Thirteen Soldiers

by John McCain

  A troop of the 10th, braving intense fire and unable to return it as it was out of their carbines’ range, made contact with the Rough Riders and cut holes in the barbed wire, freeing the volunteers to join the advance. B Troop had started up the ridge and managed to suppress some of the Spanish fire by aiming their Hotchkiss at the stone blockhouse from where much of it emanated. It was not easily done, as an African American surgeon for the 25th Infantry later recalled: “So hot was the fire directed at the men at the Hotchkiss gun that a head could not be raised, and men crawled on their stomachs like snakes loading and firing.”

  B Troop had become separated from their lieutenant, and troopers were led up the hill by two sergeants, John Buck and James Thompson. As the entire American line stoutly worked its way up the ridge and the Spanish began to drop back, General Wheeler is reported to have become momentarily lost in a reverie about battles in the previous war, when he most certainly did not command an advance led by African Americans. “C’mon men!” he urged. “We’ve got the damned Yankees on the run.”

  When the fight at Las Guásimas was finished and the casualties were being counted and official reports written, white officers praised the skill and courage of the troops engaged in the battle, regular and volunteer, black and white. But they didn’t record the 10th Cavalry’s heroics as fully as they deserved to be, at least on the subject of their assistance to the Rough Riders. That was left to other eyewitnesses, including a reporter for the Associated Press, who insisted, “If it had not been for the Negro cavalry, the Rough Riders would have been exterminated. I am not a Negro lover. My father fought with [the Confederate battalion] Mosby’s Rangers and I was born in the South, but the Negroes saved that fight, and the day will come when General Shafter will give them credit for their bravery.”

  The regiment’s young quartermaster, First Lieutenant John J. Pershing, who acquired the nickname “Black Jack” while serving in the 10th Cavalry, also commended the regulars for “relieving the Rough Riders from the volleys that were being poured into them.”

  Sixteen troopers were killed in the battle and fifty-four were wounded. Half the dead and thirty-four of the wounded were Rough Riders, who buried their dead in separate graves. Sergeant Major Baker superintended the burial of the regulars in one mass grave. He recorded their names in the diary he had been keeping since the regiment had boarded a southbound train in Missoula, Montana, the previous April.

  MOST OF THE BUFFALO SOLDIERS in Cuba were veterans of the Indian wars, although it had been eight years since the last battle of those wars was fought, the shameful massacre at Wounded Knee. Congress had passed legislation in 1866 establishing the peacetime army and ordering the creation of two cavalry regiments and four infantry regiments “which shall be composed of colored men.” The two cavalry regiments were the 9th and 10th. In 1869 the four infantry regiments were consolidated into two, the 24th and 25th.

  The regiment was formed at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas in 1866 and treated with hostility by the fort’s commander, who opposed the creation of black regiments, and by the white soldiers stationed there. But the 10th’s stay at Leavenworth lasted only a short time before its first commander, Colonel Benjamin Grierson, arranged to have the regiment transferred to Fort Riley, Kansas. It was the first of many postings in Kansas and Oklahoma, and later ones in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, from which the Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th would distinguish themselves in action against Native Americans throughout the southern plains and Southwest. They crossed deserts, mountains, and plains in campaigns against the Southern Cheyenne, Comanche, and Arapaho. They chased the Apache Victorio into Mexico. They pursued Geronimo until he surrendered, and fought in the last battles of the Apache wars. They were given the name Buffalo Soldiers, a term of respect, by their Indian adversaries, reportedly because they were as hard to kill as buffalo and their hair resembled the animals’ dark manes. The regiment left the Southwest in 1891 for the Department of Dakota, where it was stationed at various forts in the Dakotas and Montana.

  Edward Baker was born on a wagon train in Wyoming in 1865 to an African American mother and a French father, who decided to remain in eastern Wyoming to raise their son. Growing up on the frontier, Baker acquired the skills he would use to advance in the cavalry. He was an excellent horseman and shot. He could rope as well as any cowboy. He could navigate plains and mountains. He was accustomed to the hardships of frontier life. He was also highly intelligent and decently educated. He could speak Spanish passably and French fluently. He enlisted in the 9th Cavalry as a bugler when he was just sixteen and transferred to the 10th five years later.

