by Clay Risen
The surrender ceremony took place on July 17, a bright clear Sunday. That morning, two Spanish officers on horseback approached the American line, where they were met by a squad of cavalry. They passed through, and on to Shafter’s tent. One carried a silver-encased sword, which he presented to the American general. Two hours later, Shafter and his officers sat on horseback under a ceiba tree, 200 yards forward of the American line. In the distance, they could see a Spanish cavalry column leave the city and make its way slowly toward them. At its head rode General Toral, erect and proper with a fine thin mustache; behind him a line of buglers sounded. Shafter, his feet wrapped in bandages and a pith helmet perched on his head, approached the general, and they spoke briefly through an interpreter. Then Shafter gave Toral back the sword, along with the sword and spurs of General Vara del Rey, which had been taken off his fallen body at El Caney. Over the next hour hundreds of unarmed Spanish soldiers marched along the same path their general had just ridden, and further still, to fields behind the American lines, where they would make camp as prisoners of war. “It was Appomattox again, and Mexico City and Yorktown,” wrote Frank Norris, who watched the proceedings. “Tomorrow nearly a hundred million people the world round would read of this scene, and as many more, yet unborn, would read of it, but today you could sit in your saddle on the back of your little white bronco and view it as easily as a play.”54
The Americans went the other direction, led by Shafter and Wheeler on horseback, filing through the barbed wire and abandoned barricades and into Santiago, down its narrow, steeply sloping cobblestone streets, its houses painted bright blues and yellows and pinks. The men, after so many weeks in the mud and the filth of the Cuban savannah, marveled at the interior courtyards, glimpsed through wrought iron lattices, full of green bowers and marble fountains. “It is exactly like a picture of Toledo, narrow streets, Moorish windows, steep hills and little two-wheeled carts that struggle up and down the steep and narrow lanes over the rough paved streets,” Wood wrote home to his wife. “This town is just as strange and uncommon as some old place in Spain.” Which is not to say it was pretty. Santiago had a reputation as the dirtiest city in the Caribbean, and a good part of that was well deserved. “Piles of mango skins, ashes, old bones, filthy rags, dung, and kitchen refuse of all sorts lay here and there on the broken and neglected pavements,” wrote the correspondent George Kennan. “Every hole and crevice in the uneven pavement was filled with rotting organic matter washed down from the higher levels by the frequent rains, and when the sea breeze died away at night the whole atmosphere of the city seemed to be pervaded by a sickly, indescribable odor of corruption and decay.”55
They kept on, marching until they reached the Plaza de Armas, the center point of the city, which sat on a bluff overlooking the harbor. While the accompanying enlisted men waited outside, the officers entered the governor’s palace, where at 11 a.m. they were treated to lunch. Finally, at 11:45, the officers returned to the plaza, the men stood at attention, and a pair of soldiers attached an American flag to a pole in the center of the square. At noon, as soon as the bells of the nearby Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción had finished their peal, General Chambers McKibbin shouted, “Present arms!” The flag flew up the pole. An honor guard fired several volleys, and the entire assembly sang the National Anthem, then “Rally Round the Flag.” After 384 years of Spanish rule, Santiago had fallen.56
• • •
Most of the Rough Riders had watched the surrender ceremony from afar, back in their position at San Juan Hill. They were miles away, but when they saw the flag go up through their field glasses, a great roar erupted along the line. The war would continue—the Spanish still controlled most of Cuba, and all of Puerto Rico. But the Rough Riders’ first campaign was over, and they had won.
