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About Venancio Concepcion

About the author: Venancio Concepcion, Major General in the Philippine Army under the First Republic; served as Councilor representing Capiz in the Federal State of the Visayas; represented Iloilo in the Malolos Congress; appointed military commander of Pampanga by Gen. Aguinaldo in 1898. Surrendered to American forces under Gen. Peyton C. March in Cayan, December 5, 1899. Thereafter served as Deputy Collector of Internal Revenue, and was appointed President of the Philippine National Bank under the auspices of Speaker Sergio Osmeña, and later published La tragedia del Banco Nacional Filipino in 1927 as a defense of his leadership of the bank.

About the diary: The entries here are extracted from Maximo M. Kalaw’s The Development of Philippine Politics which in turn cites “the diaries entitled Apuntes y Diario de Operaciones sobre la guerra Hispano-Filipino-Americana.” In a footnote on p. 255 of his book, Kalaw says, “These Apuntes are still in MS. form but copies of them have been made and the writer is keeping one of them.” The manuscript, in turn, is listed in the catalog of the library of Kalaw which was prepared before World War II by E. Arsenio Manuel and mentioned in his article, “Teodoro M. Kalaw’s Collection of Revolutionary Notes,” which appeared in Vol. 48, No. 3 (2000) of Philippine Studies. Manuel’s entry is as follows:

21. CONCEPCION, VENANCIO

n.d. Apuntes y Diario de Operaciones Sobre La Guerra Hispano-Filipino-Americana. Original notebooks.

Note at end of Notebook 5: “Los Cuadernos 7 al 11 fueron confiscados por los Americanos en la Calle Anda.” This is an indispensable source for writing the history of this most glorious period in national history. It was no longer available to T.A. Agoncillo when he wrote Malolos: The Crisis of the Republic (1960) though the first six cuadernos were.

Leandro Heriberto Fernandez, in his 1926 doctoral thesis, “The Philippine Republic,” submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Political Science of Columbia University, cites the following in his bibliography:

Concepción, Venancio, Apuntes y diario de operaciones sobre la guerra hispano-filipino-americana. Unpublished diary of a Filipino military officer in eleven notebooks, of which notebooks 7 to 11 inclusive were confiscated by the American military authorities in Manila. A copy of notebooks 1 to 6 inclusive is found in the private library of Dean Máximo M. Kalaw of the University of the Philippines. An interesting and illuminating account of the war operations in Luzon between the American and Filipino forces.