Military government, 1898-1900

On October 18, 1898 the forces of the United States took formal possession of San Juan. The summer landing at Guánica is a campaign story told at Reducto; this lesson is the government that followed. Until Congress wrote a civil organic law, Puerto Rico remained under military government. Orders came from the War Department. Ports, customs, courts, and the old municipal machinery were kept, bent, or replaced as the commanders needed them.

The Treaty of Paris ceded the island; it did not liberate it. Signed on December 10, 1898, it made Puerto Rico a ceded territory by Article II. Cession, cesión, is a transfer of title. Spain renounced sovereignty. The island's people were not party to the treaty and did not vote on it. That legal fact is the floor of every later status argument on this board. Whoever wants a war story may leave this page; the statute begins when the title passed.

The military governors issued circulars on sanitation, schools, tariffs, and the courts. The occupation was public and documented. The 1898 collection of the Library of Congress and the Army's documentary file are the right shelf: proclamations, the treaty text, and the reports that went to Washington. This journal does not retell the Grito de Lares; that nineteenth-century uprising belongs to the Spanish-century narrative at Reducto.

What military government was not: a constitution, a compact, or a grant of United States citizenship. It was a wartime and postwar tenancy arrangement. It lasted until the Foraker Act put a civil statute in place in April 1900. Citizenship, the resident commissioner, and the word commonwealth come later, in numbered lessons. Start here so those later words have a date underneath them.

Military government is what it was. A century later it is easy to skip this interval and start with Foraker or with Jones-Shafroth. That skip hides the sequence. First the island was taken and ceded. Then the army held it. Then Congress wrote civil law. The honesty line is short. The title passed by treaty. The government was military until Congress acted. The people were not asked.

The numbered finding stays with the public law, the citation, or the scrutiny. This lesson invents no percentage, no headcount, and no date that the sources of this page do not support. The English terms are glossed in the text so the statute reads without a manifesto.

Sources: Archivos Nacionales, Tratado de París (1898); Biblioteca del Congreso, World of 1898. Freeze 2026-08-22.