by Clay Risen
Davis called the weeks spent in Tampa “the rocking chair period of the war,” and there was much truth in that. Dozens of officers were encamped at the hotel, and they spent as much time socializing as they did keeping their nervous soldiers in line. For weeks, every day word would go around the tables of men slowly sipping great glasses of iced tea that the orders had come through, and the Army was about to depart. And every day, a little later, the same people would whisper, with the same confidence, that the invasion had been delayed just another day or two. And so it went, on through May and into June. Rumors lived and died like mayflies; for a few hours, everyone was certain they were headed to Havana, then suddenly it was Cienfuegos. “There is no doubt now that we are to start for Porto Rico,” Davis wrote his mother on June 1.29
The hotel let the Army’s adjutants place a bulletin board in the lobby, where they would tack several telegrams an hour; at each new message a dozen men would rush forward to get the latest news. Over time, though, the officers began to relax. “Leggings and canvas shooting-coats gave way to white duck, fierce sombreros to innocent straw hats,” Davis wrote, “and at last wives and daughters arrived on the scene of our inactivity, and men unstrapped their trunks and appeared in evening dress.” On May 25, the officers threw a big dinner in honor of Queen Victoria’s fiftieth anniversary of assuming the throne, but also in honor of Arthur Lee, the British Army attaché, whose wit and long career made him a favorite among reporters and bored officers hanging around the hotel.30
Lee may have been the man of the moment—“There was no one, from the generals to the enlisted men, who did not like Lee,” Davis recalled—but Lee himself was taken with Roosevelt. The night he arrived, he saw a group of men gathered around a “stocky and bespectacled” colonel, “whose vigorous gestures and infectious spirits proclaimed him as someone out of the ordinary.” Lee asked Davis who he was. “Good Heavens, don’t you know Theodore Roosevelt?” Davis replied. “You must meet him this very minute. He is the biggest thing here and the most typical American living.”31
Roosevelt and Wood both had rooms at the hotel, but they preferred to stay in camp with their men. One exception was a visit by Edith Roosevelt from June 2 to about June 7. She had given birth to their fifth child, Quentin, in November, and then been sick earlier in the year with an abscess in her psoas muscle. Though Roosevelt had found her a top doctor at Johns Hopkins, and seemed in his own way to care about her well-being, her condition seemed not to have given him even a second’s pause before joining the war effort. “I would not allow even a death to stand in my way,” he had confided to a friend. “It was my one chance to do something for my country and for my family and my one chance to cut my little notch on the stick that stands as a measuring rod in every family. I know now that I would have turned away from my wife’s deathbed to have answered that call.” If Edith had any private misgivings about her husband’s choice, she kept them to herself: “Come back safe,” she wrote him after he left Washington, “and we shall be happy, but it is quite right you should be where you are.” Roosevelt put her up in his room—one of the hotel’s sixteen suites—and he stayed with her at night. But he rose every morning at four to go the one and a quarter miles to camp in time for reveille.32
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Some regiments kept a tight rein on their soldiers, but Wood and Roosevelt decided not to enforce discipline too strictly, a fact that Miller, Larned, Wrenn, and a few other late arrivals (who were, technically, not yet enlisted) took full advantage of. They went straight to the Tampa Bay Hotel, where they found a college friend of Miller’s, Teddy Burke, who had arrived earlier and rented a room. They shaved and washed, and changed into new clothes—Miller wore blue trousers, a shirt loaned to him by brother-in-law Edison, patent leather shoes, a red bandanna, and a derby hat, a sartorial blend of Fifth Avenue and Rough Rider casual wear. Then they went to the dining room. “On our way down we met several celebrities,” he wrote, including the artist Frederic Remington and Richard Harding Davis. Though still private citizens, they had the good sense not to insist on sitting in the main dining room, among the officers; instead, they got a back room. While eating, they wrote letters home over pitchers of sweet iced tea. They stayed in camp that night, but returned to the hotel the next day, Saturday, June 4, for a final meal—and this time they had the guts to sit a few tables away from Roosevelt, Wood, and Miles. That afternoon, Roosevelt enlisted them.33
