About six months earlier, on June 12, 1898, Emilio Aguinaldo had declared the Philippines to be a free and independent nation and had established a revolutionary government.
The proclamation read in part: Finally, it should be the earnest wish and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by assuring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.
Otis sent Emilio Aguinaldo a version of the proclamation that he had bowdlerized by removing mention of US sovereignty "to stress our benevolent purpose" and not "offend Filipino sensibilities" by substituting "free people" for "supremacy of the United States" and deleting "to exercise future domination.
Otis later explained: After fully considering the President's proclamation, and the temper of the Taglos, with whom I was daily discussing political problems and the friendly intentions of the U.S.A. Government toward them, I concluded that there were certain words and expressions therein such as "sovereignty," "right of cessation" and those which directed immediate occupation and so forth, which though most admirably employed and tersely expressive of actual conditions, might be advantageously used by the Tagalog.
The ignorant classes had been taught to believe that certain words such as "sovereignty," "protection," and so forth had peculiar meanings disastrous to their welfare and significant of future political domination, like that from which they had been recently freed.