Treaty of Paris (1898)

01 · Framing

Framing the treaty as entities, not a single verdict

“Was the Treaty of Paris a peace settlement or an imperial charter?” invites the same trap that the broader question of American expansion does: it asks for one word to describe a document that does several different, and sometimes contradictory, things at once. The treaty relinquishes Spanish sovereignty over Cuba in one article and cedes the Philippines outright in another. It pays Spain an indemnity in one clause and leaves the political status of millions of people undecided in the next. A single label flattens a document that rewards being read the way it was actually negotiated: clause by clause, delegation by delegation.

This guide follows that approach. Rather than starting from a verdict, “imperialist land grab” or “generous peace,” and selecting the clauses that support it, it treats the treaty as a set of distinct entities, the armistice protocol that preceded it, the commissioners who wrote it, the seventeen articles themselves, the peoples excluded from the room, and the Senate fight that ratified it, and defines each one before attempting any synthesis. The two framings in the title are not a forced choice between them; they are the two ends of a real historical argument that the treaty’s own text supports.

02 · Background

From battlefield to armistice: the Protocol of August 12

The Treaty of Paris did not emerge from a blank slate. Its core terms were largely set four months earlier, in a preliminary armistice agreement negotiated in Washington rather than Paris, that stopped the fighting and fixed the boundaries within which the eventual peace commissioners would work.

By the summer of 1898, Spain’s military position had collapsed on both fronts of the war: its Caribbean fleet was destroyed at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba in July, and its Pacific squadron had already been destroyed at Manila Bay in May. With no realistic path to a favorable outcome, Spain sought peace through French ambassador Jules Cambon, who acted as an intermediary in Washington. On August 12, 1898, Secretary of State William R. Day and Cambon signed the Protocol of Peace, an armistice that ended the fighting and set the framework for the negotiations to come. The protocol required Spain to relinquish all claim of sovereignty over Cuba, to cede Puerto Rico and other Spanish islands in the West Indies to the United States, and to cede an island in the Ladrones, later specified as Guam, to be selected by the United States. Critically, the protocol left the Philippines unresolved: it provided only that the United States would occupy and hold the city, bay, and harbor of Manila pending a final peace treaty that would determine the archipelago’s control, disposition, and government.

Why the Philippines were left open

That single unresolved clause turned out to be the most consequential sentence in the armistice. American forces under General Wesley Merritt, coordinating with Commodore George Dewey’s fleet, captured Manila from its Spanish garrison on August 13, 1898, the day after the protocol was signed but before news of it had reached the Pacific by transatlantic cable. That timing, a Spanish surrender that arrived technically after the ceasefire took effect, became the central legal and moral dispute of the Paris negotiations that followed: Spain’s commissioners argued the capture could not count as a legitimate war conquest, while American commissioners treated Manila’s fall, and the broader collapse of Spanish authority across the islands, as decisive facts on the ground regardless of the protocol’s exact timing.

03 · The commission

Ten men at the Quai d’Orsay: the commissions

Under the armistice protocol, each government appointed up to five commissioners, who convened at the French Foreign Ministry building on the Quai d’Orsay in Paris beginning October 1, 1898, to negotiate the final treaty.

President McKinley’s American commission was led by William R. Day, who had recently stepped down as Secretary of State specifically to lead the delegation, and included two sitting senators, Cushman K. Davis of Minnesota and William P. Frye of Maine, along with Senator George Gray of Delaware, the delegation’s lone member who had voted against the April 1898 war resolution and who consistently opposed acquiring the Philippines outright. The fifth American commissioner was Whitelaw Reid, a newspaper publisher and outspoken expansionist whose presence signaled how seriously the administration was weighing outright annexation of the Philippines even before instructions from Washington confirmed it. Spain’s commission was led by Eugenio Montero Ríos, president of the Spanish Senate, joined by four additional Spanish diplomats and jurists tasked with limiting the scope of Spain’s territorial losses as far as the military situation allowed.

