Apart from the war declaration itself, the most significant aspect of these preliminaries went virtually unnoticed. Attached to the Congress’s War Resolution was a legislative rider introduced by Senator Henry M. Teller (R-Colo.), thereafter known as the Teller Amendment, which in one sentence repudiated a century of U.S. policy toward Cuba. Clause one of the resolution asserted Cuba’s independence. Clause two demanded Spain’s withdrawal from Cuba. Clause three authorized the U.S. president to use the military to effect these ends. Then came the kicker: “The United States hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said Island except for the pacification thereof, and asserts its determination, when that is accomplished, to leave the government and control of the Island to its people.”
Historians disagree about how exactly to account for the Teller Amendment. Its passage followed the withdrawal of a more radical resolution granting immediate recognition to the revolutionary government, suggesting that a bargain had been struck.28 Senator Teller himself hailed from the state of Colorado, home to a lucrative sugar beet industry already reeling from increased European competition; the introduction of Cuban sugar into the U.S. sugar market duty-free could potentially have ruined U.S. beet growers.29 Then there was the roughly $1 million in cash that Tomás Estrada y Palma, exiled leader of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in New York, handed to Samuel Janney, a Cuban lobbyist in Washington, D.C., to distribute among U.S. congressmen as he saw fit.30 Finally, there was widespread and sincere support for Cuba Libre among the American people and some of their elected officials.31 Whatever the explanation, there could be no doubting the amendment’s effect: by appearances, anyway, for the first time in U.S. history, American officials had elevated the cause of Cuban independence above American interests on the island. Americans were heading down to Cuba to help remove the Spanish. With that mission accomplished they would leave Cuba in the hands of its people. Gazing northward from Revolutionary Army headquarters, Gómez must have found the Teller Amendment too good to be true.
On March 24, 1898, seeking “to secure a lucrative position and better” himself, a young man named Frank Keeler left a job in Down East Maine, bound for Boston, Massachusetts, aboard a steamer named the City of Bangor.32 In fair winds and following seas, Keeler arrived in Boston the next day, just as the city began to stir. After securing a place to stay, he set off to explore Boston’s neighborhoods; with “plenty of money” in his pocket, he could afford to put off the hunt for work for at least a couple of days.33
Like cities and towns across the United States that spring, Boston buzzed with talk of war. Due out the afternoon of Keeler’s arrival was a U.S. Navy report on the cause of the explosion of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor the previous month. Few doubted that the report would conclude that Spain was responsible, or that it would lead to war. The Boston Journal reported that President McKinley believed that a peaceful end to the Cuban War of Independence was imminent, but that column shared space with news of naval mobilization up and down the eastern seaboard and a headline announcing ominously, “SPANISH TORPEDO FLEET COMES.”34
By day, Keeler strolled Boston’s neighborhoods. By night, he shuttled between Tremont Temple and the Grand Opera House, where audiences were treated to theater suited to wartime: Julius Caesar, Spartacus, and the more whimsical naval yarn Spitfire. Bostonians were selling their private yachts to the government for use as transports. The Springfield Armory was working round the clock to turn out thousands of new rifles. Preparations were under way for the fortification of Boston Harbor and Narragansett Bay. War was very much in the air.35
A few days after arriving in Boston, Keeler found himself taking in the bustle at the Charlestown Navy Yard, across the channel from Boston’s crowded North End. “It was there I saw the Marines at drill,” Keeler wrote in his diary. “It was a fine sight, their neat uniforms, their manly appearance impressed me.” Friendless in a new city, Keeler was seduced by the marines’ “home life at the barracks.” He couldn’t stay away. Returning to the yard a few days later, he once more “watched the drill of the Marines. It was grand,” he wrote. “Fate had decided that I should be a Marine.”36
