The Spanish American War, Lessons Learned the Hard Way, Lessons Ignored and Lessons Forgotten.

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It was not just the American army who got sick on rotten rations in 1898. But it was an army VETERAN that changed the way the USG handled food production in the United States, which as a whole nation was being abused as the army was.

Old Time Farm Crime: The Embalmed Beef Scandal of 1898
NOV 08, 2013
Andrew Amelinckx

They say the beef smelled like an embalmed dead body. By the end of the scandal, it would irrevocably change how Americans dealt with their food.

But that alleged rank beef – along with a groundbreaking book – helped usher in modern food safety in the United States.

In 1898 the cry of “Remember the Maine,” a reference to the possible bombing of a U.S. battleship in Havana harbor, was whipping the country into a war frenzy. New York newspapers, especially those owned by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, helped rattle the sabers with lurid accounts of alleged atrocities committed by the Spanish in Cuba. The U.S. had been closely following the Cubans’ fight to free themselves from their colonial masters and when the Maine blew up under mysterious circumstances that February, killing 266 of her crew, it was only a matter of time before Spain and America would clash.

When war was declared in April 1898, the Army was ill-prepared for battle. At the time there were just over 28,000 available troops, but after a call for volunteers that numbers jumped by nearly 10 times, initially stretching supplies thin. Beyond this, there was little thought put into what changes would be required to fight in the tropics. Besides Cuba, the war would encompass both the Philippines and Puerto Rico. The men were issued heavy wool uniforms, had inadequate medical supplies, and rations that spoiled in the heat, forcing them to mainly subsist on canned beef that was stringy and tasteless at best and possibly sickened or killed some soldiers.

The commander of the Army, Gen. Nelson A. Miles, told a government commission investigating the handling of the war he believed the meat was “defective.”

The commander of the Army, Gen. Nelson A. Miles, told a government commission investigating the handling of the war he believed the meat was “defective.”

In Cuba, the troops ate the canned meat while in Puerto Rico the men were given a combination of canned beef and refrigerated beef, and it was this latter meat – 327 tons worth – that Miles was especially disturbed by, telling the commission the meat had an “odor like an embalmed dead body.”

“It was sent as food. If they wouldn’t have taken that, they would have had to go hungry,” he told the Dodge commission, which was named for Maj. Gen. Grenville Dodge, who headed it up.

Miles believed the chemicals used to treat the meat were responsible for the “great sickness in the American army,” and said he had advised against the shipping of beef to Puerto Rico because there were adequate supplies available there.

He characterized the plan as an “experiment” for which “someone in Washington “was responsible. That person, he said, was The Commissary General of Subsistence, Brigadier General Charles P. Eagan.

“Reports were frequently sent in to [the Commissary General], but he seemed to insist that the beef be used,” said Miles.

Eagan vigorously defended his handling of the supplies during the war and of the quality of the beef in particular. Had he left it at that, things may have subsided, but the hot-tempered general instead went on a mellifluous tirade against Miles and called him out like only a Gilded Age gentleman could.

“He lies in his throat, he lies in his heart, he lies in every hair on his head and every pore in his body,” he began, just getting started. “I wish to force the lie back in his throat, covered with the contents of a camp latrine.”

Eagan heaped contempt on his superior officer, telling the commission that Miles should be barred from polite society.

Eagan’s lawyer called his client’s ranting “the natural outburst of a man suffering under an unjust accusation.” Eagan’s superiors called it “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” He was court martialed and dismissed, but President William McKinley commuted the sentence and put Eagan on paid suspension for close to two years and then allowed him to retire.

The Dodge commission determined that there was nothing wrong with the beef and that the confirmed cases of food poisoning were due to some canned beef being mishandled.

The commission found that the refrigerated beef was not “subjected to or treated with any chemicals” and that shipping the beef from the U.S., rather than procuring fresh meat in Puerto Rica, “was wise and desirable.”

But the controversy wouldn’t die. Eventually a so-called military Beef Court (yes, there is such a thing as Beef Court) was convened with the task of trying to get to the bottom of the embalmed beef issue. In an investigation that lasted nearly as long as the war itself, the court came up with similar findings as the Dodge commission, concluding that Miles had made unjustified allegations concerning the refrigerated beef. The court also chastised Eagan for procuring thousands of pounds of canned beef that was “practically untried and unknown.”

Perhaps the embalmed beef story would have ended there but for two events: the publishing of “The Jungle,” – a muckraking novel written by socialist journalist named Upton Sinclair – and the assassination of McKinley, which elevated Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency.

“The Jungle,” published in 1906, was intended to throw light onto the deplorable living and working conditions of America’s immigrants, but instead it became a sensation for exposing the unsanitary conditions of Chicago’s meatpacking plants. Sinclair’s stomach-churning descriptions of the industry’s practices stuck in reader’s minds more than the storyline of a Lithuanian man and his family trying to survive under the harsh conditions typical of the era.

“I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,” Sinclair would later say. “I realized with bitterness that I had been made into a ‘celebrity,’ not because the public cared anything about the workers, but simply because the public did not want to eat tubercular beef.”

Many of the descriptions of industry practices, which included allowing meat to be stored in rooms where water would drip over it and rats would defecate in great mounds upon it, came from Sinclair’s first hand experience. Before writing the novel he had spent seven weeks working undercover at a plant for a series of articles for a socialist newspaper.

Roosevelt, who had fought in the Spanish-American War before becoming U.S. president, had been forced to eat some of the “embalmed beef” and believed it to be tainted. He was also disgusted by Sinclair’s description of the meat packing industry’s practices and looked further into the author’s allegations. A report by Labor Commissioner Charles Neill and a social worker named James Reynolds, who Roosevelt had sent to inspect Chicago’s meat packing plants, confirmed most of Sinclair’s claims.

Roosevelt pushed Congress to act, and in 1906 the Pure Food and Drug Act as well as the Meat Inspection Act became law, forever changing the way America dealt with its food.

There is an expression... "The stink starts at the head of the rotten fish." This one was all on William McKinley. 

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Contrafactual history to this point.



The Spaniards might have been better advised to have adopted a softer line with Ansaldo. The Cristobol Colon could have been armed with EEOC Type S 8 inch /45 pattern guns in twin mounts forward and aft as was the case with the Argentine cruiser; ARA San Martin.

Along with a Pedro de Aragorn (never put into Spanish Service), the First Spanish Cruiser Squadron might have been better able to put up a fight against Schley.    


 

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More Spanish options with the restriction being the Antonio Cánovas del Castillo government forward into the Práxedes Mateo Sagasta regime realistic possibilities come to mind.

In that light, one has the problems of practical politics in Spain. Those two men and the parties they led in the 1890s, see-sawed and swapped power in a shell game called the turno pacifico. Neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals were interested in social, legal, economic or military reform in Spain at that time.

This produced an inertia in society and form of social control that suited the Spanish polity until external pressure forced systemic disruption of that metro society. I will not go into that here; but suffice it to say that 1898 was a shattering year that defined Spain for the 20th century.

Generation of 1898. Precursors and the “Problem of Spain.”
The Generation of 1898. The “Problem of Spain.”
The Generation of 1898 was a group of literary intellectuals –first identified in 1913 by José Martínez Ruiz (better known as Azorín, 1873-1967)— who contributed significantly towards analysing the “Problem of Spain” (a catch phrase of the time).

There is no unanimous agreement regarding those who made up the Generation, but the following are generally considered members: essayist Azorín, novelist, poet, essayist, philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), novelist Pío Baroja (1872-1956), poet Antonio Machado, essayist Ramiro de Maeztu (of early days before becoming a Catholic fascist, 1874-1936), novelist, poet and dramatist Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866-1936), and dramatist Jacinto Benavente (1866-1954).

These writers were inspired by a patriotic urge to uncover the causes of Spain’s political and social malaise and suggest remedies to cure that illness. In this, they formed part of a wider group, known as regeneracionistas (regenerationists), who sought solutions that would help their country recover those qualities that had once made it Europe’s most powerful country.

Background.

What was it that triggered this intense preoccupation with Spain? Why the year 1898? Briefly, during the 19th century, Spain suffered the indignity of losing all that remained of its transoceanic empire at a time when its European rivals, Britain and France, were expanding their overseas territories. The loss culminated in 1898 in a humiliating defeat by the fledgling USA in the Spanish-American war; it quickly became known in Spain as El Desastre (The Disaster). The defeat crystalised in dramatic fashion Spain’s political impotence, and triggered an outpouring of writings questioning and analysing the country’s malaise.

However, this was nothing new. As the most powerful nation in Europe in the 16th century, with an empire over which the sun never set, it was predictable that at some time its glory would begin to dim, which would trigger enquiries over its demise. That started as early as the first years of the 17th century. Social and economic commentators known as arbitristas drew a picture of poverty and economic disparity far removed from the illusion of imperial greatness projected by Spain’s ruling class. Awareness continued in the 18th century in the writings of an enlightened, intellectual minority. It was a period when Spain –despite its huge empire– was reduced to a junior role in Europe as Britain, France and Austria called the shots. In the 19th century, political and social convulsions only emphasised the country’s degeneration or disintegration; it could not manage its own affairs leave alone control its colonies. Internally its geographical integrity was threatened by a renewed regionalism, externally it lost all its transoceanic territories.

The buzzword for the remedy sought against degeneration was “regeneration.” Different solutions were proposed depending on the political or social stripe of those advocating changes. Suggested changes included Europeanisation (following the industrial success of Spain’s northern neighbours), renovation of the political order and elimination of corruption, agrarian reform, spiritual reawakening, a crusade against the evils of liberalism, and an overhaul of an inefficient education system.

In this post, we’ll look at the approach to the “Problem of Spain” and the solutions sought to overcome the country’s malaise from two perspectives: 1. A practical approach through the creation of an educational institute; 2. A literary approach through prose fiction. Each demonstrates that the Generation of ‘98 was following a well-trodden path and that their concerns complemented those of that Generation. A third approach –an essay– can be read in Idearium español by Angel Ganivet (1865-1898).

Institución Libre de Enseñanza. Free Institute of Learning, 1876.

One of the most innovative steps towards solving Spain’s ills was the establishment in Madrid in 1876 of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institute of Learning) by professors who had been fired from their positions at the University of Madrid in 1875. Their goal was to create a secular and liberal alternative to the rote-learning educational system controlled by the Catholic Church. By initiating this, they hoped to arm Spain with leaders able to guide the country unhindered by restrictive and prejudiced policies inherited from the past.

Initially established as a free, independent university to advance the study of modern science and philosophy and prepare an elite for the modernisation of Spain, it soon ran into difficulties and turned its attention to primary and secondary education.

The moving spirit behind the Institución was Francisco Giner de los Ríos (1839-1915) a liberally minded teacher much influenced by his mentor, Julián Sanz del Río (1814-69), who had been educated in Germany and introduced to the works of a little-known German philosopher, Christian Friedrich Krause (1781-1832).

Krausismo as adopted in Spain under Giner’s guidance placed great emphasis on moral and intellectual integrity. The Institución fostered an atmosphere where questioning of the status quo was encouraged and curiosity nurtured. Children were allowed to make up their own minds without prejudice and based on rational thought and deduction. Self-reliance was fostered and pupils were urged to practice punctuality and self discipline. Religion was not avoided, but no preference was given to a particular confession.

Modern, practical teaching methods were introduced and mere memorisation rejected. These pedagogical innovations were accompanied by a modern syllabus that included “courses on art, folklore and technical subjects; pupils were encouraged to play games and take excursions into the countryside” (Carr 470). They were taught to appreciate music and the culture of common people. The Institución sought to replace the traditional teacher-oriented dominance of the classroom by establishing a more personal contact between teacher and pupils. And, truly radical for the time, girls were accepted and allowed to participate in all activities, including outdoor sports, alongside boys.

The Institución Libre de Enseñanza was like a breath of fresh air in the stultified atmosphere of education at the time, where state education was severely ill-equipped and two thirds was in the hands of religious orders. Both Azorín and Antonio Machado enjoyed the benefits of its education.

The Institute’s influence was felt in the creation of a foundation for the Study of Historical and Scientific Research in 1907 to provide scholarships for students to study abroad. More far reaching in its impact was the establishment of the Residencia de Estudiantes (Students’ Residence) in Madrid in 1910. The Residencia would remain an intellectual centre until the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), lodging such celebrities as the poet/dramatist Federico García Lorca, painter Salvador Dalí and filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and hosting numerous intellectuals invited to give lectures, e. g. composer Manuel de Falla, poets Pedro Salinas and Rafael Alberti and philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset. Predictably, militant Catholics and right-wing politicians viewed the Institute and the Residence and the liberal, secular values they championed with considerable alarm. Some right-wing politicians even claimed that they contributed in creating the atmosphere leading to the Civil War. Predictably, with the outbreak of the War, the Institute was closed down and its assets confiscated.

Prose Fiction.

The last quarter of the 19th century witnessed a flowering of the realistic novel which developed from the attachment of Romanticism to costumbrismo (interest in and portrayal of local, folkloric customs and manners). Among the best-known authors are Emilia Bardo Bazán (1851-1921), Leopoldo Alas (Clarín, 1852-1901) and Vicente Blasco Ibañez (1867-1928), whose finest novels describe life –without Romantic nostalgia– respectively in Galicia, Asturias and Valencia.

Nevertheless, the most outstanding novelist was Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920), a prolific writer whose work portrays a vast panorama of Spanish society. Born in the Canary Islands, he moved to Madrid when 19, quickly abandoned his law studies and adapted himself to the pleasant life of the capital before settling down to become an acute observer of Spanish life and politics. He travelled widely in Spain and England and France, and was a great admirer of Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac with whom he has frequently been compared.

In 1876, the year the Institución Libre de Enseñanza was founded, Galdós published Dona Perfecta a novel of contemporary social life in rural Spain and one of the most widely read of his works. Set in the fictional town of Orbajosa, the plot centres on the conflict that arises after Pepe Rey, a young liberally-educated engineer, arrives to marry his cousin, Rosario. The marriage has been arranged by Doña Perfecta, Pepe’s aunt, a devout, wealthy and influential widow in a town dominated by narrow minded religiosity. Foremost among the religious cast is Don Inocencio, Doña Perfecta’s spiritual adviser and canon of the cathedral whose plans for his niece’s son to marry Rosario look to be foiled by Pepe Rey’s arrival. Don Inocencio’s sanctimonious and feigned inferiority vis a vis Pepe’s “modern” outlook allows him to twist Pepe’s words and negatively influence Doña Perfecta’s attitude towards her nephew. Predictably, Pepe –the outsider—soon finds himself battling the reactionary ideas of the Orbajosans. Obstacles grow to the proposed marriage prompting the frustrated Pepe to plot to elope with Rosario. However, he is tragically shot and killed, at the instance of Doña Perfecta, by one of her henchmen, and the luckless Rosario is consigned to an asylum.

Widely recognised as a thesis novel, Galdós converted the religious intolerance and narrowmindedness of the Orbajosans into a cautionary, allegorical tale of the dangers facing “modern” Spain (i. e. Pepe) in its struggle with the reactionary views of “old,” provincial Spain, Orbajosa (the etymology of which is possibly twofold: Urbs Augusta –Venerable Town—or equally appropriate Orb Ajosa – Garlic Town!).

Sources.
Barton, Simon A History of Spain New York 2nd. ed. 2009.
Carr, Raymond Spain 1808-1939 Oxford 1966.
Esdaile, Charles J. Spain in the Liberal Age: From Constitution to Civil War, 1808-1939 Oxford 2000.
Perez Galdos, Benito Doña Perfecta ed. Rodolfo Cardona, New York: Dell 1965. In Spanish.
Turner, Harriet “Benito Pérez Galdós” in The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, ed, David T. Gies Cambridge 2009, pp. 392-409.
contenidos.educarex.es/mci/2004/30/WebQuest/faseprevia_archivos/www.sispain.org/english/language/1898.html

It is noteworthy to recognize that Francisco Franco would be the eventual answer Spain adopts after forty years of trying to fix 1898. But the contrafactual for Spain in this thread is the 1890s and the 'Turno' is an irreducible blockade to any fanciful notions of efficient political, social or economic reform. What could practical men like General Palmero and Admiral Cervera actually do as ministers to fix the mess their civilian masters misled them into before they have to FIGHT the Americans?

On the Armada side, Cervera, the scientific liberal, had already started some measures by scrapping the line of battleship program and centering new naval policy on the torpedo boat, mines, and the "protected cruiser" and 'fortified ports', which lessons he gleaned from the French Jeune Ecole school and the Confederate States of America naval war. With colleagues like Vilamill and Bustamente and Ordenez, he laid out affordable and effective defense measures that might hold off predator nations like Germany and the United States for awhile, or until the Spanish government could figure out the insurrections in Cuba and the Philippine Archipelago. He knew that the insurrections were nothing the Armada could solve. That was a geopolitical Gordian knot best left to the civilian politicians and or the army.

Marcelo Azcárraga Palmero and José López Domínguez between them had figured out equipment modernization for the army in the field rather well. They did not do much for troop pay, officer training at the mid grades, or a stable non-commissioned officer corps and they certainly did not reform the leader selection process whereby politically connected and incompetent officers advanced to positions of high command based on their political reliability and or bribery. That problem compounded with routine theft of allocated moneys for training pay and supply into officers' pockets, the massive falsification of records and general administrative lying and coverups as to the true state of affairs within the army rather makes any attempt to rectify the Spanish army extremely problematic in a believable counterfactual sense. The solutions are just not achievable beyond a cosmetic sense, unless a ruthless officer purge and merit-based combat-based advancement by survival of the most ruthless and efficient as happens during the Rif War after the Disaster of 1898, happens.  

I suppose that what I write is that Palmero and Cervera have to stay the course in their technical programs for their services and that Domínguez' attempted merit system reform in the army officer corps has to be carried forward by Palmero when he replaces Dominguez in 1895. It makes for a more effective martial resistance within realistic existent means available to Spain and maybe prolongs the agony of colonial divestiture for Spain from a mere year to as long as maybe three years. But this really comes down to Sagasta and Cánovas, between them, deciding to make sure that the military side of the Spanish house is in order as they musical chair their way into revolution and military putsches on the civilian side of things.  

On any sane rational political venue (This is on Sagasta, because Canovas lacked the will or inclination to actually contemplate such a radical course.), the Spanish government should have embraced controlled divestiture, seeking the highest bidders for Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines Archipelago. Whether the colonies ransomed themselves or Berlin, Tokyo or Washington coughed up the money, it would have been a practical way to raise capital for needed investment in Spain. When half of the national budget goes into hanging onto Cuba and the grip slips looser each year, it is time to make that sanity check, Sagasta. That goes triple for the Philippine Islands! $20 million in 1898, which cannot even replace the cost of the Spanish navy the Americans just wrecked; is a lot worse than the $100 million the USG originally offered a decade earlier.        

But would the Spanish people of the 1890s actually accept it? Probably not.

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Can we look at the Americans?

The modern Americans in many aspects resemble the 1890s Spanish with a two party sham system which take turns in power and nothing really changes in the way society is organized and controlled by the 1%er power elite.

That was not the 19th Century America which emerged from the American Civil War and which was still picking up the pieces forty years later. To describe that America in a shorthand, we could characterize it as mainly divided into three mutually hostile regional political factions of Northeast monopoly capitalist dominated and polyglot, the radical political West with its own form of monopoly built around railroads, cattle and oil; and the Old Unreconstructed Confederacy or racist South which was still smarting from decapitalization, the wreckage of war, the physical, and social decimation of the "planter aristocracy" and was all too busy trying to re-enslave the 'free' African Americans among the polity. The American Midwest, filled with populist Know Nothing agrarian interests, shifted like a weathervane to ally with whichever "region" and political faction seemed to have the upper hand at the time.

In the 1870s - 1890s this was the Northeast dominated Republican Party. There were brief stints when the party of rum, Romanism and Rebellion sneaked in (Cleveland for example.).

So, there was a functional one-party state where the monopoly business interests could exercise political power. Nevertheless; as part of that alliance which the Midwest gave the Northeast dominated Republicans, the Republicans had to concede some measure of compromise to Midwest agrarians and the big business West. The Westerners of course needed Northeast capitalists to fund and provide markets and sustain their own business interests and political control.

And in that era of one-party rule, the key to understanding American society was that it was a political and economic powder-keg ready to go off at the slightest mistake in governance. This explains the The Great Betrayal of 1877.

Compromise of 1877
HISTORY.COM EDITORSUPDATED:NOV 27, 2019ORIGINAL:MAR 17, 2011

CONTENTS
Compromise of 1877: The 1876 Election
Compromise of 1877: Election Results
Compromise of 1877: Congress Steps In
Compromise of 1877: The End of Reconstruction

The Compromise of 1877 was an informal agreement between southern Democrats and allies of the Republican Rutherford Hayes to settle the result of the 1876 presidential election and marked the end of the Reconstruction era.

Immediately after the presidential election of 1876, it became clear that the outcome of the race hinged largely on disputed returns from Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina–the only three states in the South with Reconstruction-era Republican governments still in power. As a bipartisan congressional commission debated over the outcome early in 1877, allies of the Republican Party candidate Rutherford Hayes met in secret with moderate southern Democrats in order to negotiate acceptance of Hayes’ election.

The Democrats agreed not to block Hayes’ victory on the condition that Republicans withdraw all federal troops from the South, thus consolidating Democratic control over the region. As a result of the so-called Compromise of 1877 (or Compromise of 1876), Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina became Democratic once again, effectively bringing an end to the Reconstruction era.

Compromise of 1877: The 1876 Election

By the 1870s, support was waning for the racially egalitarian policies of Reconstruction, a series of laws put in place after the Civil War to protect the rights of African Americans, especially in the South. Many southern whites had resorted to intimidation and violence to keep blacks from voting and restore white supremacy in the region.

Beginning in 1873, a series of Supreme Court decisions limited the scope of Reconstruction-era laws and federal support for the so-called Reconstruction Amendments, particularly the 14th Amendment and 15 Amendment, which gave African Americans the status of citizenship and the protection of the Constitution, including the all-important right to vote.

Did you know? After the most disputed election in American history, the Compromise of 1877 put Rutherford Hayes into office as the nation's 19th president; outraged northern Democrats derided Hayes as "His Fraudulency."

In addition, accusations of corruption within the administration of Ulysses S. Grant and an economic depression had heightened discontent with the Republican Party, which had been in the White House since 1861. As the 1876 presidential election approached, the Democrats chose Governor Samuel B. Tilden of New York as their candidate, while the Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, governor of Ohio. In his acceptance of the nomination, Hayes wrote that if elected, he would bring “the blessings of honest and capable local self-government” to the South–in other words, restrict federal enforcement of unpopular Reconstruction-era policies.

Compromise of 1877: Election Results

On Election Day that November, the Democrats appeared to come out on top, winning the swing states of Connecticut, Indiana, New York and New Jersey. By midnight, Tilden had 184 of the 185 electoral votes he needed to win and was leading the popular vote by 250,000. The Republicans refused to accept defeat, however, and accused Democratic supporters of intimidating and bribing African-American voters to prevent them from voting in three southern states–Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina. As of 1876, these were the only remaining states in the South with Republican governments.

In South Carolina, the election had been marred by bloodshed on both sides of the party line. Supporters of the Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wade Hampton, a former Confederate general, had used violence and intimidation to confront the African-American voting majority. A clash between black militia and armed whites in Hamburg in July ended in the death of five militiamen after their surrender, while at Camboy (near Charleston), six white men were killed when armed blacks opened fire in a political meeting.

With both sides accusing each other of electoral fraud, South Carolina, along with Florida and Louisiana, submitted two sets of election returns with different results. Meanwhile, in Oregon, the state’s Democratic governor replaced a Republican elector with a Democrat (alleging that the Republican had been ineligible), thus throwing Hayes’ victory in that state into question as well.

Compromise of 1877: Congress Steps In

To resolve the dispute, Congress set up an electoral commission in January 1877, consisting of five U.S. representatives, five senators and five Supreme Court justices. The commission’s members included seven Democrats, seven Republicans and one independent, Justice David Davis. When Davis refused to serve, the moderate Republican Justice Joseph Bradley was chosen to replace him.

During the commission’s deliberations, Hayes’ Republican allies met in secret with moderate southern Democrats in hopes of convincing them not to block the official counting of votes through filibuster and effectively allow Hayes’ election. In February, at a meeting held in Washington’s Wormley Hotel, the Democrats agreed to accept a Hayes victory and to respect the civil and political rights of African Americans, on the condition that Republicans withdraw all federal troops from the South, thus consolidating Democratic control in the region.

Hayes would also have to agree to name a leading southerner to his cabinet and to support federal aid for the Texas and Pacific Railroad, a planned transcontinental line via a southern route. On March 2, the congressional commission voted 8-7 along party lines to award all the disputed electoral votes to Hayes, giving him 185 votes to Tilden’s 184.

Compromise of 1877: The End of Reconstruction

Hayes appointed Tennessee’s David Key as postmaster general but never followed through on the promised land grant for the Texas and Pacific. Within two months, however, Hayes had ordered federal troops from their posts guarding Louisiana and South Carolina statehouses, allowing Democrats to seize control in both those states. As Florida’s Supreme Court had earlier declared a Democratic victory in the 1876 gubernatorial election, Democrats had been restored to power all across the South.

The Compromise of 1876 effectively ended the Reconstruction era. Southern Democrats’ promises to protect the civil and political rights of Black people were not kept, and the end of federal interference in southern affairs led to widespread disenfranchisement of Black voters.

From the late 1870s onward, southern legislatures passed a series of laws requiring the separation of whites from “persons of color” on public transportation, in schools, parks, restaurants, theaters and other locations. Known as the “Jim Crow laws” (after a popular minstrel act developed in the antebellum years), these segregationist statutes governed life in the South through the middle of the next century, ending only after the hard-won successes of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

This 'example' of compromise explains why the Americans were not competent to fight a war in 1898.

One of the things the Dixiecrats or as I label them; "Unreconstructed Confederates", wanted no part of, was a powerful army and navy, which some President in the future, to enforce the laws on the books, could send back into the South, to break the ongoing process of re-enslavement of the African Americans those treasonous Unreconstructed Confederates were busily wasting their time and energy upon. Once the Dixiecrats returned to Congress they became a racist voting political block to oppose "immigration, federal interference in state's rights and foreign interventions."

The rest of the country, to avoid another civil war, agreed to this 'compromise' and besides there were the Native Americans to annihilate and their lands and resources to steal. One did not need much of an army and navy to do that and Mexico was not bothering anybody and the British were keeping an eye on Europe, so... that was the Republican reasoning for the period.

Hiccups.

The Virginius Affair. 1872.


GENERAL:

The VIRGINIUS was an ex-Confederate blockade runner that was used by Cuban rebels and their American collaborators during the first half of the Ten Years’ War (1868-1878), Cuba’s unsuccessful first attempt to fight for independence from Spain. When Spanish authorities captured the vessel and executed several of its crew members (including American and British citizens) in 1873, war between the United States and Spain temporarily loomed. Although diplomacy averted armed conflict, memories of the incident would later fuel animosities between the two countries when Cuba erupted again in 1895. The "VIRGINIUS Incident" became again very highly publicized as tensions rose before the Spanish American War and during the war itself.

THE VIRGINIUS AFFAIR:

As the nineteenth century progressed, the United States developed strong economic and territorial interests in Latin America in general and Cuba in particular. Remaining part of Spain’s overseas empire long after its continental colonies in the Western Hemisphere had achieved independence, Cuba, the “Pearl of the Antilles,” attracted American expansionists for several reasons. Geographic proximity to the United States (and distance from Spain) made Cuba a tempting prize for Americans whose quest for “Manifest Destiny” had already gained them territory spanning North America by 1848. By the mid-nineteenth century, numerous American businessmen had invested in the island’s rich sugar resources, making the United States its largest commercial partner. Lastly, rumors of corrupt and repressive Spanish colonial policies won American sympathy for the Cuban people. Emboldened by their successful seizure of land from Mexico in 1848, American leaders soon turned their attention to Spain’s “Ever Faithful Isle.” Their initial attempts to acquire the island reached a climax in 1854. In October of that year, three expansionists who were then serving as United States ambassadors in Europe (Pierre Soulé in Spain, John Mason in France, and James Buchanan in Britain) met in Ostend, Belgium, to discuss annexation of Cuba, under orders of Secretary of State William Marcy. The “Ostend Manifesto” that they drafted stated that the United States should purchase the island for no more than $120 million, and would be justified in seizing it if Spain refused to sell it. Northern newspapers in the United States detected a conspiracy on behalf of the Southern states to expand slavery (since two of the Manifesto’s authors were Southern defenders of slavery), and vehemently protested. Politically embarrassed, the administration of President Franklin Pierce abandoned its Cuban venture. Sectional tensions, civil war, and postwar recovery preoccupied the United States for the next two decades, but Cuba would emerge once again as a major focus in American diplomacy during its first, abortive fight for independence known as the Ten Years’ War (1868-1878). Halfway through this conflict, an incident involving an ex-Confederate blockade runner brought the United States and Spain to the brink of war. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and war was thus postponed for a quarter century.

