In 1899, during a campaign on the island of Luzon to entrap the Filipino revolutionary president Emilio Aguinaldo, a 21-year-old buffalo soldier named David Fagen deserted from the American army. He wasn’t homesick. Young Fagen decided to join the Filipino revolutionaries and quickly took up arms against his former countrymen. In time, he became a guerrilla leader of such renown that his Filipino fighters called him “General Fagen.” For more than a century, little was known about Fagen, “the notorious renegade,” beyond the basic outlines of his story. The army had gone out of its way to suppress reports of his exploits; if they couldn’t expunge his name from the record altogether, they could disparage him as a criminal—a “badman.” Fagen himself left nothing in writing and those who knew him best either died young or neglected to leave much byway of reminiscences, journals, or correspondence. With the dearth of evidence, trying to distinguish the real Fagen from the mythic … Continue reading The 19th-Century African-American Soldier Who Fought for Filipino Liberation