The Roughest Riders Read online

  “I find that Roosevelt, in his precipitate way, has come very near causing more of an explosion than happened to the Maine,” Long stated publicly. “The very devil seemed to possess him yesterday afternoon. He has gone at things like a bull in a china shop.”

  Mark Twain had an even more poignant take on Roosevelt. The man is “clearly insane,” wrote the great satirist, “and insanest upon war and its supreme glories.”

  Roosevelt compounded his misappropriation of authority by firing off a confidential telegram to Commodore George Dewey, commander of the US Asiatic Fleet, telling him to order his squadron, except for the Monocacy, to Hong Kong. He advised Dewey to keep his boilers full of coal and, in the event of a declaration of war with Spain, to see that the Spanish squadron does not leave the Asiatic coast. Roosevelt told Dewey to then commence “offensive operations in Philippine Islands” and to stand by for further orders.

  For whatever reason, Long failed to rescind Roosevelt’s orders. He seemed to feel that more harm would be done to the United States’ reputation by ordering an about-face in reaction to Roosevelt’s insubordination. Roosevelt had clearly usurped his boss’s authority, positioned himself as the man in charge of the navy, and forced McKinley’s hand by unequivocally launching America on a path to war. Long had little choice but to rubber-stamp his assistant’s directive after Spain officially declared war on the United States on April 23.

  “War has commenced between the United States and Spain,” Long telegraphed Dewey on April 25. “Proceed at once to Philippine Islands. Commence operations particularly against the Spanish fleet. You must capture vessels or destroy. Use utmost endeavor.”

  It took Dewey’s squadron six hours, firing at ranges from two thousand to five thousand yards, to destroy Spain’s naval forces in the Philippines. The islands now effectively belonged to the United States—although it would take a prolonged ground campaign to effectively assume total control—earning Dewey a place in history as a result of the engagement. Puerto Rico and other Spanish colonies would also be sucked into the US orbit in the aftermath.

  Cuba was next on Roosevelt’s hit list. After receiving word of Dewey’s decisive victory, Roosevelt promptly resigned his post and joined the army, organizing his own quasi-private cowboy militia that also included an odd assortment of Ivy League types. No one was more stunned by Roosevelt’s latest move than Long. Why on earth would Roosevelt quit an important job in Washington to “brush mosquitoes from his neck in the Florida sands?” he asked.

  John Hay, Lincoln’s former secretary, a writer and a future secretary of state, was more than a little amused by Roosevelt’s temperament and decision: “Theodore Roosevelt, that wilder verwegener, has left the Navy Department, where he had the chance of his life, and has joined a cowboy regiment.”

  Roosevelt now had an opportunity to test his own mettle in combat as assistant to Colonel Leonard Wood, head of the First Volunteer Cavalry. Wood was a medical doctor, and it was during his tenure as personal physician to Presidents Grover Cleveland and William McKinley that he developed a friendship with Roosevelt. He had taken part in the last campaign against the Native American chieftain Geronimo in 1886, and in that same year he was awarded the Medal of Honor for carrying dispatches across a hundred miles of hostile territory and for leading an infantry unit in combat against the Apaches. Still, he had no experience as an officer in the field against a modern, well-armed enemy.

  It wouldn’t be long before Roosevelt would be joining the assemblage of volunteers as they stormed into the inferno of battle under Wood’s command. The flamboyant crew of soldiers were known as “Teddy’s Terrors” at first, and later “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.” Roosevelt himself was nothing if not good copy. The newspapers loved him for the color he provided, particularly in the form of audacious words that poured out of his mouth. Wood resented the attention given to his subordinate; but Wood’s Terrors or Wood’s Rough Riders didn’t have the same alliterative ring as the other names, and newspaper reporters knew a good headline when they saw one. Far be it from them to abandon a catchy title for the sake of accuracy.

