by Clay Risen
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To My Mother
THE COMPOSITION OF THE FIFTH CORPS, UNITED STATES ARMY
Maj. Gen. William R. Shafter, commanding
1st Division, Brig. Gen. Jacob F. Kent
1st Brigade, Brig. Gen. Hamilton S. Hawkins
6th U.S. Infantry
16th U.S. Infantry
71st New York Volunteer Infantry
2nd Brigade, Col. Edward P. Pearson
3rd U.S. Infantry
10th U.S. Infantry
21st U.S. Infantry
3rd Brigade, Col. Charles A. Wikoff
9th U.S. Infantry
13th U.S. Infantry
24th U.S. Infantry
2nd Division, Brig. Gen. Henry W. Lawton
1st Brigade, Brig. Gen. William Ludlow
8th U.S. Infantry
22nd U.S. Infantry
2nd Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry
2nd Brigade, Col. Evan Miles
1st U.S. Infantry
4th U.S. Infantry
25th U.S. Infantry
3rd Brigade, Brig. Gen. Adna R. Chaffee
7th U.S. Infantry
12th U.S. Infantry
17th U.S. Infantry
Cavalry Division, Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler
1st Brigade, Brig. Gen. Samuel S. Sumner
3rd U.S. Cavalry
6th U.S. Cavalry
9th U.S. Cavalry
2nd Brigade, Brig. Gen. Samuel B. M. Young
1st U.S. Cavalry
10th U.S. Cavalry
1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry (the Rough Riders)
Troops A, C, D, and F of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment
Artillery Battalion
Independent Brigade (part of Fourth Army Corps, attached to Fifth Corps)
3rd U.S. Infantry
20th U.S. Infantry
Signal Corps
Siege Train
Hospital Corps
Engineers Battalion
Gatling Gun Detachment (13th U.S. Infantry)
Source: Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1902).
The Route of the Fifth Corps from Tampa to Cuba, June 1898
Erin Greb Cartography
The Santiago Campaign, June–July 1898
Erin Greb Cartography
INTRODUCTION
NEW YORK CITY, 1899
It was the grandest parade New York City had ever seen. It began with the ships—243 of them, battleships, cruisers, torpedo boats, armored yachts, practically every ship in the American Navy, alongside dozens of private craft, carrying 150,000 sailors and passengers, gathered in the early evening of September 29, 1899, off the eastern coast of Staten Island, to celebrate the American victory in the Spanish-American War a year before. As fireworks ripped into the sky from scores of sites around New York Harbor, the fleet sailed forth, cruising through the Narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island. Under the glare of red, white, and blue starbursts, three and a half million people—two and a half million New Yorkers and another million visitors, who came from as far as California—watched along the harbor shorelines. To accompany the fireworks, the fleet beamed hundreds of spotlights on the crowds and buildings along the waterfront. “Wherever the eye turned, it was blinded by the magic light . . . and all the cities seemed to be bathed in harmless fire,” wrote one observer. For two hours this went on, and there was more to come: The next day 30,000 soldiers, led by a 130-piece band conducted by John Philip Sousa, marched from Morningside Heights to Madison Square, in Manhattan, where artisans had erected a triumphal arch of lath and plaster, modeled on the Arch of Titus in Rome.1
In just a few months in 1898, the United States had defeated Spain and captured Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines; in a separate move, it had annexed the Hawaiian islands. The United States and Spain had signed a peace treaty at the end of the year, but it took nine more months to coordinate a celebration with so many men, and so many ships, some deployed halfway around the world, to meet in New York. To the millions of avid onlookers, the delay was of little consequence. The celebration was less about the nation’s recent past achievements than what those achievements foretold: a new, confident, global American empire. “Surely no Roman general, surely no Roman Emperor ever received such a tribute from the populace of the Eternal City,” wrote the New York Times.2
Riding that day at the head of the New York State National Guard as it marched along the parade route was Theodore Roosevelt—naturalist, historian, war hero, and now governor of New York. Dressed in a frock coat, top hat, and kid gloves, he was the most powerful politician of this mighty state and a scion of the city’s patrician class. But he was more than that: Perhaps no single person better embodied the excitement and national pride the war elicited, and the newfound martial fervor that followed. At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, he had resigned from his job with the Department of the Navy to help lead the First United States Volunteer Cavalry—better known as the Rough Riders—during the invasion of Cuba. Roosevelt had trained the regiment, one of twenty-six in the invasion force and totaling nearly 1,000 men, then led them to Cuba and into battle, culminating in a desperate, riotous charge up a hill outside the city of Santiago, on the island’s southeastern coast. He returned victorious and world-famous, an American Caesar who took Albany a few months after taking Santiago and now, everyone said, was poised to take the presidency, too. Though the parade’s official man of honor was Admiral of the Navy George Dewey, who had defeated the Spanish Pacific fleet at Manila at the outbreak of the war, it was Roosevelt whom many in the crowd wanted to see that day. Halfway through the march, at 72nd Street, he paused to tip his hat to a reviewing stand. The crowd exploded, shouting “Teddy! Teddy!” and “Roosevelt for president!” Onlookers, trying to get close, pushed into the street; police had to hold them back. Aside from Dewey, the Times wrote, “the interest and admiration of the thronging people were expressed more uniformly and enthusiastically toward Governor Roosevelt than toward any one else.”3
