eastern half of the region called Nusantara, more envoys from these regions are gathered to Manila to discuss various issues of diplomacy and domestic policy, and the various directly ruled Philippine possessions are given some representation to hear out their issues and grievances.

Among the issues Tuason seeks to deal with is the abolition of slavery in the region. The Patriotic Regime had already abolished involuntary servitude in the republic many years prior (at least in name), and attitudes to it had turned even further against such practices under the Liberal Ascendancy. With this backdrop, Tuason puts his effort into managing foreign policy and investing into both military and economy to good use, cracking down on slavery and the slave trade in the region, cooperating with European movements to abolish slavery and break the pirates who perpetuate this scourge. This crackdown on a major part of the local economy is met with mixed feelings from the local polities, some of whom had initially turned to the Manila for protection, and would contribute to the development of tensions between the Christian republic and its constituents in the south.

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So I've been thinking about this timeline, and I added some stuff to a part that I already had written up. Here's what I have.

 

[Metempsychosis]

“Have I have played my part well in the comedy of life? If so, clap your hands and dismiss me from the stage with applause.” - Augustus

The months and years of Tuason’s administration pass, and the republic continues to prosper and grow under him and his administration’s guiding hand, even as instability plagues the wider world with the Mad Decade of the 1860s in the Western world and the spread and syncretism of liberal ideas outside it, between the intrigues and reforms of the Taiping, the spread of new schools and strains of thought in the Muslim world, and the great flurry of ideas in the Indian subcontinent. The pace of change across the world quickens with the times, and with more change comes more issues to confront.

Even in the Philippine Republic itself, fissures and battle lines begin to form within the Liberal Party, with a slew of new factions and their different visions for the future of the country rising and clashing against one another for dominance over the party: on one end are the radical secularist Marcelinists, the scattered heirs to Florentino’s legacy who seek for one reason or another to accelerate the various changes begun by the previous president, whether they be Hispanists who seek closer ties with the Hispanophone world, or Tagalists who seek to preserve Filipino unity by promoting the Tagalog language as the one national language; on the other end of the spectrum, there are the Occidentalist and borderline conservative Liberal Nationalists, who seek closer ties with the advanced Western world and want to slow down and consolidate the gains made by the Liberal Party; and caught in the middle of the clashes of the former two are the Aurelists, the moderates of the Liberal Party who follow Tuason’s lead and seek to keep the nation on the course set by the current president.

Ultimately, however, this factionalism which emerges in President Tuason’s second term remains a minor issue, and the disputes within the party are resolved relatively peacefully, though it is certainly more than coincidence that the president declines to run for a second term in the 1865 elections, the same year as a rise in political violence in the country and the accompanying international financial panic of 1865, itself caused by some problems in British finance which – although seen as minor at the time – would lead to dire consequences for the British Empire and a radical realignment of the world stage once again.

As for the president himself, Tuason looks forward to leaving the presidency after playing his part in managing the continuation of the nation’s prosperity. He slowly passes the torch of party leadership to others, especially endorsing his fellow Aurelist Liberal and Chinese mestizo, the Laguna-born Francisco Mercado y Alejandro, for presidential candidate of the party. After leaving behind a solid track record of useful reforms and continuing economic development, President Tuason leaves behind a positive reputation and legacy, and passes the presidency to Mercado without incident.

The now former president manages to keep his influence over the party even after his administration, and even after returning to business. Despite everything that would come afterward, Tuason leaves the country stronger than he found it, and his legacy as an elder statesman of the country remains intact even as his party comes to lose control of the country in favor of a different coalition of interests.