But then Spain’s Admiral Pascual Cervera left the Cape Verde islands with his Atlantic fleet and disappeared into the ocean expanse. Facing the looming danger of a sudden appearance of Cervera’s warships, including four armored cruisers and three destroyers, McKinley postponed the Cuban expedition. In the meantime, the mustering of troops at Tampa continued at a pace that outran the camp’s capacity. By the end of May, the Tampa camp encompassed some 17,000 troops. One of them was Theodore Roosevelt, whose jumble of piquant traits included a powerful sense of patriotism and a veneration of courage as a necessity of virtue. The vigorous Roosevelt resigned his naval job, joined the army, got himself commissioned as a lieutenant colonel, helped organize the U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, and became the unit’s second in command under his friend Colonel Leonard Wood. The unit, recruited mostly by Roosevelt, included western rustics he had met during his turbulent ranching experience and eastern aristocrats from his prep school and Harvard days. The proud officer had his fawn-colored uniform specially made by Brooks Brothers.
Roosevelt quickly became incensed with the lack of organization at Tampa. He wrote to Lodge, “No words could describe to you the confusion and lack of system and the general mismanagement of affairs here.” Shafter was forced to concede to Washington, “The place was overestimated and its capacities are exceeded.”
As the army struggled with the Tampa mess, McKinley turned his attention to war finances. Reporting to Congress that the previous $50 million appropriation was approaching exhaustion, he asked for a series of tax increases—mostly excise taxes on beer and tobacco and a stamp tax on legal instruments, stock transfers, bank checks, and the like—designed to raise some $100 million. Both houses quickly passed the legislation, which was designed to finance the war for the next year or so.
The president also nominated eleven men to the rank of major general, including four from civilian life and two Southerners whose designation was calculated in part to symbolize America’s post–Civil War unity. One of the Southerners was Alabama’s representative Joseph H. Wheeler, known as “Fighting Joe” from his days as a dashing Confederate cavalry officer, when he rose to the rank of major general. After the war he became a lawyer and represented his Alabama district in Congress for most of the next seventeen years. Like many Southerners, the sixty-one-year-old Wheeler loved the idea of putting on the uniform of his once and current country. The other Southerner was Fitzhugh Lee, whose blunt pronouncements as U.S. consul in Havana had given him considerable national stature.
* * *
ON THE EVENING of May 1, rumors began filtering into Washington of a significant U.S. naval victory in the Philippines. The next day’s newspapers provided sketchy reports, mostly from Madrid via London, of serious Spanish devastation. The New York Times cautioned, “While it is quite clear that the Spanish squadron has suffered a crushing defeat, the dispatches leave in doubt the intensely interesting question whether the American squadron has suffered material damage.” Nevertheless Washington erupted into what the Times called “wild rejoicing.” Newsboys rushed to the streets to hawk extras in violation of an ordinance forbidding them from calling aloud their wares after 8 p.m., but police stood by benignly. At the White House, noted Cortelyou, the news of Dewey’s action “was a source of the greatest satisfaction to the President and others who had gathered here.”
The next day the Times reported that the cable from the Philippines to Hong Kong had been cut, which meant that official military reports from Dewey wouldn’t be forthcoming for several days, since Dewey would have to dispatch the information by ship to Hong Kong. Slowly a narrative of the battle emerged and then reached full focus with Dewey’s preliminary dispatches on May 7.
Dewey had set out for the Philippines from Mirs Bay, near Hong Kong, on April 27 with nine ships, including six fighting vessels with 1,611 crewmen. Four of those were protected cruisers, meaning their decks were fortified with steel armor, although their sides were not. His fighting ships’ fifty-three heavy guns included ten potent eight-inch breech-loading cannon. Dewey’s intelligence indicated that Admiral Patricio Montojo would be waiting for him in Philippine waters, most likely in Subic Bay. Arriving off Subic on the afternoon of April 30, the commodore sent in three ships to probe the whereabouts of Montojo. He wasn’t there, which meant he must be in Manila Bay. Dewey, who considered this a better combat location for his squadron, was elated. “Now we have them!” he exclaimed to one of his officers.