The men slept two to a tent, often with their feet sticking out one end because the canvas sheets were too short. The tents came in two pieces, with each man carrying half. Decades later, veterans would look back fondly on their “bunky,” or lament his death in battle. One morning Wells, one of the Harvard volunteers, went to the Tampa Bay Hotel for a shave; coming back, he fell in with a group of men from the 32nd Michigan Volunteer Infantry. He got to chatting with one of them, a man named Frank Knox. By then it was common knowledge that many of the volunteer regiments would be left behind on the first wave of ships, and Knox said he was eager to switch. Wells told Roosevelt about his encounter. He agreed to meet Knox—and was impressed with the man’s intelligence. He added him to Troop D. Eventually, Knox shared a tent with Miller; decades later, after a long career as a newspaper executive, he became Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of the navy.34
Theodore Roosevelt was a nature lover, and there was much of it to love in Tampa. He sketched and jotted down the names of newfound species (to him) of birds, trees, and reptiles. “Here there are lots of funny little lizards that run about in the dusty roads very fast, and then stand still with their heads up,” he wrote to his daughter Ethel. Others were less enamored with the local wildlife; several men were bitten by scorpions. Great herds of mosquitoes and blackflies clouded the air around the men, who swatted and swatted and eventually gave up. But most of all, they hated the sand—“nothing but sand, now red, now white, but all sand,” Le Stourgeon wrote.35
As in San Antonio and along the route to Florida, locals flocked to see the Rough Riders in Tampa. By then, the country had gotten used to newspaper features about the famous and rich and exotic men who made up the regiment. As he had done in San Antonio, Wood had to set up guards to keep tourists from tramping through the camp, looking for souvenirs and knocking down tents. But Rough Rider fever infected Tampa nonetheless: Women and men wore gaudy handkerchiefs around their necks, like Roosevelt; local children cut out cardboard spurs to attach to their shoes, in imitation of the Rough Riders’ signature footgear. Remington, the artist, came to the camp looking for some picturesque cowboys to sketch; to his disappointment, he found soldiers. “Why, you are nothing but a lot of cavalrymen!” he said.36
Onlookers especially liked to watch the regiment drill. Wood required them to keep a similar schedule as at San Antonio—reveille at 5 a.m., then breakfast and stable duties followed by two hours of mounted drill, with three more hours in the afternoon. At one point the entire cavalry division gathered for a drill with 2,000 horses spread out almost a mile wide, trotting across the sandy plain northeast of Tampa, cheering and waving their sabers and machetes. Though the men didn’t know it, the drill marked the end of an era—the last mass cavalry demonstration ever put on by the American Army.37
From the moment they arrived, the Rough Riders had one especially avid fan: Richard Harding Davis. Soon after McKinley declared war, Davis, in a pique of patriotism—and self-interested desire for adventure and acclaim—had applied for a position with the Massachusetts militia; while in Tampa, he received a commission as a captain. “It’s all very well to say you are doing more by writing, but are you?” he asked of himself, rhetorically, in a letter to his brother. “It’s an easy game to look on and pat the other chaps on the back with a few paragraphs; that is cheap patriotism.” But a few days later he was assigned a staff job as an assistant adjutant general, which would keep him stateside. Remington spent two hours in Davis’s room in Tampa, talking him out of taking the post. He finally gave in—though it’s hard to im
agine he needed much convincing, knowing his choice was between going to Cuba as a reporter and sitting behind a desk as a soldier. Instead, he became an even more fanatical advocate for the Army, to the point where his reporting often blurred into propaganda. And no one did he advocate for more than the Rough Riders.38
Davis had known Roosevelt since their time rousting sleeping policemen in downtown New York, when Roosevelt was the head of the police board. Although Roosevelt was lukewarm about Davis (he thought his novels were salacious, and that Davis himself was a dandy), the lieutenant colonel recognized what Davis’s martial, reportorial zeal could mean for the regiment. He invited Davis to see the camp, and tolerated it when Davis hobnobbed with the Easterners in the regiment, many of whom Davis had watched play in the Harvard-Yale game. The men knew a good thing when they saw it, too. “They use my bathroom continuously,” Davis recalled, “and I never open the door without finding a heap of dirty canvas on the floor and a cheery voice splashing about in the tub calling out ‘it’s all right don’t mind me. I’m one of Teddie’s giants.’ Then an utterly strange and utterly nude giant will appear from the bathroom.”39
