The Roughest Riders Read online

  The words chaos and confusion inadequately described the prevailing atmosphere in the region. Commanding General William R. Shafter and his sizable staff of officers were hard-pressed to instill discipline and order over the troops pouring into town. Soldiers of the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth pitched their tents in Tampa Heights, west of Ybor City on the banks of the Hillsborough River, and the Ninth found space nearby. By the time the Tenth arrived, the campsites were so crowded that the unit had to set up in Lakeland, east of Tampa, alongside a few white units. With the tent poles barely in place, the sight of so many armed black men in town sent shockwaves rippling throughout the community.

  The Tampa Morning Tribune was quick to fan the fires of hatred and resentment. “The colored infantrymen stationed in Tampa and vicinity have made themselves very offensive to the people of the city,” the newspaper reported. “The men insist upon being treated as white men are treated[,] and the citizens will not make any distinction between the colored troops and the colored civilians.” The press gave front-page coverage to every incident involving black soldiers, reporting daily about “rackets” and “riots” caused by “these black ruffians in uniform.”

  “Here in Lakeland we struck the hotbed of the rebels,” wrote John E. Lewis. He described Lakeland as a beautiful little town with a population of about fifteen hundred residents, mostly farmers and country people. The town was surrounded by beautiful lakes, but they stood in counterpoint to the viciousness of the locals, who terrorized the black troops as soon as they arrived, turning the weeks before the war into a hell at home for them. The soldiers encamped there had to watch over their shoulders at all times and be constantly on the lookout for signs of mob violence. Every time a black soldier crossed the line or committed so much as a minor crime, local whites were ready to inflict summary justice on them. Any African American would suffice for a victim, whether or not he was the guilty party.

  After making camp, one party of black soldiers entered a drugstore to buy some soda and was subjected to a torrent of abuse from the druggist, who refused to serve them, telling them to take their money elsewhere. The men were enraged, and the heated emotions were further inflamed when a white barber named Abe Collins came into the store, called them one racial epithet after another, and told them to get the hell out of there or he’d have them strung up. The barber turned on his heels, went back to his barbershop, got his pistols, and returned to the drugstore waving the guns. The soldiers never gave Collins a chance to use them. They pulled their own pistols, and five shots rang out. One of them struck the barber, who fell dead to the floor. The cops showed up quickly after that, arresting two of the soldiers and disarming the rest. Fortunately, that was the end of the action, as the black troops had put the local whites on notice that here was a different breed of men than they had seen before.

  But the newspapers would not let the matter die completely. They continued to play on the fears of racist locals, who demanded greater police protection against these armed invaders with “criminal proclivities.” At the same time, they largely ignored the fights and wild behavior by the white soldiers camped throughout the area. “Prejudice reigns supreme here against the colored troops,” a black infantryman wrote to a friend in Baltimore. Everything the African American soldiers did was chronicled disproportionately, attributed in some cases to black brazenness and criminality. White drunkenness scarcely rated a mention in the dailies, but the press excoriated black men who dared look for a drink in white-only saloons. They were also accused of trying to foment riots among law-abiding citizens, who appealed to General Shafter to protect “respectable white citizens” from the black outlaws.

  Soon, fistfights erupted between black and white soldiers, who would shortly be fighting side by side against America’s common enemy. Reports of dissention among the troops traveled into the North, and Philadelphia sent a committee to Tampa to investigate. Almost predictably, the team of officials blamed the outbreaks of violence on “the insolence of the Negroes” who were trying “to run Tampa.” Black frustration became incendiary when more and more saloons and cafés refused to serve them. “We don’t deal with colored people,” one merchant was quoted. “We don’t sell to damned niggers.”

  Captain John Bigelow, a sympathetic white officer in a black regiment, came to his soldiers’ defense, writing later that if whites had treated the black soldiers with more civility, however much they might discriminate against them, the violence could have been averted.