Under cover of darkness Dewey navigated his ships through the Manila harbor entrance, with lights covered and gun crews ready to return fire from nearby hills. Though he knew the harbor and entrance would be mined, he calculated that the risk of a hit was slim enough to justify proceeding. As it happened, his ships encountered no mines that posed serious danger, and the shore batteries didn’t seem to be anticipating a night entry. Only his last vessels drew fire, and that was limited to just three ill-directed rounds that inflicted no damage. It appeared that Montojo’s officers had been literally asleep on the job. The Spanish admiral had positioned his seven fighting ships—two unprotected cruisers and five gunboats—in a crescent formation stretching east to west. He had only thirty-seven heavy guns and none larger than 6.3 inches.
At dawn Dewey maneuvered his ships into position to cruise past the Spanish squadron, with Montojo’s ships facing his portside guns. At 5:40 a.m. Dewey’s flagship, the protected cruiser Olympia, positioned itself in front of the enemy fleet at a range of about 5,000 yards. A seemingly relaxed Dewey turned to his commander, Captain Charles Gridley.
“You may fire when you are ready, Gridley,” he said.
The first shot exploded from the flagship’s forward turret, signaling to the rest of the squadron that the battle was on. Dewey’s ships passed in front of the enemy vessels, delivering devastating fire. Then they executed a “countermarch,” bringing their starboard guns into play. In all, the Americans executed the firing maneuver five times, three westward runs and two to the east. During the fighting, two of Montojo’s cruisers charged at the Olympia, but both were repelled under a barrage of debilitating fire from the Americans. The Reina Cristina, Montojo’s flagship, sustained fearsome firepower, with one shell killing twenty men at once and another killing or disabling nine. The Reina Cristina soon sank, shortly after Montojo managed to get himself aboard another ship.
At 7:35 Dewey received a report from Gridley that he interpreted as indicating his squadron was running out of ammunition. “It was a most anxious moment for me,” he wrote later, explaining that he didn’t realize how much damage his ships had delivered to the enemy and feared a disparity in ammunition supply could turn the tide of battle. But he soon learned that the report had been garbled. He had plenty of ammunition, and as the smoke cleared he could see the devastation visited upon Montojo’s fleet. “Some of them were perceived to be on fire,” Dewey wrote later, “and others were seeking protection behind Cavite Point.” Confident of victory, the commodore ordered breakfast for his men, then returned to the fray to finish the job.
The tally of Spanish destruction and death was startling. All eight of Montojo’s warships had been sunk or disabled. Some 161 Spaniards had been killed and another 210 wounded. Dewey sustained no serious damage to his vessels and no deaths; nine men had been wounded.
The next day Dewey warned Spanish officials that if another shot was fired at his ships from Manila batteries, he would destroy the city. Word came back that the garrison guns would remain silent so long as his ships didn’t position themselves to bomb Manila. “From the moment that the captain-general accepted my terms,” Dewey wrote, “the city was virtually surrendered, and I was in control of the situation.” He quickly occupied the Cavite garrison, which had been abandoned by Spanish forces, and demanded that local authorities provide access to the stocks of coal needed to keep his ships stoked for action. Then he neutralized all shore batteries along the bay’s entry route. When Spanish officials denied him access to the telegraphic cable, he had it
cut so it could not be used to his detriment. Dewey now controlled the bay and could take the city at any time. Lacking the troops to occupy it, however, he settled in to his territorial command and requested a contingent of army troops to subdue Manila.