  Roosevelt had been in love with the cowboy lifestyle since his days on the American plains, and in forming his troop, he recruited a raunchy band of individualists, men who did not look at life with the spirit of decorum and conventionality that prevailed on the East Coast. Out of an estimated 25,000 enlisted men who volunteered, he selected 1,241 young soldiers—plus 54 officers—all of them expert marksmen and seasoned cavalrymen. In addition to the cowboys and the Western gunmen, Roosevelt also attracted a claque of Eastern bluebloods, bored and wealthy Ivy Leaguers cast more or less in his own mold who were looking for adventure and thought that a popular war against ethnic inferiors—the “Garlics,” some of them called the Spaniards—would be a jolly way to find it.

  On his way to Cuba, however, Roosevelt would meet up with another type of soldier who was not cut from the common cloth. These were the black soldiers who had already proven themselves in war. They were the Buffalo Soldiers, and within months they would join Roosevelt and his Rough Riders on their charge up a remote hill in the torrid heat and humidity of the Cuban jungle.

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  Theodore Roosevelt, freshly out from under the dubious supervision of Secretary of the Navy John D. Long, lost no time inciting the wrath of his new commanding officer, Colonel Leonard Wood. San Antonio, Texas, was hot in May, and after an intense day of drilling under the scorching sun, Roosevelt, getting overly friendly with his band of ragtag volunteers, announced, “The men can go in and drink all the beer they want, which I will pay for!” To the dismay of his superiors, he hopped in a van and led his troops to the nearest saloon, where they spent the evening drowning their thirst thanks to their leader’s generosity.

  Wood reprimanded Roosevelt for his flagrant breach of military discipline. It hardly instilled respect, Wood scolded, for officers to go out drinking with their men. Roosevelt absorbed the rebuke, saluted Wood, and promptly vanished into the night. A while later, he returned to Wood’s tent and told the colonel, “Sir, I consider myself the damnedest ass within ten miles of this camp. Good night, sir.”

  The soldiers in training remained in San Antonio for a few weeks, earning the respect and gratitude of the locals, who admired the men’s spirit and appreciated their patronage—even without Roosevelt’s companionship in the barrooms. When it was time to leave for war a month later, the townspeople treated them to a farewell party, complete with a band led by the son of German immigrants who composed a tune called “Cavalry Charge.” The piece culminated with drums, cymbals, and live cannon fire. With the sound of cannons roaring in the night, some of the men thought the town was under attack and began firing their own weapons randomly into the air. Men, women, and children dove under picnic tables or ran into the woods. The electricity failed, apparently the result of an overload on the grid, cloaking the town in darkness except for the flashes from guns and cannons.

  “I was in the Franco-Prussian War and saw some hot times,” the German American composer said the next day, “but I was about as uneasy last night as I ever was in battle.”

  San Antonio, Texas, was blistering hot in May 1898, when Teddy Roosevelt arrived to assemble the Rough Riders under the command of Colonel Leonard Wood.

  Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LC-DIG-ppmsca-37599)

  In contrast, Roosevelt and his Rough Riders found the whole incident highly amusing, a good preparation for the real battle ahead. They departed from San Antonio by train laughing, heading for Tampa, Florida, the final stop before embarking for Cuba. The only one who was not amused was Roosevelt’s commander, Colonel Wood.

  Preceding Roosevelt and his entourage to Tampa by two months was the all-black Twenty-Fifth Infantry, the first troops ordered into war by President McKinley. “The Negro is better able to withstand the Cuban climate than the white man,” reasoned the commanding general of the US Army, Nelson A. Miles. The Buffalo Soldiers had last seen
action in the Johnson County War of 1892, from which they emerged as heroes. On their way southeast in March through the Great Plains region, the veteran Indian-fighters passed through a long string of towns in which they were greeted with waves and cheers by supportive locals. The black soldiers waved back, distinctive in their dark blue shirts, khaki breeches, and ten-gallon hats. American flags adorned their train as it pulled into St. Paul, Minnesota, where a gathering of white settlers clamored for tunic buttons to keep as souvenirs. The Buffalo Soldiers accommodated the townspeople by pulling buttons off their uniforms and tossing them into the crowd. “We had to pin our clothes on with sundry nails and sharpened bits of wood,” one of the soldiers commented afterward.

