*America had been defined by expansion from its earliest colonial history through the period of Manifest Destiny until the end of the Indian Wars.  However, by 1890, the American interior had been so filled in with settlements that the Census Bureau declared that there no longer was a frontier.  America had gone from sea to shining sea, so where could Americans go next?

*One obvious answer was to go overseas.  America had built a large Navy in the late 1800s, partly under the influence of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s recent book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History which said that great navies had built and protected great empires throughout history.

*Some Americans went to Hawaii.  Throughout the 1800s, Missionaries went to Hawaii, as did sugar and pineapple planters.  In 1893 the Queen of Hawaii, Liliuokalani tried to create a new constitution that would have given native Hawaiians more rights and taken special privileges away from American and European landowners.  Furthermore, the big sugar planters were suffering because a new US tariff had made their trade with the US much less profitable.  Therefore, some sugar planters rose up to overthrow the Kingdom of Hawaii and form the Republic of Hawaii under President Sanford Dole.  Soon they asked to join the United States, and were annexed in 1898.

*In Cuba, José Martí began a war for independence in 1895.  The Spanish general Valeriano Weyler, in command of 150,000 troops, brutally crushed the rebellion, rounding up dissenters and placing them in ‘reconcentration camps’ and earning the nickname ‘Butcher Weyler.’  About 200,000 Cubans died in the course of this policy, and a number of American-owned sugar plantations were destroyed.

*Many Americans sympathised with the Cubans, partly because we remembered our revolutionary war, partly because American property was being destroyed in the war and businessmen wanted to put a stop to that, and partly because American newspapers covered the war in brutal detail.

*Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst competed with each other for readers, and therefore published the most sensational papers they could.  They exaggerated news and told it in a very biased fashion with shocking photographs to drum up interest.  This was called Yellow Journalism or the Yellow Press.  According to legend, when Hearst sent Frederic Remington to Cuba to cover the rebellion against Spanish rule, he found that there was not much going on. When Remington cabled the paper saying ‘There is no war. Request to be recalled,’ Hearst shot back ‘Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war.’

*The Yellow Press presented Weyler as a monster who was not only brutal to the Cubans but ignored the rights of Americans.  A famous photograph showed an American woman being strip-searched by the Spanish authorities.  To protect Americans in Cuba, President McKinley sent a battleship, USS Maine, to Havana. 

*Soon afterwards, a private letter written by the Spanish Ambassador to the US was stolen by Cuban rebels and leaked to the press.  It called McKinley weak and stupid.  This infuriated Americans further, and many began to call for war. 

*Soon after this letter was published, USS Maine blew up in Havana Harbour.  An investigation at the time showed that a Spanish mine had blown up the ship (although years later it was discovered that the explosion was probably caused by a fire that began inside the ship).  Soon Americans demanded war, chanting ‘Remember the Maine!’

*This desire for war was known as jingoism, a term from an old British song:
We don't want to fight but by Jingo if we do
We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too.

*On 25 April, 1898, the United States declared war on Spain, and on 1 May, the US Pacific Fleet under Commodore George Dewey (a Civil War veteran who had sailed with Farragut) showed up in Manila Bay.  He was prepared to do so because the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, had told him to get ready for major operations before war had even been declared.

*Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in one morning without losing a single man in combat (although one of his sailors did die of heat stroke).  His ships sailed in front of the Spanish ships repeatedly, crossing the T of the Spanish line, and only pulled back to redistribute ammunition before returning to the battle.

*Dewey brought exiled Philippine independence leader Emilio Aguinaldo back from Hong Kong, and he led Filipino guerrillas alongside the US Army to take control of most of the Philippines within a few months. 

*On 13 August, the US General Wesley Merritt and the Spanish general in Manila agreed to stage a bloodless battle so that the Spanish could surrender with honour.  Aguinaldo and the other Filipinos were left out of the bargain, and not allowed to march into Manila.

*The United States also took Guam from Spain, planning to use it as a coaling station.  The small Spanish garrison there had not even known there was a war on, and surrendered without a fight.

