Servillano Aquino, fondly called as Mianong, was born on April 20, 1874, in Angeles, Pampanga. He was one of the seven children of Doña Petrona Aguilar de Hipolito and Don Braulio Aquino, who later became Mayor of Conception, Tarlac. He started his schooling under Pedro de la Cruz and when he reached the age of nine, he was sent to Mexico, Pampanga where he was a boarding student for three years in a school run by Don Felix Dizon.
When his father became Mayor of Concepcion in 1885, Mianong was sent to Manila to study under Don Enrique Mendiola; not long after that, however, he transferred to San Juan de Letran where he completed his preparatory course and became a bachelor of arts. He was studying land surveying in Letran when he moved to study law at the University of Santo Tomas. However, he dropped out of law school when he got married to Guadalupe Quiambao. They had three sons: Gonzalo, Benigno Servillano, and Amando.
It was the middle child, Benigno Servillano Aquino, Sr. who then would follow in the footsteps of Servillano in defending the Filipino people in Congress and in the Second World War. Like his father, Benigno Servillano Sr. would also be incarcerated during the war together with other members of the wartime government in Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison. Years later, Benigno S.
Aquino Jr., more commonly known by the public as Ninoy Aquino, would follow suit with the legacy laid down by his father and grandfather.
Servillano Aquino was Captain Municipal (or Mayor) of San Miguel de Murcia when Tarlac began its uprising against the Spanish. He was recruited to to join the Katipunan by Francisco S. Makabulos in 1896 who led the Cry of Tarlac which then unfolded a series of uprisings within the province. Servillano was only twenty-four years old when he was denoted as Major Aquino under General Makabulos. Together, they would lead countless battles to victory and evade death at the hands of the Spaniards. However, apart from this, Major Aquino was also tasked with the duty of recruiting more troops and organizing them to join in the movement.
The following year, in 1897, Major Aquino faced an encounter that earned him a daredevil reputation. He and four other natives at the time dressed themselves as peasants alighting a train. The only arms they had were short bolos disguised as umbrellas which they used to strike down at least nine Spaniards who were armed with rifles.” Then on, Major Aquino would
continue to seize neighboring towns that were under the control of the Spanish army while continuing to enlist more natives to join their troops.
At that time, General Aguinaldo was already at the Biak-na-Bato and giving orders to his men from the assembly there. General Makabulos and Major Aquino had the opportunity to join the assembly in Biak-na-Bato when they were discussing a constitution for the Philippine Republic. There, Makabulos was confirmed as the General of the armies of Tarlac with Aquino as his Commandant.
In November 1897, both Makabulos and Aquino signed the Biak-na-Bato Constitution and acceded that the aim of the revolution was to separate the Philippines from the Spanish monarchy and its formation into an independent state with its own government called the Philippine Republic. On the same day, they participated in the first national election in Philippine history which elected Emilio Aguinaldo as the country’s president with Mariano Trias as his vice-president.
In December 1897, when the revolutionary troops faced peril and Sinukuan fell, Major Aquino hid in San Fernando, Pampanga. Spanish spies were sent to track him down and he was caught in a trap specially made for him. He was taken to Manila, thrown in Fort Santiago to be court-martialed, and was later found guilty of sedition. According to him, his sentence was read on a Wednesday when he was to be shot by the firing squad on Saturday.
However, between the Wednesday of his sentencing and the Saturday of his supposed execution, the Pact of Biak-na-Bato was signed and Servillano’s execution was vacated. He and other revolutionary prisoners were set free after the ratification of the said pact on December 20 when general amnesty was proclaimed by the government. Upon release, Aquino followed Aguinaldo in Hong Kong. According to his son, Gonzalo, his father always claimed that he had been deported by the government which gives credence to the speculation that, perhaps, their release was granted on the condition that they leave the country.
When they returned in 1898 during the onset of the Spanish-American War, Aquino was assigned as colonel and assistant to General Makabulos with the goal of seizing Cavite which was still under Spanish control. Their siege of Tarlac is a noteworthy chapter in the Philippine Revolution. It was documented in detail by Carlos Ría-Baja in his El Desastre Filipino where he wrote of what he heard of and experienced as a Spanish prisoner at San Fernando, Pampanga. It began in June and ended in July of the same year when Commander Flandes and three other Spanish officers surrendered to Colonel Aquino.
After Tarlac had been taken from the remaining Spanish forces, Colonel Aquino was left in charge as its Military Governor. Later that year, he would lose his wife to the Guardia de Honor, an underground peasant army movement that did not recognize the Republic even after it had been established in Central Luzon. As Ria-baja has observed, the purpose of the Guardia de Honor was to keep an eye on the provincial authorities and impose punishment, usually by death, on those who deserved it.
This peasant army sought to kill the town president of Murcia who was the father-in-law of Servillano Aquino. When they struck, Aquino was not at home, but it was his wife, Guadalupe, and her father, Don Pablo Quiambao, who faced the Guardia de Honor armed with bolos and daggers in both hands. Unfortunately, they were not able to fight off the tulisanes, and father and daughter were slain.