  He would serve at posts in Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wyoming and usually enjoyed the favorable opinion of the officers he served under. He was married in 1887 to Mary Elizabeth Hawley and became regimental clerk in 1888. He was promoted to regimental quartermaster sergeant in 1891. The next year the regiment’s colonel, Jacob Mizner, gave Baker the highest enlisted post in the regiment, sergeant major. He held that rank for the remainder of his time in the 10th, through six years in Montana and the war with Spain.

  While in Montana in 1896 he applied to the prestigious French cavalry school, École d’application de cavalerie and asked the War Department for a one-year leave of absence, the first leave he had requested in fifteen years of service. Colonel Mizner, among others, endorsed the application, praising Baker as “a man of refinement, most excellent character, temper and disposition” and a “very capable and intelligent” soldier. Nevertheless the War Department refused the application without explanation. He reapplied the following year; this time the War Department initially approved only to reverse their position a few weeks later.

  Baker was still at Fort Assiniboine, Montana, when the Maine sank in Havana Harbor, and shortly afterward the 10th was ordered mobilized for war service. The West was certainly not free of the racism and bigotry of the age, but white settlers there had relied on African Americans to protect them from the Native Americans. In consequence many accorded the Buffalo Soldiers a degree of respect, even admiration, that was denied African Americans elsewhere in the country. Hard as life was, many lived with their families in isolated frontier communities that valued them, where they were assigned the same responsibilities as white troops and where they might have opportunities denied them in other regions of the country. It was no surprise, then, that most of the citizens of Missoula turned out to bid the 10th Cavalry farewell and that on their journey south they would encounter thousands of well-wishers along the way. “On April 19 we were off for Chickamauga Park,” Baker wrote in his diary. “En route we were heartily greeted. Patriotism was at its height. Every little hamlet, even, had its offerings. To compare the journey to Caesar’s march of triumph would be putting it mildly.”

  It was also no surprise that the regiment was unprepared for the very different treatment, the heartfelt and statutory racism they would encounter when they arrived in the Jim Crow South.

  There was disagreement in 1898 within the African American press about whether black regiments should serve in the war. Some argued that as long as their officers were exclusively white, black soldiers shouldn’t risk their lives for the country. Others believed that honorable service in the war would earn the respect and gratitude of the nation, which would lead to more just and equitable treatment of African Americans in general. The controversy didn’t appear to affect the esprit of the Buffalo Soldiers. They went to war as enthusiastically as did volunteer regiments. The four segregated black regiments were possibly the finest regiments in the army, renowned for, among other attributes, their high morale.

  It must have been something of a shock for the men of the 10th Cavalry to arrive at Chickamauga Park in Georgia and be greeted by the sheer astonishment of the locals, few of whom would have ever seen professional African American warriors, who carried themselves with the self-possession and dignity of veterans. Astonished ignorance quickly gave way to a
hate common in the Jim Crow South. Sergeant Major Frank Pullen of the 25th Infantry, which had arrived in Georgia a week before the 10th, recalled their treatment: “Outside of the Park, it mattered not if we were soldiers of the United States, and going to fight for the honor of our country and the freedom of an oppressed and starving people, we were ‘niggers,’ as they called us, and treated us with contempt. . . . That is the kind of ‘united country’ we saw in the South.”

  The Buffalo Soldiers remained in Georgia only a few weeks. On May 14 the 10th relocated to a camp in Lakeland, Florida, thirty miles from Tampa, where they again encountered the contempt of white residents, who did not just require black soldiers to obey local segregation laws but, more often than not, angrily and crudely demanded it. The hostility became mutual and came to a head in a barbershop. A trooper from the 10th had asked for a shave and was purportedly threatened with a pistol while a crowd of angry whites hurled insults at a number of troopers, who responded by drawing their pistols and shooting up the barbershop, killing one of their abusers.