Instantly George Dewey was a hero in America. Manufacturers rushed to place his visage on products as inducements to sales and to bring out new ones aimed at exploiting the patriotic fervor unleashed by his victory. A new chewing gum was dubbed “Dewey Chewies.” The commodore was celebrated in song and verse, his portrait emblazoned on “badges, banners, lithographs, and transparencies,” according to one historian, as well as “paperweights, pitchers, cups, plates, butter dishes, shaving mugs, teething rings, and rattles.” Official Washington unleashed its own display of enthusiasm. Roosevelt wired a message to Dewey: “Every American is your debtor.” John Hay wrote to praise the “mingled wisdom and daring” of his audacious Manila Bay entrance. Publicly Hay captured the national pride unleashed by this unassuming sailor: “It is these quiet, gentlemanly Americans,” he told the London press, “. . . who may be depended upon to surprise the world when the opportunity of making history comes in the line of duty.” Senator Proctor took to crowing just a bit in a letter to McKinley, highlighting his own wisdom in pushing Dewey for the Asiatic command. “We may run him against you for President,” wrote the senator. If McKinley was taken aback at such a ribbing, he didn’t show it. He quickly promoted Dewey to rear admiral and told the nation, “The magnitude of this victory can hardly be measured by the ordinary standards of naval warfare.”
Within days of Dewey’s victory, General Miles brought forth a plan to send 5,000 troops to Manila to secure the city and eliminate the danger posed to Dewey’s ships from a possible Spanish campaign to retake Manila and its mounted guns. McKinley responded quickly, and soon troops were mustering at San Francisco under Major General Wesley Merritt, the army’s second-ranking officer, who was to command a jurisdiction called “the Department of the Pacific,” including the entire Philippine archipelago. By month’s end, Merritt’s projected troop strength had ballooned to 15,000, three times what Dewey had requested.
This increase in forces occurred against a backdrop of tensions between Merritt and Miles over the mission of the Philippine operation and the kinds of troops needed for its accomplishment. Merritt saw the mission as subduing the entire archipelago and thus wanted large numbers of well-trained regular troops, as opposed to less experienced volunteers. This was necessary, he argued, to meet the challenge of “conquering a territory 7,000 miles from our base, defended by a regularly trained and acclimated army of from 10,000 to 25,000 men, and inhabited by people, the majority of whom will regard us with the intense hatred born of race and religion.” Miles disputed Merritt’s estimate of enemy strength and his definition of the mission. “The force ordered at this time is not expected to carry on a war to conquer extensive territory,” he wrote to Merritt, but rather to create “a strong garrison to command the harbor of Manila, and to relieve the . . . fleet under Admiral Dewey with the least possible delay.”
The troop strength matter was settled when Merritt was given a few more regulars, as well as the Tenth Pennsylvania militia command, touted as a particularly effective volunteer unit. That brought Merritt’s troop strength to 20,000, a remarkable number reflecting America’s new willingness to project power into the world. As for the precise nature of the mission, that resided with the president, and he remained characteristically coy on the question.
But although the president wasn’t inclined toward any expansive pronouncements, he fully meant to exploit the Dewey victory boldly. In a letter to Alger, he revealed his intention to subdue all of the Philippines, at least for the time being, under an American military government. Not only should U.S. forces bring about the “acquisition and control of the bay,” he wrote, but they should also become “an arm of occupation to the Philippines for the twofold purpose of completing the reduction of Spanish power in that quarter and of giving order and security to the islands while in the possession of the United States.” That left to the future the eventual political disposition of the islands, a question McKinley wasn’t yet prepared to answer.
Nevertheless Dewey’s triumph had consequences well beyond anything anyone had contemplated during America’s growing fixation with the agonies of Cuba. It brought forth a kind of serendipitous imperialism—the acquisition almost by accident of strategic territory in far-flung regions of the world, the result of actions by people who had other ends in mind and who hadn’t contemplated what they would do with such rewards of victory. The president, it was said, began his education on the Philippines by tearing a small map from a schoolbook, and when a government official arrived with more detailed charts he received them avidly while acknowledging his limited knowledge. “It is evident,” he said, “that I must learn a great deal of geography in this war.” But the logic of victory was generating its own impetus, as well as study requirements, and soon official Washington and the country at large embraced with growing comfort the mantle of imperialism. As Henry Cabot Lodge wrote to Roosevelt, “Unless I am utterly and profoundly mistaken, the administration is now fully committed to the large policy that we both desire.”
