The Roughest Riders (27 page)

The race continued through the afternoon and evening of July 26, throughout the night, and into the morning of the next day, with
little time for sleep or rest. With Company L policing Yauco, the rest of Garretson's troops pursued the Spaniards across the thirty-five-mile breadth of the island for the next two days until the remaining defenders—those who had not dropped out into hiding places in the fields, woods, and other remote areas—made it into Arecibo, on Puerto Rico's northern coast, on July 29. The US troops, who had thoroughly routed Puig and his men, now controlled most of the southern part of the island. Four days later, Puig took the only course he deemed honorable for a military leader in his position: he raised his pistol to his head, pulled the trigger, and sent a bullet flying through his brain.

The battle for total control over the island of Puerto Rico was almost over, only a few days after it began.

P
uig's suicide, as honorable as it seemed to him, turned out to have been a desperate act of misdirected idealism. No sooner had the Americans come storming through Yauco, the town Puig was entrusted with defending, than Yauco's mayor, Francisco Mejia, switched sides and embraced the invaders as saviors. Their arrival was “an act of the God of the just,” he said.

“Today the citizens of Puerto Rico assist in one of her most beautiful festivals,” he pronounced in an address to the local populace. “The sun of America shines upon our mountains and valleys this day of July, 1898. It is a day of glorious remembrance for each son of this beloved isle, because for the first time there waves over it the flag of the Stars, planted in the name of the United States of America by the Major-General of the American army, General Miles.”

Around the same time that Mejia was extolling the virtues of the victors, new American ships carrying more troops arrived in the bay at Guánica with orders to proceed east toward Ponce with its deeper harbor. A column of troops marched in the same direction, tracking the progress of the reinforcements. The Spanish soldiers defending Ponce absconded to the north, while the Puerto Ricans
formed a delegation to greet the Americans as soon as they entered the city. The troops aboard the newly arriving ships could see the US flag flying in Ponce's harbor, as well as the flags of other nations except for Spain. Even before the American vessels had anchored offshore, the townspeople had gathered to celebrate their liberation from the Spanish stranglehold. Miles lost no time issuing guidelines for his men's behavior on land, to ensure they did not jeopardize the trust of the locals. He then set up his headquarters, using the existing network of underwater cable lines to communicate directly with Washington, DC, which included a message to Alger informing him of his prior change in battle plans.

On July 30, the French ambassador to the United States, Jules Cambon, sent a message to President McKinley on Spain's behalf to discuss peace terms. But McKinley was not yet ready to negotiate for peace. With the Buffalo Soldiers securing Yauco and the rest of Miles's troops commanding most of the land in the south, a larger invasion force was closing in on Puerto Rico from the north. McKinley would not settle for anything less than unconditional surrender. Again, Fajardo was the target, with the conquest of San Juan as the ultimate goal.

The Spanish did not go down without a heroic struggle, even with most of the population turning against them and cheering on the Americans. Three US ships—the
Amphitrite
,
Leyden
, and
Hannibal
—passed along the coast near Fajardo on August 2 and could see the Stars and Stripes already flying from the lighthouse, raised high by the local citizenry. A reconnaissance party of American sailors and marines, plus Puerto Rican volunteers, quickly swarmed onto shore and moved within a half mile of the town center, located five miles from the coast.

There were only twenty-five Spanish soldiers on hand to defend the town, which they abandoned shortly after the invaders landed. A local civic leader, Dr. Santiago Veve Calzada, sent message after
message to San Juan pleading for help to fend off the American attack. When it became clear that no assistance would be forthcoming, Calzada went to the American encampment by himself and asked for mercy for the townspeople, which the Americans were happy to provide. The Spanish subsequently made several attempts to recapture lost ground, suffering heavy losses for almost two more weeks, with town after town falling in the face of the American onslaught. Finally, on August 13, it was officially over when the warring parties signed the Treaty of Paris, which was ratified by the US Senate and signed into law by McKinley on February 6, 1899, and approved by Spain on March 19.

According to the terms of the agreement, Spain ceded Puerto Rico, its last colony in the Western Hemisphere, which was annexed by the United States. The war in Puerto Rico was costly to Spain in lives, prestige, and standing as a major global empire. The Spanish forces on the island totaled 18,000 men, and of that many, combined with their Puerto Rican allies, there were 105 casualties, including 17 dead and 88 wounded, with an additional 324 taken prisoners of war. The American losses were light by comparison, with 40 wounded and only 3 men killed of the 15,400 troop landed over the course of the campaign.