Instructions that changed mid-negotiation

McKinley’s instructions to the American commissioners evolved over the course of the talks. Early guidance from Washington contemplated retaining only Manila and perhaps a naval station in the Philippines rather than the whole archipelago. By late October, McKinley had settled on demanding the entire Philippine archipelago, a shift driven by a mix of strategic reasoning about naval basing in the Pacific, commercial interest in Asian markets, concern that leaving part of the islands to Spain or to a third power such as Germany or Japan would create instability, and the missionary-inflected language of civilizational duty common among expansionists of the period. Spain’s commissioners protested the demand as exceeding what the armistice protocol had actually promised, since the protocol’s language on the Philippines addressed only Manila and left the rest of the archipelago’s “control, disposition, and government” open to negotiation rather than automatic cession.

04 · The Philippines fight

The fight over the Philippines and the $20 million

No provision of the treaty was more contested at the negotiating table, or has been more contested by historians since, than the disposition of the Philippines, an archipelago the original April 1898 congressional war resolution against Spain had never even mentioned.

Spain’s commissioners argued throughout the talks that the islands could not legitimately be claimed as a spoil of war, since Manila’s surrender came after the armistice had technically taken effect, and pressed instead for Spain to retain sovereignty or, failing that, for the United States to accept a lease or coaling station rather than the full archipelago. American commissioners, backed by McKinley’s firm instructions from Washington, held that the practical collapse of Spanish authority across the islands, not the precise hour of Manila’s fall, was the relevant fact, and that anything short of full cession would leave an unstable, contested territory in the middle of the Pacific. Facing continued American naval and military pressure and having no realistic alternative, Spain’s commissioners eventually yielded to the demand for the entire archipelago.

Was the $20 million a purchase price?

As a concession to Spain for accepting full cession of the archipelago, the United States agreed to pay $20 million within three months of the exchange of ratifications, a sum that appears in Article III of the final treaty. Historians describe the payment with varying precision: some treat it loosely as a purchase price, comparable in structure to the 1803 Louisiana Purchase or the 1867 Alaska purchase; others describe it more narrowly as an indemnity or settlement payment intended to resolve the legal dispute over Manila’s timing without either side conceding the underlying argument about conquest versus cession. Both descriptions capture something real: the treaty text uses the language of cession backed by payment, not a market transaction negotiated between equals, since Spain’s decision to accept the sum came under the direct pressure of a lost war rather than as a freely chosen sale.

05 · The articles

Article by article: what the treaty actually says

The seventeen articles of the Treaty of Paris are shorter and more procedural, in places, than either the “peace settlement” or “imperial charter” framing might suggest, but several of them carry consequences that stretched decades beyond 1898.

• Article I

  Spain relinquishes all claim of sovereignty over and title to Cuba; while the U.S. occupies the island, it assumes the obligations international law places on an occupying power.

• Article II

  Spain cedes Puerto Rico and other Spanish islands in the West Indies, along with the island of Guam in the Marianas, to the United States.

• Article III

  Spain cedes the entire Philippine archipelago to the United States, which in turn pays Spain $20 million within three months of ratification.

• Article IV

  For ten years, Spanish ships and merchandise receive the same commercial treatment as American ships and merchandise in Philippine ports.

• Article V

  The United States, at its own cost, returns Spanish soldiers and volunteers held as prisoners of war and repatriates Spanish forces remaining in the Philippines.

• Article VI

  Spain releases prisoners it holds in connection with the war and its Cuban and Philippine insurrections, including political prisoners.

• Article VIII

  Spain relinquishes public property in the ceded territories but retains certain rights connected to Catholic Church institutions and property, a clause aimed at protecting church holdings.

• Article IX

  Spanish subjects in the ceded territories may preserve Spanish nationality by declaration; the civil rights and political status of the native inhabitants are left for Congress to determine.

• Articles X–XI

  Guarantee free exercise of religion and provide that Spanish and American courts will continue to handle certain pending civil and criminal matters under existing law.

• Article XVI

  Clarifies that the United States, on ending its occupation of Cuba, will do so consistent with its own prior legislative commitment, understood as a reference to the Teller Amendment.

