The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  If General Shafter noticed a smaller hill in front of San Juan Heights, cutting off his view of some of the road, he did not consider it worthy of inclusion in his hand-drawn map.81

  A COUNCIL OF WAR was called in command headquarters early in the afternoon. Shafter looked ill and exhausted by his ascent of El Pozo—obviously being at the front did not agree with him—but he had a definite plan of campaign worked out, and announced it in peremptory tones. The Fifth Corps would begin the advance upon Santiago immediately, that very evening. (Eight thousand enemy troops were reported to be on their way from another part of the province, to supplement the twelve thousand already in and around Santiago: clearly not a moment must be lost.) The divisions would move along the Camino Real under cover of dusk, and spread out in the vicinity of El Pozo. While Brigadier General J. F. Kent’s 1st Infantry and General Wheeler’s Cavalry encamped on the flanks of the hill, General Lawton’s 2nd Infantry would swing right and march toward El Caney, and bivouac somewhere en route. All forces would then be poised for a big battle which would inevitably begin next morning.82

  Sitting vast and rumpled in shirt-sleeves and suspenders, his gouty foot wrapped in burlap,83 Shafter detailed the swift, simple maneuvers he would like to see, or at least hear about, during the day. At dawn General Lawton would assault El Caney and take the fort there, cutting off the northern supply route to Santiago. This should take only about three hours. Meanwhile the other two divisions would launch their own attack upon San Juan Hill, moving through the jungle along Camino Real, and deploying as they approached the foothills. Lawton was to join them on the right as soon as he was free, and the day’s action would climax in a massive onslaught on the Heights, plainly inspired by the final charge at Las Guásimas.84

  The council of war was barely over when a staff officer rode over to Rough Rider headquarters and announced that Generals Wheeler and Young had been felled by fever. Command of the Cavalry Division therefore devolved upon Brigadier General Samuel S. Sumner, and that of Young’s 2nd Brigade upon Leonard Wood; “while to my intense delight,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt, “I got my regiment.”85 His long-postponed colonelcy had come just in time for the decisive engagement of the Spanish-American War.

  ONE SMALL DETAIL which had apparently escaped General Shafter’s attention was that mobilization of some sixteen thousand men along a road ten feet wide would cause certain problems, especially as he had ordered the entire Fifth Corps to start marching at 4:00 P.M. A violent rainstorm at 3:30 did not help matters, for it converted the Camino Real into a ditch which squished deeper under every fresh line of boots.86

  “Darkness came and still we marched,” one Rough Rider remembered. “The tropical moon rose. You could almost envy the ease with which this orange ball crossed the sky. It was all we could do to lift our muddy shoes.”87 At last, at about eight o’clock, the dark silhouette of El Pozo loomed up through the trees, and the regiment clambered halfway up its eastern slope. Leaving his men to sleep where they chose, Roosevelt strolled over the brow of the hill and found Wood establishing temporary headquarters in an abandoned sugar factory. Brigadier General and Colonel now, they gazed across at San Juan Heights, and the refracted glow of Santiago’s street lights.88 Then they curled up in their yellow slickers on a bed of saddle blankets and went to sleep.

  THE FIRST OF JULY, 1898, which Roosevelt ever afterward called “the great day of my life,” dawned to a fugato of bugles, phrase echoing phrase as reveille sounded in the various camps.89 The morning was Elysian, with a pink sky lightening rapidly to pale, cloudless blue. Mists filled the basin below El Pozo, evaporating quickly as the air warmed, exposing first the crowns of royal palms, then the lower green of deciduous trees and vines. Hills rippled around the horizon to east, west, and north, like a violet backdrop. As the vapor burned away, the effect to Roosevelt was of shimmering curtains rising to disclose “an amphitheatre for the battle.”90

  While his men got up he walked about calmly lathering his face, reassuring the many who had woken afraid.91 He wore a dark blue shirt with yellow suspenders, fastened with silver leaves, and—in the apparent belief that people might otherwise mistake him for a Regular—a stand-up collar emblazoned with the Volunteer insignia.92 Breakfast was frugal: a handful of beans, the invariable slabs of fat bacon and hardtack, washed down with bitter coffee. Then the regiment fell in, along with others of Wood’s brigade, to await marching orders. Four big guns of the 1st Artillery were hauled up El Pozo and wedged into position. A staff officer came by with the predictable news that General Shafter had been taken ill during the night, and would have to command the battle from his cot.93 Roosevelt probably paid little attention: he was waiting for the first detonation of Lawton’s battery.