Between 1868 and 1873, the United States officially kept its distance from the rebellion in Cuba. Leaders in Washington focused on post-Civil War reconstruction and economic recovery, and they directed their expansionist urges toward other targets with varying degrees of success, such as Alaska and the Dominican Republic. Moreover, the United States refused to recognize Cuban belligerency, since that would have undercut the then-pending American case against Great Britain, which had recognized the belligerency of the Confederate States of America in 1861. The fledgling Cuban revolt hardly constituted a national movement, being led by a small group of rebels without an organized army and control of ports. Also, American recognition of Cuban belligerency would absolve Spain of responsibility for rebel-inflicted damage to American property on the island.

Still, there was unofficial collusion between Cuban rebels and American citizens. Cuban patriots living in exile in the United States (many of whom claimed American, as well as Cuban, citizenship) successfully sought money and material aid from sympathetic Americans. Cubans in New York City organized a Junta to organize monetary acquisition and expenditure. On March 1, 1870, General Manuel Quesada, the rebellion’s Commander-in-Chief (and brother-in-law of the provisional President Manuel de Céspedes), arrived in Washington, DC in search of additional ways of securing assistance from the United States while skirting its neutrality laws. He found two sympathizers who owned and operated a New York steamship line. With their aid and money from the Junta, Quesada purchased the Virgin, a former Confederate blockade runner that was docked in the Washington Navy Yard. Another American, John F. Patterson, made the actual transaction on Quesada’s behalf; only Patterson’s name appeared on the bill of sale. The vessel was refitted and renamed the VIRGINIUS.

This ship had been constructed in Scotland for the Confederate States of America in 1864. Over 200 feet long, and having a displacement of 491 tons, this fast sidewheel steamer was an ideal vessel for navigating along coastlines to land men and supplies. Over the next three years, it made several supplying missions for the Cuban rebels, flying either the American or the Cuban insurrection flag as expediency dictated. United States ambassadors in the South American and Caribbean nations whose ports the VIRGINIUS used to obtain its cargo frequently expressed their misgivings about the legality of the ship’s activities. However, United States consuls in the ports of call were often sympathetic to the Cuban cause and disregarded propriety. En route, the Virginius regularly outran any Spanish pursuers.

In 1873, the ship’s luck finally ran out. In June, it stopped at the port of Aspinwall, Colombia (now in present-day Panama) to have its engines overhauled. There, the Spanish gunboat BAZAN attempted to intercept it. Infuriatingly for the Bazan’s crew, the USS KANSAS interceded, claiming that the outlaw vessel was American property, and abetted its escape.

Afterward, the VIRGINIUS landed at Kingston, Jamaica to await its next mission, which came in mid-October. For this voyage, it would carry American and British citizens, as well as Cuban rebels and weapons. Commanding the expedition was General Bernabé Varona. On his staff were Lieutenant-Colonels Jesús del Sol and Agustin Santa Rosa. Pedro de Céspedes, younger brother of the Cuban President, was also present. Along with other Cubans on board, these four men claimed United States citizenship. The two main American nationals on board were General William Ryan, a Union Army veteran who had emigrated from Ireland, and Joseph Fry, a Confederate Navy veteran who was the last in a long line of captains for the VIRGINIUS.

The first stop after leaving Kingston in late October was Haiti, where the VIRGINIUS’ crew picked up 300 Remington rifles, 300,000 cartridges, 800 daggers, 800 machetes, shoes and gunpowder for the Cuban rebels. Flying the American flag, it then started for a beach where two large artillery guns were buried. Unfortunately for the crew, the Spanish corvette TORNADO intercepted them en route on October 30. The heavily laden, leaking vessel was no match for its Spanish pursuer. Within site of Guantánamo Bay, the TORNADO captured the infamous contraband vessel, and hauled it and its crew to internment at Santiago.

www.spanamwar.com/tornado.JPG
Spanish Corvette Tornado
The Spanish Corvette TORNADO
The Spanish army commander in Santiago, General Don Juan N. Burriel, sought swift justice. Rapidly arranged military trials delivered the expected verdicts. On November 4, a firing squad executed Ryan, Varona, del Sol, and Céspedes. Three days later, Fry and thirty-six other captives (several of them either American or British) met the same fate. Most of the prisoners’ lives, however, were spared, apparently because the HMS NIOBE had gotten wind of the affair, and had arrived in Santiago on November 8, demanding that the executions be postponed or the town would be bombarded.

War hysteria briefly flared up in the United States as news of these executions arrived. Many American newspapers initially exaggerated the death toll, mistakenly alleging that every captive had been killed. Several former Civil War commanders, Confederate as well as Union, petitioned President Ulysses S. Grant with offers to raise regiments in case of war. Prospects for approaching the Spanish government on this matter peacefully at first appeared bleak, as well. Spain had overthrown its monarchy in February of 1873, in favor of a republican form of government. This experiment soon encountered serious trouble. Governmental offices in Madrid changed hands with dizzying speed. Royalist supporters plunged the country into civil war. The American ambassador to Spain, former Union general Daniel Sickles, was ill-equipped for his position, owing it to political patronage (characteristic of much of the American foreign service personnel of the time). In Cuba, General Burriel and his army opposed Spanish republicanism as vehemently as they opposed Cuban insurrectionism.

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. With the assistance of the British ambassador in Washington, United States Secretary of State Hamilton Fish devised a protocol with the Spanish ambassador to the United States, José Polo de Bernabé. Signed on November 29, 1873, the agreement between Fish and Polo stipulated that: Spain would return the VIRGINIUS and its surviving crew members to the United States; if the ship was proven to have been legitimately flying the American flag at the time of its capture, Spanish authorities in Santiago would salute the American flag; and, each country would prosecute citizens proven guilty of wrongdoing. A few days later, Fish dropped his requirement that the Spaniards salute the American flag after a hearing at the United States Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York revealed the Cuban ownership of the VIRGINIUS.

The final act of the drama occurred the following month. On December 18, the surviving crew members of the VIRGINIUS arrived in New York aboard the American ship Juniata; despite a cordial reception by the Cuban Junta, these people quickly faded into obscurity. A similar fate befell the Virginius. Under the supervision of the Spanish sloop-of-war Favorita (commanded by Manuel de la Cámara), American vessels towed the decrepit Virginius out of Cuban waters on December 16. The outlaw vessel’s days were numbered. Its boilers spent from its failed attempt to elude the TORNADO, the VIRGINIUS was finally abandoned and allowed to founder on December 26. Daniel Sickles, bypassed in the diplomatic process, resigned in protest in the same month.

Subsequent years brought the denouement. On March 5, 1875, Spain signed an indemnity agreement whereby the families of the American victims would receive $80,000 from Madrid (a greater sum than that which would go to their British counterparts). American demands that General Burriel be brought to trial for ordering the executions met with less success. Burriel died on December 24, 1877, before he could be tried. Finally, in 1878, Cuba’s first struggle for independence ended in failure. Seventeen years would elapse before Cuban patriots launched another fight for nationhood.

Numerous legal, political, social, military, and economic reasons explain why the United States avoided war with Spain over Cuba in 1873, and plunged into hostilities twenty-five years later. Certainly the dubiousness of the American case against Spain regarding the VIRGINIUS in 1873 was crucial. Once the courts established the illegitimacy of the vessel, even the most hawkish of American newspapers quickly hushed their tone. In 1873, Spain was struggling to become a republic; many influential Americans at the time believed that a war with Spain would destroy a sister republic. In contrast, by 1898, Spain had reverted to a monarchy, which many Americans of that time equated with the backward, oppressive monarchies also governing Russia and China. Race was also a factor. In 1873, the United States was still grappling with its own domestic race issues regarding African-Americans and Native Americans. Leaders in Washington were unwilling to take on the additional racial problems that would result from intervention in (and acquisition of) Cuba. A quarter-century later, with their domestic racial issues apparently “resolved,” many American leaders confidently believed that the United States could accommodate more territories and control their non-white populations (though several Anti-Imperialists still harbored doubts). In 1873, war with Spain was impractical militarily. At the time, Spain had one of the world’s most modern navies, and her army was comprised of battle-hardened veterans of the war in Cuba and the civil war in Spain. In contrast, the post-Civil War demobilization of the American army and navy had rendered both obsolete and insignificant. By 1898, though the American army was still far from combat readiness, the American navy had undergone a rapid modernization. Arguably, the most compelling difference lay in the economic sphere. Both the 1870s and the 1890s were depression decades for the United States. However, the depression of the 1870s was just beginning in 1873, and the depression of the 1890s had been dragging on for five years by 1898. The acquisition of more overseas markets to offset domestic overproduction was much more emphatically seen as the cure for the nation’s economic ills in the 1890s than had been the case two decades earlier. Moreover, in the 1870s, American investment in Cuba was still growing, and Cuban military leaders in the Ten Years’ War refrained from destroying the island’s sugar plantations. By the 1890s, American investment in Cuba had skyrocketed, and the Cuban leaders of the uprising that began in 1895 (perhaps learning from the failed previous effort) instituted a “scorched-earth” policy in the island’s rich western provinces, in order to diminish Cuba’s economic value to Spain.

POSTSCRIPT:

Memories of the VIRGINIUS Affair exacerbated tensions between the United States and Spain between 1895 and 1898, and perhaps some Americans perceived war in 1898 as an opportunity to avenge the deaths of its crew members, as well as the deaths of the crew members of the battleship USS Maine. Two episodes in the war further recalled the earlier diplomatic crisis. Sergeant Hamilton Fish of the First Volunteer Cavalry Regiment (also known as the “Rough Riders”), grandson of the Secretary of State who had preserved the peace in 1873, was among the first Americans killed during the Cuban campaign, at Las Guásimas on June 24, 1898. Manuel de la Cámara, erstwhile commander of the Favorita who had witnessed the return of the VIRGINIUS into American hands, would attain the rank of Rear-Admiral by 1898. Between May and July of that year, he commanded the abortive naval expedition to the Philippines, hoping to challenge the American presence in Manila Bay. Stopped by British authorities and secret American efforts at the Suez Canal which denied coal to his ships, he rapidly returned to Spain after the destruction of Admiral Cervera’s fleet at Santiago, and spent the remainder of the war guarding the Spanish coast against an expected American naval assault that never materialized

Bibliography:
(As a service to our readers, clicking on title in red will take you to that book on Amazon.com)
-Bradford, Richard H. The Virginius Affair. Colorado: Colorado Associated University Press, 1980.
-Crabtree, J. B., The Passing of Spain and the Ascendency of America. (Springfield, MA: The King-Richardson Publishing Co., 1898). 241.
-El Buque En La Armada Espanola (Madrid: Silex editions, 1999) p. 325 (image of TORNADO)
-Musicant, Ivan, Empire by Default : The Spanish-American War and the Dawn of the American Century.(Henry Holt and Company: 1998).
-Paterson, Thomas, J. Garry Clifford, and Kenneth Hagan. American Foreign Policy, a History, Volume I: To 1914. Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1988

In 1872, Spain had a POWERRFUL navy and a GOOD one thanks to the naval minded reformer Alfonso XII, who recently tried it out on some South American republics in The Guano Wars.

There are various times in the world’s history when it’s lost its collective mind over a certain odd material.

The Ancient Romans paid incredible fees for the smelly purple dye produced by dead mollusks. In the age of imperialism, it was spices which tempted sailors to travel the globe.

In the Dutch Golden Age there was a craze over tulip bulbs. However, in the mid to late 1800’s there was a craze that topped them all.

A nondescript set of islands sits off the coast of Peru, which most would likely ignore. In fact, the only real residents on the Chincha Islands were birds: cormorants, boobies, and pelicans.

A population of 60 million of them were drawn here because there was an ample supply of fish and no predators. It was a literal bird paradise.

Unfortunately, in a bird’s paradise they let fly wherever they feel like and the islands accumulated thousands of years’ worth of excrement. Little rain also meant it rarely washed away.


Workers Dig Guano From The “Great Heap” (1865) — Rays Of Sunlight From South America, NY Public Library

The impressive collection of crap and urea piled up to 200 feet at points (see picture above) according to Dr. Paul F. Johnston’s article in the National Museum of American History. It sounds like an utterly disgusting vacation spot and a place you’d go out of your away to avoid. However, nations of the world at one point would build navies and almost go to war over the droppings the natives called guano.

Why Would You Fight Over Crap?

In 1840 Justus von Liebig, a pioneer in organic chemistry, would come up with a breakthrough in plant science.

He’d discover that nitrogen added to soil would drastically improve crop yields — particularly in the form of guano. As Charles C. Mann points out in his article in the Smithsonian, large farmers would put Liebig’s ideas to the test and see their crops double or triple in yield.

Mann explains that in the course of 40 years, the Chincha islands would export 13 million tons of crap around the world, particularly to the United States and Europe. According to Dr. Johnston, the demand was overwhelming. Some ships could be waiting for up to 8 months to load up with the prized guano.



Chincha Islands, Ships Waiting For Guano (1863)—Manuel González Olaechea y Franco Via Wikimedia Commons

The newly free country of Peru would have a monopoly on this golden urea. Obviously, the old world powers got nervous being so dependent on one small nation for the success of their food supply. Some even called for the invasion of Peru to capture the islands. A former colonial superpower from the region would actually make the idea a reality.

The Chincha Islands War

In 1865 Spain would send a “scientific mission” to South America. Of course you would send a fleet of warships to perform the experimentation.

The Spanish ironclad warship Numancia would lead the small fleet. During the expedition, some Spanish citizens would be killed in Peru and Spain seized the Chincha Islands in retribution.

According to Spencer C. Tucker’s A Global Chronology of Conflict, 60% of Peru’s government revenue came from these islands, so the capture of the islands was devastating. The Spanish would also blockade Peruvian ports as well, demanding compensation from existing claims since Peru’s independence in 1821.

During the blockade Chile would refuse to sell the Spanish coal, resulting in a declaration of war. Eventually Ecuador and Bolivia would join the alliance against the Spanish, shutting off all Pacific ports to their fleet. The Spanish had no army and didn’t have enough ships to cause any significant damage, other than sinking Chile’s merchant fleet.

The Spanish would eventually give up, sailing back to friendly waters. Although they’d lose the admiral of their fleet to suicide after the embarrassing capture of a Spanish ship by a Peruvian naval vessel. About 14 years later, Chile would go to war with the alliance of Peru and Bolivia for another large deposit of nitrates in a desert during the War of the Pacific.

Hunting For Guano Islands

In 1856 The United States would pass the Guano Islands Act. I’m dead serious, this was a piece of legislature that floated through Congress.

The law allowed the U.S. to grab any unclaimed or uninhabited island that had guano on it. This excrement would also be required to be sold to U.S. farmers at reasonable prices.

As you could imagine, this would start fleets of naval vessels traveling far and wide hunting for bird crap. Dr. Johnston explains the U.S. Navy would have to mobilize to far flung sections of the Pacific to protect these claims. It would also create the weird occurrence of armed naval vessels collecting samples of guano in random places to bring back to Washington D.C.

Dr. Johnston describes one of these voyages where the USS St. Mary’s and her 22 guns visited Nantucket and Jarvis Islands. Jarvis happens to be in the dead center of the Pacific between the West coast of the U.S. and Australia. Unfortunately, this trip would be a waste.

The Smithsonian’s first secretary; the chemist Joseph Henry, would have the sample analyzed and find it was worthless crap — literally. Not enough nitrogen in the sample.


Jarvis Island — Picture By NASA [Public Domain]

The United States would claim around 200 tiny islands in their voyages. Among these are Howland Island, which is important if you’re looking for Amelia Earhart. T

he atoll of Midway was also claimed, which would be the site of one of the most famous battles in the Pacific in WWII. Another of the small islands would be the site of numerous nuclear tests.

Guano fueled all this.

Guano Substitutes

The farming industry, which was addicted guano, knew that this party could only go on for so long.

It would take thousands of years for these deposits to accumulate, so they’d eventually be gone at rate they were being used. Dr. Johnson explains one American attempt to fix the problem.

The Pacific Guano Company (PGC) would be involved in some of the guano procurement process, but it had a higher goal. It wanted to eliminate the birds from the production line. Guano is technically fish that went through a bird’s digestive system. What if they could duplicate the process and send the birds to the unemployment line permanently?

The PGC would fish up mass quantities of menhaden around the Eastern United States. After trial and error, they eventually figured it out. They’d even display the process at an exhibit in 1876 at the Centennial in Philadelphia. Although, the residents around the plant would face an ungodly stench when the wind blew a certain direction.

Eventually land deposits of nitrates would be found and it was a good thing. The island guano deposits were pretty much mined out in the 1880’s according to Dr. Johnston.

The Threat Of War And Artificial Nitrates

“Farmers all over the world were forced to make saltpeter from manure and pay it as a tax to support the monopoly on violence claimed by their rulers, thus depriving their fields of a source of fertilizer.”

— Matt Ridley, “How Innovation Works”

Not only were nitrates good for making fertilizer, but the nitrates were also used for making gunpowder.

As the 1900’s rolled around, Germany would come a stark realization. 2/3 of the world’s nitrates came from a region which could be blockaded — Chile. If war ever erupted on the continent with Britain, Germany could be starved out of gunpowder and fertilizer.

According to Ridley, the German chemist Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald tried to figure out a way around this. He’d try and pull nitrogen out of the very air through chemical processes. Although he thought he succeeded, he’d be proven wrong by the chemist Carl Bosch. Eventually, Bosch would meet another chemist who would figure out the solution.

Fritz Haber would build on Ostwald’s work, figuring out that high pressure and temperature could pull the nitrate of ammonia straight out of the air in 1909. Bosch and his team would work on making Haber’s process economical and safer. Ovens tended to explode under high temperatures, which can be a bit problematic as you can imagine.

By 1912 a plant in Oppau, Germany would be producing a ton of liquid ammonia every 5 hours. These synthetic nitrates would feed the world, and produce enough gun powder to keep WWI going for years even with a blockade. In addition to creating a process to feed the world’s population, Haber would also create poison gases used in WWI and the gas used by the Nazi’s during the Holocaust.

Value Is In The Eyes Of The Beholder


Flock Of Cormorants, Chincha Islands (1910) — Robert Ervin Coker / [Public domain]

We live in a world where we attribute value to shiny things. Gold, silver, and technology tend to attract our gaze and admiration. However, something smellier and earthy drove nations to travel around the world and come to blows. It turns out the very thing we wash off our cars with annoyance could fuel the food to feed nations.

What’s more, the guano craze isn’t exactly over. The current drive for organic foods has revived a quiet collection of islands from the past. According to an article in The New York Times, the Chincha islands have opened up again. Miners have started digging the last remains of the guano and are exporting it once again.

Even though The Times admits the synthesized urea is a better fertilizer than the guano, it hasn’t stopped the demand. The label of “organic” now has value. It’s just another example that not everything valuable is shiny and polished. Hopefully, the world will handle this next craze in a more civilized way.

The Virginius Affair and the Guano Wars stirred up desires in the United States for a better navy, especially after THIS HAPPENED in 1866.

The War of Paraguay: Chapter XXV, Diplomacy of the War. — Bombardment of Valparaíso. — Reconciliation with Great Britain
6 SEPTEMBER 2019 FRANCIS BASSLEAVE A COMMENT
twop-c-10This post remains available for posterity’s sake, but a much revised and much expanded version of this translation is available completely for free! The revised version includes translated footnotes, a translated appendix, an expanded introduction, and a map of disputed territory and important locations. You can download a copy in the following formats: Docx — Epub — Mobi — PDF. Or, if you want to throw some money my way, you can set your price for it on Smashwords. And it’s in the public domain!

Given the reality of the war, the Brazilian government’s denunciation of the Spanish bombardment of Valparaíso (1) continues to be important.

On 31 March 1866 the Spanish fleet bombarded Valparaíso from nine in the morning until the afternoon. It is said that the value of the goods burned in the port’s storehouses surpassed 8,000,000 pesos (2). Mr. Layard, speaking on behalf of the English government in the House of Commons (15 May), laid the most solemn condemnation on Admiral Méndez Núñez’s conduct in “the bombardment of a perfectly defenceless city, which contained a large amount of neutral property.”

The communication Saraiva directed to our representative in Madrid, with the order to read it to the Minister of State, is enough to rectify the idea that the empire, due to its different institutions, had not felt solidarity with the rest of the continent. Precisely at that time, Peru took leadership over a campaign against the Triple Alliance by the Pacific Republics. The protest by Peru, and the other republics that followed it (Chile had not yet come to occupy first position in the Pacific), did not produce any effect. The supposed fear of Western America’s republican spirit yielded before the firmness and resolution of General Mitre. Having ensured that two republics joined the empire in the war against Paraguay was no minor result of the May 1st treaty. Without that, the situation would have been grave for Brazil. This was, indeed, the same time as Napoleon III’s and (another Hapsburg) Maximillian of Austria’s endeavors in Mexico, and the abolitionist cause’s victory in the United States: nothing could pose a greater threat to the strengthening of Brazil’s prestige and ascendency. It can be said that Latin America’s hostility towards us was the norm; and if, instead of having had the Argentine buffer, Mitre had been against us, aided by Prado, Pérez, and even Johnson (3), the empire’s isolation would have proved fatal. Chile was not close with us at that time, and it can be said that their only foreign policy was nothing more than a vague continental sentimentalism, shown in its acceptance of all the ideas of the Pan-American congresses, and in its chivalrous defense of America against Europe, the latter being the sentiment that brought it to intervene in the conflict between Spain and Peru.

William_Dougal_Christie
Sketch if William Dougal Chrisite ca. 1840, by George Richmond.
The diplomatic history of the war is linked in a certain way with the reestablishment of our relations with Great Britain, interrupted in 1863 due to the reprisals for the frigate Forte, in the mouth of the bay of Rio de Janeiro. With the pressure of this blockade, the Brazilian government was made to pay, not without protest, the compensation the English government demanded for the shipwreck of the Prince of Wales, later accepting the Belgian king’s arbitration, regarding the treatment of the officers of the frigate Forte (4). The empire’s eminent diplomat in London, Carvalho Moreira, later Baron of Penedo, requested of the Court of Saint-James: 1st That it show its regret for the events that occurred during the reprisals; 2nd That it demonstrate that it had no intention of violating the empire’s territorial sovereignty; 3rd Compensation for the interested parties. The English government having refused everything, our minister in London resigned. On 18 June 1863, with the arbiter Leopold, uncle of Queen Victoria, chosen, the dispute was decided in our favor. England was left in debt to Brazil, and morally condemned by the arbiter, because of the force that it employed in retaliation against—in part due to the reprisals—actions that were proven to not intend any offense to the dignity of the British navy.

The king of Portugal offered his mediation, and proposed, as a foundation for the renewal of relations, that the very clauses presented by our government, already rejected, be established in the arbiter’s verdict. With this mediation discarded, Great Britain offered (1864) terms of agreement that Brazil didn’t accept either, because they did not recognize our right to compensation for the damages suffered from the capture of merchant vessels.

In 1865 negotiations were renewed, the Olinda cabinet receiving the following proposition: “The minister plenipotentiary of H.B.M. in the Argentine Republic, Mr. Thornton, will be sent on special mission to Brazil. He will express to H.I.M. the regret with which H.B.M. has become aware of the circumstances arising from the interruption of cordial relations between the two courts; he will declare that H.M. most solemnly denies any intention to offend the dignity of the Brazilian Empire; that H.M. accepts, fully and without reserve, the ruling of the Belgians, and that it will be most agreeable to appoint a minister to Brazil, after H.I.M. finds himself ready to resume diplomatic relations.”

As Saraiva said in the Chamber (after, in the April 30th session, José Bonifacio criticized the cabinet for accepting the proposal that its antecedents had rejected), the English government granted a reparation to our honor, but not financial satisfaction. Should we have maintained our position on these conditions, refusing to resume relations with England? The issue was submitted to the ministry in these terms: “1st Will it be fit, given the current circumstances of the government, and given the point which negotiation has reached, to refuse to accept the means to reestablish diplomatic relations, which they are offering us? 2nd Could the act of rejecting the conditions offered, only because pecuniary compensation is not included in them, not potentially damage us in the general opinion of Europe? 3rd Will it be possible to do without this, considering that the English government is taking the first step, sending a special mission, in addition to the permanent one that it will send later? 4th Can the imperial government accept the latest proposal without damage to the country’s dignity?”

The emperor wrote about this episode in the margin of the Tito Franco’s book (5): “I yielded to the opinion of almost all the ministers and councilors of State. If I had done the reverse, and grave complications in Paraguay had occurred, what would they have said of imperialism?”

With national dignity satisfied by Great Britain’s conciliatory embassy, the financial issue was too insignificant to impede the reestablishment of relations, especially given that we had resorted to the London market after we had cut relations. Certainly it was not with the English government that we incurred those debts, and for another thing the interest that we payed because of them proves that they were not signs of generosity, but rather operations whose risks had been exaggerated by the borrowers; but with the purely mercantile nature of the operation admitted, even aside from that it is worth denying any incompatibility between the national sentiment of a people offended and the action of appealing to the purse of the offender. If in 1863 and in 1865 we did so, it is because we did not consider England an enemy, and because England did not completely approve of the conduct of its minister Mr. Christie (6); if it had approved of this it would not have been flippant enough to endorse a loan sent from the great Rothschild bankers, which could have served to fund military preparations against it; not even Palmerston would have tolerated it. The defense of Brazil made by men like Cobden and Bright, Lord Malmesbury, Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Osborne, Mr. Roebuck, Mr. Bramley Moore, Lord Brougham, Sir Hugh Cairns, and the current Lord Salisbury, then Lord Cecil, and many others, more than compensated for the disagreeable situation in which they found themselves, owing to their representatives, Lord Russel and Lord Palmerston (7).

If England’s initiative in attempting to restart the interrupted relations, as well as their expression of regret for what occurred, was satisfactory, then the occasion and manner of their undertaking this mission seemed calculated to dispel, by virtue of friendship and courtesy, the slightest record of Mr. Christie. The English government could not have had a more delicate courtesy than the one they showed in ensuring that their special envoy went to the emperor in Uruguaiana to present England’s apologies, and to express to him the queen’s desire to renew relations with the empire. The emperor received him full of patriotic pride, in which all those present participated, understanding the importance of the act. The message heard, the representative of H.M.B. said: “I see renewed, with sincere satisfaction, diplomatic relations between the government of Brazil and Great Britain. The fact that such event has been brought about in the very setting where Brazil and its worthy and courageous allies managed to prove their wisdom in joining moderation with the defense of justice, increases my pleasure and is proof that Brazil’s policy will continue inspiring a spirit of just and dignified harmony with all other nations.”

Translator’s Notes

1. The bombardment of Valparaíso, a major Chilean port city, took place during the Chincha Islands War, a conflict between Spain and many of its former colonies.
2. David Woods in The Bombardment of Paradise (2011) suggests the damages would amount to 224,000,000 USD today.
3. That is: Mariano Ignacio Prado, president of Peru; José Joaquín Pérez, president of Chile; and Andrew Johnson, president of the United States.
4. This is the Christie Affair, first referred to in Chapter X. See translator’s note 4 in that chapter for basic background information.
5. Tito Franco de Almeida was a Brazilian writer and politician. The book referred to is likely O Brazil e a Inglaterra ou o trafico de africanos [Brazil and England; Or, the trafficking of Africans].
6. William Christie, the British ambassador in Brazil who ordered the reprisals, and who gave his name to the Christie Affair.
7. Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1859-1865. John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, was Prime Minister 1865-1866.

The Brazilians were not too happy about it either and they got busy to make sure they were not on the receiving end of the business.

This is what they did about it.

The first Brazilian modern Battleship

The ironclad Riachuelo was one of the main reasons which pushed the Congress, at the insistence of the USN admiralty, to built battleships, notably the USS Texas. At that time indeed, a naval rivalry between South American countries pushed Brazil, Argentina and Chile to order ships to British yards. The Riachuelo was no exception, a 5900 tonnes vessel from Samuda Bros. intended to take the lead of the pack in the 1880s. She was later joined by Aquidabã, under the patronage of Admiral Jose Rodrigues de Lima Duarte, minister of the Navy.

As a minister, he presented a report to the national legislature on the importance of modernising the Brazilian Navy.

As local shipyards were unable to deliver complex vessels such as ironclads, a delegation was to be sent in Great Britain to order two modern ironclads.