What the treaty conspicuously does not say

The treaty nowhere promises independence, statehood, or a fixed political future to the inhabitants of any ceded territory except in the narrow, indirect Cuban reference of Article XVI. It nowhere sets a date, or even a process, for extending full constitutional rights to residents of Puerto Rico, Guam, or the Philippines. That absence, more than any single affirmative clause, is what later courts and historians point to when explaining how the treaty’s text itself opened the door to decades of unresolved territorial status.

06 · Cuba

Cuba: sovereignty relinquished, but to whom?

Cuba occupies a legally distinct position in the treaty from the other three territories, a distinction rooted in the Teller Amendment Congress had attached to its own declaration of war, and one that shows up directly in the treaty’s careful choice of words.

Where Articles II and III use the language of cession, transferring Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines directly to the United States, Article I uses the language of relinquishment: Spain gives up its claim of sovereignty over Cuba without the treaty naming any recipient of that sovereignty. No Cuban government, whether the insurgent Cuban Republic in Arms that had been fighting Spain for years or any other body, is named, recognized, or consulted anywhere in the treaty text. Instead, the article specifies only that so long as U.S. military occupation of the island continues, the United States will fulfill the obligations occupying powers hold under international law for the protection of life and property, language that describes a temporary military administration rather than a transfer to Cuban self-rule.

The debt Spain did not get to unload

A separate and less publicized fight at the negotiating table concerned roughly $400 million in Spanish colonial debt that had been charged against Cuba over the preceding decades to help finance Spain’s own war against the Cuban insurgency. Spanish commissioners pushed to have that debt transferred along with sovereignty, effectively making an independent Cuba, or the United States as its occupying power, responsible for repaying Spain’s own war costs. American commissioners refused, and the final treaty left the debt entirely with Spain, a provision historians treat as one of the few unambiguous concessions the American side extracted purely in Cuba’s favor rather than its own.

07 · Excluded voices

The delegations Paris didn’t invite

The single fact about the Treaty of Paris that both the “peace settlement” and “imperial charter” framings have to reckon with is the same: the treaty disposing of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines was negotiated entirely by representatives of the two governments that had just fought each other, with no seat at the table for anyone from the territories being transferred.

Felipe Agoncillo, the diplomatic representative of Emilio Aguinaldo’s Filipino revolutionary government, traveled to Paris seeking recognition and a hearing during the negotiations, on the understanding that Filipino forces had fought alongside the United States against Spain and that Aguinaldo’s government, which had already declared independence in January 1899 as the Malolos Republic, had a direct stake in the islands’ disposition. He was not granted formal standing in the talks. No comparable Cuban insurgent representative or Puerto Rican political delegation was seated either; the Cuban Republic in Arms, which had controlled substantial territory on the island for years, was likewise excluded from the negotiations that determined Cuba’s fate.

A later, symbolic visit to Washington

Once the treaty reached the Senate for ratification in early 1899, representatives from the affected territories did travel to the United States to make their case directly, after the fact, to American lawmakers rather than to the treaty’s authors. Cuban representative Ramón Villalón Sánchez, Filipino representative Felipe Agoncillo, and Puerto Rican representatives Eugenio María de Hostos and José Julio Henna all appeared in Washington seeking a hearing before the Senate vote, a visit later documented in period newspaper coverage but largely absent from standard treaty histories. Their presence in the capital changed nothing about the treaty’s text, since ratification concerned only whether the Senate would approve or reject the document as signed in Paris, not whether it would be renegotiated.

08 · Ratification

The ratification fight in the Senate

Ratification required a two-thirds majority of senators voting, and for weeks after the treaty reached Washington it was genuinely uncertain whether that threshold could be met, a fight that pulled in the era’s most prominent anti-imperialist voices and, in an unexpected turn, its most prominent Democratic presidential contender.