Less enthused were the thousands of Cuban soldiers who were still maintaining the siege on the northern and western sides of the city. Their leaders had been excluded from the surrender ceremony, and they resented that the Americans treated the captured Spanish, who were their enemies, better than the Cubans, who were their allies. Armed rebels were not allowed to enter Santiago, even as thousands of Spanish soldiers were permitted to roam its streets freely. Worst of all, Shafter decided that the Spanish civilian government in Santiago would remain in charge—meaning that, for all of the Cubans’ sacrifices, at least in the day-to-day life in the city, nothing much had changed. Frank Norris captured the mood in those first few arrogant days of American control: “There was no thought of humanitarian principles then, the war was not a ‘crusade,’ we were not fighting for Cubans just then, it was not for disinterested motives that we were there sabred and revolvered and carbined. Santiago was ours—was ours, ours, by the sword we had acquired, we, Americans, with no one to help.”57
On July 17, a few hours after the surrender ceremony, General García, in command of the Cuban rebels around Santiago, resigned in protest. He had worked with and under Shafter for too long in the hopes that the result would be immediate Cuban independence. Now, with the Americans in charge and the Cubans pushed to the margins, he was convinced he had made a mistake. He later withdrew his resignation, and went on to lead a series of rebel assaults against the Spanish that summer, but his anger spoke for thousands. He also sent a letter of rebuke to Shafter. “I have not been honored with a single word from yourself informing me about the negotiations for peace or the terms of the capitulation by the Spaniards,” he wrote. “I only know of both events by public reports.” Did Shafter dismiss his men as “savages ignoring the rules of civilized warfare”? It was true, García conceded, that the Cuban rebels were “a poor, ragged army,” but no worse off than “the heroes of Saratoga and Yorktown.” Though his letter, published a few weeks later in American papers, set off a small storm of anti-Shafter protest, nothing came of it, and the American general never publicly responded to his Cuban counterpart.58
• • •
On Monday, July 18, the Rough Riders were ordered off the line and up to a new camp in the foothills near El Caney, five miles away. By then nearly half the regiment was dead or incapacitated, either from wounds or, increasingly, disease. El Caney, despite being ravaged by battle and its aftereffects, was a welcome change from the rigors of the line. There was a clean pond in which the men could bathe. They camped in a nearby field, which was covered in green grass and mango trees, and here and there with cocoa palms. Some set up tents on the grounds of the Duerot mansion, the French consul’s country home, with its terraced gardens and marble fountains. The ruined buildings provided ample wood for fires, which had been forbidden at the front. And after the surrender of Santiago, officers could go into town for food, which was now flowing into the port. One day Roosevelt went to Santiago with a team of men and a few wagons and bought several hundred dollars’ worth of rice, oatmeal, potatoes, prunes, and tomatoes. Some of the men pooled their money to buy beef cattle off a ship that had just arrived from South America, and shared the resulting steaks with the entire regiment. Another welcome item was tobacco, which was finally, after almost a month, arriving in reliable quantities. Kirk McCurdy, a trooper from Philadelphia whose brother Allen also served, formed a scavenging party that found corn, lima beans, and cucumbers, the first fresh vegetables the men had seen since before Tampa. Roosevelt, at least, was happy. “I am more than satisfied even though I could die of yellow fever tomorrow, for at least I feel satisfied that I have done something which enables me to leave a name to the children of which they can rightly be proud and which will serve in some sense as a substitute for not leaving them more money,” he wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge on July 19. Four days later, he wrote a letter to Alger, suggesting that the regiment be sent immediately to join the next campaign, the invasion of Puerto Rico—though he declined to mention that less than half of the men were capable of going.59
Roosevelt didn’t bother with drills during the two weeks the regiment spent at El Caney, but he tried to institute an exercise regime. Several t