  The 24th and 25th infantry regiments were camped in the city of Tampa, and they too were abused and threatened, and not just by the locals. Just before the regiments embarked for Cuba, a number of drunken Ohio volunteers used a two-year-old African American child for target practice. A bullet came so close to the boy that it went through his shirtsleeve. When black soldiers learned of the outrage they retaliated by attacking white soldiers as well as some of the local businesses that refused service to “coloreds.”

  Sergeant Major Pullen from the 25th wrote that unlike white regiments waiting aboard ship, black soldiers “were not allowed to go ashore, unless an officer would take a whole company off to bathe and exercise.” They were kept in the cramped quarters and stale air below decks for a week before setting sail for Cuba. Pullen noted that the main deck was reserved for the regiment’s officers, where “no soldier was allowed to go abaft for any purpose, except to report to his superior officer.” Once they were underway to Cuba on June 14, the brigade commander imposed a strict color line between the 25th Infantry and the white soldiers of the 14th Infantry Regiment, who were transported on the same ship, despite the fact the two regiments had served together in Montana and were, according to Pullen, “on the best of terms.”

  “All of these things were done seemingly to humiliate us and without a word of protest from our officers,” Pullen remembered. “We suffered without complaint.”

  There are no reports that the segregated cavalry regiments were transported to Cuba in the same circumstances, although it’s probably safe to assume the accommodations were less than comfortable for the ranks and only somewhat better for the officers. As mentioned earlier, they traveled without their horses, which would have seemed strange to a cavalry trooper going into battle. They also left almost a third of the regiment in Tampa, mostly new recruits, to care for the regiment’s horses and supplies.

  Fifty 10th Cavalry troopers and twenty-five Rough Riders were ordered on June 21 to escort weapons, ammunition, mules, and other supplies to Cuban rebels. Their first attempted landing, at Cienfuegos on June 29, was repulsed by the Spanish. Their next attempt, the following day, was at the mouth of a river called Tayabacoa by the Americans. It was calamitous. A party of thirty Cubans and American volunteers put ashore in rowboats to secure the landing site a few hundred yards from a Spanish fort that overlooked the beach. They were quickly discovered and engaged by the Spanish garrison and forced to retreat to the beach, where they discovered that their boats had been sunk by Spanish artillery. They were trapped. Survivors sought cover in a mangrove swamp. But seven of the party were wounded, two of them Americans, and were pinned down near the beach. The brother of the rebel commander, Emilio Núñez, was shot and killed. Their only protection was the guns of U.S. warships that had escorted the convoy, which were temporarily preventing the Spanish from capturing the stranded men.

  The Cubans still aboard ship made four attempts to rescue their comrades, but each attempt was repulsed under heavy fire. Lieutenant George Johnson asked for volunteers from the 10th to make a last attempt after nightfall. A number offered their services, and Johnson chose five: his second lieutenant George Ahern, Sergeant William Thompkins, Corporal George Wanton, and Troopers Dennis Bell and Fitz Lee. While Ahern and Thompkins were experienced soldiers, the three enlisted men were considerably less so, and Corporal Wanton had a troublesome reputation, having been court-martialed eight times for various offenses.

  They made it ashore in a long boat and under withering fire helped the wounded into the boat and rowed back to the ship with no further casualties suffered, which, given the intensity of the Spanish volleys, seemed almost miraculous. The odds against the success of the rescue were considerable and the courage needed to undertake it immense. Once they were back aboard ship, Corporal Wanton volunteered to make another trip to the beach to recover the body of General Núñez’s brother but was told he had done enough. All four troopers were awarded the Medal of Honor for their gallantry.

  On the southeastern end of the island, General Shafter and his staff were making a reconnaissance of the outer defenses of Santiago. A ridgeline rose up from the jungle east of the city that featured two hill crests on a north-south axis, Kettle Hill and the larger San Juan Hill, and the village of El Caney three miles to the north. Lawton’s division, which included the 25th Infantry Regiment, was given the assignment of assaulting the Spanish garrison at El Caney. The other three “colored” regiments would be part of the attack by Kent’s 1st Infantry Division and Wheeler’s dismounted cavalry on the Spanish entrenched on the San Juan Heights. However much the men of these regiments had been made to suffer the humiliation and injustice of segregation, whatever color lines they had been compelled to obey prior to this moment, the confused and chaotic fight they would join would be remembered as the most integrated battle of the nineteenth century, a battle that might have been lost but for them.