Prior to this, the Brazilian navy had ironclads and armoured ships in service: The most recent were the coastal monitors of the Javary class (1874) built in France, the locally built (Rio) Sete of Setembro (1874), the Cabral class and the Mariz e Barros class (all built in Rennie, 1866), the Silvado (France, 1866), Bahia (Laird, 1865), Rio de Jaineiro (1865), Lima Barros class (Laird-built 1865), Tamandaré (UK? 1865), Brasil (La Seyne, 1865), and Barrozo (UK? 1864). The Riachuelo was the first modern sea-going Brazilian battleship, in the same vein as the Sachsen or Dingyan class.

The Riachuelo was typical of these late 1880s ironclads, with a twin pairs of main guns in barbettes positioned in échelon and armoured all around. Due to budget constraints however, the main armament was limited to 9.2-inch (234 mm) guns under enclosed Coles-type turrets. There was a secondary battery six 5.5-inch (140 mm) and tertiary light artillery against Torpeod boats. This was all modified during her 1894 refit in France.

The Riachuelo and Aquidabã had an artillery arrangement quite popular in the 1870s and 1880s: Two main gun turrets off the centreline, en echelon. Through this, the forward turret was placed offset to port and the aft turret to starboard. The superstructure was taller than both turrets, with gangways above them, running the whole ship's lenght. The Riachuelo's silhouette was completed with two funnels and three fully rigged masts.

Aquidabã was slighty smaller (4920 tonnes, 85 m long) and had just one funnel. She was built in the same yard at Samuda Bros but launched two years later in 1885. Riachuelo's displacement standard, was 5,029 tons, and according to Conway's* 5610 standard and 6100 tonnes fully loaded. She measured 93.33 m/92.96 m (306.2 ft or 305 ft pp), for 17.16 m/15,85 m (56.3 ft or 52 ft) wide with a draught of 5.60 m/5.99 m (18.4 ft or 19 ft 8 in).

Propulsion

She was a mixed vessels, as common at that time, with sailing and steam combined. In sailing mode, she had three masts arranged in a barque configuration. The steam engines were three-cylinder vertical compound machines, fed by height cylindrical coal-fired boilers, and the power was passed onto two shafts. Total output was 4,500 hp (3.36 kW). The top speed as designed was ​​16.5 knots (30.56 km/h). The onboard coal supply allowed for a 6,000 nmi (11,000 km) range at 10 kn (19 km/h).
Armament

Riachuelo's main armament comprised four 9.2-inch (234 mm) guns in two Coles type turrets (cheesebox style). The BL 9.2-inch Mk I was designed in 1879 as a request by the Admiralty for a response to Krupp's 24 cm (9.45 inch) gun. The Admiralty was interested and requested it to the Committee on Ordnance as considering the return to breech-loading artillery after experimenting with muzzle-loaders in the 1860s-1870s.

The new gun fired a 380-pound projectile and a total of 19 Mk I and Mk II guns/26 calibres were manufactured by Vickers, starting in 1881. However the Navy declined the model and the Mk-I/II never made it at sea but instead in coastal defence. The Mark III was the main naval model, 24 tons, 31.5 calibres. It was declined into the IV, V, VI and VII versions as well and produced in large quantities, making it in cruisers such as the Imperieuse, Orlando, Blake, Edgar class armoured cruisers, rearmed monitors and WW1 monitors. It looked relatively weak for a battleship though, but it is believed the overall budget, limitations in size of the ship, and rate of fire were critical.

The shell's weight varied from 380 pounds (172.37 kg) to 290 pounds (131.54 kg), muzzle velocity 2,065 feet per second (629 m/s) and maximum range around 10,000 yards (9,100 m) at max elevation. It should be noted that the Portuguese source is completely different about the armament: Four 225 mm main guns, four 140 mm guns, eleven 25 mm and five 11 machine guns.

Secondary armament: Six 5.5-inch (140 mm) guns. No precision of their origin. The only BL 5.5-inch Mk I naval gun in service with the RN dated back from 1913. It is more likely to be a BL 5-inch gun Mk I/II, as no British yard would accept to mount Krupp guns, and there was no French gun of this caliber either.

Tertiary armament: Fifteen 1-pounder (37 mm) guns, on the upper decks. Likely to be Hotchkiss QF models (2 pdr) customary at the time.
Torpedo armament: Five 14-inch (356 mm) torpedo tubes, broadside, stern and prow, above the waterline.
After the 1894 refit in France:
Main armament: Four 240 mm (9.45 in) guns in two turrets: Comment - No 9.45 in in service in UK, the French model dated back from 1902, so impossible, so these values are dubious again. Secondary: 6 × 120 mm (4.7 in) guns, 6 × 47mm (1.85 in) guns, 5 × 356 mm (14 in) torpedo tubes.

Armour

The Riachuelo was constructed with a steel hull, and for the first time had a compound armour belt. The Argentines shortly after wanted to respond with the armoured corvette ARA Almirante Brown. Figures were 178 to 280 mm (7-11 in) on the belt and sides, 254 mm (9.4 in) in the main turrets and the same on the superstructure and Conning tower.

Specifications as built (1885)
Dimensions 92.96 x 15.85 x 5.99m (305 x 52 x 19 ft 8 in)
Displacement 5,610 tonnes standard, 6,100 tonnes FL
Crew 367
Propulsion 2 shafts VCE, 10 Boilers, 7,500 bhp
Speed 16.7 knots (31 km/h; 19.2 mph)
Range Estimated 6000 nm at 10 knots
Armament 4 x 9.2-in/31 (234 mm), 4 x 5.5-in/30 (140 mm), 15 x 1-pdr/40 (37mm), 5 x 14-in TTs.
Armor Belt 178-280 mm, 254 mm main turrets, CT
The Riachuelo in service (1885-1910)

Name

The battleship was christened after the Battle of Riachuelo in 1865. It opposed the Brazilian and Paraguayan navies, 33 and 18 ships respectively and ended in a decisive Brazilian victory. And it was a riverine battle, on the river Paraguay. After ordering the dreadnought Rio de Janeiro a second ship to be name Riachuelo was ordered in 1914, and of course never built or delivered.

Early years: 1883-91

The Riachuelo took the head of the main battle squadron of the Brazilian Navy as soon as she was in service, and flagship. She was nevertheless the fourth ship to bear that name, after the Paraná River naval battle of June 11, 1865 under the command of Almirante Barroso. Riachuelo was built by the Samuda & Brothers shipyard for £ 365,000 less artillery and ammunition. Supervision was in charge of José da Costa Azevedo. Her keel was laid down on August 31, 1881, she was launched on June 7, 1883, and made ready for fitting out and Armament on July 15, 1884. Captain Eduardo Wandenkolk upon delivery.

On August 19, 1885, the Squadron was reformed by Notice no. 1541A, written by the then Minister of Navy, Admiral Joaquim Raymundo de Lamare. This new formation was called the Manoeuver Squadron under Squadron commander Arthur Silveira da Mota, Baron of Jaceguai. It was formed of sixteen ships, comprising the Riachuelo, Sete de Setembro, Solimões and Javary, the cruisers Guanabara, Admiral Barroso, Trajano and Primeiro de Marco, 1st Class Torpedoes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 and 4th Class Alpha, Beta and Gamma. This Squadron was the most modern task force at the time in the Americas, equipped with ships with the best combination of speed, artillery and torpedoes.

On September 20 1885, Riachuelo left UK and between September 28 and October 22, halted in Lisbon, then departed for Rio de Janeiro, where she arrived on November 13. She joined the new Squadron on November 19, in accordance with the Notice. On August 28, 1884, she became its flagship.

The same year, Riachuelo started exercizes with the new squadron under Admiral Arthur Silveira da Mota. By 1889, November 17, she left Rio de Janeiro, under Captain Lieutenant Alexandrino Faria de Alencar, to escort the liner SS Alagoas, carrying the Imperial Family into exile in Europe after the Proclamation of the Republic. On January 14, 1890, she left Rio de Janeiro for Buenos Aires, carrying the Minister Quintino Bocaiúva, to sign Treaty limits with the Argentine Republic by arbitration of the President of the United States of America, putting an end to the current naval rivalry.

Impact in USN policy

These two battleships placed overnight the Brazilian Navy at the top of the fleets in the western hemisphere. This rang bells at the hite house. Hilary A. Herbert, chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee was alarmed and immediately recommended to drastically increase naval expenditures. It was time for the "new navy" to build its first battleships. He pushed his cause and rallied supports (including from the Navy) in Congress in 1883.

He declared during a session that "if all this old navy of ours were drawn up in battle array in mid-ocean and confronted by the Riachuelo it is doubtful whether a single vessel bearing the American flag would get into port”.

He stressed the used of at least a similar design of Riachuelo to be studied and built locally. This led to the order of the USS Maine in 1889 (later reclassed as an armoured cruiser) and USS Texas, the first American battleships, launched in 1892. Both were completed in 1895, but in between their conception was already obsolete.

The naval revolt of 1891

The political scene right after the Proclamation of the Republic (1889) was very troubled. This state of affairs worsened after the promulgation of the 1891 Brazilian Constitution. Thus, on the morning of November 3, 1891, the President of the Republic, Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca, closed both houses of the Legislature.

At the time, several officers of the Brazilian Navy conspired to overthrow the dictatorial government that was emerging, led by Admiral Custódio José de Mello, who added a large number of junior officers, scattered in the various naval units based in Rio de Janeiro. Although he was concerned about the delay in the outbreak of the strike, one of the main reasons for this delay was the fact that the two most powerful navy ships - the Riachuelo and Aquidabã - were docked, in repairs.

With the battleship Riachuelo committed to the movement, Custódio de Mello had already drawn up a contingency plan: the movement would start from Cruiser Primeiro de Março, which would be anchored between Ilha das Cobras and Rio de Janeiro's Navy Arsenal, from where the officers, mostly low-ranking, to take command of the other naval units. Part of the garrison of the First of March would take over the Riachuelo, then proceed to Aquidabã, which had just left the dike; if it resisted, it would be sunk; if it joined the movement, as expected, it would then be towed, as it was still without propulsion, to Ponta da Armação in Niterói in order to protect the existing facilities, which eventually happened.

Marshal Deodoro appointed Captain-de-Mar-e-Guerra Eliezer Tavares to take command of Aquidabã on November 22, soon ordering preparations for combat, but it was still without propulsion and depended on a tug to move . The new commander declared his intention to resist the movement and to sink the Riachuelo if there was resistance from it, but the crew refused to engage in combat. With all his rebellious strength, captained by the battleship Riachuelo, he was preparing for the fighting to come, which was not necessary, because on November 23, 1891 Deodoro resigned, being replaced by Marshal Floriano Peixoto.

Later years: 1892-1910

When the Republic was proclaimed, Riachuelo was under command of Corvette Captain Alexandrino Faria de Alencar. The ship was to escort the steamer SS Alagoas to the Equator, carrying the Brazilian Imperial Family into exile in Europe.

Modernization in France

In 1893 Riachuelo was under Command of CMG João Justino Proença, and by August went to Europe to be modernized in drydock at the Forges et Chantiers de la Mediterranée shipyards, in Toulon. The first step was the replacement of the rigging, and heavy military masts fitted in the fore and last masts instead, with the central mast reduced and kept to manoeuvrer boats. The engine and armament were also modified (see notes).

Meanwhile, a supplementary contact was signed on June 19, 1894 in Toulon, between the Brazilian Government and chief engineer Claude Goubet, for the construction of a submarine of his patent. As not concerned by the treaty limits, it was Brazil's attempt to re-establish some preeminence over the Argentines. However the model was rather small, at 8 meter long with a crew composed of an officer and two sailors of Riachuelo, and carried by the latter, as a mothership, as it was done for midget torpedo boats. This project however never came to fruition, due to Goubet's failure to deliver a working model.

The modernization took the best part of 1895 and 1896, and consisted in several structural reforms, alongside the new armament. The 240 mm guns for example were fast-firing and had a ling range and muzzle velocity. The secondary armament was lighter but fast firing too. She returned to active service as commissioned in 1896, so she missed the entire Second Armada Revolt. The same year she experimented with her new machines in order to evaluate the modernization, reaching 16 knots as delivered by the yard. This performance was praised by the General Staff.

Back to Brazil, she became the flagship of the Squadron again, and in 1900 carried President Campos Sales for an state visit to Argentina. Riachuelo sailed in this occasion with the cruisers Barroso and Tamoyo, called the 'White Division' as their hull has been repainted painted in this color for this commission.

Riachuelo in 1900

On January 2 1901, the Instruction Division replaced by the 1st Manoeuver Division under Rear Admiral Carlos Frederico de Noronha, composed of the Riachuelo and the Cruisers Barroso, Tupi and Tamoyo. In 1907 Riachuelo took part in the famous Hampton Roads International Naval review in the United States with her Task Group under Rear Admiral Duarte Huet of Bacellar Pinto Guedes.

She would also carry the Brazilian Naval Commission headed by Rear Admiral Huet de Bacellar, in Great Britain to monitor the construction of the new battleships of the 1906 Naval Plan, Minas Gerais and São Paulo. The commissioned also officially took delivery of the ships and crewed them. Due to the arrival of these new capital ships, the Riachuelo was deactivated in 1910. She ws to be sold and broken up in Europe and later was sent to Scotland, by May 14, 1914, Forth Shipbreaking Co. to be dismantled.

Read More/Src:
Gardiner, Robert, ed. (1979) Conway's all the world fighting ships 1860-1905
Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin America
//www.infoescola.com/historia/revolta-da-armada/
//www.naval.com.br/ngb/R/R017/R017.htm
//pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruzador_Protegido_Tamandar%C3%A9
//www.naval.com.br/ngb/T/T002/T002.htm
//pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolta_da_Armada
//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_battleship_Riachuelo
//pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encouraçado_de_Esquadra_Riachuelo
//brasilianafotografica.bn.br/?p=10694

If nothing else, it must be remarked that the BNS Riachuello could blow the entire USN out of the water when she was commissioned.

Which leads to another hiccup. The Americans had to build something to at least save New York City from the Brazilians, so what do they build?

Remember the Maine!
Charles Lagerbom teaches AP U.S. History at Belfast Area High School and lives in Northport. He is author of "Whaling in Maine" and "Maine to Cape Horn."

Remember the Maine!
Charles Lagerbom teaches AP U.S. History at Belfast Area High School and lives in Northport. He is author of "Whaling in Maine" and "Maine to Cape Horn."

BY HALF SEAS OVER

It was a national slogan, a rallying cry, a calling card for empire. Remember the Maine! But do we really remember it? Maybe not as much as we think. And how have we remembered it?

USS Maine, a 6,682-ton second-class battleship, was commissioned in 1895, the first U.S. Navy ship named after the state. Built during a period of dramatic evolution in naval warfare and engineering, USS Maine was cutting edge technology for its day, but considered obsolete as it entered service. Do we remember that?

Its destruction resulted in 266 deaths, two-thirds of the crew, and was the catalyst thrusting us into the Spanish-American War, which in turn propelled us to international prominence for the entire the 20th century. The sinking of USS Maine was of national importance, an act considered equal in our consciousness to the siege of the Alamo or the firing on Fort Sumter. Do we remember that?

As I researched its saga, I found that the ship, its fate, and its legacy are all distinctly separate elements, yet which combine into an incredible story. Three legs to the same maritime history stool, if you will. And you need all three for that stool to stand. So, let’s look at the first leg, the ship itself.

The idea of USS Maine began with the 1883 delivery of the Brazilian battleship Riachuelo and the increase of naval forces throughout Latin America. Brazil, Argentina and Chile found themselves in an arms race and the acquisition of modern armored warships from Europe, such as Riachuelo, greatly alarmed our government. Brazil’s navy then was the most powerful in the Americas.

When confronted with the scenario of hostile warships off American coasts, the need for modern U.S. warships became clear. A design contest was held, open to any naval architect, to submit designs for two warships, an armored cruiser to be called USS Maine and a battleship to be called USS Texas.


The floor deck plan of the “Maine” shows its turret placement. Public Domain

(This is an abomination of the naval art, but when designed it was considered to be the'correct' way to build a 'battleship'. M.)

There were some set criteria. USS Maine had to fit within existing docks and have a shallow enough draft to enable it to use all major American ports and bases. Its maximum beam was similarly fixed, its length set at 300 feet, its maximum displacement 7,000 tons. In addition, the vessel needed to have a speed of 17 knots, a ram bow, double bottom, and be capable of carrying torpedo boats. Armament would be four 10-inch guns, six 6-inch guns, and four torpedo tubes. Armor thickness was also defined.

Theodore D. Wilson won the design contest for USS Maine. Although considered conservative and inferior to other plans submitted, Wilson’s was chosen most likely since the Texas design was to come from a British firm. Officials thought we would demand at least one to be American designed.

USS Maine was originally classified an armored cruiser, hence its designation AC-1. Both new vessels reflected latest European naval developments with layout of their main armament resembling the British ironclad Inflexible, as well as similar features of some Italian ships. USS Maine’s two-gun turrets were staggered en échelon, rather than on the ship’s centerline, with its fore gun positioned out from the starboard side while aft gun protruded from the port side. This allowed both guns to fire ahead, astern or across its deck, especially with cutaways in the main superstructure.

Congress authorized construction in early August 1886 and its keel was laid down Oct. 17, 1888, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The largest vessel built in a U.S. Navy yard at that time, USS Maine measured 324 feet long, with a 57-foot beam, draft just over 22 feet and a displacement of 6,682 tons. Divided into 214 watertight compartments, it had a double bottom from foremast to the aft end of its armored citadel, a distance of 196 feet. Wilson’s original design was for a three-mast bark rig for wind propulsion, but this proved impractical, and USS Maine’s mizzen mast was removed in 1892 after launching. The remaining two masts, which would be recovered from the wreck, never hoisted any sails.

Machinery for the ship, built by N. F. Palmer Jr. & Co.’s Quintard Iron Works facility in New York, was the first designed for a major ship under direct supervision of George W. Melville. This famous engineer and Arctic explorer was soon to become commodore.

USS Maine had two vertical triple-expansion steam engines, inverted and mounted in watertight compartments separated by a ship-long bulkhead. They were designed for a total output of 9,293 horsepower. Eight single-ended Scotch marine boilers provided steam at 135 psi (pounds per square inch) working pressure and 364 degrees Fahrenheit temperature. On trials, however, USS Maine failed to meet its contract speed of 17 knots or 20 mph. They also carried two dynamos to power interior lighting and searchlights.

The ship carried a maximum load of 896 tons of coal situated in 20 bunkers, 10 along on each side, which extended below the protective deck. Wing bunkers were located at each end with a fire room extending inboard to the front of the boilers.

Its guns consisted of four 10-inch/30 caliber Mark IIs with a maximum elevation of 15 degrees. The ship carried 90 rounds per gun of 510-pound shells. With a muzzle velocity of 2,000 feet per second, a range at maximum elevation could be achieved of 20,000 yards, over 11 miles!


An engraving copied from Scientific American magazine, Vol. 45, 1898, shows the launching, at the New York Navy Yard, 18 November 1889. (NH 46767, Naval History and Heritage Command)

USS Maine launched Nov. 18, 1889, sponsored by Alice Tracey Wilmerding, granddaughter of Navy Secretary Benjamin Tracy. Apparently, Wilmerding struck the ship’s bow near its plimsoll line depth of 13. This action, caught in a widely publicized photograph, scandalized many who superstitiously now considered the ship unlucky.

They were further empowered in this line of thinking when a three-year delay ensued after its launch as the shipyard waited for nickel steel plates for USS Maine‘s armor. Then, weight distribution was found to be ill-balanced, dramatically slowing its speed. Two other flaws emerged regarding its protection. One was a lack of decent topside armor to counter effects of rapid-fire intermediate-caliber guns and high-explosive shells.

The second was the use of nickel-steel armor instead of Harvey steel or Krupp armor, both having twice the tensile strength of nickel. With the same density, 6 inches of Harvey steel equaled 10 inches of nickel steel in protection. Using nickel steel made USS Maine heavier and slower.


A port quarter view, taken in Bar Harbor, Maine, 1895. (NH 48621, Naval History and Heritage Command)

The ship was finally commissioned Sept. 17, 1895, under command of Capt. Arent S. Crowninshield. Two months later, it sailed to Newport, R.I., to fit out and test-fire torpedoes. Later that month, they visited Portland and Bar Harbor in Maine.


This view, looking forward on deck, port side, was taken while the ship was visiting Bar Harbor, Maine, 1895. (NH 48622, Naval History and Heritage Command)

For the next 18 months, USS Maine operated out of Norfolk, Va., working along the Atlantic East Coast and Caribbean. On April 10, 1897, Capt. Charles Dwight Sigsbee relieved Crowninshield.

For all its shiny newness and technology, USS Maine was actually out of date by the time it entered service. This was due to several factors, including its long construction period. Nine years was considered unusually long, delays mostly caused by U.S. industry limits at the time. A fire in the drafting room of the building yard, where its working set of blueprints was stored, caused further delay. Then there was the three-year wait to get the nickel steel plating.


In a photo tilted “Evening Amusements,” Maine crew members play cards and read in their berthing spaces, circa 1895-1898. (NH 46729, Naval History and Heritage Command)

Changes in ship roles of this type, and evolution in naval tactics had also changed things. The use of steel plating now meant ramming was no longer a worthwhile maneuver, as compared to earlier ironclad vessels. There was also possibility of self-damage from the ship’s en échelon gun placement, which discouraged firing end-on or across the deck. Another drawback of this set-up limited the ability for USS Maine to fire any kind of broadside.

Its main turrets were situated on a cutaway gundeck, always awash in any bad weather. Mounted at the ends from the ship’s center of gravity, the vessel heavily rolled in rough seas. The overhanging main turrets also prevented coaling at sea, except in very calm waters.

The role of armored cruisers was also evolving. Instead of being a small, heavily armored copy of a battleship, new cruisers needed to be faster, more lightly armored commerce raiders. USS Maine was not, having been built with heavy belt armor, not conducive to this new naval strategy.

As a result, USS Maine was caught between competing positions, unable to perform either role adequately. It lacked more protective armor and higher firepower to go up against any kind of a battleship but also did not have any speed to be a raiding cruiser. As it entered its first year of service, USS Maine was already considered obsolete for the naval tactics of the day.


A half-toned photograph, originally published in “Uncle Sam’s Navy,” 1898, shows the Gunner’s Gang, photographed in one of the ship’s torpedo rooms. (NH 50183, Naval History and Heritage Command)

(Notice there is an African American present? He is probably the 'swage man'. The worst jobs on a gun crew were given to the African Americans. Wonder why? M.)

But this would not factor into its fate, as war clouds gathered over Cuba and America grew increasingly concerned watching Spanish mistreatment of the Cuban people. USS Maine had a rendezvous with Havana Harbor and a date with destiny.

Charles Lagerbom teaches AP U.S. History at Belfast Area High School and lives in Northport. He is author of “Whaling in Maine” and “Maine to Cape Horn,” available through Historypress.com.

The lack of a decade and a half of technology paced warship construction, as part of The Great Betrayal outcome, denied the Americans the experience they needed to build a competitive technically current and competent navy. 

[miletus12]

How did an army that managed to conquer more territory than Europe in area TWICE, become the shambles it was in 1898?





Well...

Going Unconventional: Ulysses S. Grant & The Battle of VicksburgDecember 18, 2017

Often, success strikes from the most unexpected quarters. The most unexpected man in the most unexpected way finds himself a sudden phenomenon whose name will always be remembered. The American Civil War presented many such cases, but perhaps none were as notable and more important than the stunning rise of Ulysses S. Grant. The description initially given in Grant As Military Commander (which I’ll reread and review here sometime in 2018) is most telling:

In that winter of 1860-61 Grant’s fortunes had reached their nadir. He was slovenly and unkempt in appearance; he had not shaken off his drinking habits; his father and younger brothers despised him and refused to lend him money; he was generally regarded as one of life’s failures. Nobody would have dreamt that from this shabby chrysalis would emerge, within the next four years, the triumphant victor of the Civil War.

Through the war, Ulysses S. Grant built a tremendous reputation, and it was the Siege and Battle of Vicksburg that was his greatest moment of glory, his aristeia. Its capture was the single most decisive moment of the Civil War and it would turn the victorious Union general into a made man, where he would soon ascend to heights unthinkable.

Why was the Battle of Vicksburg Important?

When it became clear through 1861 and 1862 that the Civil War wasn’t going to be the brief affair that everyone had expected going in, the grim reality of a long, drawn out war of attrition became clear. At first widely derided, General Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan was grudgingly accepted. The Confederacy wouldn’t be defeated in a single battle, but rather the Union would have to gradually squeeze the life out of it through a blockade and by capturing the Mississippi River to split the secessionist area in two.


Anaconda Plan map

Throughout 1862, the Union armies made gradual, but costly progress in this area. Setting up the naval blockade proved relatively easy given the North’s industrial superiority, but tightening the noose around the Mississippi proved far more challenging, as it required the conquest of territory around that river, and the Confederates, as always, put up a ferocious fight.

Ulysses S. Grant had won several hard-fought victories in those early years, capturing Forts Henry and Donelson and beating the Confederates at the bloody Battle of Shiloh. The victory was very costly, and the media called for his removal, but President Lincoln refused, famously saying “I can’t spare this man, he fights.” Lincoln showed much faith in his general throughout the war, and it would pay off most resoundingly at the Siege of Vicksburg.

Victories like Shiloh gradually saw the Union closer and closer to severing the Confederacy from the Mississippi River, and thereby split the rebel territory in two, but the fortress of Vicksburg stood out as a thorn confounding the Union’s plans. Situated on a bluff overlooking a bend in the river, it presented an extremely dangerous obstacle to any Union ships attempting to pass, as they would be utterly exposed to enemy artillery.

Unfortunately, it couldn’t be ignored either. The Battle of Vicksburg was important because the fortress would need to be captured if the Union was to control the Mississippi River and cut the Confederacy in two.

The Vicksburg Campaign

Capturing it wouldn’t be simple, as you probably imagined by now. Aside from its commanding position on the river, making an assault from the west impossible, assaulting Vicksburg from the north and much of the east was also nearly impossible, as it was in the midst of bayous and swamps called the Yazoo Delta. Further to the east, beyond the Delta, was enemy territory that Union forces hadn’t conquered.

Numerous attempts throughout late 1862 and 1863 were undertaken to bypass the Yazoo Delta and reach Vicksburg, but none succeeded. There was intense pressure on Ulysses S. Grant from superiors in the War Department and the media, but President Lincoln kept faith in his general.

Confounded by trying every conventional strategy, the Union general decided he would go unconventional. Knowing that his superiors in the War Department would never approve of his audacious plan, he withheld as much as possible from them, only letting them know after he set out.

Grant’s plan, assisted by Admiral David Porter, was to actually run the guns of Vicksburg and establish a beachhead south of the city on the eastern side of the Mississippi River. In doing so, he would risk all his men and cut himself off from his supply lines. It was a big risk, but if it were successful, he would be in position to siege and capture Vicksburg.

Reinforcing his ships with bales of hay, logs, and other amenities, Admiral Porter ferried two of Grant’s corps downriver past Vicksburg on a moonless night. The ruse didn’t trick the Confederates, who fired mercilessly upon the Union flotilla, but only a few ships were sunk, and most of Grant’s army was now on the eastern side of the river south of the city. He left Sherman’s corps behind to divert the attention of the defenders. Sherman would eventually join him.


Ulysses S. Grant Battle of Vicksburg

Turning east, Ulysses S. Grant relied on the country for his supplies. His goal was to first cut off Vicksburg from its own line of supplies stretching to Jackson, Mississippi. This was done in lightning-quick fashion, stunning the Confederates. With his army now positioned between Vicksburg and Jackson, Grant turned east.

His actions befuddled the commander at Vicksburg, John Pemberton. Not wanting to be seen as abandoning the city, but also knowing that it was better to cooperate with General Joseph E. Johnston, the commanding officer of the Confederate forces in the western theater, he tried to make both choices, stringing his forces out across the state. Therefore, they weren’t concentrated enough to stop Grant’s advance and were defeated separately.

On May 18th, Ulysses S. Grant won the Battle of Champion Hill. He would then force the Confederates back across the Big Black River. The Siege of Vicksburg then began in earnest. For nearly seven weeks, the noose tightened around the city as the siege dragged on. The population suffered tremendously. With nowhere to go, Pemberton surrendered on July 4th.

Vicksburg Campaign map

With the siege and capture of Vicksburg, the Union took complete control of the Mississippi, cutting the Confederacy in two. Now unable to draw troops and supplies from west of the river, the Confederacy’s death warrant was signed. Its only hope afterward was that the North would tire of the war, but with the re-election of Lincoln after Sherman’s infamous march to the sea in Georgia, which was probably inspired in part by Grant’s Vicksburg campaign, the last remaining hope was gone.