imes a week, he would gather his healthiest men and go for a hike in the Sierra Maestra foothills. Another time he swam out to the Merrimac with one of his officers, ignoring the small sharks that joined them along the way. But whereas these efforts seemed to strengthen him, his men overexerted themselves. “The result was that half of the party were down with some kind of sickness the next day,” Roosevelt wrote of his hikes. Despite the change in scenery, the men were getting sicker. They had been half starved for so long that many now overate, and suffered the consequences—which were bad enough on their own, but the resulting cramps and diarrhea weakened them to the point where serious disease began to course through the camp. Malaria and dysentery were common, though the real fear was of yellow fever. Roosevelt’s orderly, Henry Bardshar, was among those afflicted; he recovered but lost eighty pounds in the process. By July 18 the regiment had just 275 healthy men, and the number was ticking down hourly.60
The camp grew increasingly unsanitary. The pond filled with dirt and scum; the grassy plain became a mudflat. It rained daily, and the fields had no drainage. “We attempted to keep reasonably clean by alternately washing our uniforms while wearing underclothes, and vice versa, but the humidity was so great that our clothing was soaking wet all the time,” recalled trooper Royal Prentice. They each took a tablespoon of quinine a day, which seemed to help a bit but also made some men vomit or hallucinate. “We are having a terrible time just at present,” wrote Ralph McFie, a private, to his cousin. “I am safe in saying that 4/5 of the men in our troop are sick and unfit for duty and they do not seem to recover as soon as they should. . . . We have the regular chills and fever and malaria, but most of us are attacked by spells of severe cramps and vomiting and are unable to eat or keep anything on our stomachs.”61
Word of the worsening conditions began to appear in American papers, thanks in no small part to Richard Harding Davis. Up until then he had been a stalwart defender of the military effort. But he saw that Roosevelt was growing privately critical of the War Department’s handling of the campaign, and that gave Davis the tacit permission to open his own attack. In a scathing article for the Herald, he described the conditions of the camps and the hospitals, pinning the blame less on Shafter than on the military’s overall incompetence. “I do not see how men not made of iron can stand such a state of affairs much longer,” he wrote. “The expedition was prepared in ignorance and conducted in a series of blunders.” The article was read widely—allegedly all the way to Spain, where it was reprinted as evidence that Toral should have held out just a little longer.62
Santiago itself was slowly moving toward some semblance of stability. The refugees returned, and the remaining food stores were opened. For their hospital, American troops were using the Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, underneath which lay the grave of Cuba’s first governor, Diego Velázquez. Many of the Rough Riders spoke some Spanish from living in the Southwest, and when they traveled to town with Roosevelt or another officer to pick up supplies, they would flirt with the women, young and old, who hung out their second-story windows waving handkerchiefs at them. They enjoyed being able to sit in a café once again, and be served like regular customers. “We had coffee served in little cups that was as strong as lye and round, hard bread and rice with guava jelly,” Royal Prentice wrote.63
Reporters took to hanging out at the Café Venus, on the Plaza de Armas, or the nearby Anglo-American Club. Roosevelt, during another visit, stopped by the club to brag about his regiment’s performance in battle. “You may have heard a father talk like that when the boy had scored the winning touchdown in a big football game,” said one correspondent, Ralph Paine. Roosevelt returned a few days later with the draft of a letter he wanted the gathered correspondents to review—and, without saying as much, to write about for their newspapers. He called it a “round robin,” signed by all the top officers, and it indicted in detail the War Department’s handling of the campaign. Among other things, it said, the department had failed to send sufficient medical supplies and staff, and now thousands of men were at risk of dying from disease. “If we are kept here it will in all human possibility mean an appalling disaster, for the surgeons here estimate that over half the army, if kept here during the sickly season, will die,” the letter read. With Santiago fallen, there was no point in keeping them in Cuba any longer.64
“What do you boys think of it?” Roosevelt asked the reporters. “Have you any changes to suggest? . . . There is no more use for the army here, and it is dying on its feet, but the War Department refuses to listen.” It was signed by most of the high-ranking officers in the Fifth Corps, but it identified Roosevelt as the author. “As a volunteer officer,” Roosevelt told the reporters, “I am willing to be the scapegoat.”65
