The Bates Treaty (1899): A Recognition That Was Always Provisional

Why this instrument matters

The Bates Treaty is the only formal treaty the United States ever signed with a Philippine indigenous polity recognizing — at least textually — its continuing sovereignty. It was abrogated by unilateral U.S. action in March 1904 and superseded by the Carpenter Agreement in 1915. Its seven-year working life makes it one of the most consequential and least understood instruments of the early American colonial period.

This entry is a companion to The Treaties That Ended a Sovereignty, which places the Bates Treaty within the wider Sulu arc. Here we treat the document on its own legal-historical terms.

The signing context

The 1898 Treaty of Paris had transferred the Philippines from Spain to the United States. By mid-1899, the U.S. was at war with the First Philippine Republic in Luzon and the Visayas (the Philippine-American War, 1899–1902). U.S. commanders faced a strategic problem in the south: if they had to fight Aguinaldo’s forces in the north and the Sulu Sultanate in the south simultaneously, the campaign would consume resources well beyond what the McKinley administration was willing to commit.

Brigadier General John C. Bates was dispatched to Sulu in July 1899 with explicit instructions to neutralize the southern theater for the duration of the northern war, by treaty if possible. He arrived at Jolo, conducted negotiations through Spanish-speaking intermediaries, and on 20 August 1899 signed an agreement with Sultan Jamalul Kiram II and his datus.

The agreement provided for:

U.S. sovereignty over Sulu — recognized by the Sultan
The Sultan’s authority over internal Sulu affairs, religion, and customary law — preserved
Annual payments to the Sultan and named datus — ranging from 250 to 60 Mexican dollars per month
U.S. military presence at designated sites — permitted
Mutual obligations on slavery and order — with the Sultan undertaking gradual suppression of the slave trade

The text was prepared in English. A Sulu-language version was prepared by U.S. interpreters from the English. The Sultan and the principal datus signed.

The “recognition” reading

On its face, the Bates Treaty appears to be an instrument by which the United States recognized the Sultanate as a continuing sovereign with internal autonomy under U.S. protection. This is how Sulu received it. It is how Sultan Jamalul Kiram II conducted himself in the years following — continuing to receive foreign envoys, administer his court, and exercise religious and customary authority. It is also how the document reads if one takes its operative language at face value.

Source-criticism card: the Bates Treaty (1899)

Custody chain: Original text in U.S. War Department files; reproductions in U.S. official compilations of treaties and agreements with Philippine peoples; Sulu-side copies held by the Sultanate.

Tier: A — primary legal instrument, contemporaneous, signed and witnessed.

Reliability — that signing occurred: HIGH. Multiply attested in U.S. military, Spanish observer, and Sulu records.

Reliability — text as evidence of mutual intent: MEDIUM. The English text was drafted by the American side; Sulu-side intent must be inferred from subsequent conduct and from the Sultan’s correspondence.

Reliability — text as evidence of U.S. policy intent: LOW. U.S. internal correspondence reveals a categorically different operational understanding from what the text appears to memorialize.

Use guidance: Cite as the document that was signed. Distinguish the textual surface from the operational use the U.S. side made of it. Never present the U.S. side as having shared the Sulu reading.

The “expedient” reading

The U.S. internal record tells a different story. Bates’s own report to his superiors characterized the agreement as a modus vivendi — a temporary working arrangement — and explicitly anticipated that it would be revisited once the northern war was concluded. The McKinley administration’s correspondence treated it as a successful neutralization of the southern theater rather than as a recognition of Sulu sovereignty in any durable sense. President McKinley’s own remarks on the treaty emphasized that U.S. sovereignty was the operative principle and that the arrangements with the Sultan were administrative conveniences subject to revision.

This dual character — Sulu reading the document as recognition, the U.S. reading it as expedient — is the central feature of the Bates Treaty. It is not that one side misunderstood. It is that two governments signed the same text with mutually incompatible operational intents and proceeded for several years on those incompatible understandings.

The abrogation (March 1904)

By 1903, the Philippine-American War in the north was effectively over. The strategic rationale for Sulu neutralization had lapsed. The U.S. military command in the southern Philippines, organized as the Moro Province under General Leonard Wood, increasingly viewed the Bates Treaty as an obstacle to the administrative integration of Sulu into U.S. colonial governance.

On 2 March 1904, the United States unilaterally abrogated the Bates Treaty by act of the Senate. The stated grounds were the Sultan’s alleged failure to suppress slavery as undertaken in the agreement. The actual reasons were more comprehensive: the treaty’s recognition language had become inconvenient to the new policy of direct administration, and the annual payments were politically embarrassing in Washington as evidence of “tribute” to a non-Christian polity.

The Sultan was not consulted on the abrogation. He was informed of it. The annual payments to the Sultan and named datus were terminated unilaterally. From 2 March 1904 onward, the U.S. position was that Sulu was a part of the Moro Province under direct U.S. administration, with the Sultan possessing only such religious-customary status as the U.S. military government chose to acknowledge.