  It came at 6:30, a sullen roar that rolled over the still-sleeping jungle and sent clouds of birds into the air. Almost immediately the El Pozo battery followed suit, and Roosevelt and Wood became conscious of a white plume of gunsmoke hanging motionless over their heads. Wood barely had time to say “he wished our brigade could be moved somewhere else” when there was a whistling rush from the direction of San Juan Hill, and something exploded in the midst of the white plume. Another shell, another and another: the second explosion raised a shrapnel bump on Roosevelt’s wrist, wounded four Rough Riders, and blew the leg off a Regular. The fourth killed and maimed “a good many” Cubans, and perforated the lungs of Wood’s horse. Evidently Spanish gunners were as deadly accurate as Spanish riflemen. Roosevelt waited no longer, and hustled his regiment downhill into jungle cover.94

  About 8:45 the enemy cannonade ceased for no apparent reason—tortilla time?—and General Sumner ordered the Cavalry Division to hurry en masse along Camino Real toward San Juan. About where the jungle thinned out, a creek, also called San Juan, crossed the road at right angles; here the Rough Riders were to deploy to the right, and await further orders before moving up the Heights. Shafter’s original battle plan had been for them to link up with the 1st Infantry, as soon as General Lawton returned in triumph from El Caney; but the continual booming of guns from that quarter indicated that the fort was holding up much better than anticipated.95 For strategic purposes, Lawton’s aid could now be discounted.

  The freshness of the early morning had long since evaporated when Roosevelt, riding on Texas, led his men up the road. But last night’s mud was still thick and the jungle gave off insufferable clouds of dank moisture.96 The heat rose steadily to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and the sun drilled down with blistering force on sweaty arms and shoulders. Roosevelt’s neck, at least, was protected. He had ingeniously attached his blue polka-dot scarf—the unofficial insignia of a Rough Rider—in a semicircular screen dangling from the rim of his sombrero. It fluttered bravely as he trotted along,97 like the plumes of Alexander the Great; later in the day it would serve him to flamboyant effect.

  By now the familiar z-z-z-z-eu of Mauser bullets could be heard overhead. They sang louder and louder “in a steady deathly static”98 as Kent’s 1st Regular Brigade, marching just ahead of Roosevelt, approached San Juan Creek. The trees thinned, and suddenly so many thousands of bullets came down, ripping in sheets through grass and reeds and human bodies, that the mud of the crossing turned red, and the water flowing over it ran purple. The Rough Riders wavered, then halted, horrified at the pile-up of bodies in front of them. Ever afterward, this point of deploy was known as Bloody Ford.99

  As if to improve still further the marksmanship of the Spanish snipers (many of whom were hidden in the high crests of royal palms, completely camouflaged with green uniforms and smokeless powder), an irresistible target was towed down Camino Real: the observation balloon of the Signal Corps. Glistening and wobbling in the sun, it stayed aloft long enough to reconnoiter another crossing five hundred yards to the left, relieving the gruesome bottleneck at Bloody Ford, and gave the cannons on San Juan Heights a precise indication of the position of the advance column.100

  Plunging frantically across the creek, before the riddled ballo
on sank and smothered them, the Rough Riders found themselves crouching in a field full of waist-high grass. San Juan Hill rose up directly ahead, its blockhouse and breastworks clearly visible, as were the conical straw hats of entrenched soldiers. Roosevelt’s orders were to march to the right, along the bank of the creek, and establish himself at the foot of the little hill that Shafter had overlooked the day before.101 He, however, had not, and saw at once that it represented the nearest and most dangerous holdout of the enemy. Already it was breathing fire at its crest, like a miniature volcano about to erupt, and spitting showers of Mausers. The bullets came whisking through the grass with vicious effectiveness as the Rough Riders crawled nearer. Every now and again a trooper would leap involuntarily into the air, then crumple into a nerveless heap.102 Roosevelt remained obstinately on horseback, determined to set an example of courage to his men. Now began the worst part of the battle. While the Rough Riders took what cover they could, in bushes and banks below the hill, and in the mosquito-bogs at the edge of the creek, other cavalry regiments fought their way slowly into specified positions to left and right and—humiliatingly—in front of them. The truth was that Roosevelt and his men were being held in reserve by General Sumner,103 and the new Colonel did not like it one bit. The 1st, 3rd, 6th, and even the black 9th had prior claim to this hill, while General Kent’s Infantry Division was awarded the supreme prize of San Juan Hill, now half a mile away on the left front. Orders were orders; Roosevelt could only scrawl an angry note to the (very senior) colonel of his immediate neighbors, the 10th Cavalry. “There is too much firing. Colonel Wood directs that there be no more shooting unless there is an advance.…”104 It is doubtful Wood said any such thing.