The newly formed Anti-Imperialist League, whose supporters included Mark Twain, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, labor leader Samuel Gompers, and former president Grover Cleveland, campaigned openly for the treaty’s defeat, arguing that annexing the Philippines without Filipino consent broke faith with the country’s own founding principle of government by consent of the governed. Massachusetts Senator George Frisbie Hoar, a Republican who broke with his own party over the treaty, warned colleagues during the floor debate that ratification would turn the country into what he called a vulgar, commonplace empire ruling over subject peoples. Only Hoar and fellow Republican Eugene Hale ultimately voted against the treaty from within their own party, while expansionist senators including Henry Cabot Lodge argued forcefully that constitutional protections applied only within the United States proper and did not constrain how the government administered newly acquired territory.

Bryan’s decisive, and controversial, intervention

William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic Party’s 1896 presidential nominee and its presumptive 1900 candidate, held no Senate seat but exercised enormous influence over Democratic votes, and his position on the treaty proved decisive. Rather than urging Democratic senators to defeat the treaty outright, Bryan urged them to ratify it and then campaign against Philippine annexation as a distinct policy question in the 1900 election, reasoning that the war needed to be formally closed and that keeping the annexation question alive as a live electoral issue served the anti-imperialist cause better than an unresolved state of war. That intervention shifted enough Democratic votes to change the outcome. On February 6, 1899, the Senate approved the treaty by a vote of 57 to 27, exactly one vote above the 56 required for the necessary two-thirds majority.

09 · The war that began first

The war that started two days before the vote

The Senate vote did not take place in a calm, hypothetical atmosphere. Two days before the roll call, fighting had already broken out between American and Filipino forces outside Manila, a development that shaped the final debate even as senators cast votes on a document meant to end one war rather than authorize another.

On the night of February 4, 1899, an American sentry fired on Filipino soldiers near the town of Santa Mesa, touching off clashes that escalated within hours into the opening battle of what became the Philippine-American War. McKinley’s administration relayed accounts to the American public emphasizing that Filipino forces had initiated the attack, framing the clash as unprovoked aggression against American troops already stationed in the islands under the terms of the still-unratified treaty. Historians have since debated the precise sequence of the initial shots, but the political effect of the news arriving in Washington just before the ratification vote is not disputed: senators who might otherwise have opposed annexation on principle now faced a choice between ratifying the treaty or leaving American troops already engaged in combat without a resolved legal claim to the territory they were fighting to hold.

A war the treaty’s language did not anticipate

The treaty itself makes no reference to Filipino resistance to American rule, since its Article III language treats the cession as a transaction between Spain and the United States rather than as an act requiring Filipino consent. The war that began on February 4 continued for roughly three years, cost a large number of Filipino and American lives, and stands as the clearest immediate consequence of a treaty that transferred the islands without addressing the political status or wishes of the people already living in them.

10 · Legal legacy

Article IX and the Insular Cases

The treaty’s most consequential long-term legal effect flows from a single sentence in Article IX, which left the civil rights and political status of the native inhabitants of the ceded territories to be determined by the United States Congress rather than fixing that status in the treaty itself or extending constitutional protections automatically.

That deferral gave Congress, rather than the treaty, the authority to decide how much of the Constitution would apply in Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, and the Supreme Court was soon asked to rule on how far Congress could go in withholding constitutional protection. Beginning with Downes v. Bidwell in 1901, the Court’s Insular Cases decisions held that the Constitution did not automatically or fully extend to territory acquired under the Treaty of Paris, creating the legal category of “unincorporated territory,” distinct from earlier territories understood to be on a path toward eventual statehood. Several of the opinions relied explicitly on characterizations of the treaty’s ceded populations as unfit, in the majority’s own racialized terms, for immediate constitutional inclusion, reasoning that legal scholars and later courts have since widely repudiated even as the underlying territorial-status doctrine has never been fully overturned.

A doctrine still governing Puerto Rico and Guam today

Because the Insular Cases interpreted a status Article IX created rather than a temporary wartime measure, their core holding continues to shape the legal status of Puerto Rico and Guam into the present, more than a century after the treaty that started the chain of reasoning was signed. Litigation and scholarly criticism of the doctrine’s racial reasoning continue, giving Article IX’s brief deferral clause an outsized and still-active legal life far beyond what its drafters likely anticipated in December 1898.