How Grant Won the Battle

The key to winning the battle not only lay in the willingness of Ulysses S. Grant to persist after repeated failures, the trait which he has become so famous for, but in his willingness to completely defy the expectations of friend and foe alike. The Battle of Vicksburg required something more, however. It required him to defy every expectation, to startle and unsettle his enemies to compensate for their tremendously strong position. If Vicksburg was in such a strong position that his enemies couldn’t imagine any kind of siege, Ulysses S. Grant could use that belief to startle and unbalance them with unconventional tactics. When he acted, they were unprepared, and that was a force stronger than Vicksburg’s fortifications. The city suddenly found itself under siege, and Ulysses S. Grant solved the problem of getting to it with rapid results.

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Mark that the army which accomplished these incredible feats, did not innovate technology or much in the way of tactics or applied military science. What it did, and did very well, was create officers and trained men to do the impossible and make it seem routine.

This will still be seen in 1898 in the Filipino-American War, after the Spaniards fold up their tents and go home, but not during the months when the Spaniards and Americans fight army versus army. Then it will be a complete clown act on both sides.

The Spaniards would in post-mortem be fairly seen as sloppy in basic tactics. Their generals and senior officers, at least the ones who fought the Americans, were mostly incompetent, not even trained to read ground or set up the most rudimentary of defensive works. The Tercio, the Spanish infantry soldier, was brave and willing to fight, but it is to be noted that he could only perform to the level of his rudimentary training and leadership. When he came up against trained American "Regulars"; if he could not keep them at a distance they would close with him, the Tercio, and cut him to pieces either with aimed rifle fire or close combat with the bayonet and knife. Note that the Spaniard would not usually run, unless his officers did. When the Spanish captains and lieutenants stood their ground, the Tercios did as well. It was the colonels, majors and above who turned yellow dog and ran for it. The captains and lieutenants would follow and then the Tercios broke and ran last. There were some cases (Battle of El Caney) where Spanish generals stood with their men, but this was a rarity.  

This was not true of American Regulars. They were not as officer dependent to carry the fight forward. Maybe we can see a reason, because the 9th and 10th Cavalry, even when their officers were cut down, obviously kept going, despite what Teddy Roosevelt claimed. That says something about devotion to duty among the officers, sergeants and corporals and privates especially among these soldiers...



Troop C, Ninth U.S. Cavalry, Captain Taylor leading the charge at The Battle of San Juan Hill, 1 July 1898, aka the battle for the San Juan Heights, during the Spanish-American War. From Harper's Pictorial History of the War With Spain, published 1899.

BATTLE OF SAN JUAN AND KETTLE HILL (1898)
POSTED ONJUNE 16, 2020
BY CONTRIBUTED BY: EUELL A. NIELSEN

During the Spanish American War, several battles were fought that included Buffalo Soldiers. The Battle of Kettle Hill (generally known as San Juan Hill) fought on July 1, 1898, was the most significant since it was the only battle that involved all four buffalo soldier regiments, the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry.



After the Battle of El Caney on July 1, 1898, which engaged the 25th Infantry, over 8,000 American troops pressed on later that day towards San Juan Heights, where another battle was taking place. These troops included 1,250 black soldiers from the 9th and 10th Cavalry, led by Brigadier General Samuel S. Sumner as part of his Cavalry Division, and the 24th Infantry Regiment who were part of Brigadier General Jacob F. Kent’s 1st Infantry Division. Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders were also part of the assault on San Juan Heights.



San Juan Heights had two high spots along its north-south axis, one called San Juan Hill and the other later named Kettle Hill by the troops. On July 1, General William Shafter, the overall commander of U.S. forces in Cuba, ordered attacks on the Spanish blockhouse at El Caney and San Juan Heights. Generals Sumner and Kent lined up for an attack on San Juan Heights and waited for Brigadier General Henry W. Lawton’s division to arrive from El Caney which included the 25th Infantry.



The Spanish forces at San Juan Heights were well armed and well entrenched. Once American reinforcements arrived and the battle commenced, hundreds of U.S. soldiers fell under Spanish gunfire in an area known as Hell’s Pocket, before reaching the base of the hills. American forces then split into two groups to take both hills simultaneously. Sumner’s troops which included the 24th and 25th Infantry, charged up the side of San Juan Hill while Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, units of the all-white 3rd Division, and the 9th and 10th Calvary, headed up Kettle Hill. Racial segregation broke down during the battle as white and black soldiers intermingled during the charge. Sergeant George Berry of the 10th Cavalry, for example, carried the colors of 3rd Division, along with his own regiment’s flag.





Some of our brave colored boys who helped to free Cuba, ca. 1899

Courtesy U.S. Library of Congress (2007682340)

(The caption is "regrettable", but in accurate line with the racist attitudes of the day. M.)

By the end of day of July 1, U.S. forces had taken both San Juan Hill and Kettle Hill. Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders got most of the credit for taking Kettle Hill but the victory belonged to all of the soldiers who charged up the hill including the 9th and 10th Cavalry. Twenty-six Buffalo Soldiers died that day and several troopers from the 9th and 10th Calvary, and the 24th and 25th Infantry were later recognized and awarded for their bravery. Quarter Master Sergeant Edward L. Baker, Jr of the 10th Calvary, for example, was wounded by shrapnel and was awarded The Medal of Honor for his heroism. With control of San Juan Heights overlooking the city of Santiago, American forces began the siege of the city on July 2.



On July 3, U.S. warships destroyed the Spanish fleet off the coast of Santiago effectively trapping Spanish forces. On July 17, the Spanish Army surrendered the city, and all of Cuba, ending the Spanish-American War.

These soldiers who kept going were African Americans, the most ill-treated of American citizens in civil society, but who in the American army of 1898 were 'soldiers'.  

One could see the same devotion to duty among certain American volunteer units. 



Col. Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt and his Rough Riders atop San Juan Hill, July 3,1898. The Rough Riders were a diverse bunch of men consisting of cowboys, gold or mining prospectors, hunters, gamblers, Native Americans and college boys; all of whom were able-bodied and capable on horseback and in shooting.

Yet, it must be remarked that such volunteer units were "picked men" and they were extremely well led. Your average American volunteer of 1898 was not that well-led, well-trained, or as well-equipped as the basic Spanish Tercio who faced him, and what was much worse, not as devoted to duty as your average Spanish Tercio. Those men would bolt for the rear if their officers, both commissioned and especially non-commissioned, could not hold them. Fortunately, the officers and NCOs were ruthless enough to maintain discipline, Roosevelt among them as his account describes.  

Account of the Battle for Kettle and San Juan Hills

By Theodore Roosevelt

General:


Theodore Roosevelt was colonel of the Rough Riders (1st United States Volunteer Infantry) at the time of the Battles of Kettle and San Juan Hills. He recorded his recollections of these actions in his book, The Rough Riders. For his actions and leadership in this battle, he was nominated for a Congressional Medal of Honor, an honor denied him for political reasons until over eighty years after his death (his efforts to get the troops away from disease-ravaged Cuba had embarassed the Secretary of War).



The account is interesting, dynamic, and is some ways, very callous. Roosevelt, though a very compassionate man, showed little regard for life when it came to war, even when looking back over the years. He had expressed in private letters a concern that the war would be averted before he had a chance to get into battle, and asking that efforts be made to be sure that peace would not come before this happened. Though many people, writing in retrospect of killing an enemy in battle, will state that the action left them numb or unfeeling, or that they later had some regrets over killing of another human, albeit an enemy, Theodore Roosevelt never seemed to how this attitude. It is perhaps this disregard for life in battle, including his own life, that made him the excellent leader he was.



The Battles for Kettle and San Juan Hills

By Theodore Roosevelt



Theodore Roosevelt in his "Rough Rider uniform“

(Notice the khakis? USG Regulars wore blue jerseys and denim trousers. M.)

The most serious loss that I and the regiment could have suffered befell just before we charged. Bucky O'Neill was strolling up and down in front of his men, smoking his cigarette, for he was inveterately addicted to the habit. He had a theory that an officer ought never to take cover - a theory which was, of course, wrong, though in a volunteer organization the officers should certainly expose themselves very fully, simply for the effect on the men; our regimental toast on the transport running, " The officers; may the war last until each is killed, wounded, or promoted." As O'Neill moved to and fro, his men begged him to lie down, and one of the sergeants said, " Captain, a bullet is sure to hit you." O'Neill took his cigarette out of his mouth, and blowing out a cloud of smoke laughed and said, " Sergeant, the Spanish bullet isn't made that will kill me." A little later he discussed for a moment with one of the regular officers the direction from which the Spanish fire was coming. As he turned on his heel a bullet struck him in the mouth and came out at the back of his head; so that even before he fell his wild and gallant soul had gone out into the darkness.



My orderly was a brave young Harvard boy, Sanders, from the quaint old Massachusetts town of Salem. The work of an orderly on foot, under the blazing sun, through the hot and matted jungle, was very severe, and finally the heat overcame him. He dropped; nor did he ever recover fully, and later he died from fever. In his place I summoned a trooper whose name I did not know. Shortly afterward, while sitting beside the bank, I directed him to go back and ask whatever general he came across if I could not advance, as my men were being much cut up. He stood up to salute and then pitched forward across my knees, a bullet having gone through his throat, cutting the carotid.



When O'Neill was shot, his troop, who were devoted to him, were for the moment at a loss whom to follow. One of their number, Henry Bardshar, a huge Arizona miner, immediately attached himself to me as my orderly, and from that moment he was closer to me, not only in the fight but throughout the rest of the campaign, than an other man, not even excepting the color-sergeant, Wright.



Captain Mills was with me; gallant Ship had already been killed. Mills was an invaluable aide, absolutely cool, absolutely unmoved or flurried in any way.



I sent messenger after messenger to try to find General Sumner or General Wood and get permission to advance, and was just about making up my mind that in the absence of orders I had better " march toward the guns," when Lieutenant-Colonel Dorst came riding up through the storm of bullets with the welcome command "to move forward and support the regulars in the assault on the hills in front." General Sumner had obtained authority to advance from Lieutenant Miley, who was representing General Shafter at the front, and was in the thick of the fire. The General at once ordered the first brigade to advance on the hills, and the second to support it. He himself was riding his horse along the lines, superintending the fight. Later I overheard a couple of my men talking together about him. What they said illustrates the value of a display of courage among the officers in hardening their soldiers; for their theme was how, as they were lying down under a fire which they could not return, and were in consequence feeling rather nervous, General Sumner suddenly appeared on horseback, sauntering by quite unmoved; and, said one of the men, “That made us feel all right. If the General could stand it, we could."



The instant I received the order I sprang on my horse and then my "crowded hour" began. The guerillas had been shooting at us from the edges of the jungle and from their perches in the leafy trees, and as they used smokeless powder, it was almost impossible to see them, though a few of my men had from time to time responded. We had also suffered from the hill on our right front, which was held chiefly by guerillas, although there were also some Spanish regulars with them, for we found their dead. I formed my men in column of troops, each troop extended in open skirmishing order, the right resting on the wire fences which bordered the sunken lane. Captain Jenkins led the first squadron, his eyes literally dancing with joyous excitement.



I started in the rear of the regiment, the position in which the colonel should theoretically stay. Captain Mills and Captain McCormick were both with me as aides; but I speedily had to send them off on special duty in getting the different bodies of men forward. I had intended to go into action on foot as at Las Guasimas, but the heat was so oppressive that I found I should be quite unable to run up and down the line and superintend matters unless I was mounted; and, moreover, when on horseback, I could see the men better and they could see me better.



A curious incident happened as I was getting the men started forward. Always when men have been lying down under cover for some time, and are required to advance, there is a little hesitation, each looking to see whether the others are going forward. As I rode down the line, calling to the troopers to go forward, and rasping brief directions to the captains and lieutenants, I came upon a man lying behind a little bush, and I ordered him to jump up. I do not think he understood that we weremaking a forward move, and he looked up at me for a moment with hesitation, and I again bade him rise, jeering him and saying: "Are you afraid to stand up when I am on horseback?" As I spoke, he suddenly fell forward on his face, a bullet having struck him and gone through him lengthwise. I suppose the bullet had been aimed at me; at any rate, I, who was on horseback in the open, was unhurt, and the man lying flat on the ground in the cover beside me was killed. There were several pairs of brothers with us; of the two Nortons one was killed; of the two McCurdys one was wounded.



I soon found that I could get that line, behind which I personally was, faster forward than the one immediately in front of it, with the result that the two rearmost lines of the regiment began to crowd together; so I rode through them both, the better to move on the one in front. This happened with every line in succession, until I found myself at the head of the regiment.



Both lieutenants of B Troop from Arizona had been exerting themselves greatly, and both were overcome by the heat; but Sergeants Campbell and Davidson took it forward in splendid shape. Some of the men from this troop and from the other Arizona troop (Bucky O'Neill's) joined me as a kind of fighting tail.



The Ninth Regiment was immediately in front of me, and the First on my left, and these went up Kettle Hill with my regiment. The Third, Sixth, and Tenth went partly up Kettle Hill (following the Rough Riders and the Ninth and First), and partly between that and the block-house hill, which the infantry were assailing. General Sumner in person gave the Tenth the order to charge the hills; and it went forward at a rapid gait. The three regiments went forward more or less intermingled, advancing steadily and keeping up a heavy fire. Up Kettle Hill Sergeant George Berry, of the Tenth, bore not only his own regimental colors but those of the Third, the color-sergeant of the Third having been shot down; he kept shouting, Dress on the colors, boys, dress on the colors!” as he followed Captain Ayres, who was running in advance of his men, shouting and waving his hat. The Tenth Cavalry lost a greater proportion of its officers than any other regiment in the battle - eleven out of twenty-two.



By the time I had come to the head of the regiment we ran into the left wing of the Ninth Regulars, and some of the First Regulars, who were lying down; that is, the troopers were lying down, while the officers were walking to and fro. The officers of the white and colored regiments alike took the greatest pride in seeing that the men more than did their duty; and the mortality among them was great.



I spoke to the captain in command of the rear platoons, saying that I had been ordered to support the regulars in the attack upon the hills, and that in my judgment we could not take these hills by firing at them, and that we must rush them. He answered that his orders were to keep his men lying where they were, and that he could not charge without orders. I asked where the Colonel was, and as he was not in sight, said, " Then I am the ranking officer here and I give the order to charge" - for I did not want to keep the men longer in the open suffering under a fire which they could not effectively return. Naturally the Captain hesitated to obey this order whenno word had been received from his own Colonel. So I said, “Then let my men through, sir," and rode on through the lines, followed by the grinning Rough Riders, whose attention had been completely taken off the Spanish bullets, partly by my dialogue with the regulars, and partly by the language I had been using to themselves as I got the lines forward, for I had been joking with some and swearing at others, as the exigencies of the case seemed to demand. When we started to go through,however, it proved too much for the regulars, and they jumped up and came along,their officers and troops mingling with mine, all being delighted at the chance. When I got to where the head of the left wing of the Ninth was lying, through the courtesy of Lieutenant Hartwick, two of whose colored troopers threw down the fence, I was enabled to get back into the lane, at the same time waving my hat, and giving the order to charge the hill on our right front. Out of my sight, over on the right, Captains McBlain and Taylor, of the Ninth, made up their minds independently to charge at just about this time; and at almost the same moment Colonels Carroll and Hamilton, who were off, I believe, to my left where we could see neither them nor their men, gave the order to advance. But of all this I knew nothing at the time. The whole line, tired of waiting, and eager to close with the enemy, was straining to go forward; and it seems that different parts slipped the leash at almost the same moment. The First Cavalry came up the hill just behind, and partly mixed with my regiment and the Ninth. As already said, portions of the Third, Sixth, and Tenth followed, while the rest of the members of these three regiments kept more in touch with the infantry on our left.



By this time we were all in the spirit of the thing and greatly excited by the charge, the men cheering and running forward between shots, while the delighted faces of the foremost officers, like Captain C. J. Stevens, of the Ninth, as they ran at the head of their troops, will always stay in my mind. As soon as I was in the line I galloped forward a few yards until I saw that the men were well started, and then galloped back to help Goodrich, who was in command of his troop, get his men across the road so as to attack the hill from that side. Captain Mills had already thrown three of the other troops of the regiment across this road for the same purpose. Wheeling around, I then again galloped toward the hill passing the shouting, cheering, firing men, and went up the lane, splashing through a small stream; when I got abreast of the ranch buildings on the top of Kettle Hill, I turned and went up the slope. Being on horseback I was, of course, able to get ahead of the men on foot, excepting my orderly, Henry Bardshar, who had run ahead very fast in order to get better shots at the Spaniards, who were now running out of the ranch buildings. Sergeant Campbell and a number of the Arizona men, and Dudley Dean, among others, were very close behind. Stevens, with his platoon of the Ninth, was abreast of us; so were McNamee and Hartwick. Some forty yards from the top I ran into a wire fence and jumped off Little Texas, turninghim loose. He had been scraped by a couple of bullets, one of which nicked my elbow, and I never expected to see him again. As I ran up to the hill, Bardshar stopped to shoot, and two Spaniards fell as he emptied his magazine. These were the only Spaniards I actually saw fall to aimed shots by any one of my men, with the exceptionof two guerillas in trees.



Almost immediately afterward the hill was covered by the troops, both Rough Riders and the colored troopers of the Ninth, and some men of the First. There was the usual confusion, and afterward there was much discussion as to exactly who been on the hill first. The first guidons planted there were those of the three New Mexican troops, G, E, and F, of my regiment, under their Captains, Llewellen, Luna, and Muller, but on the extreme right of the hill, at the opposite end from where we struck it, Captains Taylor and McBlain and their men of the Ninth were first up. Each of the five captains was firm in the belief that his troop was first up. As for the individual men, each of whom honestly thought he was first on the summit, their name was legion.One Spaniard was captured in the buildings, another was shot as he tried to hide himself, and a few others were killed as they ran.



Among the many deeds of conspicuous gallantry here performed, two, both to the credit of the First Cavalry, may be mentioned as examples of the others, not as exceptions. Sergeant Charles Karsten, while close beside Captain Tutherly, the squadron commander, was hit by a shrapnel bullet. He continued on the line, firing until his arm grew numb; and he then refused to go to the rear, and devoted himself to taking care of the wounded, utterly unmoved by the heavy fire. Trooper Hugo Brittain, when wounded, brought the regimental standard forward, waving it to and fro, to cheer the men.



No sooner were we on the crest than the Spaniards from the line of hills in our front, where they were strongly entrenched, opened a very heavy fire upon us with their rifles. They also opened upon us with one or two pieces of artillery, using time fuses which burned very accurately, the shells exploding right over our heads.



On the top of the hill was a huge iron kettle, or something of the kind, probably used for sugar refining. Several of our men took shelter behind this. We had a splendid view of the charge on the San Juan block-house to our left, where the infantry of Kent, led by Hawkins, were climbing the hill. Obviously the proper thing to do was to help them, and I got the men together and started them volley-firing against the Spaniards in the San Juan block-house and in the trenches around it. We could only see their heads; of course this was all we ever could see when we were firing at them in their trenches. Stevens was directing not only his own colored troopers, but a number of Rough Riders; for in a melee good soldiers are always prompt to recognize a good officer, and are eager to follow him.



We kept up a brisk fire for some five or ten minutes; meanwhile we were much cut up ourselves. Gallant Colonel Hamilton, than whom was never a braver man, was killed, and equally gallant Colonel Carroll wounded. When near the summit Captain Mills had been through the head, the bullet destroying the sight of one eye permanently and of the other temporarily. He would not go back or let any man assist him, sitting down where he was and waiting until one of the men brought him word that the hill was stormed. Colonel Veile planted the standard of the First Cavalry on the hill, and General Sumner rode up. He was fighting his division in great form, and was always himself in the thick of the fire. As the men were much excited by the firing, they seemed to pay very little heed to their own losses.



Suddenly, above the cracking of the carbines, rose a peculiar drumming sound, and some of the men cried, "The Spanish machine-guns!" Listening, I made out that it came from the flat ground to the left, and jumped to my feet, smiting my hand on my thigh, and shouting aloud with exultation, "It's the Gatlings, men, our Gatlings!" Lieutenant Parker was bringing his four gatlings into action, and shoving them nearer and nearer the front. Now and then the drumming ceased for a moment; then it would resound always closer to San Juan hill, which like ourselves, was hammering to assist entry attack. Our men cheered lustily.



We saw much of Parker after that, and there was never a more welcome sound than his Gatlings as they opened. It was the only sound which I ever heard my men cheer in battle.



The infantry got nearer and nearer the crest of the hill. At last we could see the Spaniards running from the rifle-pits as the Americans came on in their final rush. Then I stopped my men for fear they should injure their comrades, and called to them to charge the next line of trenches, on the hills in our front, from which we had been undergoing a good deal of punishment. Thinking that the men would all come, I jumped over the wire fence in front of us and started at the double; but, as a matter of fact, the troopers were so excited, what with shooting and being shot, and shouting and cheering, that they did not hear, or did not heed me; and after running about a hundred yards I found I had only five men along with me. Bullets were ripping the grass all around us, and one of the men, Clay Green, was mortally wounded; another, Winslow Clark, a Harvard man, was shot first in the leg and then through the body. He made not the slightest murmur, only asking me to put his water canteen where he could get at it, which I did; he ultimately recovered. There was no use going on with the remaining three men, and I bade them stay where they were while I went back and brought up the rest of the rest of the brigade. This was a decidedly cool request, for there was really no possible point in letting them stay there while I went back; but atthe moment it seemed perfectly natural to me, and apparently so to them, for they cheerfully nodded, and sat down in the grass, firing back at the line of trenches from which the Spaniards were shooting at them. Meanwhile, I ran back, jumped over the wire fence, and went over the crest of the hill, filled with anger against the troopers, and especially those of my own regiment, for not having accompanied me. They, of course, were quite innocent of wrong-doing; and even while I taunted them bitterly for not having followed me, it was all I could do not to smile at the look of injury and surprise that came over their faces, while they cried out, "We didn't hear you, we didn't see you go, Colonel; lead on now, we'll sure follow you." I wanted the other regiments to come too, so I ran down to where General Sumner was and asked him if I might make the charge; and he told me to go and that he would see that the men followed. By this time everybody had his attention attracted, and when I leaped over the fence again, with Major Jenkins beside me, the men of the various regiments which were already on the hill came with a rush, and we started across the wide valley which lay between us and the Spanish entrenchments. Captain Dimmick, now in command of the Ninth, was bringing it forward; Captain McBlain had a number of Rough Riders mixed in with his troop, and led them all together; Captain Taylor had been severely wounded. The long-legged men like Greenway, Goodrich, sharpshooter Proffit, and others, outstripped the rest of us, as we had a considerable distance to go. Longbefore we got near them the Spaniards ran, save a few here and there, who either surrendered or were shot down. When we reached the trenches we found them filled with dead bodies in the light blue and white uniform of the Spanish regular army. There were very few wounded. Most of the fallen had little holes in their heads from which their brains were oozing; for they were covered from the neck down by the trenches.



It was at this place that Major Wessels, of the Third Cavalry, was shot in the back of the head. It was a severe wound, but after having it bound up he again came to the front in command of his regiment. Among the men who were foremost was Lieutenant Milton F. Davis, of the First Cavalry. He had been joined by three men of the Seventy-first New York, who ran up, and, saluting, said, " Lieutenant, we want to go with you, our officers won't lead us." One of the brave fellows was soon afterward shot in the face. Lieutenant Davis's first sergeant, Clarence Gould, kill a Spanish soldier with his revolver, just as the Spaniard was aiming at one of my Rough Riders . At about the same time I also shot one. I was with Henry Bardshar, running up at the double, and two Spaniards leaped from the trenches and fired at us, not ten yardsaway. As they turned to run I closed in and fired twice, missing the first and killing the second. My revolver was from the sunken battleship Maine, and had been given me by my brother-in-law, Captain W. S. Cowles, of the Navy. At the time I did not knowof Gould's exploit, and supposed my feat to be unique; and although Gould had killed his Spaniard in the trenches, not very far from me, I never learned of it until weeks after. It is astonishing what a limited area of vision and experience one has in the hurly-burly of a battle.



There was very great confusion at this time, the different regiments being completely intermingled-white regulars, colored regulars, and Rough Riders . General Sumner had kept a considerable force in reserve on Kettle Hill, under Major Jackson, of the Third Cavalry. We were still under a heavy fire and I got together a mixed lot of men and pushed on from the trenches and ranch-houses which we had just taken, driving the Spaniards through a line of palm-trees, and over the crest of a chain of hills. When we reached these crests we found ourselves overlooking Santiago. Some of the men, including Jenkins, Greenway, and Goodrich, pushed on almost by themselves far ahead. Lieutenant Hugh Berkely, of the First, with a sergeant and two troopers, reached the extreme front. He was, at the time, ahead of everyone; the sergeant was killed and one trooper wounded; but the lieutenant and the remaining trooper stuck to their post for the rest of the afternoon until our line was gradually extended to include them.



While I was re-forming the troops on the chain of hills, one of General Sumner's aides, Captain Robert Howze - as dashing and gallant an officer as there was in the whole gallant cavalry division, by the way - came up with orders to me to halt where I was, not advancing farther, but to hold the hill at all hazards. Howze had his horse, and I had some difficulty in making him take proper shelter; he stayed with us for quite a time, unable to make up his mind to leave the extreme front, and mean while jumping at the chance to render any service, of risk or otherwise, which the moment developed.



I now had under me all the fragments six cavalry regiments which were at the extreme front, being the highest officer left there, and I was in immediate command of them for the remainder of the afternoon and that night. The Ninth was over to the right, and the Thirteenth Infantry afterward came up beside it. The rest of Kent's infantry was to our left. Of the Tenth, Lieutenants Anderson, Muller, and Fleming reported to me; Anderson was slightly wounded, but he paid no heed to this. All three, like every other officer, had troopers of various regiments under them; such mixing was inevitable in making repeated charges through thick jungle; it was essentially a troop commanders', indeed, almost a squad leaders', fight. The Spaniards who had been holding the trenches and the line of hills, had fallen back upon their supports and we were under a very heavy fire both from rifles and great guns. At the point where we were, the grass-covered hill-crest was gently rounded, giving poor cover, and I made

my men lie down on the hither slope.



On the extreme left Captain Beck, of the Tenth, with his own troop, and small bodies of the men of other regiments, was exercising a practically independent command, driving back the Spaniards whenever they showed any symptoms of advancing. He had received his orders to hold the line at all hazards….



Bibliography:

(As a service to our readers, clicking on title in red will take you to that book on Amazon.com)

Excerpted from:



Roosevelt, Theodore, The Rough Riders (Da Capo Paperback). (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920). This is a reprint of Roosevelt's classic 1902 edition.



Otis, James, The Boys of '98. (Boston: Dana Estes & Company,1898) 218 (image of Roosevelt).

That lack of discipline and professionalism would change at least in the Philippines as the National Guardsmen became professionalized and frankly brutalized in the very awful Filipino-American War; an utterly criminal imperialist exercise so reminiscent of the Native American Wars. This professionalism would arise from the same exact reason that the American Regulars had become professionals in those Native American Wars. A wily and elusive and intelligent enemy would teach the 'volunteers' to either soldier up, or they, the American soldier-volunteer, would be found dead with a bolo knife in the belly or missing his head. It made for tough cynical soldiers and for a hideous militaristic bigotry against the Filipino people, not really seen again until the Vietnam War where similar conditions produced the racism, but not devotion to duty.

[miletus12]

So, what could have been different in the American context? What 'might' the Americans have done, if their politics and society had made possible a different approach to the 1898 situation?

Trying to find an alternative path in the economic and social morass of America in the late 19th Century is difficult. \

Roosevelt and the Business World

WHAT MR. ROOSEVELT'S ELECTION WILL MEAN TO THE BUSINESS WORLD

BY FRANK A. MUNSEY

THIS article is written on the day following the Ohio preferential primary, May 22. Things are moving so rapidly in these times that a magazine article, necessarily written several weeks before publication, but read as from the date of the issue of the magazine, may well seem a misfit. It is essential, therefore, to fix the time of writing that the reader may see as from the writer's viewpoint.

If there were any longer any considerable doubt of Mr. Roosevelt's nomination at origin in— Chicago, it would be venturesome to write anything for publication a month hence under the caption of this article. The question everyone is asking himself or his neighbor to-day is:

"What will Mr. Roosevelt's election mean to the business world? Will it mean greater general prosperity, or greater confusion and disturbance than we now have?"

This is exactly what every man wishes to know. It is with him, after all, a question of busy factories and bulging commerce rather than the election of any particular man to the Presidency.

In the contest for delegates to the nominating convention in Chicago, most business and professional men throughout the country have opposed Mr. Roosevelt. Their opposition has been based on the fancy, or fear, that if again elected President he would not give us as safe an administration as Mr. Taft would. This is the very heart of the matter.

Such concern about Mr. Roosevelt's attitude toward business, toward railroads, toward corporations, and industries generally, cannot be squared to a just and intelligent review of his former administration. Mr. Roosevelt is not an experiment. He has been many years in public life, during seven of which he was President of the United States.