As a result of the victory in Puerto Rico, Nelson A. Miles became the Douglas MacArthur, so to speak, of an earlier generation. Just as MacArthur became ruler of Japan following its surrender in 1945, so did Miles serve as the first US military governor of Puerto Rico when the war ended in 1898. His change in military strategy was totally vindicated by his success, and it put to rest any question of disciplinary action by Alger, who basked in the reflected glory of Miles's conquest of the island.

For the Buffalo Soldiers, the battle in Puerto Rico was a brief prelude to the struggle that was about to erupt on more distant soil. The Philippines, another region of the globe infested with a toxic variety of tropical diseases, was exploding. And, notwithstanding the ailments the black troops succumbed to in Cuba, the government of the United States still believed they could more readily withstand those diseases than their white counterparts.

This time around, the Buffalo Soldiers would be fighting not Spaniards but Filipino
insurrectos
, led by a fiery revolutionary named Emilio Aguinaldo, known among his men as Aquino. Aquino established his own ad hoc government in the northern region of Luzon and drew up plans to attack the American occupiers in and around Manila to the south. Admiral George Dewey had defeated the Spanish fleet protecting the Philippine Islands, but the United States failed to put enough boots on the ground to secure order throughout the Spanish colony.

Julius Caesar had articulated a formula two millennia earlier: if you want to totally shut down a country, you need to send in an occupying army equal to 2 percent of the population. The population of the Philippines in 1899 was about 7 million, which, by Caesar's calculations, called for an American occupation force of 140,000 men, more than ten times the number the US government put in place.

Aquino and his followers didn't care for American domination any more than they liked being trampled under the boot of Spain, and he raised an army of forty thousand men to clear their homeland of the twelve thousand US troops stationed there. Independence from foreign rule was what the insurrectos wanted, and they didn't much care if the colonialists called themselves Spaniards or Americans. The Americans would soon learn that they were confronting a far more dangerous enemy in the Filipinos than they had against the Spaniards, especially as the locals' tactics transformed
from traditional military maneuvers to guerrilla-style fighting. American forces realized it would be a different experience to combat dedicated rebels rising up for liberty on their own turf—much as American revolutionaries did against the British—rather than to battle an occupying force of underequipped colonial soldiers.

Orders went out for the four contingents of Buffalo Soldiers that had fought in Cuba, plus two newly authorized volunteer black units—the Forty-Eighth and Forty-Ninth Infantries—to report to the Presidio in San Francisco, from which they would embark for the Philippines. The Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth were the first to arrive in San Francisco at the beginning of 1899, and they landed in the Philippines over the course of two days, July 30 and 31. The Ninth and Tenth were sent on the long journey across the Pacific Ocean as reinforcements, arriving in September, while the Forty-Eighth and Forty-Ninth completed the Buffalo Soldiers' presence on the islands during a three-week stretch between February 2 and 25. Altogether, seven thousand Buffalo Soldiers would see combat in this remote corner of the globe.

The hostilities erupted when Aquino launched an attack against the American troops on the island on February 2, 1899, and declared war against the United States two days later. But before the Buffalo Soldiers left the Presidio, black resentment of yet another colonial war against dark-skinned people had already begun to mount. Ida Wells-Barnett, an African American journalist who had long been advocating equal treatment for black citizens in her articles and speeches, told the Afro-American Council in the nation's capital on January 7, 1899, that “Negroes should oppose expansion [abroad] until the government was able to protect the Negro at home.” Mob violence and anarchy brutalized blacks in the North and South, she said.

She was not alone in her opposition to American imperialism, particularly as it involved risking the lives and limbs of black soldiers to feed the country's growing appetite for a global empire. While the United States is embarking on a “hare-brained attempt to go into the colonizing business against its own Declaration of Independence,” stated an editorial in the
Washington Bee
on June 24, 1899, “and while she is making such frantic clamor of some kind of independence which she has up her sleeve for Cuba and the Filipinos, would it be extremely wise for the American Negro to show to the entire civilized world the class of liberty they enjoy here?”

“The colored American is for ‘expansion,' but he wants expansion on lines consistent with the human principles, for which he has given his labor and shed his blood in four wars,” read an article in the
Colored American
on December 2, 1899. A prominent African American bishop, Henry M. Turner, called the crusade in the Philippines “an unholy war of conquest.” Some black voices defended the war. “It is now said that colored troops are to be sent to the Philippines. The sooner the better,” editorialized the
Indianapolis Freeman
, a black publication, on July 1, 1899. “The enemy of the country is a common enemy and the color of the face has nothing to do with it.” Again, on October 7, the same newspaper declared, “It is quite time for the Negroes to quit claiming kindred with every black face from Hannibal down. Hannibal was no Negro, nor was Aguinaldo. We are to share in the glories or defeats of our country's wars; that is patriotism pure and simple.”