11 · The case for restraint

The case for a restrained peace settlement

Those who read the Treaty of Paris primarily as a conventional, even restrained, peace settlement point to a set of provisions that distinguish it from a pure conquest-and-annexation document, several of which protected Spanish interests more generously than a defeated power in 1898 might have expected.

Rather than seizing the Philippines outright as war spoils without compensation, which the American commissioners could plausibly have justified given Spain’s collapsed military position, the treaty provided a $20 million payment to Spain, a substantial sum by the standards of the day. Article IV guaranteed Spanish commerce equal treatment in Philippine ports for a full decade, protecting an economic interest the United States had no legal obligation to preserve. The treaty left Spain’s Cuban colonial debt with Spain rather than transferring it to Cuba or the United States, released prisoners on both sides, and included specific protections for Catholic Church property and religious practice in the ceded territories under Articles VIII and X. None of these provisions were required by the laws of war as understood at the time, and advocates of the settlement framing argue that a purely imperial document, uninterested in the interests of the defeated party or the practicalities of governance, would not have included them.

Consistency with the Teller Amendment on Cuba

The Cuba article’s careful language, relinquishment rather than cession, occupation rather than annexation, tracks the Teller Amendment’s April 1898 commitment not to exercise permanent sovereignty over the island, a commitment the treaty text does not contradict even as its practical effects, addressed elsewhere in the broader history of this period, later proved more constrained than the promise suggested.

12 · The case for empire

The case for an imperial charter

Those who read the treaty primarily as the founding charter of an American overseas empire point to a different, equally well-documented set of facts: a document negotiated entirely between two governments, transferring millions of people and their territory without their consent, and explicitly withholding rather than granting political rights.

Article III ceded the entire Philippine archipelago over the objection of a Filipino government that had already declared independence and expected American support for it, a transfer that led directly to a war lasting roughly three years. Article IX did not extend citizenship, statehood, or a defined political future to any of the territories’ populations; it explicitly left their civil rights and political status open for congressional determination at an unspecified future date, a deferral the Supreme Court later used to justify withholding full constitutional protection for decades. No representative of any ceded territory sat at the negotiating table, and the treaty’s careful even-handed language toward Spain, the $20 million payment, the decade of commercial protection, contrasts sharply with its near-total silence on any comparable protection or promise to the populations actually being transferred. Advocates of this framing argue that a $20 million payment made between the two governments that had just fought a war does not transform a territorial cession achieved through military conquest into a negotiated purchase between consenting parties, since the population being transferred was never a party to the transaction at all.

The gap between April 1898 and December 1898

Congress’s own April 1898 war resolution, which authorized the conflict with Spain, made no mention of the Philippines and centered its stated justification on Cuban independence. The treaty signed eight months later transferred an entirely different archipelago, on the other side of the world, that the original war aims had never named, a shift historians on this side of the debate cite as evidence that the war’s stated purpose and its ultimate territorial outcome diverged substantially over the course of 1898.

13 · Consensus

Where do historians broadly agree?

Despite real disagreement over how to characterize the treaty as a whole, historians across the methodological spectrum agree on a substantial set of underlying facts about how it was made and what it did.

There is broad agreement that the treaty was negotiated exclusively between American and Spanish commissioners, with no formal participation from Cuban, Filipino, or Puerto Rican representatives, and that Filipino diplomat Felipe Agoncillo’s attempt to gain a hearing in Paris was unsuccessful. There is broad agreement that the disposition of the Philippines was the most contested issue at the negotiating table, that Spain’s commissioners argued Manila’s capture could not fairly count as a war conquest given its timing relative to the armistice, and that the United States ultimately obtained the full archipelago backed by continued military and naval pressure rather than through a negotiation between equals. There is broad agreement that Article IX’s deferral of civil rights and political status to future congressional action was the direct textual basis for the Supreme Court’s later Insular Cases doctrine, and that the Senate ratification vote, at 57 to 27, passed by the narrowest possible margin under the two-thirds rule. There is also broad agreement that William Jennings Bryan’s intervention urging Democratic ratification, followed by electoral opposition to annexation, was decisive to the treaty’s approval and remains one of the more debated tactical choices in the period’s political history.