THE CHARGES AGAINST ROOSEVELT

The chief charges against him have their (premises based on three cases. M.)

HIS FIGHT AGAINST RAILROAD METHODS THAT WERE ARCHAIC AND DISHONEST.

HIS INITIATION OF PROCEEDINGS AGAINST TRUSTS.

THE PANIC OF 1907.

Wall Street was perfectly satisfied with the railroad situation, so far as concerned its freedom to run business in its own way and to keep accounts in its own way. Before Mr. Roosevelt's administration railroading was looked upon very much as a personal business -- a business with which the man at the head of it, subject to his board of directors, had a right to do pretty much as he pleased. Railroading was an empire unto itself. Its freedom and tremendous power made for dramatic speculation and the highest kind of high finance. Something was happening, something doing in the railroad world, every day, that gave the Street a chill, or thrilled it with speculative intoxication.

Those were wonderful in the arena of high financial tumbling, the like of which we shall never see again. The variegated pictures of delirium that were thrown upon the speculative screen almost from day to day were masterpieces of interwoven fact and fiction.

Mr. Roosevelt had no patience with the idea that a railroad was of the nature of a personal business, like a man's farm, for instance, or the shop of a small merchant or a local trucking business, all of which do have, or can easily have, ample competition.

A railroad, as he saw it -- and he saw it right -- is a public-service concern, which must serve the public generally, and which exists by grace of the public. It is a private property in the sense of the actual dollars invested in it, but the property of the community in the bigger and broader sense -a dual property, which could not exist without the good-will of the community, on the one hand, and the money put into it, on the other.

This was a conception that found no place in Wall Street and with railroad managements. It is not recorded that more than one railroad magnate openly said "the public be damned," but as acts sometimes speak louder than words, and more convincingly, it is obvious that this particular railroad president did not stand alone in his view of the relation between a railroad and the public.

ROOSEVELT'S RAILROAD REGULATION

So, when this man Roosevelt took it upon himself to bring sane business methods and regulation to the railroad world, to introduce a uniform system of bookkeeping, to cut out rebates, to regulate freight-rates, and to insist on reports that should show with reasonable accuracy the financial condition of a railroad, all Wall Street and all the speculators rose up in their wrath and denounced him.

There was no precedent for all this, they cried. No President had hitherto taken it upon himself to meddle in railroad affairs in any such way, and had we not had a great and glorious list of Presidents? This man Roosevelt was a usurper of the rights of the people, a dictator, a demagogue, playing to the mob.

From this time on Mr. Roosevelt's administration was a battle-ground. Lined up together against him were the interests, all big business, all the speculators, and the politicians.

Eight or ten years have elapsed since this effort at the regulation of railroads, and since this new doctrine of public service on the part of railroads was vitalized by Mr. Roosevelt. To-day, the reforms that he insisted upon have become ingrained into the very life of railroading, and have proved, for the most part, to be possessed of broad common sense and justice and fairness, both to the railroads themselves and to the community.

No first-rate railroad management would wish to go back to the old conditions of rate-cutting and indiscriminate rebates and idiosyncratic methods of accounting, neither would the legitimate bankers or the serious investors be willing to return to the uncertainties of the pre-Roosevelt period, so far as concerns the stability of the prices of securities.

THE NORTHERN SECURITIES VICTORY

Mr. Roosevelt's courageous and masterful work in forcing through these reforms, and in awakening the public conscience to their righteousness, showed great vision, great sense of justice, great statesmanship.

One of Mr. Roosevelt's most notable victories was his triumph in the Northern Securities case, compelling the dissolution of that enormous holding company, which, in the inception, was to control the Great Northern, the Northern Pacific, and the C., B. and Q. But for the determined war Mr. Roosevelt waged on this holding corporation, a concern that had the backing of the most powerful financial forces of the country, we might to-day be practically without competition in our railroad systems.

Indeed, it is not reasonable to assume that the Northern Securities Company would have stopped with the roads with which it started. It would, perhaps, have gone on taking in other railway systems until it controlled all, or a large part, of the important railroads of the country.

It might have been this, or it might have' been that one or two similar holding companies would have been established, resulting in throwing all our railroads into the hands of one, two, or three gigantic trusts, and leaving our people without competing railway systems, leaving our business interests without competing freight-rates.

After he had the railroad situation well in hand and it was in process of clarification Mr. Roosevelt turned his attention to big business. He initiated prosecutions against the Standard Oil Company, the American Tobacco Company, the Virginia Carolina Chemical Company, and some others. He also began an investigation of the Sugar Trust's customs frauds.

These aggressive moves looking to the regulation of big business further embittered the money centers and speculative communities. Their antagonism had grown to such enormous proportions, and had so warped their judgment, that nothing Mr. Roosevelt did was right and everything he did was wrong. Oversensitive and hostile capital could see no good in him, and fought him relentlessly then, as it still does.

Mr. Roosevelt might have had a peaceful and colorless administration if he had chosen the easy path, but he elected, instead, to work for the good of the ninety millions, and to see, so far as in him lay, and so far as his official 'powers would permit, that every man, rich or poor, influential or otherwise, had the squarest kind of a deal.

This meant war on arrogant intrenched interests, and in this war he stood wellnigh alone, save for the support of the people themselves and of the more progressive minds in Congress.

THE PANIC or 1907

Then came the panic of 1907, which Wall Street and its allies charged entirely to Roosevelt. There never was a more mistaken conclusion than this. The panic was inevitable. It could not have been prevented. No human force could have prevented it. With speculation strained to the breaking-point, with business strained to the breaking-point, with capital strained to the breaking-point, something had to give way.

The panic was two years overdue when it came. It would have come quite as surely, whether Mr. Roosevelt or some one else had been in the White House, if the overstrained business conditions had been the same.

The fact is, we hadn't money enough to do the work we were doing, and to do the work we wanted to do. Every phase of industry was pushed to its utmost capacity. There had never been a period of equal activity, of equal expansion. All legitimate business was as optimistic, as reckless, as heedless of danger as Wall Street and the speculative world generally.

Factories of every kind all over the land were running on full time, running overtime, running night and day, and couldn't keep up with their orders. Many new factories had been built, 'and others had been enlarged, or were in process of enlargement. The building trade was at high pressure. Sky-scrapers were going up everywhere, from one end of the country to the other, and sky-scrapers call for real money, and lots of it.

Traffic was so heavy and business so enormous that the railroads were hopelessly inadequate to meet the demands upon them. They were literally groaning under the burdens of prosperity. They couldn't handle the business of the country. In the Dakotas, in the winter of 1906 and 1907, the people found themselves in danger of freezing to death for want of coal, which the railroads could not haul, congested as they were with the mountains of freight hurled at them. So great was this congestion that many shopkeepers in the extreme. Northwest did not get their Christmas goods until long after the holidays were over -- not until late in January or February.

James J. Hill, the seer of the Western railroad world, about that time pointed out the critical dangers of the situation, and the hopeless incapacity of our transportation systems to keep pace with the growth of our industries and the output of our soil. He urged that money should be found somewhere with which to double both the trackage and the equipment of all our railroads. But where and how to raise this money was a problem that staggered him. It meant billions and billions of dollars.

And the farmers were no laggards in that period. They felt the spur of inflated prosperity, and let themselves go as the business world had let itself go in the matter of expansion, betterments, and expenditures.

Wages were going up everywhere, and as wages went up the prices of all commodities went up; rents increased, the value of farmlands increased, all realty increased, even as the price of stocks and bonds increased.

A PERIOD OF TOO MUCH PROSPERITY

It was a period of intense speculation in securities, in real estate, in everything. Everybody was prosperity-mad, everybody talked of our boundless resources, of bigger and bigger and yet bigger prices for securities, and of bigger and bigger and yet bigger prices for everything. There was no pessimism anywhere, there was no note of the impending crash. There was no thought of the day of reckoning, no thought of the panic that was soon to fall so heavily upon the land.

Money in Wall Street had reached one hundred and twenty per cent on call— that is, money borrowed from day to day —and at other times forty, ninety, and one hundred per cent. With stocks all the while bounding upward, day after day marked higher and higher, what mattered it that money averaged to cost ten or twenty percent ? The thought of interest was petty and narrow, considered beside the glittering profits of the higher and always higher prices.

And time money -- that is, money borrowed for a specified period, three months, four months, or six months -- was very difficult to get and ranged at impossible rates.

In March, 1907, the first break came in the price of securities. That was, in fact, the beginning of the panic. With this break the European money-markets closed their doors to us. They were deaf to our demands for money, and turned their backs on our securities.

We were going at such a pace that we were compelled to have money. We couldn't stop in a minute, and there was no apparent way of gradually slowing down. No longer able to sell our securities in Europe, and with the tremendous volume of securities held in Europe and thrown back upon us, we were unable to stem the tide. Everybody was crying for money and willing to pay almost any price for it. Everybody had to have money to meet commitments, to finance industry and commerce and the matchless business that still swept on in undiminished strides.

A WARNING THAT WAS NOT HEEDED

The spring crash in securities seemed not to affect general business at all. Wall Street was looked upon as a thing apart from the rest of the country, and business men saw nothing in what had happened there that meant a warning to them. In fact, business, which is never too friendly to Wall Street, felt no sense of depression at the curbing of speculation. It meant less demand for money from holders of securities, which foreshadowed more and easier money for business.

The crumbling and tumbling of prices in March was regarded by many in the Street as merely a temporary setback, and every effort was made to restore prices to the old sky-high figures.

But with occasional rallies, the sagging went on throughout the dreary months of summer. Everybody who had sufficient foresight reduced his holdings of securities, or got out of the market altogether if he could, but every share of stock that was sold was bought by somebody, and the purchaser soon found himself burdened with a declining security.

And so it went on until the great panic broke upon us in October. The first upheaval came in the Mercantile National Bank and the National Bank of North America, two institutions in the Morse chain of banks, where high finance had run riot. This was the beginning of Morse's troubles, which involved the Heinzes, the Thomases, and Barney, president of the Knickerbocker Trust Company.

Morse and his associates almost immediately resigned from these two banks, and from other institutions which they controlled, or with which they were prominently connected. Then came the announcement that Barney had been compelled to resign from the Knickerbocker Trust, and a little later the entire community was shocked and stunned by the news that he had committed suicide. The Knickerbocker was one of the leading trust companies of the city, and Barney was thought to be a genius in finance.

Thus the great panic started here in New York, and thus it spread from one institution to another, until it leaped the boundaries of the city and swept like a cyclone over the whole country.

WAS MR. ROOSEVELT RESPONSIBLE?

-Was Mr. Roosevelt responsible for this period of reckless speculation ? Certainly not.
-Was Mr. Roosevelt responsible for bidding prices of securities up to the breaking-point? Certainly not.
-Was Mr. Roosevelt responsible for Morse and his chain of banks and his system of high finance? Certainly not.
-Was Mr. Roosevelt responsible for Barney's reckless management of the Knickerbocker Trust Company, his dismissal from that company, and his suicide? Certainly not.
-Was Mr. Roosevelt responsible for all the high finance of that period, for the over extension in every branch of business, for the tremendous scale of building that had developed, for the artificial and sensational life of the community, dazzled by the song of wealth and the scheme of money-getting? Certainly not.
-And yet Wall Street and all those who think, or fancy they think, as Wall Street thinks charged it up to Roosevelt, and haven't yet got the idea out of their heads.

In one sense he was responsible -- in the sense that under his administration this greatest of business prosperity was reached. Nothing like it had ever been known before, and nothing like it has happened since. It was more than a mere speculative inflation. It was big, broad, genuine prosperity, all - round prosperity. And it was on this prosperity that speculation rested, this prosperity that made possible the figures to which our securities were marked up and the enormous volume of transactions in them.

It was a case of too much prosperity, dangerous prosperity, and without criticizable responsibility to anyone. Man reflects in his acts and thoughts the period, the very moment of the period, and in these times of matchless optimism few men could see disaster ahead.

It is to Mr. Roosevelt's credit that this era of greatest prosperity was reached under his administration, and not to his discredit. What happened in 1907 will happen again under similar or approximately similar conditions -that is, when business and speculation and extravagance are pushed to the breaking-point. Money will stand a certain strain, no more.

In this view of Mr. Roosevelt as President, of his relation to the railroads, to big business, and to the great panic of 1907, is there anything, I submit, to justify the belief that he is a dangerous man to the business interests of the country, to the industries of the country?

He faced in his administration a condition that no longer exists, and he met it as a strong man meets difficult situations. We had gone just as far as we could under the old, go-as-you-please, capitalistic domination. The people were in revolt against it and would have no more of it. They demanded reforms, certain righteous reforms, and this demand reached a crisis during Mr. Roosevelt's incumbency of office.

He had to deal with a condition that had never before urgently confronted any administration since the formation of the government, and he handled it with great courage and striking ability.

If Mr. Roosevelt is elected this fall, he will enter upon his duties as President under entirely different conditions. The drastic work that fell to his hands to do, he did. There is no occasion for such drastic work now. Regulation, upbuilding, and the polishing off of the work of his former administration is, in part, the task that would confront him on March 4, 1913. His new work would be that of construction, not that of reconstruction.

ROOSEVELT'S RECORD AS PRESIDENT

What did Mr. Roosevelt do as President that he should not have done, in the public interest, that was dangerous and hurtful to business? Let us look at the facts, and base our conclusions on them -- not on prejudice, not on vagaries.

Was Mr. Roosevelt's intervention in the coal strike, in a crisis such as existed at that time, justifiable or not? Wasn't it, to the very last note, in the interest of general business and the people as a whole, who had to have coal ?

Was Mr. Roosevelt's action against the Northern Securities Company justifiable or not; and was it dangerous and hurtful to business?

Was Mr. Roosevelt's Pure Food and Drugs Act justifiable, and was it dangerous and hurtful to legitimate business?

Were Mr. Roosevelt's efforts' in keeping the door of China open to American commerce dangerous and hurtful to business?

Was Mr. Roosevelt's masterful work in bringing about the settlement of the Russo-Japanese War dangerous and hurtful to business?

Was Mr. Roosevelt's Panama Canal project dangerous and hurtful to business?

Was Mr. Roosevelt's movement for the conservation of our natural resources dangerous and hurtful to business?

Was Mr. Roosevelt's inauguration of an annual conference of the Governors of all our States dangerous and hurtful to business?

Was Mr. Roosevelt's inauguration of a movement for the improvement of conditions of country life dangerous and hurtful to business?

Was Mr. Roosevelt's act forbidding corporations to contribute to campaign funds dangerous and hurtful to business? Was Mr. Roosevelt's reduction of the interest-bearing debt by more than ninety million dollars dangerous and hurtful to business?

Was Mr. Roosevelt's settlement of the Alaska boundary dispute dangerous and hurtful to business?

Was Mr. Roosevelt's act calling for the extension of the forest reserves dangerous and hurtful to business?

Was Mr. Roosevelt's National Irrigation Act dangerous and hurtful to business?

Was Mr. Roosevelt's act for the improvement of waterways and water-power sites dangerous and hurtful to business?

Were Mr. Roosevelt's Employers' Liability Act, Safety Appliance Act, and the regulation of railroad employees' hours of labor dangerous and hurtful to business?

If not these? and if not his stand against archaic and dishonest railroad methods and against trusts, what is there, may I ask, in his record as President, to justify the conclusion that he would be a dangerous man to the business interests of the country?

And here are some of his urgent recommendations which he did not have time to concrete into law before he left the White House:

The reform of the banking and currency system. Is there anything in this dangerous and hurtful to business?

An inheritance tax and. an income tax. Is there anything in these that is dangerous and hurtful to business?

The passage of an employers' liability act to meet objections raised by the Supreme Court. Is there anything in this dangerous and hurtful to business?

A postal savings-bank act. Is there anything in this dangerous and hurtful to business?

A parcel-post act. Is there anything dangerous and hurtful- to business in this?

A recommendation for an anti-trust act that will make clear what a businessman can and cannot do lawfully. Is there anything in this dangerous and hurtful to business? Wouldn't something of the sort clarify the situation 'and be a great deal better for business than the present indefinite, uncertain Sherman Law?

Legislation to prevent overcapitalization, stock-watering, and so forth, of common carriers. Is there anything dangerous and hurtful to business in this?

Legislation compelling incorporation under Federal laws of corporations engaged in interstate commerce. Is there anything dangerous and hurtful to business in this?

CHANGED CONDITIONS OF TODAY

To get an idea of what Mr. Roosevelt would mean to the business world if elected again, it is well first to get a clear idea of what his former Presidency meant to the business world. It does not follow, however, that his new administration would be like his former. The conditions would not be the same, neither would Mr. Roosevelt himself be the same. He is four years older, and with increasing years come increasing consideration, increasing conservatism, greater poise, and greater deliberation.

These are bad when the man starts with an inefficient horsepower, with more balance than energy, with more caution than aggressiveness. But in a man like Roosevelt, who is supercharged with energy, whose horsepower is twenty times greater than that of the normal man, the ripening process of experience that comes with added years, if not too many, means increased wisdom and increased usefulness.

A man must be true to himself. He cannot be aggressive on the one hand and judicial and inert on the other. Roosevelt does things, is the embodiment of action and energy. And in his aggressiveness he not infrequently expresses himself in a way that pictures him as more radical than he is in fact -- more radical than he ever is in his administrative acts. In all that he does, and in the outworking of his ideas, he is much the greatest and soundest conservative of all the big progressives of the country. And eighty per cent of our people are today progressives -- a force to be reckoned with.

A POST THAT CALLS FOR A STRONG MAN

Our system of government, with a nation grown so big, calls for a man in the White House of the greatest measure of executive and administrative qualities. NO man can make a dent in that situation unless he be specially endowed with these abilities from God Almighty.

Executive and administrative genius are just as distinct gifts as music and art and song. The orator and the poet and the logician of renown are born orator, poet, and logician. They can't be made on this earth. No university has ever yet made one, and no university ever will make one.

In Germany, when a city wants a mayor it searches the country over for a mayor, searches for the man highly endowed with the qualifications for executive work, supplemented by training and experience. Local pride and politics cut no figure in choosing a mayor in wisely governed Germany.

We should do well in this country, when we want a President or Governor or mayor, to follow the German custom and go after the man fitted for the job.

The business of the country is now in much closer relation to the government than ever before. Indeed, it is so much under the control of the government that the latter, in a way, has the dominating voice in the board of directors of our railroads and all our great corporations.

We cannot go back to the old system of individual ownership, with its unstable prices, unwise competition, and greater cost and greater waste. We must so do business that the cost will be at the lowest possible figure, and then, as a government, we must see that the people benefit by this lowest cost. This is the governmental control we must have; a wise, just, helpful control -- helpful alike to our industries and to our people.

Business to-day is timid, is unsettled, halting, and knows not what it can do or not. It doesn't want what it can't do.

We have the natural resources, we have the people of brains and energy and courage, and we have the money with which to resume the leading place among the nations as an industrial and commercial country. All we need to bring this about is a wise policy on the part of the government -- a policy that will not seek to strangle business, but to help business, and in helping business to help the money-earner and the consumer, to help all the people, of whatever calling and of whatever position.

OUR NEED OF FIRST-RATE LEADERSHIP

To bring order out of the present chaotic governmental methods will require a very strong man as the leader and general manager of the country's business. I don't believe we can reasonably hope for anything from Washington of at all a satisfactory nature unless we have such a man -- a man who can command results, a man who knows what we want and will see that we get it.

Is there in the whole country another man who so measures up to this requirement as Theodore Roosevelt? If there be, I do not know who it is.

When we had a little bit of a republic, with small industries and narrow vision, our scheme of government made it possible to get on after a fashion with an indifferent man in the White House. But with so big a nation as we have now, and with all the local interests of the country clamoring for part of the "swag," it is well-nigh impossible to get through Congress the unselfish, patriotic legislation that we need, except we have in the White House a man who commands results. And such an executive is likewise essential to the efficient handling of the official departments, which need first-rate leadership quite as much as does big business.

Wall Street has bitterly criticized Mr. Roosevelt for his mistakes -- Wall Street, which itself, mind you, holds the record for mistakes. In discussing Mr. Roosevelt's mistakes, it discreetly says nothing about his successes. There is a lot of hypocrisy, a lot of dishonesty, in all this.

As for myself, let me say I am glad that Mr. Roosevelt is human enough, big enough, to make mistakes. If he were not, he wouldn't be good for anything. The man who makes no mistakes never accomplishes anything really worth while. To get an accurate measurement of a man -- to know his real worth -- we must compare his good work with his bad, his successes with his failures. If the average shows strongly in his favor, he is the man for the job; if the average is against him, he isn't the man for the job.

Roosevelt's mistakes as President were trivial as compared with his brilliant and far-reaching achievements. Roosevelt's mistakes as President were relatively fewer, I should say, than the mistakes of any one of our great captains of industry -- fewer than those of Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Jim Hill, or any other man whose financial undertakings span the world. They all make mistakes, both in utterance and acts. If they were to try to square themselves to a policy of no mistakes, their usefulness as great leaders in the business world would be at an end.

Far better the mistakes of progress than the inertia of the sure thing.

That Mr. Roosevelt, if elected, will restore confidence to the business world, I am certain. That he will point the way to reawakened commerce and become the leader of revivified prosperity, I am equally certain.

This *(^^^) article gives some realistic idea of the rancid politics and the utter chaos that is the United States of 1907 AFTER Mister Roosevelt began his damage control repairs and reforms based on his 1898 experiences. In 1898, before the reforms, it is much much worse.

Let me shed more light from an American I despise:

The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.

Woodrow Wilson

A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.

Woodrow Wilson

If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.

Woodrow Wilson

That would be the only grounds that TR, that fascist Woodrow Wilson, or *I would find common agreement. It therefore follows that whatever can be contemplated in the nature of reasonable counterfactual history has to take in account the American monopoly capitalists and their influence on the proto-imperialistic criminal tendencies inside the American government that seeks to serve those interests and to weigh that influence against the natural inclination of the American people to have nothing to do with such international lawbreaking.

In other words, can BIG STEEL, BIG SUGAR, BIG BANKS, BIG RAILROADS, BIG FINANCE and BIG NEWSPAPERS give the Americans a better army and navy to carry out a more efficient rapacious war of imperial conquest than was historical; or will the American people make it known through their government, that it is better to negotiate a deal and buy a diplomatic solution (dollar diplomacy) to a security crisis like the Caribbean, rather than engage in a shooting solution?

Mahan.

Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History: Securing International Markets in the 1890s

In 1890, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a lecturer in naval history and the president of the United States Naval War College, published The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, a revolutionary analysis of the importance of naval power as a factor in the rise of the British Empire. Two years later, he completed a supplementary volume, The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812.


Book Cover of the 12th Edition of Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783

Mahan argued that British control of the seas, combined with a corresponding decline in the naval strength of its major European rivals, paved the way for Great Britain’s emergence as the world’s dominant military, political, and economic power. Mahan and some leading American politicians believed that these lessons could be applied to U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the quest to expand U.S. markets overseas.

The 1890s were marked by social and economic unrest throughout the United States, which culminated in the onset of an economic depression between 1893 and 1894. The publication of Mahan’s books preceded much of the disorder associated with the 1890s, but his work resonated with many leading intellectuals and politicians concerned by the political and economic challenges of the period and the declining lack of economic opportunity on the American continent.

Mahan’s books complemented the work of one of his contemporaries, Professor Frederick Jackson Turner, who is best known for his seminal essay of 1893, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” An American history professor at the University of Wisconsin, Turner postulated that westward migration across the North American continent and the country’s population growth had finally led to the “closing” of the American frontier, with profound social and economic consequences. While Turner did not explicitly argue for a shift towards commercial expansion overseas, he did note that calls for a “vigorous foreign policy” were signs that Americans were increasingly looking outside the continental United States in order to satiate their desire for new economic opportunities and markets.

Mahan was one of the foremost proponents of the “vigorous foreign policy” referred to by Turner. Mahan believed that the U.S. economy would soon be unable to absorb the massive amounts of industrial and commercial goods being produced domestically, and he argued that the United States should seek new markets abroad. What concerned Mahan most was ensuring that the U.S. Government could guarantee access to these new international markets. Securing such access would require three things: a merchant navy, which could carry American products to new markets across the “great highway” of the high seas; an American battleship navy to deter or destroy rival fleets; and a network of naval bases capable of providing fuel and supplies for the enlarged navy, and maintaining open lines of communications between the United States and its new markets.

Mahan’s emphasis upon the acquisition of naval bases was not completely new. Following the Civil War, Secretary of State William Seward had attempted to expand the U.S. commercial presence in Asia by purchasing Alaska in 1867, and increasing American influence over Hawaii by concluding a reciprocity treaty that would bind the islands’ economy to that of the United States. Seward also attempted to purchase suitable Caribbean naval bases. Finally, he attempted to ratify a treaty with the Colombian Government that would allow the United States to build an isthmian canal through the province of Panama. In the wake of the Civil War, however, Congress became preoccupied with Reconstruction in the South, and the Senate rejected all of Seward’s efforts to create a network of American naval bases.

In the 1890s, Mahan’s ideas resonated with leading politicians, including Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, and Secretary of the Navy Herbert Tracy. After the outbreak of hostilities with Spain in May 1898, President William McKinley finally secured the annexation of Hawaii by means of joint resolution of Congress. Following the successful conclusion of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States gained control of territories that could serve as the coaling stations and naval bases that Mahan had discussed, such as Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Five years later, the United States obtained a perpetual lease for a naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

America's leaders in the professional political classes, knew about the American powder keg of social unrest that I previously described in the sectionalism and factionalism above. What they wanted was something to distract and divert the populace's attention and energies away from the internal social and economic inequities and problems. Mahan's book came about a decade too late to change the slow and inept general buildup of the New Steel Navy and it certainly did nothing for restoring the army The Great Betrayal of 1877 wrecked as an institution, but what if it had come a decade earlier?    



Notice the confluence of Mahan, Roosevelt and BIG NEWSPAPERS. Also, notice the role of bird guano in this process? History, actual or counter-factual can be weird.  

[miletus12]

Nuts and bolts for Spain.

1. No Spanish Conservative or Liberal government will divest itself of empire or accept the secular reforms needed to promote able and competent administration free of church influence either in the metropole or in the colonies.
2. What it could have done is possibly created an industrial state in the metropole.



It is not going to be easy.



The primary resource belts are the Asturian mountains and along the Andalusia coasts. Naturally this makes Ferrol, Cadiz, Bilboa and Barcelona and Cartagena, not only trading ports and bases, but likely manufactories centers since Spain's interior is a checkerboard of valleys surrounded by mountains and a central poor arid plateau. Seville seems to be the only rich internal city next to a resource base. It is miserable farm country, more suitable for raising grazing livestock. In many ways Spain in terrain is like North Africa. Fertile coasts, some resources, some mountains, but:


Not what one would call a candidate for a French or German style agrarian-industrial state, which would generate an efficient civil service bureaucracy to manage such a 19th century economic model. 

However: one could still try: Alfonso XII, the Pacifier, was a good chance for Spain to stabilize and become something of a constitutional monarchy with a revived functional civil service bureaucracy. This, in turn, as in the part of the Spanish past when that bureaucracy had been efficient, could have made the governance reforms and adjustments to render the unrest in Cuba and the Philippine Archipelago less, whereas in the real history, the upper classes and intelligentsia oppression of the working poor with the connivance of corrupt colonial administrators, fomented revolution, and gave the very same upper classes and intelligentsia the opportunity to kick Spain out and make themselves the tax collectors upon and despoilers of the peonage.

(Sometimes one reads the history of how things were and what happened and one weeps. One group of foreign bandits is kicked out, only to be replaced by domestic ones. Cuba was unlucky. At least the Philippine Islands got a taste of 'good government', by 19th century standards. M.)   

If he had lived and if Antonio Cánovas del Castillo had kept his own promises, then Admiral Cervera and General Palmero might have carried out their own reform programs? Who knows?      



       

[miletus12]

Nuts and bolts for Spain: part II; the Army equipment.

There is nothing wrong with the Model 1893 Mauser rifle or carbine.

GENERAL:
The 7 x 57 mm Mauser rifle was the standard armament of the Spanish forces during the Spanish American War. The weapon, firing smokeless powder, was far superior to the Springfield trapdoor rifle carried by most American volunteer units, and also to Krag-Jorgenson Rifle carried by the U.S. Regular Army troops and the "Rough Riders".

BACKGROUND:
Brothers Paul and Wilhelm Mauser brought innovative rifle design to Germany in the late 1800's. Specifically in 1892, Paul Mauser introduced several rifle improvements. The most important being a long, non-rotary extractor that prevented double loading and improved in smoothness of operation.
The Navy Version of the Weapon:

The Model 92/93 cal. 7.65mm carbine was made for the Spanish Navy with a contract for 400 rifles.