  It all came to a boil on the very eve of the troops’ departure for Cuba. Fired up with alcohol, a white Ohio volunteer thought it would be great fun to snatch a two-year-old black child from his mother, hang him upside down with one hand, and spank him with the other. His comrades joined in on the evening’s entertainment by demonstrating their marksmanship. With the boy’s mother wailing helplessly, the soldiers took turns firing their pistols at the boy to see who could wing a bullet closest to him without actually hitting him. The winner was a white soldier who ripped a hole in a sleeve of the boy’s shirt, missing his skin by less than an inch. At the end of the contest, the Ohioans handed the child back to his weeping mother and headed back toward their tents.

  Word of the outrage flared like wildfire through the black campsites. Totally fed up with the hostility they had faced in Tampa, the troops of the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth stormed through town, firing their weapons into the air and charging through the white-only saloons and brothels, tearing the establishments apart as they took on all comers, civilians and soldiers alike. The combined forces of the camp guards and Tampa police were unable to quell the riot. Finally, the commanding general assigned the job of restoring peace to the all-white Second Georgia Volunteer Infantry. They waded in with fixed bayonets, loaded guns, and heavy truncheons, and battled with the black troops through the wee hours of the morning. Near daybreak on the morning of June 7, the Georgia volunteers had accomplished their mission.

  In an attempt to cover up the extent of the mayhem, the official report stated that no one had been killed in the incident. Local newspapers claimed that twenty-seven black soldiers and a handful of whites had sustained serious enough injuries for them to be transported to Fort McPherson, in East Point, Georgia, on the southwest edge of Atlanta. The black press, however, viewed the melee differently, reporting that the streets of Tampa “ran red with Negro blood” and “many Afro-Americans were killed and scores wounded.” Howard Zinn wondered in his 1980 book A People’s History of the United States why the black troops maintained their loyalty to their country in the face of such rampant racism. Many black American soldiers began to question that sort of lopsided loyalty themselves. In the four years between 1889 and 1902, black troops wrote 114 letters to black newspapers complaining about the way they were treated by their fellow countrymen.

  For once, the Tampa Morning Tribune played down the publicity given to the black soldiers involved in the riot, believing that if the true facts got out, they would reflect adversely on the city. The newspaper’s chamber-of-commerce mentality won out over snarling racial bigotry, for the moment at least.

  7

  Teddy Roosevelt and the First United States Volunteer Cavalry left San Antonio bound for Tampa on May 29. His seven trainloads of troops, mules, horses, and a mountain lion cub—with up to eighteen cars in each train—made great fodder for the press as they passed almost twelve hundred miles through the heart of the South. Cheering multitudes greeted them at almost every stop, where they restocked their supplies, sometimes roping chickens, pigs, and virtually everything else that was edible, hauling them up through the train windows and cooking them on the floors. Roosevelt had gathered around him an eccentric collection of men who were accustomed to the use of firearms and to fending for themselves in nature, he said. The future president wrote that the men he picked were “intelligent and self-reliant; they possessed hardihood and endurance and physical prowess.”

  When they arrived in Tampa on June 3 to what was describ
ed as “an appalling spectacle of congestion and confusion,” the only people surprised that there was no one on hand to meet them and tell them where to camp were Roosevelt and his men. Worst of all, there was no food set aside for them. Roosevelt and his officers made the rounds of local merchants and used their own money to restock their supplies. Then they confiscated some abandoned wagons to transport their food and luggage to a campground a little more than a mile west of the Tampa Bay Hotel, near the present-day intersection of Armenia Avenue and Kennedy Boulevard. By noon, they had pitched their tents in long, straight rows alongside those of the Second, Third, and Fifth Cavalry divisions, with the officers’ quarters on one end and a kitchen on the opposite end. Roosevelt lost no time ordering his men onto an open field to begin marching drills, followed by cavalry drills a day later when their horses were sufficiently rested.

  Tampa was chaotic in May 1898 when the Rough Riders finally arrived after their long journey from San Antonio. Roosevelt and his fellow officers had to spend their own money to buy food and supplies for the troops.

  Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LC-DIG-stereo-1s01904)

  With his men hunkered down awaiting orders to debark for Cuba, Roosevelt set up his headquarters at the Tampa Bay Hotel, where his friend Colonel Wood allowed him to spend the night, from the dinner hour until breakfast the following morning. General Shafter dispensed $175,000 to pay the men the money due to them for their service, and they immediately set out for Ybor City and other areas in the middle of town for a night of carousing. The Rough Riders in their brown canvas uniforms and wide-brimmed gray hats stood out from their fellow soldiers dressed in traditional dark blue shirts and trousers.

  Shafter and the other senior officers debated strategy at the hotel before sailing for Cuba. One of the first orders of business was deciding where to land on the Cuban coast. Shafter at first believed they would go ashore somewhere around Matanzas or Cardenas, east of Havana on the northern side of the island. Shafter insisted that an American victory would require upward of five thousand American troops, who would join forces with twenty-five thousand Cuban rebels to battle the Spanish soldiers, which he was convinced numbered no more than fifty thousand scattered throughout the island. With that number of troops under his command, plus a concentrated naval bombardment on the city of Havana, Shafter thought the conquest of Cuba would be a simple affair.

  In retrospect, the general’s assessment of the challenges he faced proved to be ludicrous. What he thought would be accomplished in a few months with so few soldiers—to say nothing of the dangers incurred by striking directly at Havana—fell far short of the terrible reality.

  General William R. Shafter, well past his prime and hobbled by obesity and gout, is generally believed to have botched the disembarkation from Tampa, which was a bedlam of chaos and confusion.

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  The soldiers jammed into the bars, brothels, and gambling houses with pockets full of cash to spend. Fights broke out among Roosevelt’s troops and regular army soldiers, and when they got tired of pounding on one another, they ransacked local homes, beat up the town cops, invaded a British ship in the harbor, and stole bananas, coconuts, and booze. Children followed the Rough Riders through the streets as they drank, laughed, fought, and rampaged at will. Some of the local youth made cardboard spurs, which they taped onto their shoes in imitation of Roosevelt’s curious collection of cowboys, ranchers, former sheriffs, gunfighters, some Eastern blue-bloods, and a handful of Native Americans. The Easterners were mostly wealthy university kids looking for adventure, among them Hamilton Fish, grandson of President Ulysses S. Grant’s secretary of state. More typical were the rough-and-tumble Westerners like former Dodge City marshal Benjamin Daniels, who had had half his ear chewed off during a barroom brawl. Most of them had never seen so much water before, let alone saltwater, and were disappointed to learn they couldn’t drink it.

  Their sojourn in Tampa lasted only a few days. President McKinley, feverishly following developments in Cuba from his war room on the second floor of the White House, surrounded by an array of maps and fifteen telephones, sent word that the troops should prepare to depart toward the eastern coastline of Cuba—not the northern coast—where the rebels maintained a strong presence. He assembled a fleet of transport ships beyond a narrow stretch of land bordering the dredged canal in Port Tampa. He then ordered General Shafter to begin shifting men and material along the single nine-mile track connecting the campsites around the city to the ships in the harbor—an ordeal that lasted almost two weeks.

  Roosevelt’s Rough Riders were devastated when they learned that they would have to leave their beloved horses behind, except for six horses per regiment for the officers. On the first sailing, there was only enough room aboard the fleet for essential supplies, pack mules, the small number of horses, and eight troops of seventy men. The allowance for the officers’ baggage was reduced from 250 to 80 pounds. Navy secretary Long, however, convinced the president that such a small armada would easily be destroyed by the Spanish fleet under the command of Vice Admiral Pascual Cervera, which could intercept them before they reached Cuba. Cervera was said to be heading toward Cuba with fresh troops, arms, and supplies.

  The United States’ North Atlantic Squadron, commanded by William T. Sampson, by then promoted to Rear Admiral, was entrusted with blockading the Cuban ports. McKinley countermanded his original instructions and dispatched orders to board the entire expedition simultaneously, triggering a frantic twenty-four-hour rush to get everyone ready to leave as quickly as possible. As it turned out, the transport ships could carry only about sixteen thousand men, rather than the twenty-five thousand authorized for service in Cuba, and Roosevelt was informed he could take with him only 560 of his Rough Riders, roughly half of the men who had signed up. The rest had to remain behind in Tampa. The American fleet was to depart at daybreak on June 8. Anyone not aboard by then would be left behind.