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In between drills, the men in Shafter’s army, organized into three divisions as the Fifth Corps, went to the beach. Some rode their horses; those who could, swam. Others went looking for alligators. Some stayed in camp and tried to learn Spanish. Still others went to Ybor City, the center of the area’s Cuban community and the city’s red-light district. Many of Tampa’s bars had gone officially, temporarily dry under community pressure—residents didn’t like the idea of thousands of drunken soldiers—but sold alcohol surreptitiously, with names like the General Robert E. Lee Milkshake or General Miles Grape Juice. It was in Ybor City that Frank Brito, a cowboy from New Mexico who had joined the Rough Riders, recalled his first and only experience with opium. “We laid down on some cots,” he told the historian Dale Walker years later, “and a Chinaman brought in a pipe about three feet long and some black stuff that looked like coal tar. He worked the stuff into a ball and put it into the pipe and touched a candle flame to it while we sucked on the mouthpiece. I took about four puffs and that was enough. All of us were sick for a week.”40
For other soldiers, who were there long before the Rough Riders arrived and who stayed long after they had left, Ybor City was more than just a place to blow off steam. With both black and white troops crammed into the camps, it was only a matter of time before the men, fueled by alcohol and sex, came to blows. Many of the 4,000 black soldiers camped in Tampa were Army regulars, men who had been raised outside the South and whose military experience consisted of life on the isolated plains, under the relatively egalitarian strictures of Army camp life. In Tampa, they faced both racist locals and hostile white soldiers, especially among the volunteers. By 1898, Jim Crow segregation was fast setting in across the South, and the black soldiers found service flat out refused to them at diners and bordellos—often for the first time in their lives. Whites especially resented seeing black men wearing the uniform of the United States Army, even though the federal forces were segregated, and there were only a handful of black officers. One black soldier wrote to a friend, “Prejudice reigns supreme here against the colored troops. Every little thing that is done here is chronicled as negro brazenness, outlawry, etc.”41
Fights between black and white soldiers were common, sometimes man-to-man, often in large scrums. Already stoked on the rhetoric of national unity against a common, non-Anglo enemy, it was a short jump for Northern soldiers and reporters to side with Southern whites against black troops (though there is no evidence that any men from the Rough Riders participated in racial violence). This was the ugly side of the national reunification that Leonard Wood and the Rough Riders had celebrated during their trip along the Gulf Coast, the side that whites rarely considered or cared about. Reuniting North and South could only come at the expense of black equality, a deal that was forged in part during the Spanish-American War.
Typical of the Northern response to the scene in Tampa was a report about a race riot in the New York Sun. A group of black soldiers “went to the city and began drinking bad whiskey. In a short time they were hilarious and attempted to take the town. . . . Some of the white soldiers from the north, it is said, joined in with the colored regulars against the Southern boys, and a free fight was waged.” Four black soldiers were killed. But this was not how the black soldiers reported the fight—in their telling, which appeared in black newspapers across the North, a bar owner refused to serve them, and a gang of drunken white soldiers had attacked them. “This is the kind of ‘united country’ we saw in the South,” one black soldier wrote home.42
In a study of the Southern media coverage of the Tampa encampment, the historian Willard B. Gatewood Jr. found that in most cases, white violence—whether against property, civilians, or other soldiers—was dismissed in newspapers as rowdiness and steam-blowing, while the same behavior by blacks was written up as “rackets” and “riots.” The sight of uniformed, armed black men was a Southern nightmare, and a justification for further segregation. “Their presence in Florida contributed to the final capitulation of the white South to extreme racism,” Gatewood concluded.43
• • •
On the morning of June 5, right after reveille, Wood announced a surprise inspection. As he had hoped and expected, the tents were perfectly spaced, the blankets were all folded precisely, and the picket ropes running around the camp were as straight as a shot. They had better be: General Joseph Wheeler, the commander of the cavalry division, was coming to visit.