  Mere spleen could not last through the one and a half hours of military torture that followed. General Sumner was waiting for orders to advance from General Shafter, but General Shafter assumed that any damn fool capable of leading a division would know when to do so without authority. Until this slight misunderstanding was cleared up, the cavalry regiments had to lie in stifling heat and try to stop as few Mausers as possible.105 Morale sagged as the shrieking projectiles chugged into groins, hearts, lungs, limbs, and eyes.106 Even Roosevelt found it prudent, in this killing hailstorm, to get off his horse and lie low; but Bucky O’Neill insisted on strolling up and down in front of his troop, smoking his perpetual cigarette, as if he were still walking along the sidewalk in Prescott, Arizona. “Sergeant,” he said to a protester, “the Spanish bullet isn’t made that will kill me.” He had hardly exhaled a laughing cloud of smoke before a Mauser shot went z-z-z-z-eu into his mouth, and burst out the back of his head. “The biggest, handsomest, laziest officer in the regiment” was dead by the time he hit the ground.107

  It was now well past noon, and the insect-like figures of General Kent’s infantry could be seen beginning a slow, toiling ascent of San Juan Hill. Roosevelt sent messenger after messenger to General Sumner, imploring permission to attack his own hill, and was just about to do so unilaterally when the welcome message arrived: “Move forward and support the regulars in the assault on the hills in front.”108 It was not the total advancement he had been hoping for, but it was enough. “The instant I received the order I sprang on my horse, and then my ‘crowded hour’ began.”109

  SOLDIERS ARE APT TO recollect their wartime actions, as poets do emotions, in tranquillity, imposing order and reason upon a dreamlike tumult. Roosevelt was honest enough to admit, even when minutely describing his charge up the hill, that at the time he was aware of very little that was going on outside the orbit of his ears and sweat-fogged spectacles.110 It was as if some primeval force drove him. “All men who feel any power of joy in battle,” he wrote, “know what it is like when the wolf rises in the heart.”111

  Yet enough original images, visual and auditory, survive in Roosevelt’s written account of the battle to give a sense of the rush, the roar, the pounce of that vulpine movement.112 To begin with, there was the sound of his own voice rasping and swearing as he cajoled terrified soldiers to follow him. “Are you afraid to stand up when I am on horseback?” Then the sight of a Rough Rider at his feet being drilled lengthwise with a bullet intended for himself. Next, line after line of cavalry parting before his advance, like waves under a Viking’s prow. The puzzled face of a captain refusing to go farther without permission from some senior colonel, who could not be found.

  Roosevelt: “Then I am the ranking officer here and I give the order to charge.” Another refusal. Roosevelt: “Then let my men through, sir.” Grinning white faces behind him; black men throwing down a barbed wire fence before him. A wave of his hat and flapping blue neckerchief. The sound of shouting and cheering. The sound of bullets “like the ripping of a silk dress.” Little Texas splashing bravely across a stream, galloping on, and on, up, up, up. Another wire fence, forty yards from the top, stopping her in her tracks. A bullet grazing his elbow. Jumping off, wriggling through, and running. Spaniards fleeing from the hacienda above. Only one man with him now: his orderly, Bardshar, shooting and killing two of the enemy. And then suddenly a revolver salvaged from the Maine leaping into his own hand and firing: a Spaniard not ten yards away doubling over “neatly as a jackrabbit.” At last the summit of the hill—his and Bardshar’s alone for one breathless moment before the other Rough Riders and cavalrymen swarmed up to join them. One final incongruous image: “a huge iron kettle, or something of the kind, probably used for sugar-refining.”113