As Keeler enlisted in the marines that spring, young men throughout the nation confronted the vexing question of whether to enroll in the army. In late April 1898, Robert Huntington Jr. wrote a letter to his father seeking advice about what to do. Robert Huntington Sr. must have seemed a likely source of clever counsel. Huntington was a Civil War veteran and a Marine Corps lieutenant soon to be promoted to lieutenant colonel, the very man who would oversee the landing of the U.S. Marines at Guantánamo Bay. “I do not think I would go for adventures in this war,” the father cautioned the son. “Going to war in almost any part of the US would be better, I would say, than Cuba in summer … nothing less than high principle ought to carry a man into this fight.” Wanting such principle, Bobby took his dad’s advice and spent the summer shuttling between apartments in New York City and Hartford, Connecticut, and the family cottage on New Hampshire’s exclusive Squam Lake.37
With no one to turn to for advice (“I had not been home for five years. If killed there would be no one to mourn”), Frank Keeler found himself tethered to what turned out to be a deeply ambivalent commander as marines from across the northeastern United States converged on the Brooklyn Navy Yard.38 In his letter to Bobby, Colonel Huntington confessed that he thought the Cubans “not worth fighting for. At least I do not think they would be much improvement on the Spaniards.” Only later would Huntington’s ambivalence compromise the welfare of his troops; for now, Keeler and his fellow marines were buoyed by the martial euphoria that brought crowds thronging to observe the marines at drill. Who was thinking about the Cubans anyway? It was war for war’s sake that inspired the roars and whistles that spirited Keeler and his fellow marines out “the main gate of the Barracks down Flushing Avenue to the gate of the Navy Yard, and thence through the Yard to the Panther,” the converted passenger steamer that would carry the marines south. After a jubilant send-off, the Panther pulled out into New York Harbor, groaning under a load of “mosquito netting, woolen and linen clothing, heavy and light weight underwear, three months’ supply of provision, wheelbarrows, pushcarts, pickaxes, shovels, barbed-wire cutters, wall and shelter tents, and a full supply of medical stores,” not to mention guns and ammunition.39
Euphoria soon gave way to the drudgery of a prolonged deployment. Many of the young enlistees had never been to sea. A rough baptism on the first leg of the journey to Hampton Roads, Virginia, was nothing compared to the punishment meted the Panther off Cape Hatteras, where a spring tempest tossed the overloaded steamer “like a wash-tub,” and where “every man and the Colonel’s horse were sick.”40 The marines’ introduction to sea life was made more taxing by the jealousy of their navy hosts, who resented having to share their ship with landlubbers. When the Panther’s captain was not confining the marines “like cattle” to half the main deck, the first officer busied them with menial chores typically reserved for sailors.
On April 30, the marines arrived off Key West, in what Keeler described as “lovely sea and weather.” Anything is better than a stomach in a roiling sea, and if the Florida sun seemed a blessing at first, it soon combined with monotony and mistreatment to raise the marines’ blood pressure to the boiling point. Had Huntington been more forceful, he might have defended his men from the Panther’s crew. But, he confessed to Bobby, he was past his prime and more than a little halfhearted in taking up his latest commission. “Have been sick (grippe and malaria) and have not been on shore,” he reported. “As one grows older they had as soon somebody else went. Of course this ought to be my chance, but I think I am all of ten years’ too old for this business.”41
As days in the scorching heat became weeks, and with their commander down with fever, the marines became the playthings of the Panther’s officers. “Should we ever set down for a moment some officer would order us to
another part of the ship,” Keeler complained, “then another would order us back. If a dozen of us ever got together at one time they would turn the hose on us.” All the while, the marines “could not say a word only mind like cattle.” Had the treatment lasted another week, Keeler imagined, “there would have been a mutiny and the officers would have been thrown overboard.”42 Huntington confirmed Keeler’s account of the mistreatment. “The Captain and Executive Officer did not treat us well,” he remarked, “and under the regulations he commands everyone on board and my men were punished without my advice and against my protest in more than one case.” One of the men got ten days in “double irons” in a small room belowdecks simply for playing cards.