By Royal Order of 30 January 1893, the 7 mm Mauser rifle received the denomination of “Mauser especial 1892”. The Model 92 Spanish rifle and carbine introduced a new Mauser smokeless powder caliber--7mm. It was a repeating rifle with a cartridge rack containing five smokless bullets. The smokeless powder made it very difficult for the enemy to spot the location of the shooter. The cartridge rack was located inside the main body of the rifle.

The Spanish Navy decided to purchase 2,000 units of this rifle between the years 1893 and 1894 with a total cost of 312,000 pesetas. Belting and 400,000 rifle-grenade cartridges were included in this sum. In addition, the following rifles, of identical model, were purchased to be sent to the colonies:

Destination
Cuba.........................Units.......................bullets............................Cost (pesetas)
...............................787.......................157,400............................122,772
Philippines..................2,070.......................414,000............................322,920
Puerto Rico.....................72........................14,400.............................11,232
Fernando Poo (Africa)...........34.........................6,300..............................5,304

The next version, Model 93, was a major step in Mauser development. This rifle was chosen over all contenders in the Spanish rifle trials of the early 1890's. Chambered for the 7mm rimless cartridge, the Spanish Model 93 rifle featured a staggered-column box magazine flush with the bottom of the stock. This five-round magazine not only gave the rifle improved compactness and a better appearance, but also facilitated carrying and afforded protection for the magazine box, which could be clip loaded.

The Army Version of the Weapon:

By Royal Decree of 30 November 1892, the Mauser rifle was initially qualified as the "service weapon" for the Spanish Army under the name of "Fusil Mauser Español Modelo 1892", (Spanish Mauser Rifle Model 1892). Only a year later, it would be replaced. In 1893, "...having exhausted all means of improvement and arriving at the moment for the final approval with the modifications proposed by the manufacturer..." the Royal Order of 7 November 1893 declared again this rifle as the service weapon under the name of "Spanish Mauser Rifle Model 1893". Consequently of this, Spain decided to purchase 70,000 rifles and 5,000 carbines as well as 18 millions of cartridges.

A few years later, this model was produced at the Spanish arms factory in Oviedo at a production cost of 78 pesetas/unit.

Additional Information:

The effectiveness of these new 7mm rifles were soon felt by the U.S. in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Theodore Roosevelt reported on the difficulties of locating the Spanish at Las Guasimas commenting "...as we advanced; we were, of course, exposed... But they themselves were entirely invisible. The jungle covered everything, and not the faintest trace of smoke was to be seen in any direction to indicate from whence the bullets came." The effects of the superior Spanish weapons were again felt at San Juan Hill and El Caney. This experience led to the U.S. development of the 1903 Springfield after being bested on the field of battle by the Model 93.

The Mauser 93 was the basis for the development of the American rifle Springfield M1903, and it was intended to be used by “first line” or regular troops.

ADVANTAGES/DISADVANTAGES:
The smoothness of operation of the Mauser, and the use of smokeless powder were the weapon's primary advantages.

TECHNOTES:
Model 1893
Action:..........................Turnbolt Repeater
Total length without bayonet:....1,235 mm (48.62 inches)
Total length with bayonet:.......1,484 mm (58.43 inches)
Length of barrel:..................738 mm (29.06 inches)
Rifling:.............................4 grooves with one turn in 8.8 inches
Weight:...........................3.95 kg (8.69 pounds)
Ammunition:..........................7mm rimless in five round clips
Maximum range....................4,000 meters (4320 yards)
Operational range................2,000 meters (2160 yards)
Initial muzzle velocity............680 meters/sec (2203 feet/second)
Charge:............................2.5 grams
Overall Weight of cartridge:........25 grams (0.88 oz.)
Overall length of cartridge.........78 mm (3.07 inches)
Weight of projectile:.............11.2 grams (.394 oz.)(173 grains)
Muzzle Velocity:.................2,300 feet per second
Bayonet: Knife-type,............. .405 kg (.891 pounds)

By WWI standards it was an 'excellent' weapon.

Palmero's mistakes with it were threefold;
a. He did not obtain a production license for Spanish manufacture. Most of the Mausers the Spanish used in 1898, were imported from Germany, along with the bullets and smokeless powder. When US forces captured Spanish stocks in Cuba and the Philippine Islands, the Tercios were finished as far as a fighting force until they obtained tooling and production licenses from Mauser after 1900, just in time for the Rif Wars.
b. He did not buy enough bullets. 2,400 bullets per rifle seems like a lot, but out at the points of contact, over 2 million rounds were expended in fighting the Americans in just two weeks. Another 4 million rounds were scooped up in the clean-up as the Spaniards evacuated Cuba, the Philippine Islands and Puerto Rico. With about almost half their rifle inventory of this modern weapon taken and 1/3 of their ammunition gone, the Spanish Army was logistically eliminated as a fighting force "if" the 1898 war had continued.
c. Volley fire as opposed to individual marksmanship. The tercios were trained to shoot by squad volley and beat an area with bullets, trusting to percentages to produce hits. This was effective in mowing down inept American volunteers, including Rough Riders, who insisted on neat-ordered skirmish lines advancing in four rows, as still called for in the obsolete American civil war infantry training manuals, but it sure cut no ice against Buffalo Soldiers who were trained to scatter and charge Apaches in short squad rushes while covering each other with sniper fire.

It could be suggested that General Palmero as war minister, and his logistics and training commands should have fixed these problems. it was well within their financial means and industrial base capacity to solve these fundamentals in material, while time on the practice ranges could solve the marksman and bullet wastage problems.

Sidearms....

The best revolver available in quantity to the Spanish army, for which they stole the rights, and made illegally; was the Smith and Wesson Model 3. 


It worked and with its ready adaptability to use .44 Russian ammunition and relative ease for small shop manufacture, it was logistically "cheap" since this pistol could be made or bought ANYWHERE where Smith and Wesson licensed or did business, which included FRANCE and BELGIUM (Where it was also illegally made.). The downside is that it was/is a black powder revolver and much shorter effective ranged than the American Schofield version of the same revolver. Still, the revolver works as an officer / non-com sidearm and could be standardized instead of the hodgepodge of pistols the Spanish officers bought or 'procured'.  One more additional drawback, was that Spanish gun makers did not standardize parts to government specifications, so that one could wind up with a pistol made in Liege that would not with replacement parts supplied by Elbata. This goes to another problem we will see with the Americans, lack of arsenal and foundry capacity.       

Was the lack of commonality of issue of this weapon, a solvable one? Yes, it was. The Spanish could stand up a small state arsenal to make these guns to a common parts pattern. Their Basque gunsmiths certainly knew how to reverse engineer the Smith and Wesson revolver, because they did. 

Artillery...

While we have seen the Krupp 75 in reference among the Spanish Army's assets, this was a rare gun. What Spain could make domestically and ship overseas was the 8 cm, 15 caliber Plasencia mountain gun. 

Official name: Steel barrel of 8 centimeters, short loaded by the cylinder head model 1874 (Plasencia).



Small cannon of general cylindrical shape used for mountain and developed by Commander Plasencia, during the 3rd Civil War (1872-1876). It is made of Krupp steel of 8 cm (3") internal diameter, backload, with screw closure. The wheels are made of wooden cube with reinforcing iron rings. It could be dragged by a horse or mule, or loaded unarmed in parts. It was used in the defense of the Asomante (August 9 and 12, 1898) and was present in "the disaster of the Guasio". The 8 cm Plasencia was one of the main protagonists, in terms of armament, of the Spanish-American War in Puerto Rico.



Piece weight: 102 kg, total length: 1.01 m, reach for 20º 35': 3,000 m. As ammunition he used the ordinary grenade, the shrapnel grenade and the shrapnel canister.



Personnel required:



In the document State of Force of the Army of Puerto Rico on May 30, 1898 signed by Governor Manuel Macías, it appears that in Mayagüez there were 40 artillerymen (including officers, non-commissioned officers and soldiers) with 15 horses. Knowing that this group of gunners only had 2 small Cannons model Plasencia seemed to us, by our crass ignorance in these matters and by having a modern point of view, that it was too many people and horses for so little artillery. Transmitted our concern to Artillery Colonel Francisco Rodríguez Padrón this gives us light on the matter:



Mayagüez's artillery group may have been composed as follows:



Officers: 1 lieutenant



Non-commissioned officers: 4 part managers (2 per piece), 1 administrator and 1 mechanic.



Each piece had at least: 1 closing servant, 1 pointer, 1 loader, 1 supplier, 1 artificer. Total: 5 gunners per gun for a grand total of 10 gunners (5 X 2 guns).



Now we would have to put some cook (2), sanitary (1), some mechanic assistant (1), 1 furriel (kitchen servant), 1 administration assistant, some ordinance (1), 4 stretcher bearers, and possibly some more gunner in security missions (1 corporal and 4 gunners).



Each cannon was transported unarmed in 5 parts and each part was carried on a horse therefore 5 horse drivers are needed per cannon for a total of 10 drivers and there are already 41 people (we have 1 left).



As for the horses, 1 would be needed for the lieutenant, 4 for the non-commissioned officers and 5 for each cannon transported in parts (cannon, cureña, axle and wheels, ammunition, spare parts) that would make a large total of 15 horses. And it is still necessary to transport the impediment (tools of the troop), kitchen, etc., with which horses would be missing. Then most likely they dragged them with lemon trees (in the sheet the upper left drawing) since two horses per piece are saved, for a total saving of four that would be used for impediment and so on. Therefore, the 15 horses do come out.

-See: Rayed Artillery-



Information obtained from the book "MATERIAL DE ARTILLERIA. Description of the regulation in Spain" Author: Juan Govantes y Nieto (1887) and transmitted via e-mail by the Colonel of Artillery Francisco Rodríguez Padrón of the Artillery Academy in Segovia. The Coronel Rodríguez Padrón also has the Page Gran Atlas de la Artillería Española Siglo XX.

This artillery piece has an effective range of about 2,000 yards and by 1898, had a timed air burst grenade as part of its ammunition assortment, for we have TR's report that the Spanish gunners of a 4 gun battery at Kettle Hill were air bursting such fused shells over the Rough Riders' heads to some effect. 

The gun was originally designed to use black powder propellant, had its barrel thickened to handle "acorn powder" and was eventually found able to use French type bag charged white powder propellant with correspondent increases in range. It was not as good as a Krupp 75, as to rapidity of load or range, but it was superior to the American 3.2 inch field gun. and to the 1.69 inch Hotchkiss and the Hotchkiss rotary gun.

As with the Mauser rifle and the Orbei revolver, the problem was a lack of numbers of guns, of the standardization of parts, lack of repair parts and lack of propellant and shells. The gunners did not get enough training time on the range, either. 

Money solves most of these issues to some extent, but it really comes down to training time with the equipment to get the most out of it. As with the Mausers, once the Americans scoop up the hardware, the Spanish army is finished as to an extended war.   


  
 

[miletus12]

I often have looked at 1898 Spain as being a defective version of Meiji Restoration Japan.

The Impact of the ‘Disaster’ of 1898 on the Spanish Army
By Charles Hendricks

The following is a paper that the author delivered at the 1998 Conference of Army Historians in Bethesda, Maryland.

Despite its decisive victory in the Spanish-American War, the United States at the end of the nineteenth century recognized that its military forces had faced serious organizational, logistical, and medical challenges in that conflict. The war clearly pointed to a need for military reform in the United States, and in its aftermath Congress enacted some critical reform legislation. The defeated Spanish Army, however, had as much, if not more, incentive for reform in the aftermath of the war whose centennial we now observe. The Spanish Army also had a profound need to defend its reputation, and this led to a series of conflicts with Spain’s civil government. I believe that it is important for U.S. Army historians to explore the impact of America’s wars not only on this nation’s forces but also on the military and political structures of our opponents. I will argue that the Spanish Army did change rather substantially in the decades after 1898. However, due to the weakness of Spain’s civil government, the reforms that were manifestly required in the aftermath of the difficult Cuban insurrection and the shocking defeat inflicted by the Americans came slowly and fitfully. Nevertheless within 25 years, a new, more effective, and more assertive Spanish Army had begun to evolve with decidedly negative implications for democratic evolution in Spain.

For much of the nineteenth century, the Spanish Army had been intimately involved in domestic political life. While the regime of Queen Isabel II, whose reign spanned the middle third of the century, maintained the robust and vigorous Army necessary to keep at bay the ultraconservative and persistent rival Carlist pretenders to the throne, that Army’s leaders did not submit easily to the direction of the queen’s ministers. On the whole, Spain’s senior Army officers derived from more middling backgrounds and were more liberal in their political orientation than were most ministers who served Isabel and her royal predecessor Fernando VII, who ruled from 1814 to 1833. Spanish military historian and sociologist Julio Busquets counted 34 pronunciamientos, or military interventions, in Spanish politics between 1814 and 1868. Of these, nine were successful, but participants were shot or hanged after an equal number. The successful interventions forced the Spanish crown to rule in a constitutional format, dramatically reduced the power of the Catholic hierarchy in Spanish politics, and ultimately overthrew Isabel and led to the formation of the short-lived first Spanish republic. Both the frequent coup attempts and the lengthy struggle with the Carlists impelled nineteenth-century Spanish governments to be very respectful of the perquisites of Spanish Army officers and to reward them generously when they aided the government.1

The restoration constitution of 1876 was carefully crafted by Conservative party leader Antonio Cánovas to assure that the competing Liberal and Conservative parties would share or alternate governmental power in Spain and thus hopefully obviate the cause for military intervention. The 1876 constitution also provided Spanish officers a forum for political participation in the Cortes, or Spanish Parliament. All Army captains-general and Navy admirals were automatically members of the Senate, and Army and Navy officers of all ranks were eligible for election to the House of Deputies. In a sample year, 1907, career military officers, both active and retired, comprised 8 percent of the deputies and 6 percent of the senators. Ministers of war were regularly selected from the officers serving in the Cortes. While Republican leaders attempted for a decade to induce military elements to overthrow the Cánovas constitution and proclaim a new republic, the unsuccessful 1886 rising attempted by exiled General Manuel Villacampa and two Madrid regiments showed that the new regime retained broad support within the Army. 2

The Spanish Army that fought independence movements and the United States Army in Cuba and the Philippines in the 1890s was a conscript army. It was raised under the draft law of 1877 which, like the constitution of the previous year, had been designed to satisfy the members of all politically active classes. While conscripts could be required to serve three years on active duty and eight more on a reserve list, the law provided a wide range of exemptions—for only sons, for specialized employment, for supporting grandparents, and even for illegitimate children supporting their parents. More generally, anyone could purchase an exemption for 1,200 pesetas, a substantial sum for a middle-class family, but one that 10,000 paid in 1882. While many Spaniards legally evaded the draft, few directly flouted the law in the nineteenth century, with only 4 percent of those called in 1897 failing to respond.3

The Spanish public, and a wide spectrum of Spanish political leaders from Republican to Carlist, supported the repression of the Cuban insurrection at its outbreak in 1895. However, that broad support soon began to erode. The heavy cost in manpower that the Cuban war entailed, not least as a result of tropical disease, and the economic dislocation caused by the rebels’ scorched-earth tactics and the policy of rural population concentration to which the most successful Spanish commander in Cuba, General Valeriano Weyler, turned in response, led the powerful Liberal party to undergo a dramatic change of heart by mid-1897. After an Italian anarchist assassinated Prime Minister Cánovas in August 1897, Liberal leader Mateo Sagasta assumed the reins of government, recalled General Weyler, and issued a broad Cuban autonomy decree. While not satisfying the surviving leaders of the fight for Cuban independence, this decree mollified U.S. President McKinley. It also enraged a group of hard-line Spanish officers in Havana, who felt that Spain’s political leaders had sold them out. In an action with significant precedents in the metropolis, the disenchanted officers and a coterie of civilian sympathizers ransacked the offices of a Havana newspaper that had been campaigning for autonomy and had denounced Weyler’s military methods. McKinley responded to this act of indiscipline by sending the USS Maine on a courtesy visit to Havana, and within ten weeks of its explosion on 15 February 1898 the United States intervened in the still unsettled Cuban conflict.4

The American declaration of war did not faze a Spanish public convinced that its military could defend Spain’s long-held Cuban and Philippine colonies. The Sagasta government, however, recognized that Spanish forces could not defeat the Americans. Having already conceded autonomy to the Cubans, it might have concluded that taking the additional step of granting Cuban independence in response to an American ultimatum would at least save Spain the human and financial toll of a losing war. But Sagasta also recognized that the Spanish Army’s acceptance of Spain’s restored constitutional monarchy was not unconditional. Were Spanish political leaders to capitulate to American demands without a test of arms, the politicians would likely turn the ire of the entire Army against them and their constitutional regime. Thus Sagasta’s government accepted the American challenge and sent Admiral Pascual Cervera and a substantial part of the Spanish Navy to the West Indies, where, as Cervera pointed out, its ultimate destruction was eminently predictable.5

The Spanish soldiers who defended Santiago de Cuba at the start of July 1898 fought bravely and, for their numbers, rather effectively. At the battles of El Caney and San Juan Heights, the Spanish suffered 593 casualties, the Americans 1,519. But the decisions of the Spanish Army’s generals could surely be second-guessed. The Spanish commander in Oriente province, General Arsenio Linares, had deployed on the heights overlooking Santiago only some 1,800 of the 30,000 troops under his command, or less than 2 percent of the Spanish army in all of Cuba. Moreover, he had not seriously opposed the American landings in late June at Daiquirí and Siboney. General Ramón Blanco, who in 1898 commanded Spanish forces in Cuba from his Havana palace, was responsible for the order that sent Cervera’s fleet from Santiago harbor to its demise in battle on July 3. Linares’ reputation in Spain benefited, however, from the serious wounds he received on San Juan Heights.6

In the aftermath of Spain’s disastrous defeat in 1898, Spanish intellectuals clamored for a thoroughgoing reform of Spanish politics; Spanish politicians examined which of their nation’s military leaders should be held responsible for the debacle; and a lieutenant general, Camilo Polavieja, contemplated a military coup. Polavieja, a one-time enlisted man from a poor family of aristocratic ancestry, had executed such a fiercely repressive approach as field commander in the Philippines in 1896–97, during the first year of the rebellion there, that Prime Minister Cánovas had recalled him to Spain. General Weyler and the queen regent thwarted Polavieja’s ambitions, and he settled for the post of minister of war. His efforts in that position to end special exemptions to the draft fell flat in the Cortes, and he soon resigned.

The responsibilities debate in the Cortes did little to clarify the army’s shortcomings, serving instead to antagonize and demoralize the officer corps. General Linares and most other Spanish military leaders in Cuba found their upward career paths unobstructed by the inquiry.7

The Army’s most serious problem remained its excessive number of officers, particularly generals, and the insufficient money available for weapons and equipment after the officers’ salaries had been paid. By 1900, after the award of the last wartime "merit" promotions, the officer corps numbered 24,700 in a standing Army authorized only 80,000 troops, and their salaries comprised 58 percent of the Army’s budget. The Spanish Army’s 471 general officers, meanwhile, were the oldest, on average, of any European army. 8

Polavieja addressed the officer excess by ordering that half of all vacancies that would occur over time not be filled. This quickly slowed promotions. The resulting pressure from younger officers led General Weyler, as minister of war in 1902, to cut the officer amortization rate to 25 percent. A proposal to reduce the retirement age by three years for major and brigadier generals merely to 64 and 62, respectively, was similarly dropped. Even in light of Spain’s disproportionate spending on officers’ salaries in lieu of equipment, it is perhaps surprising that by 1909 the Spanish army had the lowest proportion of artillery to troop strength of any European army, including that of Montenegro. In 1914, the army of Romania, which was about equally large as that of Spain, had only about one-third as many officers.9

The Cu-Cut! Affair in 1905 foreshadowed the type of renovation that the Spanish Army could achieve in the context of a civil government cowed by a fear of military overthrow. The industrialists and workers of Barcelona and the surrounding province of Catalonia, Spain’s most economically advanced region and the one that suffered most from the loss of protected exports to Cuba, were not similarly awed by the Army. Cu-Cut!—a beautifully illustrated humor magazine closely affiliated with the leading Catalan regionalist party—frequently turned for comic material to the travails of the Spanish military. Cartoons run by this journal over the course of 1905 provoked a violent military reaction and a governmental crisis.

One cartoon showed a Spanish military observer with the Russian Army in Manchuria being asked what he had learned there. The Spaniard replied: "What we already knew. How to lose battles." When General Julio Fuentes, Barcelona’s civil governor, ordered residents to take down Catalan flags they were displaying for a regional holiday, the magazine posed the question of whether he had nothing better to do and had him answer: "[Striking the colors] is all they taught us to do in Cuba." The magazine also commented that General Fuentes "has so little to show for himself that he does not even have what [other generals] like Linares, Weyler, Polavieja, Primo de Rivera and Augustins had to show for themselves, namely the merit of having lost some colonial possession or other." When the Spanish foreign minister visited Berlin, the Cu-Cut! cartoonist showed him talking to Kaiser Wilhelm. "Spain wants to be at peace with all nations," the Spaniard asserted. "That’s understandable," the kaiser replied, "no one likes to receive a whipping." On November 23, 1905, a Cu-Cut! cartoon depicted Army officers expressing surprise over a celebration by Catalan regionalists on account of their recent victory in local elections and then admitting ruefully that, in Spain, only civilians had victories of which to boast. On November 25, some 200 junior officers ransacked the presses of Cu-Cut! and the editorial offices of Barcelona’s leading regionalist daily. A committee representing the disenchanted officers then demanded that the Cortes include the press in the military code’s existing prohibition of all oral or written "offenses" to military institutions. Such inclusion would move the prosecution of press offenses against the military into the military courts.10

The Spanish government resisted this demand, although War Minister Weyler waffled, fearing that the junior officers who led the movement in Barcelona might broaden their attack to encompass the many privileges of the Army’s senior hierarchy. King Alfonso XIII, however, supported the disgruntled officers’ demands, and this forced the resignation of the cabinet. A new government resolved the crisis by winning Cortes approval of a new law for the "Repression of Crimes Against the Fatherland and the Army," which would largely stifle criticism of the Army in the press for the next 25 years.11

The war that was in various ways to resuscitate the effectiveness and image of the Spanish Army after the loss of Spain’s overseas possessions broke out in the Spanish zone in Morocco in 1909. The initial course of that war illustrated the desperate condition of the Army. The war developed after a Conservative party government headed by Antonio Maura supported some restless tribes in northeast Morocco in their attack on Abu Himara, known to the Spanish as El Roghi, a false pretender to the Moroccan sultanate who had nevertheless been a stabilizing factor in the Spanish zone. Weakened by these attacks, Abu Himara had fallen victim to a raid by the sultan’s army, which had captured him, brought him to Marrakesh, and, according to reports, fed him alive to the palace lions. The now unrestrained tribes then turned their attention to the Spanish firms working mining claims that had been approved by Abu Himara, killing six miners on July 9, 1909. Maura and his minister of war, General Arsenio Linares of Santiago repute, responded vigorously.12

Linares quickly mobilized the Third Mixed Brigade, comprised of regulars and reservists from still volatile Catalonia, where Linares had until recently been captain general and as such personally responsible for the brigade’s training. But Spain’s growing Socialist party responded with vigorous anti-war agitation. Party leader Pablo Iglesias suggested in a Madrid speech that Spanish soldiers should point their rifles not at Moroccan Berbers but at the Spanish government. On July 18 military officials had one battalion of the Third Brigade march through Barcelona to the dock from which it would embark. A crowd encircled the soldiers amid cries of "Throw away your guns" and "Let the rich go, all or none." Some soldiers threw into the sea medals given them by society ladies, whose sons could buy draft exemptions. The following day, the government announced the end of troop debarkations from Barcelona, and workers began a series of nightly street demonstrations. On July 22, civil governor Angel Ossorio cut Barcelona’s telephone and telegraph contact with Madrid, but on the 24th newspaper readers in Barcelona learned that Berber tribesmen had broken Spanish supply lines in fighting to which some seasick, or perhaps simply nervous, Spanish reservists had been marched straight from their ships. The Socialists called a general strike for Monday, July 26. The strike shut down Barcelona but proved ineffective in most of the rest of the country. Barcelonans could not learn this, however, due to the cut-off of communication lines. 13

The anti-war Socialists soon lost control of Barcelona’s streets to older Radical party, which redirected the crowds into an orgy of attacks on the city’s Catholic churches, convents, and schools, more than half of which were burned during the ensuing week of rioting. Before the "Tragic Week" ended, 104 civilians had been killed along with 28 police and Civil Guards, but Barcelona’s Captain General Luis Santiago proved unwilling or unable to apply any effective military force against the rioting, which subsided more or less on its own. Meanwhile in Morocco on July 27, Brig. Gen. Guillermo Pintos, ignoring his instructions, pushed his First Madrid Chasseurs across Wolf Ravine on the slopes of Mt. Gurugú, where he was ambushed and killed along with dozens of other officers and troops. Not until the second half of September did the Spanish gain control of the western and southern approaches to this commanding peak, and only on September 29 did Colonel Miguel Primo de Rivera lead a detachment to the summit. By then the Spanish had suffered at least 2,500 casualties, or as many as 4,000 by some estimates, among the 40,000 troops deployed. Mining operations could now safely resume.14

Spanish historian and Air Force General Alfredo Kindelán later saw the ultimately successful 1909 Moroccan operation as ending the depression endured by the soul of the Spanish military in consequence of its defeat in 1898.15 There can be little doubt that the uncompromising determination of the Spanish military to use the Moroccan war to revive its flagging reputation in Spain effectively forced a series of governments with little commitment to that conflict to underwrite a long and costly military involvement in that North African land. But the turn-around achieved by the Spanish military involved a slow and gradual process. Intermittent conflict with various Moroccan tribal groups persisted for a decade and a half, and over this period the Spanish army introduced a number of innovations that created a new, more fully professional force to replace the conscript army that had performed so imperfectly in Cuba and the early Moroccan fighting. In June 1911 the Spanish organized the first of several companies of Regulares, Moorish volunteer troops led by a group of Spanish officers that initially included the ambitious young Second Lt. Francisco Franco. Another officer in the Regulares, Maj. José Millán Astray, who had served in the Philippine campaign of 1896–97 as a teenage second lieutenant, convinced the cabinet and king in 1920 to approve the creation of a Spanish Foreign Legion, or Tercio de Extranjeros. Foreigners were not easy to recruit, however, and the legion’s five battalions were eventually filled primarily by native Spaniards with most of its foreign members coming from the now-independent Republic of Cuba. The Tercio was distinguished, however, by the severe discipline to which its troops were subjected in vice-plagued Spanish Morocco.16

Over the two and a half decades following the outbreak of fighting in Morocco in 1909, Spain’s army would make a fitful transition from a lower-class conscript force led by career officers who preferred to remain safely in Spain and focus on parliamentary politics and cabinet reshuffles to a new, more disciplined and professional army that learned from and built upon its experiences in Morocco. The old bureaucratic army did not die quietly, however, and in its fight for survival it undermined the restoration constitution and facilitated its demise. The hesitancy of career officers to volunteer for service in Morocco and the preference of the government to induce rather than force them to serve there led to the reinstitution of merit promotions in Morocco in 1910. One of those who benefited from the merit promotions was Francisco Franco, who was a major by the age of 23 and a brigadier general and commander of the Tercio by the age of 33.

Many officers were offended by the merit promotions, however, and they charged that their award was often based on political favor. When General Serrallo, as minister of war in 1916, proposed administering professional and physical tests to all officers, many protested and the testing program had to be cancelled. The testing plan sparked the formation of committees or Juntas of infantry and cavalry officers in Spanish garrisons as a means to protect their status relative to those serving in Morocco and to push for higher salaries and an end to political and royal favoritism. The government did not act against the Juntas until May 1917. It then demanded that the Juntas disband, and, when they did not, it arrested Col. Benito Márquez and other leaders of the Barcelona Infantry Junta. New Junta leaders, however, demanded their release and threatened otherwise to seize power in the Catalan entrepôt. The Republican Radicals that had rioted there eight years before rallied to the officers’ support. Within a week, the cabinet released those arrested, gave legal status to the Juntas, and promised favorable action on their agenda. A civilian politician favorable to the Juntas became war minister and granted hefty pay raises to all military personnel.