In 1899, when it was announced that the Philippines has been ceded to the United States, General Aguinaldo announced that the Republic would be ready once again to open hostilities should the Americans try to take forcible possession of the country. At that time, Servillano Aquino was enrolled in the Military School put up by General Luna in Malolos that was staffed with former officers of the Spanish army in the Philippines. Aquino went back to Tarlac when the Americans from Manila started their ascent and took over Caloocan.
General Luna had a plan of retaking Caloocan and, eventually, Manila, from the Americans; However, it did not succeed, even though they had the upper hand, because a group of men had disobeyed General Luna’s orders as they were supposedly only to take orders from General Aguinaldo. This led to a feud between the two generals and eventually one death between them. At the failure to take control of Manila, Aquino and his men had to retreat back to the North with the American soldiers shortly behind their tails.
When Malolos fell, Aquino and his troops fled north to Candaba and then to Dagupan in order to regroup with General Makabulos. However, upon their arrival, Aquino received orders to position his men in Calumpit then at the Mexico-Arayat area. Then, Aguinaldo personally took control of the battle in San Fernando, but their attacks were easily deflected by the Americans. The Republic reassembled in Tarlac and Aquino was summoned by Aguinaldo. There, Aquino was promoted to Brigadier General and appointed as a deputy to Congress, representing Samar.
General Aquino’s brigade was then left in charge of the whole of Magalang; in case the Americans were forcing their way to Magalang, he and his men were to keep hitting at the right flank of the enemy in order to protect the retreat of the other brigades to capas where a second line of defense was to be established. The Americans tried to break the defenses in Magalang but Aquino and his troops held their position. However, on the night of November 12, Tarlac had fallen into the hands of the Americans; Aguinaldo fled to Pangasinan and the armies of General Makabulos and General Aquino retreated to the hills of Mayanto and Mount Arayat, respectively.
Servillano Aquino was once again in the Mountain of Arayat fighting another war, now, however, as a general with five hundred men. The expedition specifically assigned to take down General Aquino scaled the great mountain with difficulty; some of the American soldiers only ended up as prisoners of the Aquino squadron. When MacArthur offered amnesty, Makabulos gave himself up, but Aquino did not. Even after a series of negotiations with an American captain who asked for his desistance, General Aquino refused to give up the war unless he was to be set free and not be tried for anything once he yielded.
In September 1900, General Aquino finally came down from Arayat and surrendered “unconditionally” to U.S. General Grant; he was subsequently charged with the atrocities he allegedly committed on the Americans taken as prisoners where one of them died. He was taken to Manila and went on trial for his life. Once again, he evaded a death sentence and was only given the penalty of life imprisonment.
General Aquino was detained at Bilibid where he served for two years before being given a pardon by U.S. President Roosevelt upon the recommendation of then Secretary of War Taft. Although uncertain, it is popularly believed that the release of General Aquino was due to the friendship of Taft’s son with Aquino’s son, Benigno Servillano.
Upon release, General Aquino returned to his hometown in Concepcion, Tarlac while his three sons were staying with their grandmother Lorenza Quiambao and their aunt Petronila — whom he later married. His union with Petronilla produced one daughter, Fortunata. They lived in the house known as Casa Grande in Murcia, Tarlac which was the biggest in town with a surrounding orchard along the Calle Real.
Don Mianong, as he was called then, was beloved by his town. He liked to spend his time in the fields together with the peasantry; he was with them from sun-up to sundown working with them. Joaquin writes that, although he remained anti-American, he offered his services during the First World War when citizen troops were being organized for defense; He was appointed as Inspector-General of the National Guard with the rank of Colonel.
At home, he was gentle with his daughters but tough as an army general with his sons. His sons Gonzalo, Benigno, and Salvador, all graduated from Letran with a bachelor of art. Gonzalo studied in Japan to pursue ceramics and engineering, while Benigno and Salvador studied at the University of Santo Tomas-Benigno and sought law, and Salvador medicine. In Japan, however, Gonzalo was learning about judo and jujitsu instead of ceramics and engineering; He was able to master Judo and Nippongo. When Gonzalo encountered a misunderstanding that turned violent and sent him to the Hospital, Don Mianong immediately sent him a telegram stating that he was to leave for London at once. There, he finished civil engineering at the Manchester Technical School.
In 1923, Petronila, Don Mianong’s second wife, died and he divided the Murcia hacienda among her heirs. He relocated to their Magalang property and lived there until the 1930s when his children decided that it was time for him to retire as tuberculosis also weakened him. Don Mianong lived next door to his son Benigno in Concepcion, Tarlac.
During the Second World War, the Japanese favored him for constantly having warred the Americans and persuaded him to carry a message to his distant cousin, Eusebio Aquino, who was the Huk guerilla leader at the time in Tarlac. In 1946, Don Mianong wedded Belen Sanchez, despite her own and her families reservations. They lived in Concepcion, Tarlac.
At the beginning of 1959, he suffered a stroke but was immediately back on his feet. However, not long after, on the 3rd of February of the same year, Don Mianong Aquino died at the age of 85. A few years later after his death, Republic Act No. 3494 was enacted that renamed Camp James Ord in San Miguel, Tarlac, Tarlac after his honor. In 2021, the National Historical Commission of the Philippines established a marker in his honor in the now Camp General Serviliano Aquino in Tarlac. This year, 2024, we commemorate his 150″ birth anniversary.
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