The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  After supper at 7:00, there was night school for both commissioned and non-commissioned officers until final roll call at 8:30. But Roosevelt himself did not allow the “Dismiss” to cut short his military education for the day. With obsessive dedication he carried on by himself. “He was serenely unselfconscious,” recalled Quartermaster Coleman. “He would practice giving commands within fifty feet of half the regiment as earnestly as he would have done had he been alone in a desert.”23

  Taps sounded at 9:00. As darkness spread from tent to tent, the Lieutenant Colonel turned up his table lamp and began to write his nightly quota of letters.

  Dear Mr. President, This is just a line to tell you that we are in fine shape. Wood is a dandy Colonel, and I really think that the rank and file of this regiment are better than you would find in any other regiment anywhere. In fact, in all the world there is not a regiment I would so soon belong to. The men are picking up the drill wonderfully … We are ready now to leave at any moment, and we earnestly hope that we will be put into Cuba with the very first troops; the sooner the better.…24

  Quietness descended over Camp Wood, broken only by the occasional bray of a pack-mule, and the creaking of loose fence-planks, as one by one Roosevelt’s Rough Riders squeezed out of bounds and headed for the fleshpots of San Antonio.25

  IT DID NOT take the men long to size Roosevelt up, to compare him with “Old Poker Face,” and find Wood wanting. Although some cowpunchers were put off by the New Yorker’s overbearing courtesy (“he was polite almost to the extent of making one uneasy”),26 they could not help being impressed by his drive. “It was evident to all who met him that he was tremendously ambitious.”27 They noticed that Wood often asked advice, but seldom information; Roosevelt asked information, but never advice.28 For all the punctilious deference of the older man to the younger, for all Wood’s mastery of military bureaucracy (the Rough Riders were easily the best-armed and best-equipped regiment in the Army),29 there was no doubt, within a week of Roosevelt’s arrival, as to whom they considered to be colonel malgré lui. Wood knew it, and knew that his superiors in Washington knew it. “I realized that if this campaign lasted for any considerable length of time I would be kicked upstairs to make room for Roosevelt.”30

  Yet the Colonel did not hesitate to exercise authority over his subordinate when he deemed it necessary. Roosevelt was still inexperienced in matters of military discipline, and when Wood heard that he had treated an entire squadron to unlimited beer—apparently as a reward for their improvement in drill—he made a pointed remark over supper “that, of course, an officer who would go out with a large batch of men and drink with them was quite unfit to hold a commission.” There was a dead silence. Later Roosevelt visited Wood privately in his tent and confessed to the crime. “I wish to say, sir, that I agree with what you said. I consider myself the damndest ass within ten miles of this camp. Good night.”31

  Toward the end of May it was evident that the Rough Riders had already been forged into a warlike cavalry regiment. In the modest opinion of its Lieutenant Colonel, “it could whip Caesar’s Tenth Legion.”32 The speed of this transformation was not altogether surprising, considering the administrative efficiency of the Wood/Roosevelt team, and the fitness and equestrian skills of the troopers (over twenty applicants had been rejected for every one accepted).33 A local newspaper reported the men “sunburned and … impatient to get away.” There was not the slightest hint as to where the War Department intended to send them next, or indeed if they would ever get to Cuba. Outbursts of bellicose fervor began to disturb the peace of San Antonio. Two Texan troopers shot a mirrored saloon into smithereens, and the proprietor was too scared to ask for damages. On 26 May, a party of concertgoing Rough Riders were asked to discharge their revolvers discreetly during an outdoor performance of The Cavalry Charge, and responded with such gusto that the lights blew out, causing instant pandemonium.34 “If we don’t get them to Cuba quickly to fight Spaniards,” Wood remarked, “there is great danger that they’ll be fighting one another.”35

  A day or two later the Colonel received a telegram from Washington. He read it expressionlessly, then turned and looked at his second-in-command. Suddenly the two men were hugging each other like schoolboys, while war-whoops resounded through the camp. The Rough Riders had been ordered to proceed to Tampa, Florida, for immediate embarkation on transport ships, “destination unknown.”36

  BEFORE LEAVING SAN ANTONIO the Rough Riders dressed in full uniform and posed in formation for the official regimental photograph. Spread out across the plain, their mounts obedient now and immaculately groomed, they made a majestic military display. But the picture was marred by a slight irregularity of drill: Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt had absentmindedly allowed his horse to stand a few feet in advance of Colonel Wood’s.37