Roosevelt’s experience as a wartime leader raised his national profile and changed him utterly. Until then, his career had included politics, ranching, history writing, and biology; he was good at most of these pursuits, frighteningly so, but he had struggled to unify them into a single intellectual project. A man with powerful friends, many people nevertheless dismissed him as a gadfly and a blowhard. By 1895, he worried that history had passed him by: “There will come a period in which I shall be whirled off into some eddy, and shall see the current sweep on, even if it sweeps in the right direction, without me,” he wrote to a friend. He ended up, in early 1897, as the assistant secretary of the navy and an ardent advocate of war with Spain. When he quit that job to join the Army, his friends all said he was crazy—that even if he wasn’t killed, he had cast off his career one time too many.4
Instead, he blossomed as a leader. He trained and led his men into battle, then watched over them during a grueling three-week siege outside Santiago, in which the bigger enemies, more so than the Spanish, were heat, disease, rats, and rainstorms. He kept his men in line, and he kept them loyal—years later, when Roosevelt was president, groups of Rough Riders would stop by the White House for a visit, and they were always allowed to skip past the crowd outside his office. It w
as these skills, as much as his charisma and unending appetite for work, that made Roosevelt such an effective public executive—as governor and, in 1901, as president.
Roosevelt blossomed intellectually as well. The experience with the Rough Riders, and his time at war, helped him hone his ideas about America, its place in the world, and his philosophy of the “strenuous life” that governed his approach to the presidency. It helped him clarify his complicated and flawed ideas about American unity—he embraced the notion of a country brought together by common values and a mission to bring those values to the world, even as he endorsed its exclusion of a large swath of its population behind disenfranchisement and Jim Crow. Roosevelt’s time in Cuba also brought home for him the importance of what his generation called the manly virtues—the social Darwinian notions of competition, often violent, between men, and between nations. He did not discover these ideas on the battlefield, but the battlefield offered all the evidence he needed of their veracity, as well as the prestige to spread them among his adoring public. He became, wrote the historian Gail Bederman, “a walking advertisement for the imperialistic manhood he desired for the American race.”5
The story of Roosevelt and the Rough Riders is not just a matter of presidential biography. The regiment, often dismissed by historians and pop culture as a cartoonish band of cowboys, in fact played a central role in the emergence of a new idea about American power, and in particular the military’s role in projecting that power. It was unlike anything America had ever seen. Organized hastily to supplement the meager 28,000 men who comprised the Regular Army in 1898, the regiment brought together Westerners and Easterners, cowboys and college kids, New York City cops and frontier sheriffs, football stars and gold miners. They were men like Theodore Miller, the son of an Ohio industrial magnate and a promising New York law student who quit his studies to join the regiment. James McClintock was a journalist from California. Hamilton Fish was the product of a storied New York political family who had dropped out of Columbia University to work on a railroad. Bill Larned and Bob Wrenn were the first- and second-ranked professional tennis players in America; they both quit to go to war. So did Buckey O’Neill, the mayor of Prescott, Arizona.
Even if Roosevelt had stayed put in the Department of the Navy, these men would still have captured the national imagination, because to so many back home, they represented a quintessentially American story: ragtag, provisional, drawn from the country’s vast distances and disparate communities, forged by patriotic fervor and sent out into the world to fight for what was right. As the journalist Jacob Riis wrote: “The Rough-Riders were the most composite lot that ever gathered under a regimental standard, but they were at the same time singularly typical of the spirit that conquered a continent in three generations, eminently American.”6
Roosevelt made the Rough Riders, and the Rough Riders made Roosevelt. Together, they comprised one of the most storied, and most important, military units in American history. This book is an account of their story, and Roosevelt’s story with them. It is also an account of the Spanish-American War: why it happened when it did, and how it shaped America at a crucial moment in its history. Roosevelt called his charge during the Battle of San Juan Heights, on July 1, 1898, his “crowded hour”—the brief span of time in which so much of his life came together, and from which, afterward, so much followed. Similarly, the Spanish-American War was America’s own “crowded hour”—a relatively brief conflict that set in motion the wheels of myth-making, idealism, and national self-interest that would guide the country through the twentieth century.
• • •
John Hay, who started his career as Abraham Lincoln’s personal secretary and ended it as Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state, called the fight against the Spanish a “splendid little war.” It was nothing of the kind. The Spanish-American War—more accurately, if less often and more awkwardly, known as the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War—was certainly not “splendid” for the people involved. Though only a few thousand American soldiers died in combat in Cuba and the Philippines, thousands more died of disease, many of them volunteers awaiting orders in camps across the Southern states. It was even less “splendid” for Cuban and Filipino soldiers and civilians, whose total losses—many died of torture and in concentration camps at the hands of Spanish and American troops—are uncountable, but certainly range in the hundreds of thousands.