Weeks after leaving Brooklyn, Keeler lamented being “given no chance for a bath since leaving the barracks and food was bad. We had hard tack and canned corn-beef or canned corn beef and hard tack just as we like.” This they washed down with distilled water “so warm we had to work hard to drink it.” Mornings, the marines went ashore to perform “fierce drills” in blazing sun and full uniform. Journalists assigned to the military staging areas in Florida reported taxing conditions. “With the thermometer at ninety-eight in the shade … the U.S. troops sweat night and day in their cowhide boots, thick flannel shirts and winter trousers.” Details of the troops’ living conditions were so bad, another journalist remarked, “if I started to tell the truth at all … it would open up a hell of an outcry from all the families of the boys who have volunteered.”43 Still, Keeler and his fellow marines were better off aboard the Panther than in Tampa with the army, where the soldiers received meat canned five years earlier, at the time of the Sino-Japanese War.44
After three and a half weeks at anchor aboard the Panther, the marines received orders to disembark to a nearby campground, their relief at escaping the Panther’s crew tempered by the drudgery of having to unload (and later reload) the thousands of pounds of guns, ammunition, lumber, and other equipment that would accompany them to Cuba. Never mind the nuisance of mosquitoes and flies. Outside the clutches of the Panther’s captain, the marines turned out to be unruly. “I hope I get a hold on the men,” Huntington wrote Bobby. “They have little idea of obeying orders and perhaps they may improve some.” Though they worked hard, “they stole lots out of the ship”; some “steal anything they can lay [their] hands upon.”45
Four weeks of these appalling conditions did not sit well with the marines. Like Keeler, many had enlisted in the war in a pique of patriotism. Unflattering, often racialized images of Spanish troops abounded in newspaper and periodical cartoons, depicting Spaniards as dark, almost black, and barbarous. Desperate for a fight, the marines settled for the nearest thing they could find to the diabolical Spaniard. When “a nigro shot and killed a sailor” in the town of Key West, Keeler reported, the marines greeted it as the opening salvo of the Spanish-American War. Refusing to leave the matter to the local sheriff, “75 Marines on liberty … armed themselves with ropes, clubs, knives, and revolvers” and marched on the jail where the suspect sat in custody. Only an official guard dispatched from the marines’ camp managed to prevent a lynching. It was past time to sail for Cuba.46
Clearing Key West on the afternoon of June 7, 1898, Colonel Huntington could not be sure exactly where in Cuba he and his marines were headed. But Spain’s new captain-general, Ramón Blanco, thought he had a good idea. In April that year, Blanco warned his commander in eastern Cuba, Arsenio Linares y Pombo, to expect the Americans to come ashore along the southeast coast. Blanco ordered Linares to fortify Guantánamo Bay and to reinforce Santiago. The calls of Spanish officials to fortify Guantánamo Bay had not ended with the populating of the basin at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Before Blanco’s, the latest warning to be ignored had been that of Captain-General Arsenio Martínez Campos y Antón, who had dispatched a team of engineers and artillery experts to Guantánamo in the wake of the USS Columbia’s visit in February 1895. By the late nineteenth century, Guantánamo Bay had strategic value as more than a potential staging ground for an attack on Santiago. French telegraph lines connecting Cuba to Jamaica and Haiti stretched across the mouth of the bay, and a French telegraph station sat atop Fisherman’s Point, just inside the southeastern entrance to the harbor. To Campos, as to a long line of Spanish officials before him, Guantánamo presented an obvious, and vulnerable, target.47
Predictably, Campos’s plans went unheeded, leaving Linares to fortify Guantánamo virtually from scratch while holding back increasingly confident Cuban forces. The best Campos could do that spring was to refurbish an old battery of smooth-bore guns on Toro Cay, at the center top of the outer harbor, and erect two blockhouses, one on Windward Point, at the southeast corner of the bay, the other at the port of Caimanera, at the western entrance to the inner harbor. Conceding the outer harbor, Linares mined the mouth of the inner harbor. 48 As for the rest of the bay’s defenses, that fell to the gunship Sandoval and its plucky commander, Lieutenant Teniente de Navio Scandella, who for over two months played cat and mouse with the largest ships in the U.S. Navy.