  THE ROUGH RIDERS STRUCK CAMP at 5:00 A.M. on 29 May 1898. They expected to be off in a matter of hours, but so great was the difficulty of coaxing twelve hundred horses and mules aboard seven different trains that it was after midnight when the last door clanged shut. Somebody then discovered that the passenger cars were missing, and would not be available until dawn; so officers and men lay down in the brush beside the tracks to snatch what sleep they could.38

  At 6:00 A.M. next morning the Rough Rider convoy finally pulled out of San Antonio. “I doubt,” Roosevelt wrote afterward, “if anybody who was on the trip will soon forget it.”39 For four sweltering days the seven trains chugged eastward and southward, strewing a trail of cinders, vomit, and manure across the face of the old Confederacy. Roosevelt, who was in charge of the rear sections, punished all cases of drunkenness severely, “in order to give full liberty to those who would not abuse it.”40 Two or three times a day, as he read his way steadily through Demolins’s Supériorité des Anglo-Saxons, he sent buckets of hot coffee back to his men to compensate for lack of hot food.41 But the most eagerly awaited refreshments were free watermelons and jugs of iced beer at stopping-places en route. These were passed through the car windows by “girls in straw hats and freshly starched dresses of many colors,” whose beauty some troopers would remember for half a century.42 No Louisiana village or Mississippi cotton-depot was so remote as to have escaped Rough Rider newspaper publicity: exotic celebrities like Woodbury Kane and Hamilton Fish were requested to appear so often that the cowpunchers took to impersonating them. Everywhere, of course, there were gap-toothed cries for “Teddy.”43

  As he waved at grizzled old Southerners, and they in turn waved the Stars and Stripes back at him, Roosevelt reflected that only thirty-three years before these men had been enemies of the Union.44 It took war to heal the scars of war; attack upon a foreign power to bring unity at home. But what future war would heal the scars of this one?

  ON THE EVENING OF 2 June the seven trains ground to a halt on the pine flats of western Florida, six miles short of Tampa. For some reason railroad employees refused to haul the regiment any farther, so the Rough Riders were forced to complete their journey on horseback, dragging their equipment behind in commandeered wagons. No official welcome awaited them at the sleep-shrouded Fifth Corps campground outside of town; Roosevelt and Wood had to ride through acres of dim tents before stumbling, almost by accident, upon their allotted space.45

  Next morning they awoke to see the largest gathering of the U.S. Army in four decades. For miles in every direction a pitched city spread out across the savanna. Under the moss-hung pines twenty-five thousand troops, mostly Regulars, were enduring what one of them called “the bane of a soldier’s life—waiting for something to happen.” Tampa itself lay a mile or so away, shimmering in coastal haze: it looked like some Middle Eastern mirage, with silver domes and minarets.46

  Half an hour’s ride into the freshening sea breeze disclosed that the mirage was real. Here, among mosquito-swamps, derelict shacks, and ankle-deep drifts of sand, stood Henry B. Plant’s famous “folly,” a five-hundred-room hotel in authentic Moorish style, with its own casino, ballroom, swimming pool,
and peacock park. On its street-wide verandah, Army and Navy officers, newspaper correspondents, foreign attachés, and pretty Cuban women rocked in elegant bentwoods, sipping iced tea and champagne.47

  “This was the rocking-chair period of the war,” wrote Richard Harding Davis of the New York Herald, himself an indefatigable rocker. “It was an army of occupation, but it occupied the piazza of a big hotel.”48

  Roosevelt dismissed the Tampa Bay Hotel with a single haughty sentence in his own memoir of those days: “We spent very little time there.”49 Actually he spent three nights in its luxurious accommodations, for Edith came down to Tampa, and Colonel Wood discreetly allowed him leave “from before dinner to after breakfast each day.”50 Having attended Edith through much of her recent illness, that gentlemanly officer must have sensed her need to be with Theodore now that she was returned to health and strength.

  CONSPICUOUS AMONG THE ELITE who daily crossed the Tampa Bay Hotel lobby was dropsical, gouty old Brigadier General William Rufus Shafter, commander of the Fifth Corps. At three hundred pounds, or one-seventh of a ton, Shafter was barely able to heave himself up the grand stairway;51 yet President McKinley had chosen him to lead an expeditionary force over the hills of southern Cuba, showing equal faith in the Army’s seniority system and its ability to transport ponderous cargo.