Nor was the war in any way “little.” America’s Cuban and Puerto Rican campaigns were indeed brief—less than six months from the Army’s landing, in June 1898, at a beach called Daiquirí, on Cuba’s southeastern coast, to the Spanish capitulation at San Juan, Puerto Rico, followed by a peace treaty with Madrid at the end of the year. But that was only one part of the war; by the time the Rough Riders arrived in Cuba, insurgents had been battling the Spanish colonial army for three years. And it does not include the American conflict in the Philippines, which went on for another four years. As a globe-spanning whole, the war lasted seven years, left at least 200,000 dead, destroyed the last of the Spanish Empire and opened the door to a century of American dominance.
The root cause of the war was the long decline of the Spanish Empire, which by 1898 was left clinging by its fingernails to its last two colonial holdings in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba and Puerto Rico. Cuba had come under Spanish control only a few decades after Isabella and Ferdinand conquered Granada—in other words, Spain had controlled Cuba for almost as long as Spain had been Spain. There had been Spanish citizens living in Cuba for over a century before the first English settlers landed on the east coast of what would become the United States. And history was just part of the reason for Madrid’s tenacity; rich with sugar, tobacco, and minerals, Cuba was an economic bounty for the cash-strapped empire. Cuba allowed Spain to maintain its self-image as a global power—a fiction, but a vital one for the fragile Spanish state.
It had been a long time since anyone else had agreed with Spain’s fantasies about its own power, once the greatest in Europe. Wars of independence had whittled away at its immense holdings in the Western Hemisphere, while it suffered chronic instability and persistent underdevelopment at home. Preoccupied, Spain let Cuba wallow in bureaucratic inefficiency, overbearing taxes, and the occasional burst of mindless, pointlessly oppressive violence. Eventually, the island exploded: first in a ten-year revolt that left 50,000 rebels, 100,000 civilians, and 85,000 Spanish soldiers dead, then in another, more brutal uprising, beginning in 1895, one that would shock America’s conscience and propel the United States into its first major foreign conflict since the Mexican War in 1848.
The war broke out at a turning point in American history; arguably, it broke out because America was at a turning point. America in 1898 was growing at an unprecedented pace, absorbing millions of immigrants into its seemingly endless interior and converting their labor and the nation’s natural bounty into a Mississippian flow of commerce. It was also recovering from a deep economic depression, which fed social and political unrest; that unrest, in turn, created what the historian Richard Hofstadter called the “psychic crisis” of the 1890s, a collective soul-searching about America’s place in the world and each citizen’s place within that quest. Populists were challenging the economic order of the fading Gilded Age, while Southern whites were fast erecting the apartheid regime known as Jim Crow.
At the same time, everyday Americans were beginning to look outward. For much of the nineteenth century, most had been content to have their country serve as a passive example for the world to follow—“a model of Christian charity,” the Puritan leader John Winthrop had said in 1630, sitting aloof “as a city upon a hill.” But by the 1890s a rapid process of civil war, territorial expansion, and a campaign of outright annihilation against Native Americans was largely completed—in 1898, Congress ended the primacy of tribal courts in Oklahoma, the last of their kind. With manifest destiny largely over at home, many Americans began to take an interest in the world. In 1885 alone, 100,000 Americans
traveled abroad. Thousands of others went as missionaries. Their curiosity extended beyond tourist spots and saving souls; they also became interested in foreign affairs, and their nation’s role in the world. As the economy grew, illiteracy plunged and the modern news media blossomed, and average citizens became more aware of the troubled world around them. When they read about massacres of Armenians by the Ottoman army, American editors and their readers were apoplectic, and demanded that the president threaten military action. They swooned over the underdog Greeks in their fights against the Turks. They called for war against Britain in a dispute with Venezuela over its border with British Guiana. And they flocked to the cause of “Cuba Libre”: Thousands of Americans, including hundreds of Anglos, joined private military expeditions across the Straits of Florida; countless more donated to the network of pro-independence Cuban activists called the Junta; and millions kept up with events in the unending reams of newspapers that fed the minds of an increasingly urban, literate, middle-class country.7
Americans, especially younger ones, did not go to war with Spain reluctantly. They rushed in headlong. Freedom for Cuba had animated the 1896 American presidential campaign, and the question of what to do about it dominated the first year of William McKinley’s administration, even if the president tried, at first, to avoid it. Newspapers, especially the so-called yellow press papers that trafficked in tragedy and rumors, hyped stories of mass execution and rape, but they weren’t the only, or even the main, source of information. World-famous correspondents like Stephen Bonsal and Richard Harding Davis made extensive visits to the island, and brought back horror stories of their own, which they published in national magazines like The Century and Scribner’s. Cuba was dying, they said, and America, as its neighbor and as the self-styled light of liberty, had to act. When it became clear that Spain was not going to cede the island on its own, intervention was just a matter of time.