Faded Glory: A Century of Forgotten Texas Military Sites, Then and Now

4. The Spanish American War

C h a p t e r 3 86 10 35 35 45 20 35W 37 10 G u l f o f M e x i c o Camp Wood Corpus Christi Laredo San Antonio Menger Hotel Camp Mabry Austin T E X A S SpanishAmerican War M E X I C O Map by Molly O’Halloran 4 The Spanish-American War of 1898 marked both a turning point in American foreign policy and a maturation of a new national vision of the United States as a rising global power. It was a conflict Americans engaged in not because of an imminent threat to national security, as in past disputes, but rather out of a collective sense of moral obligation. But there were also underlying currents of expansionism and imperialism, despite a long-standing trend toward isolationism. In the decades following the Civil War, the United States increasingly found itself on the periphery of complex foreign affairs in such locales as the West Indies, Samoa, Hawaii, and Venezuela , among others. By the mid-1890s it also had to deal with the matter of Cuba. For years Spain had dealt with its role as a declining empire, in large part because of unrest in Latin America, but through it all Cuba remained loyal to the crown and therefore received favored status. But a spirit of independence grew there nonetheless and spilled over in the 1870s and again in the 1890s. By the time of the second major rebellion, Spain began implementing stronger measures to quell any further disturbances . Under Gen. Valeriano Weyler, the Spanish government instituted concentration camps and cast a wide net for what it loosely defined as insurrectionists and These men are wild. If we don’t get them to Cuba quickly to fight the Spanish there is a real danger they’ll be fighting themselves. —Col. LeonardWood The SpaniShaMerican War 1898 87 revolutionary sympathizers. Word of atrocities in the camps and in the rural areas of the territory spread to the United States, where the “yellow press” of the time took up the cause and through its sensationalist reporting pressured the American people and political leadership to intervene in support of the rebels. In the ensuing debate, Pres. Grover Cleveland and his successor, Pres. William McKinley, were reluctant to get involved in the war. Committed as past presidents were to upholding the Monroe Doctrine which discouraged foreign involvement in the Western Hemisphere, they were also aware that existing foreign ties were, in effect , exempt. While the United States had used its power to support in principle earlier Latin American struggles for independence and had even sent its ships into harm’s way to protect its citizens in times of revolution, it had never unleashed its power in support of any warring nation. By the late 1890s, though, a changing national vision of its military strength and moral obligations changed the way the United States reacted to such matters. Following a particularly intense riot at Havana in January 1898, the US government sent the battleship Maine to provide protection for American citizens and also American business interests. While anchored in Havana harbor on the evening of February 15, an explosion ripped through the ship, sinking it and killing 260 crewmen. Although a Navy Department board of inquiry determined the cause to be a mine, it failed to identify the parties responsible for the incident. Regardless, the yellow press intensified the call for action against Spain. In late March, President McKinley sought first a diplomatic solution, calling on the Spanish government to declare a temporary armistice and to end its policy of concentration camps. But quickly giving in to mounting pressures for military intervention, he decided to forego diplomacy in favor of a war resolution from Congress, which he received on April 20. In the resolution, Congress stated its recognition of an independent Cuba, emphasizing that the United States sought no territorial claims on the island. It called on Spain to withdraw its forces immediately and authorized the president to utilize military power to prosecute the demands. In quick succession, Spain withdrew its diplomats from the United States, which in return instituted a blockade of prime Cuban ports. Spain followed that action with a declaration of war, and the United States reciprocated, marking the start of the intense and pivotal, but short-lived, Spanish-American War. At the opening of the conflict, U.S. military strength...