The treaty’s two faces are not really in tension with each other. It was possible for American negotiators to treat Spain generously, in payment, in trade rights, in prisoner exchange, while treating the populations of the ceded territories as objects of the agreement rather than parties to it; the record shows both happening in the same seventeen articles. Pattern reflected across the treaty text and its ratification debate

14 · Contested ground

Where does genuine debate continue?

Several questions about how to weigh and characterize the treaty remain genuinely unsettled among credentialed historians, not merely between political factions, and an honest treatment of the topic names them directly.

Was the $20 million payment a purchase, an indemnity, or a fig leaf?

Historians disagree over how much weight the $20 million payment should carry in characterizing the transaction. Some treat it as functionally comparable to earlier American territorial purchases, evidence that the transfer followed a recognizable, if coercive, legal form rather than uncompensated seizure. Others argue the payment was better understood as an indemnity resolving a legal dispute over Manila’s surrender timing, or even as a face-saving device that let both governments avoid directly litigating whether the islands had been legitimately conquered, and that calling the transaction a “purchase” imports a market-transaction framing the historical circumstances do not support.

Did McKinley’s Philippine policy reflect a coherent plan or an improvised response?

A second live debate concerns whether McKinley’s shift from a limited coaling-station demand to full annexation of the Philippines over the course of the Paris talks reflected a considered strategic and ideological commitment formed earlier in 1898, or a more improvised response to developments on the ground, Dewey’s naval victory, Manila’s capture, uncertainty about Filipino self-governance capacity, that hardened into policy only during the negotiations themselves. McKinley’s own later public statements describing an agonized decision-making process are treated by some historians as sincere and by others as a retrospective narrative constructed to soften a decision made largely for strategic and commercial reasons.

How should Bryan’s ratification strategy be judged?

A third area of disagreement concerns whether Bryan’s push for Democratic senators to ratify the treaty, rather than defeat it outright, helped or hurt the anti-imperialist cause. Some historians argue the strategy was a miscalculation that handed annexation supporters the one vote they needed while failing to make Philippine policy the decisive 1900 campaign issue Bryan hoped it would become, since McKinley won reelection comfortably. Others argue that defeating the treaty in February 1899 would have left the war with Spain formally unresolved and Manila’s legal status unsettled, and that Bryan’s approach was the more defensible path available at the time given the political realities the anti-imperialist minority actually faced in the Senate.

15 · Timeline

Timeline at a glance, 1898–1901

Because the treaty’s negotiation, signing, and legal aftermath span roughly three years, a single reference view of the sequence is useful for keeping the events straight.

• May 1–Jul 3, 1898

  Dewey destroys Spain’s Pacific squadron at Manila Bay; American forces defeat Spain’s Caribbean fleet at Santiago de Cuba.

• Aug 12, 1898

  Protocol of Peace signed in Washington by Secretary of State Day and French ambassador Cambon, ending the fighting and fixing the outline of the coming peace talks.

• Aug 13, 1898

  American forces capture Manila from its Spanish garrison, the day after the armistice technically took effect.

• Oct 1, 1898

  American and Spanish peace commissioners open formal negotiations in Paris.

• Late Oct 1898

  McKinley’s instructions to the American commission shift from a limited Philippine claim to demanding cession of the entire archipelago.

• Dec 10, 1898

  Treaty of Paris signed by both commissions; Spain cedes Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines and relinquishes sovereignty over Cuba.

• Jan 1899

  Aguinaldo’s forces proclaim the Malolos Republic in the Philippines; Senate debate over ratification intensifies.

• Feb 4, 1899

  Fighting breaks out between American and Filipino forces near Manila, opening the Philippine-American War.

• Feb 6, 1899

  U.S. Senate ratifies the treaty, 57 to 27, one vote above the two-thirds threshold required.

• Feb 11, 1899

  Spain ratifies the treaty; ratifications are formally exchanged.