  AS HIS HEAD CLEARED and his lungs stopped heaving, Roosevelt found that Kettle Hill commanded an excellent view of Kent’s attack on San Juan Hill, still in progress across the valley about seven hundred yards away. The toiling figures seemed pitifully few. “Obviously the proper thing to do was help them.”114 For the next ten minutes he supervised a continuous volley-fire at the heads of Spaniards in the San Juan blockhouse, until powerful Gatlings took over from somewhere down below, and the infantry on the left began their final rush.115 At this the wolf rose again in Roosevelt’s heart. Leaping over rolls of wire, he started down the hill to join them, but forgot to give the order to follow, and found that he had only five companions. Two were shot down while he ran back and roared imprecations at his regiment. “What, are you cowards?” “We’re waiting for the command.” “Forward MARCH!”116 The Rough Riders willingly obeyed, as well as members of the 1st and 10th Cavalry. Again Roosevelt pounded over lower ground under heavy fire; again he surged up grassy slopes, and again he saw Spaniards deserting their high fortifications. To left and right, all along the crested line of San Juan Heights, other regiments were doing the same. “When we reached these crests we found ourselves overlooking Santiago.”117

  UNTIL NIGHT FELL, Roosevelt was more interested in looking at the carnage behind him than ahead at the prize city. The trenches were filled with corpses in light blue and white uniforms, most of them with “little holes in their heads from which their brains were oozing”118—proof of the killing accuracy of Rough Rider volleys from the top of Kettle Hill. “Look at all these damned Spanish dead!” he exulted to Trooper Bob Ferguson, an old family friend.119

  Official tallies revealed a fair score of American casualties—656 according to one count, 1,071 according to another. The Rough Riders contributed 89, but this only increased Roosevelt’s sense of pride; he noted that it was “the heaviest loss suffered by any regiment in the cavalry division.”120

  “No hunting trip so far has ever equalled it in Theodore’s eyes,” Bob Ferguson wrote to Edith. “It makes up for the omissions of many past years … T. was just revelling in victory and gore.”121

  Roosevelt’s exhilaration at finding himself a hero (already there was talk of a Medal of Honor)122 and, by virtue of his two charges, senior officer in command of the highest crest and the extreme front of the American line, was so great that he could not sit, let alone lie down, even in the midst of a surprise bombardment at 3:00 A.M. A shell landed right next to him, besmirching his skin with powder, and killing several nearby so
ldiers; but he continued to strut up and down, “snuffing the fragrant air of combat,”123 silhouetted against the flares like a black lion rampant.

  “I really believe firmly now they can’t kill him,” wrote Ferguson.124

  SO BEGAN THE SIEGE of Santiago. It was not accomplished without considerable further bloodshed, for the Spanish were found to have retreated only half a mile, albeit downhill, and their retaliatory shells did much damage during the next few days. The city proper was stiffly fortified, with five thousand troops and a seemingly inexhaustible stock of heavy ammunition. Meanwhile the thin blue and khaki line cresting San Juan Heights grew thinner as wounds, malarial fever, and dysentery reduced more and more men to shivering incapacity, and often death. It took less than forty-eight hours for Roosevelt to become desperate should Shafter decide to withdraw for lack of personnel and supplies. Siboney was still clogged with unlisted crates, and each day’s rain made it more difficult to haul wagons along the Camino Real. “Tell the President for Heaven’s sake to send us every regiment and above all every battery possible,” he scribbled to Henry Cabot Lodge. “We are within measurable distance of a terrible military disaster.”125

  On the same day Shafter, blustering out of sheer panic, sent a warning to General José Toral, of the city garrison:

  I shall be obliged, unless you surrender, to shell Santiago de Cuba. Please inform the citizens of foreign countries, and all women and children, that they should leave the city before 10 o’clock tomorrow morning.126

  Toral’s response was to admit a further 3,600 Spanish troops who had somehow managed to elude a watch force of insurrectos to the north of the city. That afternoon, while the U.S. Army sweated and sickened in its muddy trenches along the Heights, hostilities suddenly broke out in Santiago Harbor. Admiral Cervera’s imprisoned ironclads attempted to rush Admiral Sampson’s blockade, with suicidal results. By 10:00 P.M. Shafter was able to inform Washington, “The Spanish fleet … is reported practically destroyed.” He promptly demanded surrender of the city. Toral replied that a truce might be possible.127