The baneful effects that such capitulation could have, not only on the civil government but also on the military, soon became apparent. Non-commissioned officers and enlisted troops began to form their own juntas, threatening to undermine all discipline in the army. The government took advantage of this development to gain the juntero officers’ support for banning all independent representative organizations in the Army, while transforming the officer juntas into advisory commissions. The commissions continued to flex their muscle, however, obtaining the dismissal from the Army of 23 captains who, upon graduation from the staff college, refused to renounce the speedier promotions that their general staff commissions could offer them.17

It was the government’s uncharacteristically strong reaction to the new disaster that Moroccan rebel commander Abd-el-Krim inflicted on the Spanish Army in July 1921 at Annual that led to its overthrow by General Miguel Primo de Rivera two years later. The disastrous 1921 campaign, which cost the lives of some 8,000 Spanish soldiers, was the responsibility of General Manuel Fernández Silvestre, who spread his troops across a series of mutually unsupportable posts as he approached Abd-el-Krim’s stronghold and then found he had woefully underestimated his opponent’s strength. As in 1899, the Cortes reacted by conducting an inquiry into military responsibility for the debacle, only this time Silvestre was already dead, the victim of his own revolver.

As the factions in the Cortes jostled over the political implications of the responsibilities issue and the future use of Spanish force in Morocco, a number of generals, fearful of a Spanish withdrawal from North Africa, plotted a military take-over. The government’s weak response to previous Junta threats could not have deterred them. The captain general of Barcelona, Lt. Gen. Miguel Primo de Rivera, agreed to lead the movement, but his August 1923 pronunciamiento drew so little support within the Army that it probably would have failed had it not been supported by King Alfonso XIII. As dictator, Primo first withdrew Spanish troops from exposed positions in Morocco and then focused on training them. He also expanded the Tercio to seven battalions, while upgrading its equipment. When Abd-el-Krim attacked weakly garrisoned French Morocco in April 1925, hoping for Soviet and French Communist assistance, the French and Spanish governments coordinated their operational plans. The French sent General Henri Pétain to Morocco. In September Primo de Rivera landed with 10,000 men at the Bay of Alhucemas, and he took Abd-el-Krim’s base at Axdir on October 2. The Berber leader surrendered to the French in May 1926.18

The Spanish Army which had now finally pacified northern Morocco was a much more professional force than the one which had lost Spain’s overseas territories in 1898. It also enjoyed a much more confident self-image. As the Army subsequently observed the decline and fall of both Primo de Rivera’s regime and the restored monarchy and as it survived the violent swings that marked the political life of the second republic, its leaders concluded that civilian leaders, be they monarchist or republican, were incapable of governing Spain effectively. Career soldiers, particularly the veterans of Spain’s Moroccan garrisons, saw their units as the bulwark of the nation. When the Popular Front government elected in 1936 began seriously to threaten the institutional gains which the Spanish Army had made in the decades since 1898, the military leaders attempted to rally their troops to overthrow the republic. Led by the forces still in Morocco and by generals who had gained their critical military experience there, the Army, with significant assistance from Germany and Italy, defeated the levies raised by the republic in a brutal three-year civil war. This time the army unified behind the leadership of General Franco and did not return power to civilian leadership until after his death in 1975.19 By 1936 Spanish Army leaders had some reason to conclude that they had reformed their institution more effectively than had civilian leaders solved the problems of governing Spain. The ironic result was that Spanish military leaders would rule Spain as dictators for nearly half of the period that the organizers of this conference have termed the American century.

Dr. Charles Hendricks is a historian in the Field and International Branch of the U.S. Army Center of Military History and editor of the Center’s quarterly bulletin, Army History.

Notes
1. Julio Busquets, El Militar de Carrera en España, 2d ed. (Barcelona: Ediciones Ariel, 1971), pp. 55–64; Stanley G. Payne, Politics and the Military in Modern Spain (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1967), pp. 17–32.
2. Carolyn P. Boyd, Praetorian Politics in Liberal Spain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), pp. 3–8; Payne, Politics and the Military, pp. 50–54.
3. Payne, Politics and the Military, pp. 47–48, 79–80.
4. Sebastian Balfour, The End of the Spanish Empire, 1898–1923 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 13–25.
5. Balfour, End of the Spanish Empire, pp. 25–33; Manuel Díez-Alegría, "La espléndida guerrita de los americanos," Revue Internationale d'Histoire Militaire, no. 56 (Madrid, 1984), pp. 27–30.
6. David Trask, The War with Spain in 1898 (New York: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 201–46; Díez-Alegría, "La espléndida guerrita," pp. 29–30. Díez-Alegría gives somewhat higher casualty figures for both sides—654 for the Spanish and 1,767 for the Americans.
7. Payne, Politics and the Military, pp. 74–75 and 83–87; Balfour, End of the Spanish Empire, pp. 49–73.
8. Payne, Politics and the Military, pp. 87–88.
9. Boyd, Praetorian Politics in Liberal Spain, pp. 27–28; Payne, Politics and the Military, pp. 97–99.
10. Joaquín Romero-Maura, The Spanish Army and Catalonia: The "Cu-Cut! Incident" and the Law of Jurisdictions, 1905–1906, Sage Research Papers in the Social Sciences No. 5 (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1976), with the quotations on pages 16–17.
11. Boyd, Praetorian Politics in Liberal Spain, pp. 14–16.
12. Payne, Politics and the Military, pp. 102–05; Boyd, Praetorian Politics in Liberal Spain, pp. 23–24.
13. Joan Connelly Ullman, The Tragic Week: A Study of Antclericalism in Spain, 1875–1912 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 132–98, with the quoted words on p. 136.
14. Ullman, The Tragic Week, pp. 198–282; Payne, Politics and the Military, pp. 108–12.
15. Busquets, El Militar de Carrera, p. 140.
16. Payne, Politics and the Military, pp. 112–22, 152–57; Boyd, Praetorian Politics in Liberal Spain, pp. 160–74.
17. Boyd, Praetorian Politics in Liberal Spain, pp. 44–147; Payne, Politics and the Military, pp. 123–50, 223.
18. Boyd, Praetorian Politics in Liberal Spain, pp. 175–276; Payne, Politics and the Military, pp. 152–221.
19. Payne, Politics and the Military, pp. 224–449.

Insofar as the essay covers the Spanish American War and the lessons the Spanish army did not learn, it can be summarized in the military sphere that:

a. the officer corps remained over-politicized and created a state within the state that corrupted not only civil institutions, but impeded and crippled military efficiency both financially and operationally. The officer corps was corrupt in the materialist sense and cowardly. Do not be deceived by the physical evidence of getting oneself, shot oaqqt San Juan heights. Arsenio Linares was "unacceptable" by even "Pecos Bill" William Schaffter levels of incompetence standards.

b. Arsenio Linares Pombo illustrates another problem and example of what the Spanish army did not fix.  There was too much nepotism and lack of technical education among the senior command leadership levels. Even the mid grades did not know their jobs very well and were deficient in basic technical understanding of how to use the tools of the trade; being men and the weapons the men used.

c. Discipline and good conduct in peace and war. This begins with obedience to civilian authority and ends with adhering to the chain of responsibility in that one carries out lawful orders and missions to the best of one's ability, refrains from "politics", and accepts the responsibility for success and or failure of one' decisions and actions. Really, a lot of Spanish officers were rewarded for stupidity and incompetence and moral and physical cowardice. Again, Linares is the poster boy for this ill discipline.  

Linares Pombo, Arsenio. Valencia, 22.X.1848 – Madrid, 7.VIII.1914. Lieutenant General of the Army, Minister of War, State Councilor, Senator for Life.

Son of Brigadier Carlos Linares Nieto and Clotilde Pombo Bargés. When he turned six, his father, then commander of the Infantry, reserved for him a place at the Infantry College of Toledo. However, eight years later he passed the entrance exam at the Artillery College of Segovia, which he joined on January 12, 1863 and in which he was discharged due to poor school performance on September 8, 1864. Then, the general undersecretary of the War, Joaquín Jovellar Soler, at the request of the father, assigned to his orders, granted him the job of second lieutenant in the battalion of Cazadores Baza No. 12, garrison in Seville, where his brother Augusto was already placed.

Successive transfers of his unit took him to Granada, Aranjuez, Barcelona and Madrid, where he joined the revolution of September 1868, a circumstance that earned him the rank of lieutenant. Transferred their battalion to Pamplona, both brothers requested to return to Madrid, to the battalion of Cazadores Barcelona n.º 3, with which, in July 1869, he went out to fight the Carlist factions raised in La Mancha, being rewarded with the employment of lieutenant. The following summer, he went to Biscay for the same purpose, obtaining the rank of captain, and in October 1871 he was appointed aide-de-camp to Brigadier Victoriano de Ameller, undersecretary of war.

In December of the same year he requested the pass to the army of Cuba, immersed in the struggle for independence since October 1868, where he was assigned to the battalion of Cazadores Talavera No. 5, with which he joined the campaign against the insurgents in the jurisdiction of Port-au-Prince, operations for which he obtained the job of captain on November 10, 1872.

In May 1873, suffering from malaria, he had to return to Madrid, being assigned to the 2nd Section of the Ministry of War. In September, General Jovellar, newly appointed captain general of Cuba, claimed him as aide-de-camp, remaining in Havana until, when Jovellar ceased in April 1874, he returned to Madrid. His uncle, Brigadier Enrique Bargés Pombo, head of the Vanguard Brigade of the II Corps of the Army of the North, placed him in the battalion of Cazadores Puerto Rico No. 19, integrated in that one, with which he joined the Carlist War and intervened in the battle of Monte Muro, an action that earned him the rank of commander.

In October, Jovellar took charge of the army of the North, appointed him his aide-de-camp, and awarded him a Red Cross of Military Merit for the capture of La Guardia, and the employment of commander by those of Camarillas and Tomargal.

In January 1875, after the restoration of Alfonso XII, he returned to Madrid with Jovellar, whom Cánovas had appointed Minister of War, and again to Navarre, when the King put himself at the head of the army of the North, being rewarded with the rank of lieutenant colonel for the battle of Monte Esquinza and the lifting of the siege of Pamplona.

The incident of Lácar, which was about to cost the life of the Monarch, caused his return to the capital, where he continued as an assistant to the minister until, in June, he put himself at the head of the army of the Center in Valencia, where he obtained the rank of colonel for his participation in the action of Monlleó and another Red Cross of Military Merit for that of Seo de Urgel.

In December, Jovellar was again appointed captain general of Cuba, which led him to cross the Atlantic again. During the first months of 1876, he made numerous reserved efforts to defuse the insurrection, and in September he requested to take an active part in the campaign. Without losing the status of assistant to the captain general, he joined the battalion of Cazadores de Sagua, with which he intervened in various operations carried out in the jurisdiction of Sancti Spiritus, for which Martínez Campos, in his capacity as head of the army of Operations, promoted him to lieutenant colonel on March 23, 1877.

Placed in command of the battalion of Cazadores de Pizarro, he moved to the province of Las Villas and was appointed head of the half brigade that operated in the jurisdiction of Remedios. In March 1878, after being awarded another Red Cross of Military Merit, he embarked with his unit to Gíbara and began to operate in the Holguín area. In June, Jovellar ceased as captain general and both returned to the Peninsula. On July 23, newly arrived in Madrid, he was promoted to colonel for his performance in the meeting of Arroyo Gato and was given command of the San Fernando Infantry Regiment No. 11, in Lleida.

In December, after marrying Jovellar's daughter, María Rosa Jovellar Cardona, in Madrid, his unit was transferred to Cartagena, two years later to Valencia and in 1882 to Alicante. In February 1883, his father-in-law was appointed captain general of the Philippines, taking him with him to Manila, where he entrusted him with the command of the 1.er Tercio of the Civil Guard, a position he held until, in April 1885, jovellar ceased, he returned to Madrid and took charge of the San Fernando, then stationed in Aranjuez and, since June 1887, in Leganés.

On March 21, 1889, at the age of forty, he was promoted to brigadier general. Assigned to the Recruitment Section of the Ministry of War, Minister Marcelo Azcárraga commissioned him to draft a bill and Drafting and Replacement of the Army, which would include Cassola's proposals to abolish substitution and redemption, a project that was withdrawn from Parliament when López Domínguez took over the War portfolio in December 1892. In the previous June, Azcárraga had given him the command of the II Organic Infantry Brigade, stationed in Leganés, with which he marched to Melilla on the occasion of the incidents of October 1893, which cost the life of General Margallo and gave rise to the fleeting campaign that allowed to occupy the border strip obtained in the Peace of Tetuán of 1860.

After the dissolution of the army of Africa, he resumed command of the brigade of Leganés until, at the beginning of the Cuban War in 1895, Martínez Campos claimed him and appointed him head of the brigade of San Luis, in the vicinity of Santiago de Cuba. Several meetings held with the parties of José Maceo in the foothills of Sierra Maestra were rewarded with the Retired Grand Red Cross of Military Merit.

In January 1896, threatened Havana by the so-called Invasion Army commanded by Antonio Maceo and Máximo Gómez, he embarked for the capital at the head of a column of nine hundred men, with which he undertook operations against the parties that ravaged the west of the island. The feat of imprisoning Antonio Maceo in the province of Pinar del Río prompted Weyler to propose him for promotion to major general, granted on March 23.

At the request of his uncle, Lieutenant General Bargés, head of the army corps with head in Santiago de Cuba, Weyler gave him command of his 1st Division of the same, with which he resumed operations against José Maceo in Sierra Maestra and Baracoa. In June, when the aforementioned army corps was dissolved, he took charge of the Cuban Division and the General Command of Santiago, from which he directed the actions that cost the life of José Maceo in the Loma del Gato.

During the winter of 1897, he managed to fortify the steps of the mountains, in order to keep the parties of Calixto García away from the population, which earned him a second Grand Red Cross pensioned of Military Merit; in the spring he directed an amphibious operation in the vicinity of Baracoa, rewarded with the Grand Red Cross of Naval Merit, and throughout the second semester, he held continuous encounters with the enemy, which were recognized with the award of the Grand Cross of María Cristina, antecedent of the Military Medal.

In March 1898, before the imminent declaration of war by the United States, Captain General Ramón Blanco Erenas appointed him Chief of Staff of the Eastern Army Corps of the South, an appointment that he considered harmful and that moved him to request the return to the Peninsula, claiming to be affected by malaria. Faced with the difficult situation and in order to dissuade him, Blanco proposed his promotion to lieutenant general, which was approved on May 4. Within two weeks, the U.S. fleet blockaded Santiago Bay, where Admiral Cervera's squadron had just anchored, and began bombarding the forts protecting the mouth.

On May 29, the same day that half of the U.S. army was preparing to embark in Tampa, Linares was fighting for an adequate destination to be given to his new job and Blanco limited himself to confirming him in command of the Cuban Division. However, a month later, given the gravity of the situation, he decided to segregate the Eastern Army Corps in two and put Linares at the head of one of them, number IV, composed of the Divisions of Cuba and Manzanillo.

On June 21, General Shafter, at the head of 16,887 officers and soldiers of the V Army Corps, began to disembark laboriously on the beach of Daiquirí, east of Santiago, an operation successfully completed the next day in Siboney, thanks to the decision of Linares to retreat the coastal garrisons and abandon the advantageous positions that prevented penetrating inland. A second mistake by Linares — concentrating the troops of the so-called mining zone in Santiago — allowed Shafter to establish his camp west of Seville, less than ten kilometers from the city.

Blanco, with gentle nineteenth-century manners, criticized the operation, and Linares requested to be relieved. Replacing him in those circumstances was impossible, so he authorized him to act as he saw fit, proceeding to distribute his brief troops around the city. A week later, at dawn on July 1, five thousand American soldiers, supported by four artillery pieces, attacked the village of El Caney, an advanced position defended by four hundred men commanded by General Vara de Rey. Upon hearing the cannon, Linares established his command post in the position of Canosa, seven hundred meters to the rear of that of the Lomas de San Juan, which he proceeded to reinforce, and a few steps ahead of the wall that surrounded the city of Santiago.

The bitter resistance of El Caney postponed until noon the assault by another eight thousand soldiers from the position of San Juan, less than a kilometer from the urban border and defended by less than five hundred Spaniards. After two hours of resistance, San Juan fell and an hour later El Caney did. Almost at the same time, Linares, who had stayed all morning in Canosa, was shot in the left forearm, handed over command to General José Toral, military governor of Santiago, and was evacuated to his residence.

(Well out of range of any American soldiers by the way, so who actually SHOT him? A bullet wound in the left forearm? He was right handed Linares was. M.)

In the afternoon, the attackers did not manage to advance, nor the next day, but they did manage to seize the reservoir that supplied water to the city, located five kilometers to the north. In the early morning of the 3rd, the Spanish fleet, blockaded for a month and a half, went to sea and was sunk. On the same day, Shafter, while requesting permission from Washington to retreat, ordered Toral to surrender, threatening to bombard the city with artillery he lacked. The latter, unaware of this circumstance, but without the possibility of being helped, lacking water and with food for ten days, accepted the challenge, suspended hostilities and negotiated the capitulation, including in it all the troops of the IV Army Corps. Without further confrontation, Spain gave up the war and was forced to sign a leonine peace treaty.

(They were busy consolidating the heights and dragging up siege guns and Gatling guns. As from American accounts, Schaffter was unclear as to whether enough troops were atop the heights to hold against the expected counterattack. He ordered a withdrawal to a position on the reverse slop and for troops to dig in, so as to keep them out Spanish artillery observation and to set up a reverse slope defense that would catch the Spanish counterattack out in the open as they crested the ridge-top. It was the West Point solution to break up a counterattack. That was much too complicated for the Unreconstructed Confederate cavalryman, Joe Wheeler, who told the Americans there to stay put and dig in and trust Parker's Gatling guns to mow the tercios down. Wheeler turned out to be exactly right. M.)      

On the 12th, Blanco ordered Toral to initiate the mandatory contradictory trial for the granting of the Laureate Cross of San Fernando to Linares, and on the 20th the government granted him a second Grand Cross of María Cristina for the defense of Santiago. On August 23 he embarked for the Peninsula, moving to the situation of barracks in Madrid, where the contradictory trial was restarted because the actions initiated in the capitulated square were considered null and void.

In October 1899, when the conservatives returned to power, with Azcárraga in the Ministry of War, he was appointed captain general of Aragon. When he ceased on October 18, 1900, Francisco Silvela entrusted him with the portfolio, in which he was confirmed by Azcárraga himself when five days later he relieved the previous one.

In November, the Regent appointed him senator for life, and on March 6, 1901 he ceased in the Ministry, when Sagasta formed his last government.

In July, a few days before his wife died, the prosecutors of the Supreme Council of War and Navy rejected the award of the laureate, not observing heroic behavior in her behavior in Santiago, and proposed that she be awarded the Simple Cross of San Fernando, an opinion that was endorsed by the plenary in October.

On June 27, 1902, Weyler, Minister of War of Sagasta, appointed him captain general of the North, based in Burgos, and on December 16, when Silvela returned to power, he passed for the second time to the Ministry of War, a position he held for seven months until, on July 20, 1903, Raimundo Fernández Villaverde replaced Silvela in the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.

On November 23, he entrusted him with the General Directorate of the Civil Guard, but fifteen days later Antonio Maura appointed him Minister of War for the third time, being the most relevant of this mandate the creation of the Central General Staff. Dismissed by Azcárraga when Maura resigned in December 1904, he was left without a destination until, in March 1906, Agustín Luque, Minister of War of the liberal Government of Segismundo Moret, put him at the head of the Captaincy General of Catalonia, whose garrison had just starred in the assault on the Cu-Cut, an episode that caused the approval of the Law of Jurisdictions. The governments that succeeded each other in power during the following triennium kept him in that destiny, which he made compatible with the presidency of the junta that outlined the organization of the Central General Staff, work rewarded with the Grand Cross of Carlos III.

On March 1, 1909, when Minister Fernando Primo de Rivera dissented from Maura's budgetary policy, he turned to Linares for the fourth and last time to carry out the War portfolio, where in June he made the mistake of completing with reservists the units sent to quell the rebellion of the cabilas near Melilla. At the end of July, its embarkation in Barcelona caused the so-called Tragic Week, and its massacre in the Barranco del Lobo, the fall of the Maura Government when the parliamentary sessions restarted in October, a circumstance that put an end to the peaceful turn of parties characteristic of the Restoration.

In October 1912, after three years away from public life, he was appointed president of the Supreme Council of War and Navy. A year later, on November 26, 1913, he married Elisa Pozurama López – older sister of the wife of General Castro Girona – and died suddenly at the age of sixty-five, around the same time that the First World War began.

Works of ~: Instructions for the regime and dispatch of affairs in the Secretariat of the Supreme Council of War and Navy, Madrid, Deposit of the War, 1918.

Bibl.:
-J. Muller y Teijeiro, Combates y capitulación de Santiago de Cuba, Madrid, Imprenta de Felipe Márquez, 1898.
-S. Gómez Núñez, The Spanish-American War. Santiago de Cuba, Madrid, Imprenta del Cuerpo de Artillería, 1901.
-A.M. T. E. Wester, El combate de "El Caney",, Madrid, Est. Typographic The Work, 1906.
-H. H. Sargent, The Campaign of Santiago de Cuba, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd., 1907
-M. Kunz, Tactical Exercises of the Wars of Modern Times. La Guerra Hispano-Americana, Barcelona, Imprenta Viuda de Casanovas, 1909.
-A.M. T. E. Wester, El combate de "San Juan",, Madrid, Publicaciones de la Revista Técnica de Infantería y Caballería, 1909.
-V. Weyler, My command in Cuba (February 10, 1896 to October 31, 1897). Historia militar y política de la última guerra separatista durante dicho mando, Madrid, Imprenta de Felipe González Rojas, 1910.
-P. de Azcárate, La guerra del 98, Madrid, Alianza, 1968.
-P. S. Foner, The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of U.S. Imperialism, Madrid, Akal, 1972.
-J.C. Ullman, The Tragic Week. Study on the socioeconomic causes of anti-clericalism in Spain (1898-1912), Barcelona, Ariel, 1972.
-D.B. Chidsey, La guerra hispano americana. 1896-1898, Barcelona, Grijalbo, 1973.
-J. Barón Fernández, La guerra hispano-americana de 1898, La Coruña, Ediciones do Castro, 1993.
-F. Puell de la Villa, The Unknown Soldier. De la leva a la "mili" (1700-1912), Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva, 1996.
-G. G. Calleja Leal, "La Guerra Hispano-cubano-norteamericano: los combates terrestres en el escenario oriental", in Revista de Historia Militar, 83 (1997), pp. 91-160; J. A. Plaza, El maldito verano del 98: los 112 días de la Guerra con los Estados Unidos, Madrid, Temas de Hoy, 1997.
-F. Puell de la Villa, "La insurrección en Cuba y Filipinas", in Revista Española de Defensa, 132 (1998), pp. 38-45; P. González-Pola de la Granja, La configuración de la mentalidad militar contemporánea (1868-1909), Madrid, Ministerio de Defensa, 2003.
-F. Puell de la Villa, El Desastre de Cuba, 1898. Las Guásimas, El Caney y las Lomas de San Juan, Madrid, Almena, 2005.

author:

Fernando Puell de la Villa

To be brutally FRANK about it, Linares was an example of a not unique Spanish army apple polisher, insurrectionist, career ladder climbing man of no merit, 'rising on the coattails of his relatives' incompetent, who had learned just enough military science by the time General Blanco handed him the hot potato of Santiago de Cuba, to try repeatedly to be reposted to Spain, citing Malaria he did not have. He wanted no part of what he assumed would be a disaster for which he might be blamed or charged. He bungled the defense at the beach, he failed to secure the Santiago water reservoir which the Americans promptly made a beeline to seize after they brushed aside the rather feeble defense his troops put up at the El Caney blocking position defending it. After Linares had been slightly wounded in the left arm near the rear of San Juan heights (Some confusion exists as to WHO shot at him at this time, since nobody American claims to have seen and shot at him, it might have been his own tercios, who bungled an assassination attempt. Or it could have been a stray Gatling round passing over the hill, but then I have my own theory about it. See above for my thoughts on how to interpret the peculiar wound placement. M.) and had his 'honor wound' and therefore promptly yellowed dogged out, bolted immediately for the rear and by default, passed command and dumped the hot potato on General Toral as to how to surrender the city, Fat old incompetent 300-pound General Schaffter, bluffed aforesaid General Toral with a Gatling gun demonstration, and proclaimed; "I shall shell you, next." That forced Toral to pack it in because American guns were being dragged up Kettle Hill and he could see them. These were the battery of four siege guns, General Schaffter supposedly did not have.

Why Linares was not shot by his own troops for his physical cowardice as well as his criminal stupidity has always AMAZED me.

M.

[miletus12]

Nuts and bolts for Spain: Part III, counterfactual Navy;

The Spanish Armada order of battle as listed for 1898.

-3 Battleships
-5 or 6 armored cruisers
-18 cruisers as follows;
--3 of the 1st class
--12 of the 2nd class
-6 torpedo boat destroyers
-12 torpedo boats
-1 submarine
-37 gunboats (cutters)

They were expected to handle...

-5 battleships
-6 monitors
-2 armored cruisers
-15 cruisers, which by Spanish naval classification would be 1st class cruisers.
-15 gunboats, which by Spanish naval classification would be 2nd class cruisers.
-5 torpedo boats which would be roughly comparable to Spanish gunboats or cutters.
-1 armored ram
-1 dynamite cruiser
-18 wooden schooners and brigs with reworked American civil war era guns.

That was the 'on paper' lineup. It looks at first glance to be fairly equal.

However, things were not as appeared.

Naval Strategy, Spanish-American War



When news of the American blockade of Cuba reached Madrid, large numbers of Spaniards clamored to enlist in the navy. Convinced of Spanish naval strength following more than a decade of showy reconstruction and foreign purchases, many Spaniards pressed for its immediate employment. These sentiments were echoed by many politicians in the Cortes (parliament) and throughout the civilian administration.

Pundits and opinion makers expected Rear Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete to sortie immediately with his squadron from the Cape Verde Islands and challenge the U.S. Navy in the Caribbean. Many Spaniards believed that while the Americans were distracted in the Caribbean, the navy could also easily raid the vulnerable U.S. Atlantic seaboard. General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, who had been recalled to Madrid by the queen regent, even glibly proposed that 50,000 Spanish troops be disembarked to wreak havoc along the U.S. eastern shoreline.

Such grandiose schemes, of course, went well beyond the capabilities of the Spanish Navy. Spanish professional naval officers realized that although numerous, few of their warships were capable of campaigning effectively on the high seas against their more powerful American opponents. Set-piece battles against an enemy fleet were not part of the Spanish Navy’s mentality or training. Indeed, the Royal Spanish Navy’s defensive strategy had been codified as early as 1886 by naval minister Vice Admiral José María Beránger.

When current minister Rear Admiral Segismundo Bermejo y Merelo, in office scarcely seven months, bowed to political pressure and reluctantly drew up orders for Cervera to steam to the Caribbean, he attempted to deflect the public clamor for his squadron to charge headlong into battle. Indeed, Cervera was to proceed stealthily toward the sanctuary of San Juan de Puerto Rico, avoiding any unfavorable clashes at sea. He was also authorized to proceed on to Cuba, depending upon the situation.

To Cervera, even such modest goals seemed ill-advised. After meeting with his officers, he cabled back a proposal that his warships proceed no farther than the Canary Islands, taking up station there so as to steam to the aid of any threat against Spain itself. In proposing this strategy, he pointed out that U.S. naval forces were “immensely superior in number and class of ships, armor, and gunnery, as well as in state of readiness” to his own problem-plagued command.

Yet such a timid course as Cervera proposed was impossible for political reasons, so Bermejo’s initial orders were repeated. At midnight on April 29, 1898, Cervera slipped out of San Vicente in the Cape Verde Islands with his four cruisers, three destroyers, and a hospital ship. While running across the Atlantic, he learned that Rear Admiral Patricio Montojo y Pasarón’s squadron had been destroyed in the Battle of Manila Bay on May 1 and that the shore batteries guarding San Juan, Puerto Rico, had been shelled by Rear Admiral William Sampson’s powerful North Atlantic Squadron. Therefore, with considerable skill and good fortune, Cervera was able to coal at Curaçao and steal into Santiago Bay on May 19.

Only the day before, Bermejo had been compelled to resign as minister of the navy amid a great public outcry against the unexpected Spanish defeat at Manila. In order to mitigate the recriminations being hurled against the navy’s disappointing performance, the notion of attacking the U.S. eastern seaboard was revived. Although a full-scale invasion was clearly impossible, it was suggested that a pair of transatlantic sorties might be launched. While no significant strategic advantage could realistically be achieved by such a feat, naval professionals at least consoled themselves that the distraction might ease some of the American pressure on blockaded Cuba.

Thus, Captain José Ferrándiz was ordered to prepare to strike out in the direction of the Caribbean with his aged battleship Pelayo plus the even older coast guard vessel Vitoria and the destroyers Osado, Audaz, and Proserpina. This sortie was to be merely a feint, though, as all five were to quickly reverse course and return to Spanish waters and assume coastal patrol.