  THE BATTLE OF EL CANEY opened at dawn on July 1 with an American artillery barrage on a Spanish blockhouse, which was the only enemy position visible from the American lines below. General Lawton had estimated it would take his division two hours to overrun El Caney, and Shafter had ordered the attacks on the San Juan Heights to wait until Lawton’s division had finished the assignment and joined the right flank for the assault on Kettle and San Juan.

  Despite Lawton’s optimism, it would take his division the entire day to drive the Spanish from El Caney. Two hours after American guns had opened fire on the blockhouse, an American artillery battery opened fire on San Juan Hill, the signal for the infantry and dismounted cavalry to begin moving into position. Spanish cannon immediately answered. Shafter had situated his artillery on a hill, El Pozo, opposite the Heights, where the clouds of black powder they belched with every salvo made them easy targets for the Spanish 77 mm Krupp guns. Spanish marksmen and skirmishers, using smokeless powder to conceal their positions, began killing and wounding Americans assembling in the jungle in advance of the attack on the Heights.

  A gout-plagued Shafter returned to his headquarters, intending to direct the battle from there. General Wheeler had fallen ill as well and transferred command of the dismounted cavalry division to his brigade commander, General Samuel Sumner. Wheeler would return to the front early in the battle. General Young, 2nd Brigade commander, had become seriously ill just after Las Guásimas and had given command of the brigade to Wood, which left Roosevelt in command of the Rough Riders.

  Kent’s infantry held the left of the American line while Wheeler’s cavalry division on the right moved down jungle trails to a ford in the San Juan River and formed lines on the other side expecting to link up with Lawton’s infantry. 1st Cavalry Brigade, commanded that day by Colonel Henry Carroll, including the 9th Cavalry, crossed the river first. The 2nd Brigade, with the Rough Riders in the lead, followed. With orders to act in support of Carroll’s brigade they held the extreme right of the line. The 10th Cavalry, to their left, w
as the only regiment that would join attacks on both hills.

  As they waited for the signal to attack, men felled by heat stroke added to the casualties claimed by the rapid-firing Mausers and shrapnel from Spanish artillery sweeping the jungle trails. Black gunpowder smoke gave away their positions. Making matters worse, as the cavalry were making their way along the approaches to Kettle Hill, a Signal Corps hot air observation balloon floated fifty feet above them and drew what Sergeant Major Baker described as “terrific converging fire from the blockhouse and intrenchments in front and the works further to the left” on the troopers scrambling to take cover in the tall grass. Baker, who was constantly moving between the regiment’s command and the troops, found himself pinned down beneath the balloon on more than one occasion. “Every gun, both great and small, was playing on it,” he remembered. Eventually shell shrapnel punctured the balloon and it dropped to earth—to the relief, one assumes, of every American on the scene except those who had been held aloft by it.

  Roosevelt recalled in his memoir the dire situation the troopers were in as they splashed across the river at the crossing they would remember as “Bloody Ford” and waited three hours for the order to charge while bullets and shells rained down on them:

  While we were lying in reserve we were suffering nearly as much as afterward when we charged. I think that the bulk of the Spanish fire was practically unaimed, or at least not aimed at any particular man . . . but they swept the whole field of battle up to the edge of the river, and man after man in our ranks fell dead or wounded, although I had the troopers scattered out far apart, taking advantage of every scrap of cover.

  One of the dead was Buckey O’Neill. According to Roosevelt, who deeply mourned the loss of “this wild and gallant soul,” O’Neill had been conspicuously walking in front of his men, who were all lying prone. His company first sergeant had beseeched him to get down, but O’Neill replied, “Sergeant, the Spanish bullet isn’t made that will kill me.” Moments later just such a bullet struck him in the mouth and he fell dead.