— 19 —
The Caribbean War
“WHAT YOU WENT TO SANTIAGO FOR WAS THE SPANISH ARMY”
On Monday, May 2, President McKinley convened a joint Cabinet-military meeting at the White House to draw up expansive new plans to take the war to Spain’s Cuba. The concept of a modest expedition of 5,000 men to join rebel leader Máximo Gómez now gave way to a strategy of establishing a Cuban beachhead near Havana, probably at Mariel, and then pouring in some 50,000 troops for a march on the Cuban capital, Spain’s pivot of power in the Western Hemisphere. General Shafter’s regulars at Tampa would serve as vanguard, capturing and fortifying the beachhead, and then volunteer forces would follow as quickly as they could be trained and transported through Tampa. There wouldn’t be much interaction with rebel forces, whose fighting capacity and spirit increasingly were viewed as less robust than previously thought. When War Secretary Alger was asked how quickly he could get his troops in place for the mission, he replied that he needed three weeks.
It was a rash answer, and Navy Secretary Long knew it. Four days later, at the regular Friday Cabinet meeting, Long emphasized his readiness to transport army troops to a Cuban invasion. He presented a letter previously sent to Alger “stating that the Navy is ready to convoy any force of forty or fifty thousand men to Cuba, and urging the War Department to take active steps,” as Long described it in his diary. Not surprisingly, Alger took offense. The army, he said, could handle its end of the war without naval interference. The wily Long responded good-naturedly that his intent was simply to counter any impression “that there is any delay on our part.”
No doubt Long truly wished to dispel any concerns about naval delays. But in doing so he also placed a spotlight on Alger, “the most active of all members of the Cabinet for war,” as Long described him. For two months, the navy secretary added in a diary entry, Alger had insisted that he could get his army ready in ten days, “whereas, in fact, not a volunteer has left his state, and in my judgment there has been a striking lack of preparation and promptness.”
In fact Alger didn’t have anything approaching an adequate army. As a leading trade publication called the Army and Navy Journal put it, “To invade Cuba requires an army, and whoever may be held responsible for the result, the fact remains that we have no army. We have some excellent raw material for one, that is all.” The problem was that Alger hadn’t given his boss a realistic picture of just how long it would take to muster in and train the volunteer force. Long’s aim at the May 6 Cabinet meeting was to force into the open Alger’s lack of readiness.
It was not what McKinley wanted to hear. He faced military, diplomatic, and political imperatives for an aggressive and speedy war. For one thing, delay could introduce into the region pow
er ambiguities, which might in turn lure European nations bent on exploiting the chaos and getting a Caribbean foothold. Beyond that, the navy couldn’t maintain an effective Cuban blockade indefinitely. Hurricane season would arrive in late summer, and in the meantime the arduous maritime task of sealing off the island imposed serious wear and tear on Long’s ships. Also, given that the president certainly didn’t want to launch an invasion during the dangerous, yellow fever–infested rainy season, he felt a need for hurried action before the onset of the rains. Finally, Dewey’s Manila victory had diminished Washington’s concerns about initiating the invasion with Admiral Cervera’s whereabouts unknown, although U.S. planners certainly didn’t want to take any foolhardy chances with the vulnerable transport operation.
With all this in mind, the president needed Caribbean victories quickly to force Madrid into a war settlement. The longer it took, the greater the expenditure in blood, treasure, and American prestige—and the greater the political danger facing McKinley at home. The American people had wanted this war, had practically forced the president into it as he expended valuable political capital in seeking to get the desired result without war. That approach had left an impression among many that he was an inert president, insufficiently engaged and aggressive when the country’s honor and interests were threatened. He could hardly afford to have that image attach to him now as a war president. And he knew also that nothing saps a president’s political standing more quickly than voter perceptions of military ineptitude or an appearance that he got the country into a war he couldn’t win. Thus delay was his enemy, along with the Spanish military and yellow fever. He needed, as the Washington Post put it, “a short, sharp, conclusive, and immediate campaign.”
President McKinley Page 34