  Roosevelt was furious at the bungled operation, mismanaged from the start before they even got under way. He and his entire group of Rough Riders were in danger of missing out on the action altogether when a train scheduled to pick them up at midnight failed to arrive.

  “We were ordered to be at a certain track with all our baggage at midnight,” Roosevelt wrote, “there to take a train for Port Tampa.” The Rough Riders were there at midnight, but the train never showed up. The men crashed along the sides of the tracks, trying to get some sleep, while Wood, Roosevelt, and a few other officers looked for someone—anyone—with information about what they should do. Every so often they came across a general or two, none of whom knew any more than they did. Other regiments had already boarded trains, only to remain stationary on the tracks when the cars failed to get moving.

  At three o’clock in the morning, Wood got a message telling him to hike his men over to a different set of tracks, where a train would be waiting for them. Again, no such train was in evidence. Finally, at six in the morning, Roosevelt and the Rough Riders decided to take matters into their own hands. They commandeered an empty coal train with long flatcars and ordered the engineer to get them on their way to Port Tampa. They simply stopped the train and hopped on board, startling the unsuspecting engineer. Wood and Roosevelt convinced the befuddled gentleman to start backing down the track westward, until they reached the end of the line at the coast in Port Tampa, almost ten miles away.

  Just as daylight was breaking over the eastern horizon, the train chugged into the so-called Last Chance Village, a makeshift town or staging area containing bars, brothels, and women cooking chicken on Cuban clay stoves. The locale was aptly named, as it was the last chance for the men to load up on a decent meal, beer, or whiskey, and a girl if time allowed. Roosevelt and his men were grimy with soot and coal dust, but their entire unit and equipment were intact. They stepped off the flatcars into the chaos of the harbor, staring in alarm at the thousands of men who had beaten them there and were struggling to scamper
onto the ships in time.

  More confusion ensued when they looked out at the flotilla of thirty-one ships and realized they had no instructions about which one was assigned to them. Roosevelt tracked down Colonel Charles Frederic Humphrey, the overwhelmed officer in charge of loading operations, who told Roosevelt to take a launch out to the Yucatan, which was anchored off the dock. Roosevelt mustered his men, and together they outmaneuvered two other regiments also anxious to board the ship, which was quickly filled to capacity. Roosevelt managed to get two of his horses, Rain in the Face and Texas, on board as well.

  And there they remained for a week, the entire expedition that was supposed to leave at dawn, sweltering beneath the blistering Florida sun, chowing down on bad food—including so-called corned beef, which the men called “embalmed meat”—fuming inwardly over the hopelessly crowded conditions aboard ship and boiling to get into action as they waited for orders to sail. On the evening of June 13, they finally received word to get ready to depart from their US homeland the next morning and head down the coast of Florida toward war in Cuba.

  When Roosevelt discovered that no ship had been assigned to the Rough Riders to transport them to Cuba, he outmaneuvered two other regiments to get his men on board the already overcrowded Yucatan.

  Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZ62-57122)

  8

  The black regiments, along with a small group of white soldiers, were assigned to six ships: the Miami, Alamo, Comal, Concho, City of Washington, and Leona. They were sent down to the lowest deck, where no light could penetrate the dark enclosure beyond the ten feet from the main hatch. The bunks were stacked in four tiers and lined up so closely together that the men could barely slip between them. They were constructed of raw timber, with rectangular rims four to six inches high. There was no bedding except for whatever the men could improvise for themselves, using blankets for mattresses and haversacks for pillows. The men were forced to stack their gear, including their clothes, shelter-halves, rifles, and ammunition, on their bunks, allowing them scarcely enough room to stretch out and sleep. Toilet and bathing facilities were all but nonexistent. The lowest deck of the Concho contained a single toilet for more than twelve hundred soldiers.