What followed

The abrogation did not end U.S.-Sulu conflict; it began a new phase. The years 1904–1913 saw escalating military operations against Sulu communities that did not accept the new direct-administration regime. The most consequential incident was the Bud Dajo massacre of March 1906, in which U.S. forces killed approximately 600–1,000 Tausug non-combatants — extended-family communities who had withdrawn to the crater of an extinct volcano to refuse U.S. authority — using mountain artillery against a defenseless target. The Bud Dajo killings are treated in the parent story; here it suffices to note that they occurred two years and ten days after the Bates Treaty’s abrogation, and that they are not separable from the policy shift the abrogation marked.

The formal terminus of the Sultanate’s political sovereignty came in the Carpenter Agreement of 22 March 1915 — see the companion entry on the Carpenter Agreement for full treatment.

Legal-doctrinal afterlife

Three doctrinal questions descend from the Bates Treaty.

First, the question of indigenous treaty-making capacity. The treaty’s signing implies that the U.S. recognized the Sultanate as possessing the international-law capacity to enter binding treaty relations. Its abrogation on grounds of Sultan-side breach implies the same: a non-treaty-capable entity cannot breach a treaty. The U.S. position was therefore internally inconsistent — recognizing capacity sufficient for breach while denying capacity sufficient for continuing sovereignty.

Second, the question of unilateral abrogation. Under the law of nations as understood in 1904, unilateral abrogation of a treaty for material breach was a recognized remedy, but it required (a) genuine material breach; (b) notice to the other party; (c) proportionate response. The U.S. position that Sultan Jamalul Kiram had materially breached the slavery provisions has been challenged by historians who note that the slavery the Sultan was charged with failing to suppress was the integrated graduated-assimilation institution discussed in The Sulu Zone, not chattel slavery as Anglo-American law understood it. The categorical mismatch between what the treaty obligation was and what U.S. authorities expected the Sultan to do made breach effectively unavoidable.

Third, the question of legal-formal versus lived sovereignty. The Bates Treaty addressed only legal-formal sovereignty — the relations between the U.S. government and the Sulu court. It did not, and could not, reach the lived sovereignty of Sulu communities, which continued to operate through datu authority, customary law, and religious practice regardless of which document was or was not in force. This is the through-line of the entire Sulu arc: colonial instruments target the apex; the substrate continues beneath. The Bates Treaty is one instance among many.

What can honestly be said

Anchored: The Bates Treaty was signed on 20 August 1899; the text recognized U.S. sovereignty while preserving Sultanate internal authority; it was unilaterally abrogated by the U.S. on 2 March 1904.
Anchored: The U.S. side never operationally treated the agreement as a recognition of durable Sulu sovereignty; internal correspondence treated it from the outset as a temporary expedient.
Probable: The Sultan and his court understood the agreement as a recognition of the kind their text on its face appeared to provide — i.e., as analogous to other inter-sovereign protectorate arrangements of the period.
Contested: Whether the abrogation was lawful under the international law of the period. U.S. position: lawful, on grounds of Sultan-side breach. Critical position: the categorical mismatch on “slavery” made breach effectively unavoidable and therefore was not a lawful ground for unilateral termination.

Quarantined Claims

Applying the framework laid out in Story 1:

QUARANTINED: That the Bates Treaty represented good-faith U.S. recognition of Sulu sovereignty. U.S. internal correspondence shows it was conceived as a temporary military expedient with full intent to revisit when convenient.
QUARANTINED: That the abrogation was a response to genuine Sulu non-compliance. The slavery provisions were structured around an Anglo-American category that did not map cleanly onto the Sulu institution; non-compliance was effectively unavoidable and provided convenient pretext rather than substantive ground.
QUARANTINED: That the Bates Treaty had no continuing legal effect after 1904. The Sultan’s continuing exercise of religious and customary authority, recognized in the 1915 Carpenter Agreement, traces back through the Bates Treaty’s preservation of those domains. The thread of recognized Sultan authority over religion and custom — though not politics — runs continuously from 1899 through 1915 and beyond.
QUARANTINED: That the Sultan’s continued authority after 1904 was extra-legal or merely tolerated. It was operative authority that the U.S. could not extinguish by unilateral act, because it derived from the Sulu community rather than from the treaty.

Primary source: The Bates Treaty (Agreement Between the United States and the Sultan of Sulu, signed at Jolo, 20 August 1899); U.S. War Department records on Bates’s mission; correspondence of Bates, Otis, and McKinley on the southern Philippines theater; U.S. Senate proceedings of 2 March 1904 on abrogation. Secondary: Peter Gowing, Mandate in Moroland: The American Government of Muslim Filipinos, 1899–1920 (1977); Samuel K. Tan, The Filipino Muslim Armed Struggle, 1900–1972 (1977); Cesar Adib Majul, Muslims in the Philippines (1973), chapter on the American period; Reynaldo Ileto, Filipinos and Their Revolution: Event, Discourse, and Historiography (1998) for the broader context of U.S. colonial legalism; Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (2006) for the racial-legal architecture of U.S. Philippine policy. Internal cross-references: see “The Treaties That Ended a Sovereignty” for the full arc, “The 1878 Sulu Instrument” for the predecessor international agreement, and “The Carpenter Agreement” for the instrument that succeeded the Bates Treaty as the operative U.S.-Sulu legal framework.