There was more to the story than that. It began several days earlier, on August 2, when Secretary Alger had sent a cable to Shafter suggesting that he move the men inland, to higher and presumably drier climes, where they could rest and prepare to push westward toward Havana, which was still in Spanish hands. To Shafter, this would be suicide—whatever his skills or deficiencies as a general, he had a keen sense of a soldier’s limits, and he knew that scores were already dying of disease in Siboney. Keeping them any longer in Cuba would destroy his army. Roosevelt agreed. Every time the men moved, they got sicker, and living off the land was proving impossible. “To have sent the troops there would have been simple butchery,” Roosevelt wrote in his memoir. By then there were fewer than 175 Rough Riders on the active-duty roster.66
The next day Shafter called together his top officers—Roosevelt, Wood, seven generals, and the medical officers. Wood had since been appointed military governor of Santiago, and Roosevelt had been promoted to full colonel and put in Wood’s place, in charge of the Second Brigade. The situation was untenable, Shafter told them, but Washington wasn’t listening. Someone needed to talk to the press. The problem was that the generals and medical officers were all Regular Army men, and any sign of dissent would end their careers. But, Shafter went on, Roosevelt, being a famous public figure and a volunteer, could talk to a reporter, and the worst that could happen would be that he’d be on his way back to civilian life earlier than he’d expected. Roosevelt hesitated. He wanted to help his men get out of Cuba, but he suspected that if the source of the leak got out, Shafter might deny everything and leave Roosevelt to blame. But when Wood suggested he write a letter to Shafter that the general himself could then leak to the press—creating a paper trail that Shafter couldn’t deny—he agreed.67
Later that day Roosevelt approached Bardshar with several rolls of paper. “I have a letter here I want you to type for me if you can,” he said, and showed him to a typewriter he had recovered in Santiago. When Bardshar finished, he handed the pages to Roosevelt, adding, “If you send it to the War Department, they will have you shot at sunrise.” Roosevelt pared it back a little, but not by much. This was the draft he brought to the correspondents at the Anglo-American Club, and it was searing—a fearless indictment of Washington’s handling of the campaign.68
He then pointed at a reporter from the Associated Press to come with him. The two went back to Shafter’s tent, where the general was sitting by his camp desk. Roosevelt moved to hand the letter to Shafter, but the general waved his hand absently.69
“I don’t want to take it; do whatever you wish with it,” Shafter said.
But Roosevelt, worried that the general was clinging to the possibility that he could later deny any knowledge of the exchange, insisted that he at least touch the letter. Shafter relented, and the two of them, still each gripping a side of the paper, handed it to the reporter. Wood and the other officers also wrote their own statement, as did the medical officers. Those were also leaked to the press, and news of their existence spread rapidly. Three days later, the Army was ordered home.70
• • •
At eleven in the morning on July 28, 1898, hundreds of New York’s most prominent residents—Harrimans, Stuyvesants, Stewarts�
��began to arrive at St. Mark’s Protestant Episcopal Church, at Second Avenue and 10th Street in Manhattan, to pay their respects to Hamilton Fish. Edward Cooper, a former mayor, was there, and so was Thomas Platt, the power broker who had pushed Roosevelt out of his job as police commissioner. Several thousand more stood outside, peering through the wrought iron fence that surrounded the churchyard. All of New York had followed the exploits of the Rough Riders, and if they didn’t know Hamilton Fish in life they now mourned him in death. As the service began the crowd outside pressed in closer, and dozens of police officers were needed to create a cordon around the church.71
St. Mark’s was a fitting location: Fish’s namesake, Alexander Hamilton, had helped incorporate the church, a century earlier, on land once belonging to one of Fish’s maternal ancestors, Peter Stuyvesant. An honor guard drawn from Fish’s Columbia fraternity, Delta Psi, carried his flag-draped casket into the sanctuary, past five massive wreaths of pond lilies and pink roses, on which small American flags were printed. The music was modern—“Asa’s Death” by Edvard Grieg, the Funeral March from Richard Wagner’s Siegfried. As a choir sang “Rock of Ages,” seventy-five of Fish’s Delta Psi brothers filed up to the casket, upon which they laid sprigs of evergreen.72
The service over, pallbearers carried Fish’s casket outside; they mounted it on a hearse and then his family led the grieving hundreds up Second Avenue. Thousands lined the street for a glimpse of the procession as it made its way to Grand Central Terminal. The family and the casket rode together in a special train north along the Hudson River to the town of Garrison, where they put their son into the ground. Along with them went an honor guard of Rough Riders from Troop A, who had stayed behind in Tampa and traveled to New York for the funeral. At the graveside, they pointed their rifles at the sky and fired three volleys. Hamilton Fish, among the first Rough Riders killed in battle, was the first one home.73