Wheeler was a courtly Georgian of great stature but diminutive size—barely five feet tall, he had narrowly cleared the height requirement for West Point in 1854. When the Civil War broke out he joined the Confederate Army; when it ended, he was a cavalry general, at just twenty-eight years old. He later served as a representative from Alabama, and though a Democrat—and therefore a member of a party that vociferously opposed the Army and its deployment—he had supported both the creep toward war with Spain and the president’s cautious approach to actually declaring it. Once McKinley did, the president had called Wheeler to his office and asked him to command the cavalry division in Cuba. By then Wheeler was sixty-one years old, with a long white beard; there were younger, more adept generals in the Regular Army. But McKinley wanted Wheeler because of what he represented: sectional reconciliation.44
Wheeler relished his new job. More than anyone else in the Army, he took McKinley’s directive about reuniting North and South to heart. At one point in Tampa, Stephen Bonsal wrote, someone asked Wheeler, “How does it feel, General, to wear the blue again?” Wheeler replied: “I feel as though I had been away on a three weeks’ furlough, and had but just come back to my own colors.” He also seemed to appreciate the way the Rough Riders deviated from the West Point playbook. “This is a mob of men,” he said after watching the regiment drill. There was a long silence. Roosevelt looked on. “This is a mob of men I’m very glad and proud to command. I had just such another mob in Tennessee and the Yankees will tell you what that mob did. I’m glad to be with you.”45
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Despite the rapid influx of soldiers and the pressure to move on Cuba, General Shafter and his superiors in Washington refused to set sail for the island. There were many reasons for the delay—the lack of clear orders, the need to wait on more men and more supplies—but the primary concern was the Spanish Atlantic Squadron, under the command of Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete. Reserved, cerebral, and opposed to the war, Cervera nevertheless knew how to follow commands, and had set sail from the Cape Verde Islands on April 29 with orders to defend Cuba from attack. American warships all along the Eastern Seaboard were put on alert, but Cervera ended up sailing into the harbor at Santiago de Cuba, on the southeastern coast, on May 19 without firing a shot. It took another week for the Americans to discover his hiding place, and on June 1 the cruisers New York and Oregon arrived to b
ottle him in. Two days later a Navy lieutenant named Richmond Hobson led a small crew on a near-suicide mission into the harbor, which snakes through a narrow channel before opening up into a bay just west of Santiago. Their boat was packed with explosives, and they aimed to detonate it in the middle of the channel, to stopper up the exit. This they did, but the ship drifted as it sank, and the channel remained free. Hobson and his men were picked out of the water by Spanish sailors and taken prisoner. Back in the United States, the crew became national celebrities overnight, and their misadventure underlined the importance of taking Santiago as soon as possible.46
The Navy faced a conundrum. As long as Cervera was at Santiago, the Americans had to maintain an extensive blockade around the harbor mouth, diverting nearly a dozen warships from their duty as part of the overall blockade of the island. But the harbor was so well-protected that it would be impossible to go into it for a naval attack. The only solution, concluded Admiral William T. Sampson, in charge of the fleet, was to capture the city by land, thereby capturing the Spanish ships as well. Conveniently, General Miles, commander of the Army, had already been assembling plans for Shafter’s Fifth Corps to attack Santiago as an opening move in the assault on Cuba. Cervera’s presence, and Hobson’s capture, gave that plan a sudden urgency. Shafter received orders to sail for Santiago on May 29.47