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April/May 1982 | Volume 33, Issue 3
American Characters
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
He arrived in Manila on March 18, 1899, bearing his six-foot-four frame with such easy strength that it would have been natural to wonder how he could so recently have suffered the “ill health” for which he had been relieved of the military governorship of Santiago.
In fact, Major General Henry Ware Lawton had been removed from his post for drinking too much. President McKinley himself had given him a talking to about the virtues of temperance before sending him to the Philippines, and Lawton had sworn he wouldn’t touch liquor in his new command. He kept his promise, too, though the job he had would have been enough to drive far less volatile men to the bottle. The job—which he himself described as “unholy”—involved subduing Filipinos led by Emilio Aguinaldo who were fighting to keep Americans from occupying their homeland. Lawton’s characteristics made him at once a somewhat dubious choice and the obvious one: he had true compassion for a native cause, but it was coupled with great fighting stamina. The former could be attested to by various Cheyennes, the latter by the Confederates who had faced him when he was a boy.
Born in Ohio and raised in Indiana, Lawton had just turned eighteen when the Civil War broke out. He was chosen sergeant in the 9th Indiana, soon promoted to lieutenant, and by war’s end he was a lieutenant colonel with a regiment of his own, which he handled so bravely before Atlanta that he was awarded the Medal of Honor.
He was mustered out with the brevet rank of colonel in November of 1865 and went east to study law at Harvard. But he found soldiering had got into his blood, and he left school the next spring to accept a commission as a lieutenant in a black regiment. In 1871 he transferred into the 4th Cavalry, whose high-strung genius of a commander, Ranald S. Mackenzie, had made it the finest mounted regiment in the country. Lawton fought beside Mackenzie in the Indian wars, and in 1877 he helped deport captured Cheyennes south to Indiana Territory. They had little reason to love white soldiers but, as one of them said, Lawton “was a good man, always kind to the Indians.” He let the old and the sick ride in the army wagons and issued them tents; they called him Tall White Man.
In 1886, under orders from Nelson Miles, he led a column for thirteen hundred parched and scorching miles through the Sierra Madre in high summer. The punishing campaign ended with the capture of the implacable Apache leader, Geronimo.
Lawton went to Cuba as a brigadier general during the Spanish-American War. He was a fighting general; it was afterward, when he was in charge of Santiago, that internal tensions pushed him toward drink. He was always happiest in the field. If the Philippines did not strike him as an entirely savory command, he nonetheless intended to press the