  “Not since the campaign of Crassus against the Parthians,” in Roosevelt’s later opinion, “has there been so criminally incompetent a General as Shafter.”52 Yet it was hard in the early days of June 1898 not to sympathize with that harassed officer, for President McKinley was proving an exceedingly erratic Commander-in-Chief. Bent, apparently, on acting as his own Secretary of War, he had been sending Shafter contradictory orders ever since the Battle of Manila. Dewey’s overwhelming victory had turned both the President and Secretary Long into war-hawks overnight; their first reaction to the news had been to endorse Roosevelt’s naval/military invasion plan, over the objection of Commanding General Miles, on 2 May.53 General Shafter was ordered to prepare for immediate departure from Tampa (although the Volunteers were still in training), and on 8 May the President had increased the project landing force from ten thousand to seventy thousand. But then McKinley discovered that there was not enough ammunition in the United States to keep such an army firing for one hour in battle, and an urgent cancellation order flew to Tampa.54 Shafter’s force was scaled down to twenty-five thousand by the end of May, and the telegrams from Washington became querulous: “When will you leave? Answer at once.” Shafter wired back that he could not sail before 4 June.55

  Roosevelt happened to ride into town that day, the morning after his midnight arrival in camp. One look at the half-empty transport ships swinging idly at anchor in Tampa Bay—nine miles away at the end of a single railroad track—was enough to convince him, if not General Shafter, that the Fifth Corps would not sail for another few days at least. “No words can paint the confusion,” he wrote in his diary on 5 June. “No head; a breakdown of both the railroad and military system of the country.”56

  While train after overloaded train jostled for possession of the track, and desperate quartermasters broke open dozens of unmarked cars to see if they contained guns, uniforms, grain, or medicinal brandy, the Rough Riders joined other cavalry regiments at drill on the limitless flats. Richard Harding Davis escorted Edith Roosevelt and a party of foreign attachés to watch some formal exercises on 6 June.57

  Half-aware that he was witnessing the last great mounted maneuvers in American military history, Davis regretted that more of his countrymen could not be there to enjoy the spectacle. For over an hour two thousand riders galloped back and forth, sweeping through the spindly trees as waves comb through reeds. A cool onshore breeze seemed at times to drive them on, at others to break them up into eddies and ripples of faster and slower motion. The air rang with cheers and the steely percussion of swords (the Rough Riders, flamboyant as ever, brandishing Cuban machetes instead of regulation sabers), and finally, in response to a barked order, the regiments deployed into shoulder-to-shoulder file abreast. “There will be few such chances again,” Davis wrote, “to see a brigade of cavalry advancing through a forest of palms in a line two miles long.…”58

  Later that morning Roosevelt received the shocking news that General Shafter had decided to send no horses to Cuba except those belonging to senior officers.59 What was more, there would be room on the ships for only eight of the twelve Rough Rider troops. If the remaining volunteers wished to charge to glory, they would have to do it on foot.

  THE NEXT THIRTY-SIX HOURS were not pleasant for Wood or Roosevelt. They had to decide who would go and who would stay, and had to endure the sight of officers and troopers alike bursting into tears on receiving the bad news. The lucky ones, numbering some 560 men, could hardly bemoan the loss of their horses. “We would rather crawl on all fours than not go.”60

  Coffee was being served at the Tampa Bay Hotel on the evening of Tuesday, 7 June, when General Shafter was summoned to the Western Union office by order of the President of the United States. His instructions, tapped out on a direct line from the White House, were terse: “You will sail immediately as you are needed at destination.”61

  McKinley’s urgency was prompted by an agonized cable from Admiral Sampson, who had been blockading the Spanish Cuba Squadron in Santiago Harbor since 1 June: “If 10,000 men were here, city and fleet would be ours within 48 hours.” Shafter could only tap back, “I will sail tomorrow morning. Steam cannot be gotten up earlier.”62