*The most conspicuous fighting of the war would be in the Caribbean, as America invaded the Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico and Cuba. 

*This was harder than it seemed, as the US Army was still fairly small (28,183 men), and to reach its planned war-time size of 250,000 men, it had to be augmented with volunteers, many of them organised as militia from the various states—including some Southern states, who had spend the past three decades resenting the US government and US Army.  One US Major-General in the war was Joseph Wheeler, a congressman from Alabama and a former Major-General of the Confederate Army.  When Wheeler met James Longstreet in 1902, Longstreet said "Joe, I hope that Almighty God takes me before he does you, for I want to be within the gates of hell to hear Jubal Early cuss you in the blue uniform."

*The most famous volunteers, however, were the Rough Riders, a cavalry regiment recruited by Theodore Roosevelt from the cowboys he had met as a rancher out west and the polo players and Ivy League athletes he knew as a wealthy member of New York society back east.  Initially they were under the command of Leonard Wood.

*Furthermore, the army had problems with supplies.  Wool winter uniforms were sent to the troops in Cuba while lightweight summer uniforms were distributed to troops when they returned from Cuba to cold northern harbours.  Transporting horses to Cuba was an almost total failure—although the Rough Riders were supposed to be a cavalry unit, most of them had to fight on foot.  Canned beef provided to soldiers was of such poor quality that an investigation was ordered by the Commanding General of the US Army, Nelson Miles, after the war. 

*Eventually, the war forced many reforms on the army and on the militia system, most notably through the Militia Act of 1903, which organised the state militias into the National Guard.

*Although Havana is the capital of Cuba, its main naval base and a large part of its army were at Santiago, so that is where American forces concentrated.  The Army, under the overall command of General William Shafter, landed near Santiago between 22 and 24 June, 1898, while the Navy blockaded and eventually took control of the harbour after capturing the port at Guantanamo Bay to use for shelter during hurricane season.

*The Army had trouble with the tropical climate of Cuba and with fighting through the tropical forests of the island, where the Spanish soldiers had learnt to conceal themselves in the trees while fighting Cuban independence fighters.  The US Army did have help from the Cuban independence movement, partly because some Americans were part of it, most famously Fred Funston.

*On 1 July, the US Army fought the Battle of San Juan Hill (which, along with Kettle Hill, was part of San Juan Heights, the more proper name for the entire battlefield), just outside Santiago.  The Rough Riders captured Kettle Hill after fierce fighting alongside the 10th US Cavalry, made up of Buffalo Soldiers (one of their white officers was John Pershing, who would later command the American Expeditionary Force in World War I).

*Although there were a few other battles before and after the Battle of San Juan Hill, it was the key to surrounding and besieging Santiago, which surrendered on 17 July, 1898.

*The US Army also invaded Puerto Rico, where they faced stiff resistance from the Spanish, who would fight small battles and then retreat before they could be captured.  However, many Puerto Ricans supported the US, who they believed were helping them win their independence.

*Fighting between the US and Spain officially ended on 12 August, 1898 (and actually ended shortly after that).  A peace treaty officially went into effect on 11 April, 1899, and it made the United States into an empire.

*The US gained Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines (where the US Army fought a long, hard war against the Filipinos who thought they had been fighting for their independence from Spain).  Cuba was made an independent country, but the US retained the right to intervene in Cuba whenever necessary (as defined by the United States).  The United States also retained a perpetual lease on Guantanamo Bay.

*Roosevelt called the Spanish-American War a ‘splendid little war,’ and in many ways it was.  The United States lost fewer than four hundred American soldiers killed in battle (although more than 5,000 died of disease).

*In the United States, the war reinforced Americans’ opinions favouring a strong Navy, which continued to expand in the early 1900s.  It forced improvements in Army organisation and Federal regulation of the National Guard.  It helped reunite Northerners and Southerners.  It also made Theodore Roosevelt a national hero, and his fame as leader of the Rough Riders helped him become Governor of New York, Vice-President, a powerful reforming President, and a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

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