Matthew Arlington Batson (Anna, Illinois, US, 24 April 1866 – 13 January 1917) was a United States Army Officer who received the Medal of Honor for actions during the Philippine–American War.

1st Lieutenant Batson was awarded the medal for swimming the San Juan River under enemy fire.

He had two stints of teaching school and spent a year studying law in hopes of passing the bar exam.

[3] Batson accompanied the 4th Cavalry to the Philippines, arriving in October 1898, and joined the VIII Corps, then occupying only the city of Manila and a small area around the Cavite naval base.

On one of these expeditions to Laguna Province, south of Manila, at the town of Calamba, he swam the San Juan River under fire, flanked enemy forces, and compelled them to retire.

Batson had arrived in the Philippines disenchanted with the Army and unlike most of peers with seven years service in a predominately African-American regiment.

So he reached the Islands predisposed to judge people of color on their merits as individuals and not lump them together as racial inferiors.

A lieutenant's pay in the Philippines would go much further than in the United States so that sometime after Batson arrived he hired a body servant, a Filipino name Jacinto, whose last name is lost to history.

When war broke out between the Americans and the self-proclaimed Philippine Republic led by Emilio Aguinaldo the Macabebes maintained a cool neutrality toward both sides.

With this thought in mind, accompanied by two captains, a newspaper reporter, and forty enlisted men, he set off for the town of Macabebe sometime before June 1, 1899.

Batson's subsequent battlefield heroics called him to the attention of his division commander, General Lawton.

Lawton, also a Medal of Honor winner---in the Civil War, had the reputation of being one of the bravest officers in uniform.

Batson quickly organized the first company of 108 men, all of them "well disciplined and brave" veterans of the Spanish colonial army.

With the monsoon soon to end, Otis planned for MacArthur to make a holding attack along the rail line to fix the Philippine Army in place while Lawton's 1st Division drove north on MacArthur's right flank, trapping the Filipinos on the great central plain by systematically blocking all the passes leading into the mountainous interior of Luzon.

On 19 November 1899, straining every nerve to block Aguinaldo's retreat into the mountains, Batson and his scouts passed through the town of Tubao and advanced down a long canyon.

Some 200 entrenched Filipinos guarded the ford, and "a sharp fight" ensued that lasted about twenty-five minutes The scouts carried the ford—and two hours later the town—but they suffered substantial losses while doing so.

The wound was a bad one, but Batson typically refused to go to the rear in the one medical litter that accompanied his detachment.

The death of Lawton and Otis' return to the United States left no one in a command position in the Philippines who fully understood the role that Batson had played in organizing the scouts.

[8] Batson returned to duty with the scouts in March 1900 and was heavily involved in counter-guerrilla operations—with considerable success—for the next year.

He mustered out of the volunteer force when it legally dissolved on 30 June 1901, but by then he had received promotion to captain in the Regular Army.

By 1903 with the war over the Scouts consisted of multiple regiments with an aggregate strength of 5,000, 40 percent of the total peace-time U.S. Army garrison in the Philippines.

By the eve of World War II the Scouts totaled 11,000 men and were organized as infantry, cavalry, and artillery regiments and were noted for their high standards of professionalism.

[8] Batson's Medal of Honor citation reads: for most distinguished gallantry in swimming the San Juan River in the face of the enemy's fire and driving him from his entrenchments, near Calamba, Luzon, P. I., while serving as a lieutenant, 4th Cavalry.