  Notwithstanding this guarded reply, the words “sail immediately” ran like an electric shock through the Fifth Corps. By midnight the Rough Riders were packed and waiting with their baggage at the track which had been assigned to them. No train appeared, and after a long period of waiting new orders arrived to proceed to another track. There was no train there, either; but just after dawn some filthy coal-cars hove into sight, and, to quote Roosevelt, “these we seized.” The fact that the locomotive was pointing the wrong way did not deter them. “By various arguments” the engineer was persuaded to steam the nine miles to Port Tampa in reverse gear.63

  Wednesday’s sun disclosed what appeared to be a black regiment descending from the coal-cars and jostling for space on the already overcrowded quay. More men kept arriving every few minutes, until the boards groaned with a swarming mass of human freight. Thirty transport ships were taking on the last bales of food and equipment, but it was anybody’s guess which regiments were to follow onto what vessel. While the Rough Riders (now mockingly called “Wood’s Weary Walkers”)64 stood sweating patiently in the sun, Wood and Roosevelt fanned out in search of Shafter’s chief quartermaster, Colonel C. F. Humphrey. “After an hour’s rapid and industrious search” they happened upon him almost simultaneously. Humphrey said they were welcome to a transport named Yucatán, which had not yet come in to the quay. Wood, sensing a certain lack of interest in the quartermaster’s voice, jumped into a passing launch and hijacked the Yucatán in midstream. Meanwhile Roosevelt learned that the ship had already been assigned to two other regiments—the 2nd Regular Infantry and the 71st New York Volunteers.

  Accordingly, I ran at full speed to our train; and leaving a strong guard with the baggage, I double-quicked the rest of the regiment up to the boat, just in time to board her as she came into the quay, and then to hold her against the Second Regulars and the Seventy-first, who had arrived a little too late, being a shade less ready than we were in the matter of individual initiative.

  Roosevelt listened with polite sympathy to the protests from the quay, but his final argument was conclusive: “Well, we seem to have it.”65 The 71st marched off in a huff, accompanied by a shower of coal from the Yucatán’s bunkers.

  Presently Roosevelt noticed two photographers standing beside a huge tripod and camera. “What are you young men up to?”

  “We are the Vitagraph Company, Colonel Roosevelt, and we are going to Cuba to take moving pictures of the war.”

  The p
hotographers found themselves being escorted up the gangplank. “I can’t take care of a regiment,” said nineteenth-century America’s greatest master of press relations, “but I might be able to handle two more.”66

  CONSIDERING THE LOGISTICAL problem of moving 16,286 troops along a single stretch of track between 9:00 P.M. Tuesday and 5:00 P.M. Wednesday, the “criminally incompetent” General Shafter did not do too badly. He had no choice but to leave the remainder of his corps behind in Tampa, owing to wild miscalculations of available berth space; as it was the ships were so crammed with men that bodies covered every foot of deck. Convinced that he had done everything that God and gout permitted him, Shafter struggled over the side of his flagship Segurança at about 4:30 P.M. and ordered her to lead the way out of the harbor. Then he went below and eased his weary bulk into bed.67

  The Segurança had barely slipped her moorings when a shrilling tug halted her with a telegram:

  WAIT UNTIL YOU GET FURTHER ORDERS BEFORE YOU SAIL. ANSWER QUICK. R. A. ALGER, SECRETARY OF WAR.68

  It transpired that three unidentified warships had been sighted in the Gulf, apparently lying in wait for the invasion fleet.

  While the Navy rushed to investigate, Shafter ordered his armada back to quayside. It was out of the question to disembark, since orders to proceed might be received at any minute; so for the next six days sixteen thousand men baked like sardines in their steel ovens.69

  As if enduring some Ancient Mariner’s nightmare, Theodore Roosevelt paced the decks of the Yucatán, breathing the stench of dirty men and dying mules. Garbage clogged the quayside canal until it festered in the sun; the drinking-water tanks turned brackish, and Army rations of “fresh beef,” when opened, proved to be so disgusting that three out of every four cans were thrown overboard. A move out to midstream on 10 June afforded partial relief, although sharks made swimming hazardous.70 In any case most of the Rough Riders, having been brought up in the desert, were too transfixed by the sight of seawater to venture into it.71 Periodically Roosevelt went down to his cabin to vent his wrath in long letters to Henry Cabot Lodge. “I did not feel that I was fit to be Colonel of this regiment … but I am more fit to command a Brigade or a Division or attend to this whole matter of embarking and sending the army than many of those whose business it is.…”72