• Mar 1900

  Supplementary protocol amends Article IX’s treatment of certain Philippine islands not explicitly named in the original text.

• 1901

  Supreme Court decides Downes v. Bidwell and the first of the Insular Cases, interpreting Article IX’s deferral to create the “unincorporated territory” doctrine.

16 · Common errors

Common misconceptions, addressed directly

Because the treaty is often summarized in a single sentence, a handful of specific misunderstandings recur. Naming them directly clears up a meaningful share of the confusion.

“The treaty granted the Philippines independence, or at least promised it”

The treaty text does neither. Article III simply cedes the archipelago to the United States in exchange for payment; no clause promises eventual independence. A formal U.S. commitment to eventual Philippine independence did not appear until the 1916 Jones Act, seventeen years after ratification, and full independence was not granted until 1946.

“Cuba became a sovereign nation the moment the treaty was signed”

Article I relinquishes Spanish sovereignty but names no Cuban recipient and instead describes a continuing U.S. military occupation governed by the laws applicable to an occupying power. Formal Cuban independence did not arrive until 1902, and it came bound by the separate Platt Amendment’s restrictions on Cuban sovereignty.

“The $20 million made this a straightforward real-estate purchase”

Historians generally resist that framing. The payment was negotiated between two governments after a war Spain had lost decisively, without the Filipino population’s involvement or consent, and functioned at least in part to resolve a legal dispute over whether Manila’s capture legitimately counted as a war conquest, rather than as a market transaction between willing parties.

“Article IX gave the ceded territories’ residents the same rights as other Americans”

The opposite is closer to the text. Article IX explicitly left the civil rights and political status of the territories’ native inhabitants to be determined later by Congress, a deferral, not a grant, that the Supreme Court’s Insular Cases later interpreted to permit withholding full constitutional protection indefinitely.

17 · Legacy

The treaty’s afterlife, into the present

Few nineteenth-century treaties have as direct and continuing a legal life today as the Treaty of Paris of 1898, whose Article IX deferral still shapes the constitutional status of two American territories more than a century after it was written.

Puerto Rico and Guam remain unincorporated territory

Puerto Rico and Guam are today classified, under the doctrine the Insular Cases built directly on Article IX’s language, as unincorporated U.S. territories, a status that continues to generate litigation, congressional proposals, and public debate over statehood, independence, or an enhanced form of the current arrangement. Ongoing scholarly criticism of the racialized reasoning in the original Insular Cases opinions has not overturned the underlying territorial-status framework, keeping a direct line open between a nineteenth-century treaty clause and twenty-first-century constitutional argument.

A model, and a warning, for later territorial transfers

The treaty’s structure, negotiated exclusively between the ceding and receiving governments, with the affected population’s status left open rather than resolved, has been cited by later scholars of American territorial expansion and international law as both a precedent other transfers followed and a cautionary example of what excluding affected populations from a negotiation can produce decades later. The Philippine-American War that began two days before ratification remains the clearest immediate cost historians attach to that structural choice, and it is the case most frequently invoked when the treaty’s two framings, restrained settlement and imperial charter, are weighed against each other today.

Closing

Key takeaways

The Treaty of Paris of 1898 does not sort cleanly into either a purely restrained peace settlement or a purely imperial charter, and the strongest answer to the question this guide opened with is that the document is genuinely both, depending on which article and which party is in view. Toward Spain, the treaty’s authors extracted a decisive military victory but tempered it with a $20 million payment, a decade of protected commercial access, prisoner releases, and debt relief, provisions a purely punitive settlement would not have required. Toward the populations of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, the same document offered no seat at the negotiating table, no defined political future, and, in Article IX, an explicit deferral of civil rights and political status that opened the door to the Insular Cases doctrine still governing Puerto Rico and Guam today. The Philippine-American War that erupted two days before the Senate’s 57-to-27 ratification vote stands as the clearest immediate evidence that a treaty generous toward the defeated great power and largely silent toward the territories it transferred was not, and could not have been, experienced as pure liberation by the people whose future it decided without them.

18 · Notes

Frequently asked questions