  It was the first time the entire regiment had met together since 1870, and the journey was “a marked event, attracting the attention of the daily and illustrated press,” wrote Chaplain Theophilus G. Steward, the only black officer in the infantry unit. No sooner were they reunited, however, than they were ordered to separate. At the Union Depot at St. Paul, two companies were told to proceed directly to Key West, and six other companies were directed to Chickamauga in Georgia. Those six, accompanied by the regimental band, were the first troops to arrive in the park at Chickamauga, where they joined with a large contingent of white troops.

  Commander of the US Army, Major-General Nelson A. Miles, believed that black soldiers were better equipped genetically to withstand the torrid weather of the tropics than their white counterparts.

  Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZ62-122405)

  “The streets were jammed, the people wild with enthusiasm,” wrote scholar William G. Muller in his history of the event. And then the mood of jubilation turned to one of hostility and hatred. The trainload of black infantrymen crossed an invisible but real divide, the Mason-Dixon Line; they had made the transition from the North to the South.

  “It is needless to attempt a description of patriotism displayed by the liberty loving people of the country along our line of travel until reaching the South,” wrote Herschel V. Cashin, a white historian of the era who rode with the troops. In the South, he said, “cool receptions told the tale of race prejudice even though these brave men were rushing to the front in the very face of grim death to defend the flag and preserve the country’s honor and dignity.”

  As the Twenty-Fifth headed deeper into the South, the War Department activated four new regiments of black soldiers to join them—the Seventh through the Tenth US Volunteer Infantries, led mostly by white officers. The Eighth had been stationed at Fort Thomas, Kentucky, where there had been three officers’ messes: one for white captains and higher-ranking white officers, a second for black lieutenants, and a third for mostly white field and staff officers. Two black staff officers—the chaplain and the assistant surgeon—dined with the lieutenants.

  Even as the black infantrymen traveled through the hostile South on the way to war, some military voices came forward with concern. Writing to the editor of the Cleveland Gazette, Chaplain George Washington Proileau of the Ninth Cavalry wrote, “Talk about fighting and freeing poor Cuba and of Spain’s brutality…. Is America any better than Spain? Has she not subjects in her very midst who are murdered daily without a trial of judge or jury? Has she not subjects in her borders whose children are half-fed and half-clothed, because their father’s skin is black?” The chaplain, himself a former slave, continued, “Yet the Negro is loyal to his country’s flag. O! He is a noble creature, loyal and true…. Forgetting that he is ostracized, his race considered as dumb as driven cattle, yet, as loyal and true men, he answers the call to arms and with blinding tears in his eyes and sobs he goes forth: he sings ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty,’ and though the word ‘liberty’ chokes him, he swallowed it and finished the stanza ‘of Thee I sing.’”

  Yet, the majority of African American civilians endorsed the war, some on the grounds that it was the patriotic thing to do, and others with the opinion that it would bring their people in contact with other “colored” cultures. “Will Cuba be a Negro republic?” asked an article in the Afro-American Sentinel, out of Omaha, Nebraska. “Decidedly so, because the greater portion of the insurgents are Negroes and they are politically ambitious. In Cuba the colored man may engage in business and make a great success. Puerto Rico is another field for Negro colonization and they should not fail to grasp this great opportunity.”

  It also helped that no army regiments had a better reputation than the colored regiments, and, claimed Steward, none performed better in combat. He hoped that black soldiers, or American soldiers of any color, would never have to fight another war, but he said that if black troops were called on to serve their country again, he had no doubt they would do their unenviable duty as patriotic Americans.

  So, while some African Americans believed that black troops should take no part in a war of white imperialism, a larger part thought it was worth the effort to secure a foothold in a predominantly black culture where there were greater opportunities for advancement. As for the soldiers themselves, many of them reasoned, logically enough, that their patriotism during this new war would finally earn them the respect they deserved. So they soldiered on, at first thinking they were headed into a warzone on a tropical island south of Florida, but soon realizing they were already traveling through enemy territory within US borders.