By early June 1898, Spain had nearly 200,000 troops in Cuba, though these were by no means fresh. Roughly 36,500 Spanish troops were dispersed throughout Santiago province, with about 6,000 stationed at Guantánamo City, under the command of General Felix Pareja. Some 300 patrolled the immediate perimeter of Guantánamo Bay. At the bay, Spain had established headquarters at Cuzco Well, near Windward Point, site of the only known source of freshwater at the outer harbor. Meanwhile, confronting Pareja and his 6,000 troops at Guantánamo City was Cuba’s First Division, 1,000 strong, under the command of General Pedro A. Pérez.49
On the night of June 9, 1898, the Panther rounded Punto Maisí, the southeastern tip of Cuba, and entered the Windward Passage. There it collided with a U.S. transport named Scorpion, nearly cutting the Scorpion in half. Despite this hiccup, by midmorning of the next day, the Panther arrived at a rendezvous with the U.S. fleet off Santiago, where it reported to Rear Admiral William T. Sampson. Charles L. McCawley, a captain in Huntington’s command, remembered the rendezvous as “most picturesque. In front of the harbor, lying one inside the other in two half circles, were assembled the two splendid squadrons of Admiral Sampson and Commodore Schley, comprising the flower of the navy.” Meanwhile, “Morro Castle and Socapa Battery loomed up before us four miles away, and the dark green hills of Cuba were spread out before us to the east and the west as far as the eye could see.”
This proved to be the extent of the marines’ sightseeing. The sailors whom the marines joined that day off Santiago had long since ceased to regard the Cuban coastline as picturesque. They had been blockading the island since April 21, two days after the U.S. Congress passed its war resolution. That day, U.S. Navy secretary John D. Long named Sampson commander in chief of the U.S. naval fleet on the North Atlantic Station, promoting him to rear admiral and ordering him to Cuba. Long also charged Sampson with locating and observing the Spanish fleet under the command of Pascual Cervera y Topete, last seen off Cape Verde and known to be headed for the Caribbean Sea.
On May 12 one of Sampson’s cruisers spotted the Spaniards leaving the French port of Martinique, where they had tried unsuccessfully to recoal (the French policy of neutrality prohibited the fueling of warships). Three days later, they were reported to be at Curaçao, the Dutch colony off the coast of today’s Venezuela. There Cervera met a slightly warmer reception and attained coal sufficient to carry him to Cuba. A week later, May 19, Cervera stole unobserved into Santiago Harbor, where Cuban informants caught up to him the following day. Still, conflicting reports had Cervera in other harbors along Cuba’s southern coast, and for over a week U.S. naval officials bickered about his exact whereabouts while Sampson searched frantically to find him. Cervera, all the while, stayed put in Santiago, creating confusion about his ultimate destination.
The very day Cervera arrived at Santiago, the U.S. Navy fought its first engagement in the Cuba campaign, just down the co
ast, at Guantánamo Bay. Since long before the war broke out, Sampson had been eyeing the telegraph cables at Santiago and Guantánamo Bay. Amid the confusion over Cervera’s whereabouts, Secretary Long ordered the USS St. Louis, under the command of Casper F. Goodrich, to Guantánamo to cut the French cable and thus sever communications between Cuba and the outside world.50 The St. Louis was greeted by the Spanish gunship Sandoval, which boasted heavier guns than the converted passenger liner. Rather than risk his ship, Goodrich withdrew, vowing to return to Guantánamo with proper equipment and protection. If less than auspicious, this debut in Cuba nonetheless provided crucial information about Spanish defenses in the region. Notwithstanding the presence of the gallant Sandoval, Goodrich reported, Guantánamo Bay was exposed and vulnerable.51
The Spanish fleet that tucked into Santiago on May 19 was nearly out of coal. Nothing so confirms the demise of the Spanish Empire in the New World than the fact of Cervera’s having to throw himself upon the French (in vain) and the Dutch (nearly so) for fuel upon arriving in what had once been a Spanish sea. “Fuel is the life of modern naval warfare,” Admiral Mahan wrote just the previous year. “Without it the modern monsters of the deep die of inanition. Around it, therefore, cluster some of the most important considerations of naval strategy.”52 For Mahan, as no doubt for Cervera, fuel was synonymous with naval bases. Any navy that expected to operate overseas needed secure bases and a ready supply of coal.
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