  The Twenty-Fifth Infantry was the first to arrive in Chickamauga Park, Georgia, where it was soon joined by the other black contingents. One of the volunteers with the Eighth was eighteen-year-old Benjamin O. Davis, who would go on to become the first African American general in the US Army four decades later, on October 25, 1940. Their instructions changed from day to day; some heard they would eventually be departing for Tampa, Florida, others that they were headed for the Dry Tortugas, a remote outpost situated due west of the Florida Keys and north of Havana, Cuba. Other units had orders to go to New Orleans, Louisiana. Their final destination was never in question, however; they would all eventually be risking their necks in the hellhole of wartime Cuba.

  The Spanish troops stationed in Cuba included 150,000 regulars and more than 40,000 volunteers, all there in opposition to only about 50,000 Cuban revolutionaries. The US Army originally counted a little more than 27,000 men and 2,000 officers, only a handful of whom were black. On April 22, Congress had passed the Mobilization Act, allowing for an increase in wartime army strength up to 200,000, plus a regular standing army of 65,000. Three days later, McKinley issued his call for 125,000 volunteers to man the campaign in Cuba.

  The black soldiers stayed in Chickamauga Park for a few weeks in March and April, pitching tents, chopping wood, lighting campfires, cleaning equipment, drilling under the punishing sun, and losing a baseball game against a team of white soldiers before five thousand spectators. In the beginning, the sojourn in Georgia passed well, according to Theophilus G. Steward, chaplain of the Twenty-Fifth, who said he was pleased to see the fraternity that characterized the relationship between white and black servicemen. He noted in particular that an atmosphere close to friendship prevailed between the black Twenty-Fifth and the white Twelfth.

  “Our camp life at Chickamauga Park was one round of pleasure,” wrote John E. Lewis, a trooper with the Tenth. He reported that although white Southerners often tried to stir up trouble between the white and black soldiers, sometimes it backfired, as in one case when a white soldier objected to the verbal abuse being showered on one of his black comrades by a local white, and he responded by punching out the white civilian. The fight became ferocious and ended in the death of the white Southerner, an act that went unpunished by local authorities. Up to that time, this was one of few instances in the history of American race relations when blacks and whites stood together as one against white racism at large. Before Chickamauga, many of the black soldiers had never been befriended or treated as equals by white men in uniform.

  The white press, however, proved less generous. The southern newspa
pers launched a campaign of malicious abuse against the armed black troops in their community and complained almost daily about their uncivilized conduct. The black soldiers in Chickamauga withstood the insults, backed for the most part by their fellow soldiers, who attributed the hostility to the “well-known prejudices of the Southern people.” As a result, the onslaught of press abuse carried little weight with the men, and in short order, the brouhaha subsided and the black contingents in Georgia were ordered to pack up and get ready to assemble in Tampa, Florida, the next step along the path that would take them to the killing zones in Cuba.

  At the end of April, the black troops sent their heavy luggage into storage, shipping off to war with only the equipment deemed essential for combat. They assembled on the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, established by Congress in 1890 to commemorate a Civil War battle, and then headed deeper into the South, toward the even greater swampland of racial animosity around Tampa.

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  Tampa at the time was “a BUM place,” according to a white volunteer, First Sergeant Henry A. Dobson, who left a cache of letters describing his experience there. Two railroads linked Tampa—described by one reporter at the time as “a desolate village filled with derelict wooden houses drifting on an ocean of sand”—to Georgia, Louisiana, and other states to the north. The major edifice in town was the Tampa Bay Hotel, grotesquely out of place with its silver minarets and wide porches set amid an arid wasteland of sand, pines, palmettoes, industrial plants, and squalid houses. A few substantial homes for a handful of richer residents, who were a tiny minority of the town’s fourteen thousand citizens, stood apart from the others. During the first two weeks of May 1898, more than four thousand black troops descended on this military staging area of “congestion and confusion,” which had been chosen as the one best suited for embarkation to Cuba, wrote historian Karl Grimser.