The real thrust was to be made by Admiral Manuel de la Cámara y Libermoore, who under cover of this initial diversion was to slip out for Bermuda with his armored cruiser Carlos V accompanied by three fast, lightly armed liners that had been converted into auxiliary cruisers—the 12,000-ton Patriota, 11,000-ton Meteoro, and 10,500-ton Patriota—as well as the dispatch vessel Giralda. After coaling at Bermuda, this strike force was to ply the eastern seaboard of the United States as commerce raiders, wreaking as much havoc as possible, while working its way northward into Canadian waters. From Halifax, Admiral Cámara’s small force was then to head east into the Atlantic as if returning to Spain before actually veering south to emerge amid the Turks and Caicos islands for more interceptions of American ships.

Finally, anticipating that U.S. naval forces would be obliged to redeploy into the North Atlantic to hunt for this elusive force, a second small squadron of commerce raiders was to steam from Spain under Captain José Barrasa. With his aged cruiser Alfonso XII plus the auxiliary cruisers Antonio López and Buenos Aires, he was to make landfall near Brazil’s Cape San Roque, then prey upon the busy American ship lanes rounding South America.

Yet all these offensive notions were scrapped when it was learned that the United States intended to dispatch an expeditionary force to occupy the Philippines. Hoping to beat them to the archipelago, Spanish naval strategy turned around completely. Admiral Cámara was ordered to convoy transports carrying 4,000 troops to the Philippines. This Spanish force was to move through the Suez Canal so as to arrive in Philippine waters prior to the U.S. invasion army and disembark the Spanish troops on the islands of Jolo and Mindanao to spearhead a local resistance.

Cámara’s original 13 vessels were to be augmented by the transport Isla de Panay as well as the colliers Colón, Covadonga, San Agustín, and San Francisco, the latter four ships because the only reliable supplies of coal for the Spanish squadron would be found at the neutral Italian ports in Eritrea as well as French ports in Indochina. Accompanied by the dispatch vessel Joaquín del Piélago, Cámara’s lumbering squadron reached Port Said, Egypt, by June 22, 1898, only to be delayed in gaining access to the Suez Canal.

Meanwhile, political pressure continued to mount in Madrid regarding the navy’s lackluster performance, with feelings running especially high against Cervera’s lengthy stay inside Santiago Bay. Fearful that the anchored Spanish warships would be forced to surrender without firing a shot once Santiago fell to its American besiegers, yet another new and hard-pressed navy minister, Captain Ramón Auñón y Villalón, ordered Cervera’s squadron to sortie. Fully as Cervera had predicted, it was annihilated after exiting the harbor on July 3. This shocking loss collapsed public morale and also led to the recall of Cámara’s expedition from the Red Sea. The Philippines had been openly abandoned to U.S. seizure, soon to be followed by Cuba and Puerto Rico, as Spain could only look on helplessly.

If allowed to pursue their prewar strategy, the high command of the Royal Spanish Navy would have preferred to fight a defensive struggle, sortieing occasionally from their fortified harbors with single ships or swift, small squadrons to make a sweep or to relieve a beleaguered outpost. Instead, unrealistic expectations generated by public opinion and pushed by the politicians had resulted in demands for a naval strategy that the professional navy did not want and could not perform.

Further Reading Almunia Fernández, Celso Jesús. “La opinión pública española sobre la pérdida del imperio colonial: De Zanjón al desastre (1878–1898)” [Spanish Public Opinion toward the Loss of the Imperial Colonies: From Zanjon to the Disaster, 1878–1898]. Imágenes y ensayos del 98 (1998): 205–252. Calvo Poyato, José. El Desastre del 98 [The Disaster of 1898]. Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1997. Cervera Pery, José. La guerra naval del 98: a mal planeamiento, peores consecuencias [The Naval War of 1898: Poor Planning, Worse Consequences]. Madrid: San Martín, 1998. Feuer, A. B. The Spanish-American War at Sea: Naval Action in the Atlantic. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995. Smith, Joseph. The Spanish-American War: Conflict in the Caribbean and the Pacific, 1895–1902. New York: Longman, 1994.

There was nothing of practical effect that could be done about the naval geography;



The naval situation in the Atlantic for Spain, even if her fleet had been up to scratch, was limited by no defendable bases at the terminus of seapower projection, the two on which she depended, being San Juan, Puerto Rico and Havana, Cuba not being prepared with naval depot or ship repair facilities to either host, victual, fuel or repair and maintain a battle fleet or raid force.

While Alfonso XIIs and regent Cristina's navy ministers^1 built shiny snazzy ineffective ships, and the army and navy fortified these ports and other fjords and harbors around Cuba and Puerto Rico with reasonable coastal artillery and coast guard vessels, nobody in the Spanish government had seen fit to look at the fleet sustenance problem as they had with the Philippine Archipelago, where Cavite was established as both a shipyard and naval arsenal dating back to 1607, when this base built galleons and supported the Acupulco to Manila trade route.

This sin of omission of which even Admiral Cervera was guilty, was to doom the Armada to quick Atlantic defeat. It was the same problems in the Canary Islands which Cervera wanted to use as a base to flank any American naval attack on the Spanish metropole.

Neither Tenerife, nor Gran Canaria had sheltered and properly prepared anchorages which could supply or maintain a fleet. (See map.)



For all practical purposes, if the Spanish were to fight a naval war, it would have to be from Ferrol, Cadiz, Cartagena or Manila Bay.

They had nowhere else capable of serving as a fleet locus or base in 1898. As a counterfactual, they would have to make provisions to at least prepare Cienfuegos as a naval base and perhaps Santiago de Cuba, since Havana and San Juan were too exposed to British and American attacks, though from a naval geographical and land lines of communication perspective to Havana, GUANTANAMO BAY was the logical choice for a Caribbean base as Manila Bay with Subic Bay as a fallback position, would be for the Philippine Islands.

That goes to the naval logistics errors. Could this have been corrected? Probably. Storing up coal and putting in spare parts and machine shops was done for Montojo at Cavite (By accident mainly. M.). Dewey profited thereby. The error in Manila Bay was not garrisoning the place with loyal competent personnel (Refer to the Spanish army above. M.).and not sending Montojo the right kinds of ships to mount a defense. He could have used some decent torpedo boats and a minelayer; instead of the decrepit Castille and flock of colonial gunboat / cutters which made up the bulk of his fleet.

About those ministers...

^1 These ministers:
Minister............................................................date of service.
Santiago Durán Lira.................................................(9 December 1879 – 8 February 1881)
Francisco de Paula Pavía Pavía......................................(8 February 1881 – 9 January 1883)
Arsenio Martínez-Campos Antón.......................................(9 January 1883 – 13 January 1883)
Rafael Rodríguez de Arias Villavicencio.........................(13 January 1883 – 13 October 1883)
Carlos Valcárcel Usell de Gimbarda..............................(13 October 1883 – 18 January 1884)
Juan Bautista Antequera y Bobadilla............................(18 January 1884 – 13 July 1885)
Manuel de la Pezuela y Lobo.......................................(13 July 1885 – 27 November 1885)
José María Beránger Ruiz de Apodaca..........................(27 November 1885 – 10 October 1886)
Rafael Rodríguez de Arias Villavicencio.........................(10 October 1886 – 21 January 1890)
Juan Romero Moreno.................................................(21 January 1890 – 5 July 1890)
José María Beránger Ruiz de Apodaca..........................(5 July 1890 – 5 November 1891)
Antonio Cánovas del Castillo.......................................(5 November 1891 – 23 November 1891)
Florencio Montojo Trillo..............................................(23 November 1891 – 11 March 1892)
José María Beránger Ruiz de Apodaca..........................(11 March 1892 – 11 December 1892)
José López Domínguez...............................................(11 December 1892 – 14 December 1892)
Pascual Cervera y Topete............................................(14 December 1892 – 23 March 1893)
Manuel Pasquín de Juan..............................................(12 March 1894 – 23 March 1895)
José María Beránger Ruiz de Apodaca...........................(23 March 1895 – 4 October 1897)

From the Spanish wiki...

José María Beránger

Index
1 Biography
2 References
3 Bibliography
4 External links

Biography
In command of Vitoria, he joined the cause of General Prim in 1868, capturing the war steamer Colón, in which Admiral Pavia, captain general of the department of Ferrol, was traveling.2Between March 20, 1870 and January 4, 1871 he held the portfolio of Minister of the Navy during the regency period of General Francisco Serrano y Domínguez after the Revolution of 1868. already under the reign of Amadeus I he will again occupy the portfolio of Marina on three occasions. The first of them, without solution of continuity with the previous one, will cover from January 4 to July 24, 1871 in the government presided over by General Francisco Serrano. Later he occupied the aforementioned portfolio between July 24 and October 5, 1871, as well as between June 13, 1872 and February 11, 1873, on both occasions in governments presided over by Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla. After the resignation of the throne of Amadeo I and the proclamation of the First Spanish Republic he was part of the first government of the same presided over by Estanislao Figueras y Moragas, being in charge again of the Ministry of The Navy between February 11 and February 24, 1873.

He was also a deputy in four different legislatures during the Democratic Sexennium, specifically those corresponding to the elections of 1869 -for Lugo-, 1871 -for La Coruña-, April 1872 -for Madrid- and August 1872, in which he obtained an act for both La Coruña and Madrid.3​

The coup d'état led by General Manuel Pavia on January 2, 1874, followed by the pronouncement that General Martínez Campos would make on December 29 of that same year, caused the fall of the First Spanish Republic and the monarchical restoration. José María Beránger y Ruiz de Apodaca, who had collaborated in the coup of General Pavia, was elected senator for Almería in 1876 and for La Coruña in 1881. In 1883 King Alfonso XII appointed him senator for life.

On November 27, 1885 he returned to occupy the portfolio of the Ministry of the Navy in the government presided over by Sagasta, ceasing in it on October 10, 1886 for his refusal to accept the pardon to General Villacampa. In 1890 and 1892 he again occupied the aforementioned ministerial portfolio, with a parenthesis between both stages, with Cánovas. At this stage he took care of destroying the submarine project of Isaac Peral y Caballero.4Between 1895 and 1897 the same prime minister returned to the same portfolio. He went into reserve in 1896.

He died at 22:00 on January 23, 1907 in Madrid, at the age of eighty-three, at his home on Calle de Serrano.5He was buried at 4:30 p.m. on January 25 in the San Isidro cemetery.6​

To call José María Beránger Ruiz de Apodaca 'incompetent' is to insult most incompetents everywhere. He was far worse. 

[miletus12]

Nuts and bolts for Spain: Part IV, counterfactual Navy;

How is that gun thing doing?

Chapter from a Spanish textbook on the Spanish Navy. (This work is not mine, I just translated it. M.)

III BREECH-LOADING ARTILLERY IN THE NAVY FIRST PERIOD, 1879-1895

On ships, the assembly of breech-loading parts had the advantage of not having to be removed from the battery to insert the swage and proceed with loading. The French Navy quickly caught on to this and was quick to adopt them on their 1858-60 ship models.

In Spain, the opposite occurred: the Navy lagged behind the Army in adopting this material development, and in 1870 it became interested in a project for a 25.4 cm cast-iron cannon, conceived by artilleryman, José González Hontoria (1840- 1889), having scheduled the construction of a specimen in Trubia. It was the first to be cast there using the Rodman procedure, but the 1872-1875 war brought an interruption to the work and it was no longer considered interesting to resume it.

González Hontoria then presented a project for a complete naval artillery system, functionally breech-loading, which La Llave considered: “modest, because it did not have any frankly radical innovative pieces, serving at first only to arm our propeller-driven frigates and the cruisers that were under construction. leaving, without a doubt, for later the making of breech loading pieces for the rest of the fleet if the test was successful” 1 . The González Hontoria system aspired to achieve the Navy's own artillery, which would make it possible to dispense with that of the Army in manning boats and landing equipment. Thus, his system brought together pieces of calibers of 20, 18, 16, 12, 9 and 7 cm. The pieces of 20, 18, 16 cm were made of cast iron by the Rodman procedure, with inner steel tube inserts, those of 12 and 9 of iron, swaged, without tubing and the one of 7 cm. steel, unwrapped.

The system included the transformation of the 22-cm Barrios cannons into 18-cm caliber, and the 20-cm Rivera. and Vigodet-Alcón of 16 cm. No. 1, in caliber 16 cm2, making usable those pieces that had not been transformed by the Palliser system. All parts of this system were breech-loading, De Bange-type screw locks and were adopted by R.O. of September 24, 1879. Of each caliber, two copies were manufactured in Trubia to be tested and, having given good results, “some of them were manufactured regularly” 3 , but the system had its detractors and for From 1881 to 1883, pieces were acquired from Armstrong and Krupp, "which gave our navy a great lack of uniformity and much more when the calibers are not the same" 4 , creating problems in ammunition.

In 1883, González Hontoria presented a new system that included 12, 16, 18, 20, 24, 28 and 32 cm steel barrels, authorizing the experimental manufacture of 12 and 16 cm pieces. in Le Havre, by the firm Forges et Chantiers de la Mediterranée. The pieces gave a result that is said to have surprised the French themselves and thus the system was adopted as "model 1883", later adding a 14 cm piece.

1. Joaquín de La Llave, work cited, 2nd Part, p. 174.
2. Three 16 cm caliber pieces resulted: the newly manufactured one, nominated No. 1, the one obtained with the refurbishment of the “Rivera” cannon, nominated No. 2, and the one from the “Vigodet-Alcón” cannon No. 1, nominated Nº3
3. Joaquín de La Llave, work cited, 2nd Part, p. 175.
4. Joaquín de La Llave, work cited, 2nd Part, p. 175. 114 González Hontoria 12-cm Cannon Once the system was adopted, the construction of the pieces involved different firms, exhibiting La Llave: “the two 32-cm and the two 28-cm. del Pelayo have been manufactured in Trubia with Creusot tubes, the 24 cm. of the Queen Regent in the Armstrong factory, although according to plans by Hontoria. Some of 20 and 16 cm. They have been built by Portilla & White, from Seville, and others in the Forges et Chantiers factory or in the Creusot, and finally for the cruisers under construction in the shipyards of the Nervión, the 28 cm guns are built. as well as those of 16, 14 and smaller, in the workshops of the same company”
5. And Vigón adds: “The 28 cm. of the Carlos V and those of 24 cm. of the Prince of Asturias were built in the arsenal of La Carraca with tubes and bands bought at Creusot, the same as those of 12 and 14 cm”
6. González Hontoria 24 cm cannon in armored turet. The production of González Hontoria system parts in private shipyards such as Nervión and Portilla & White, was a consequence of the naval program initiated with the Rodríguez Arias Law (1887), an attempt by Spain to free itself from dependence on foreign supply, which was never fully achieved, Agustín Ramón Rodríguez pointed out, "it was calculated that only 40% of the inventgory of heavy cannons, and 80% of small ones, was manufactured in Spain, with an average of 60% overall".
7. The project should be considered 5 Joaquín de La Llave, cited work, 2nd Part, p. 177-178
8. Jorge Vigón, cited work, Volume II, p. 358-359 7 Agustín Ramón Rodríguez González Naval Policy of the Restoration, 1875-1898, Madrid 1988, pag 296-297 115 failed, since after the initial experience the previous system was restored.

Spain, as of 1887, was overly dependent on the British and French sources for their naval artillery.

What else can be determined? Translated article from the blog; "vidamaritima.com/public_html"

EL BRIGADIER GONZÁLEZ HONTORIA... the never well-regarded...

This phrase often used in the past has always been curious to me. It must be applied to notable people who have excelled in any of the branches of knowledge or technique and that no matter how much is said about them – and well said, which is difficult in this country – will never be enough to value their human effort and their weight in history.

This phrase can be applied to Brigadier José González y Hontoria, born on July 21, 1840 in Sanlucar de Barrameda. In this beautiful city the best chamomile in the world is made, which is responsible for remembering the practices of rio to anyone who needs their services.

In those times people were baptized with multiple names and our biography subject was given, neither more nor less, José María de la Paz Antonio by his parents Don Antonio González Angel and Doña Maria de la Paz Hontoria Tezanos.

From the family of eight brothers, José was the one who achieved world renown by developing a complete family of naval guns of great quality and technical value that, as always, the myopia of those responsible for investment and development of the Navy, both civilian and military, did not know how to progress in series through programs of continuity and support to benefit the national industry. Easier and more comfortable for them – for not taking into account darker considerations – the delivery of the nation over to foreign technology and to the advantage of large foreign firms: That they advocate this approach ...

Today, in Spain, with nuances, it is the same story.

When he was young, his father applied for him a place to enter the Military Naval College of San Fernando as an applicant, where he entered on December 31, 1851.

After vicissitudes of youth that led him even to leave the Navy momentarily, and demonstrating great capacity for science, he entered the Academy of the Royal Artillery Corps of the Navy.

On March 11, 1858, he was appointed a second lieutenant student of the Academy; in 1860 he left as a lieutenant and on September 4 he was appointed as a assistant professor of the Academy.

He was sent by the administration to engage in a journey of information gathering and learning; a tour of various Spanish factories for the making of powder and weapons, as well as to study the casting processes of the national industry. On January 31, ,861, on the return and termination of the commission, he resumed his work as a professor.

From August 17, 1863 he is put in charge of the Command of the School and Section of Instruction, being the most senior teacher.

In the years 1864 and 1865, at the age of 24, he was sent on a commission to the United States of America to study the new technical processes of casting cannons and the technology of these, studying all kinds of pieces of wrapped and smooth anima (tubes) that he would later duplicate in a complete memory, including plans of pieces and fuses and scientific data of great value for the military naval progress of our country.

He returned to the Academy in the years 1865 and 1866, until November 14 of this last year in which he is assigned to the Trubia factory as part of the Navy commission that was posted permanently there.

On October 2, 1867, in Trubia, he married Doña María de la Concepción Fernández de Ladreda y Miranda.

He returned to Trubia and occasionally held the position of Head of the Commission, ending this period on October 18, 1,869.

On October 20 of the same year he was appointed lieutenant colonel at 29 years of age.

On October 27 he was appointed Commander of the Ferrol Arsenal Park.

In 1870 and following the principles learned in the United States, he developed his first cannon project – one of 254 mm – following the Rodman system and with the parabolic wrapping Palliser system. It had neither inner tube liner nor reinforcement straps.

On February 19, 1872 he was added to the Special Artillery Board of the Navy, moving again to Trubia to carry out the tests of his 10-inch caliber cannon.

In this new commission he developed his second project; a family of guns of 7, 9, 12, 16, 18 and 20 cm. of the calibers known as the Model 1879 family, the year in which they were named regulation calibers in our Navy. The technological leap for our country, was gigantic. The benefit to our large industry, despite the very small investment made, became immediate.

On January 23, ,878 he was promoted to supernumerary colonel of Artillery of the Navy.

In that year he undergoes a new commission abroad as he visits France, England, Belgium, Germany, Russia, Austria and Italy.

On August 21, 1878 he was appointed a member of the Commission of Experiments in the Department of Cádiz. On February 21, 1,881 he was promoted to brigadier and that same year his model 1879 artillery system was definitively accepted for the Navy.

In 1883 he proposed his third development in pieces of naval artillery for the Navy; they were made of steel and of much greater power than those of the 1879 system, and the calibers vary from 120 mm to 320 mm. Unfortunately, Spain had to resort to foreign factories for the construction and testing of these parts – one of which, the 160 mm is then considered the most powerful of its caliber class in Europe – these tests being completely satisfactory.

On April 26, 1884, he was appointed 1st in the Ministry. On May 16 of the following year, he was relieved of the position of 1st Officer and became president of the Inspection Board for the manufacture of his artillery pieces.

On March 2, 1887 he was promoted to field marshal of the Marine Corps, the only case being in Spanish history that a colonel of the Artillery Corps of the Navy is also a field marshal.

The year 1889 is unfortunate since Hontorio begins to show symptoms of physical exhaustion and mental delirium. That year the 280 mm cannon was tested with extraordinary success, able to pierce armors of 66 cm thickness.

On June 14, 1889, he died of cerebral anemia. Shortly before he died, by Royal Order of June 12, 1889 he was promoted to brigadier of Artillery of the Navy.

This summary of her life, extracted from the Monographic Notebooks of the Institute of Naval History and Culture, No. 16, ISSN: 0212-467X, NIPO-098-88-027-8 with the title of El Brigadier González Hontoria, and written by Paz Garcia de Paredes y Rodriguez of Austria, is a condensate of a complete diary of her life that the author shows us in this extraordinary collection.

These notebooks are a source of competent information, and this particular one consists of six sections; two written by the aforementioned author and the other four by the then Captain D. Ignacio Garcia de Paredes y Rodríguez de Austria.

The most interesting part is referring, of course, to the cannons themselves. Condensing from the section The Hontoria Cannons in the Spanish Ships, Mr. Garcia de Paredes points out: The Hontoria Canyons. Historical Context...

The Spain of the nineteenth century was marked by the wars that, starting with that of Independence and continuing with the colonial and the Carlist, did nothing but destroy it and lead Spain to chaos.

In the midst of this chaos and the environment of poverty and political disorder, we can understand the decline of our Navy, both in its ships and in the artillery, the ships mounted, in the middle of the century, when the fight between the cannon and the armored citadel plate began. In this struggle, Spain had been left behind, unable to participate in the artillery inventions and progress of the time. While France possessed the most powerful naval pieces of smooth 50-pounder (19 cm) guns, as well as England its 68-pounder (20 cm) guns, wrapped guns make their appearance in Europe. However, the U.S. insisted on perfecting the mono-block artillery, which led Commander Rodman to devise a cannon casting system that greatly improved the conditions of the material, and Colonel Gadolin who gave rise to the wire reinforcement of the pieces; both inventions which constitute the starting point of the gigantic progress that artillery has made since then, England being the first to adopt them in 1860, managing to place itself at the head of European artillery, as it had already achieved in the manufacture of armor plates.

Meanwhile (After a series of Armstrong breechloader gun explosions. M.) the English Navy abandoned the idea of breechloading in 1864, without returning to it until after 1880. In the meantime, Major Palliser devised a way to turn smooth pieces into rifled guns, for which he turned them and introduced a rifled steel inner tube (which could be inserted into a Rodman gun, which is how USN Civil War artillery was converted into breech loaders in the 1870s.

From this situation we could start when at the end of the Pacific campaign the squadron of Méndez Núñez returned, after the bombardment of El Callao on May 2, 1866, the Navy decided to develop its own artillery so that its pieces could give the ships the power that at that time were in accordance with their possibilities.

With a view to this, our gunners had been preparing, among whom was the then Captain González Hontoria who had spent a year in the Union of North America studying the procedures used there in the manufacture of American cannons.

First Hontoria cannon (1870)

The immediate fruit of these studies was a project of a rifled cannon, of avancarga (means case charged or unitary round ammunition) and of cast iron, presented by the already lieutenant colonel Hontoria in 1870, who was at that time in El Ferrol, shortly after having left the existing Marine commission in Trubia. For its manufacture, a procedure devised by the American commander Rodman was used, a procedure that tried to improve the characteristics of the foundry and for which he took advantage of a hollow melting system that had already been used for a century, to which he introduced certain modifications that were the key to success. The project contains data on the various parameters involved in the foundry for each particular case. There are also the calculations of the different types of stresses in the shot (tangential, longitudinal, transverse and compression), which allowed him to determine the outer shape of the piece.

(I do not know what Hontoria tried here, but the Rodman is the bell cast cylinder method which uses water circulation to control the tube hardening on the interior cavity face. Called CASE HARDENING, what happens is that, the face surface that the circulating water flows past, is chilled down faster than the backing material. This is akin to the much more sophisticated carbon leeching processes whereby first Harvey and then Krupp created face hardened armor plate. In a gun barrel, the Rodman process allowed a casting and then a hardening of the inside face of a mono-block tube. With cast iron guns the pressure limit in theory is about ten tones per square inch. Rodman guns had a nasty habit of bursting at the muzzle, so this led to the further development of steel inset tubes for Rodman guns *(The USN 1870s artillery and the Ordunez Spanish coast defense guns. M.). As soon as a steel mono-block casting process, and case hardening was developed, the all-steel gun appeared, first in Germany and then in France . These proved to be too brittle and they burst asunder, so by the mid 1880s we get hardened steel inner liners, rifled on a Palliser lathe, wrapped by more ductile and shrinked down upon the liners hoops or in the example of the British, wire wrapped and welded to act as a rfeinforcement band in the combustion and high gas pressure zones. This is the appearance of the 'coke bottle' gun thus made in naval artillery. M.)         

This piece was of the caliber 25.4 cm. and the projectile was of drive bands arranged in two orders (collars). The rifling was parabolic, of the type devised by Major Palliser, consisting of two systems of lands and groves; of three bands each so that three of them led the first order of drive bands and three others conducted the second. 

*(Apparently the drive bands were notched to fit the rifling grooves. M.)

The prototype began to be built in the Trubia factory, presenting some difficulties motivated by being the first time that the new manufacturing system was used. However, thanks to the attentive and meticulous direction of the author of the project, he managed to finish the experimental piece overcoming all the difficulties not only technical but economic, since the limitation of the resources available then were very great. In 1872 the piece was made ready to undergo the tests of fire (weapon proof), which began with a great expectation on the part of all, together with a certain reservation or distrust, in a certain way natural; but soon the expectations turned to joy as the test unfolded, so that at the end of the 100 shots Hontoria was acclaimed resoundingly and he was congratulated for the satisfactory results obtained.

The success was soon overshadowed by the outbreak of the third Carlist war, when the Navy's budgets were cut to meet the needs of the Army. This situation was such though that González Hontoria was not discouraged; he took advantage of the time to continue his studies and thus catch up, since technological advances had left the 25.4 cm piece outmoded and the manufacturing procedures of the new parts for breechloaders advanced; in effect, breachloading had been improved, the two drive band tail ceased to be used, and the ships' armor had been perfected in such a way that greater gun power was needed to pierce them.

Second project (1879)

As Vice Admiral García-Parreño says very well in his work Las Armas Navales Españolas, "in 1879 we were proud to release a complete system of Artillery of our own national project and manufacture, devised by the colonel of artillery of the Navy Don José González, Hontoria, which were rifled breachloaded cannons, completely up to date at the time they were projected and manufactured that was at the height of the limited resources of a country like Spain."

In fact, the project took into account all the advances that had been made in the world since 1870 when González Hontoria had presented his first project, until 1878 when it was considered a new system, in addition to the transformation of previous cannons. These advances, as will be seen below, not only consisted of replacing the muzzle-loader with the breech-loader that had been imposed in almost all countries, but the groove banded shells were replaced by those of lead wrapping first and by those of copper forcing rings later, which provided a perfect seal on the uniform twist rifling bands. In addition and very mainly, since the armor of the ships had reached an extraordinary strength, it forced gunmakers to increase the power of the pieces for which it was necessary to move to steel, a material that was seen as the best of the metals for the manufacture in optimal conditions.

(As described above. Both Spain and the United States are about a half decade behind France, Germany and Britain in 1880. M.)

The description of the project would be too extensive to express it here in great detail, so it has been preferred to make a summary of the brief review that Colonel González Hontoria himself wrote about it from Trubia in November of 79 and that he published in the Revista General de Marina.

The system called "Model 1879" was composed in essence of two parts: one of totally new cannons and another of old cannons transformed, constituting a set, that despite being of six calibers supposed to unify a series of cannons that were all similar, with slight differences that facilitated extraordinarily both its manufacture and the teaching and training of the gunners, without forgetting the independence from the outside that meant being national in its entirety. All the guns in the system, both the six new and the three transformed, were rifled and loaded by the stock.

The new model guns were of the calibers 20, 18, 16, 12, 9 and 7 cm. The first three were cast iron, cast by the Rodman procedure, reinforced internally by two tubes of different lengths superimposed with the due initial tension; the inner tube was the longest and was made of molten, hammered and oil-tempered steel, while the outer tube was of puddled steel constructed with spirally wound bars; on this double tube the casting exerted an initial pressure both tangentially and longitudinally. Those of caliber 12 and 9 cm., were made of a single tube of cast steel that constituted the rod and inner part of the body, which is reinforced with a small strap in the back, followed by another strap that carried the trunnion knobs and ended in a sleeve, all of molten steel.

The transformed cannons were the old ones of 20 cm., which were transformed into calibers 18 cm., while those of 20 cm. of the number 2 and those of 16 cm. of the number 1 remained in 16 cm. Logically the transformation had to be of two types, the first was to sub-cap with an inner tube of molten steel that had the same length of the original barrel, reinforced with another shorter tube of puddled steel, while the 16 cm. of number 1 maintained the caliber 16 based on reinforcing it with a double tube that only reaches part of the barrel, in the same way as it was done with the new model of 20, 18 and 16 cm.

The rifling in the new cannons was parabolic up to a caliber of the mouth and from this point it continued with constant inclination to the mouth, while in the transformed cannons; the rifling is of constant inclination along the entire barrel; the number of grooves was decreasing from 46 in the 20 cm. to 18 in the 7 cm.

(I think he means "groove incline" as in relaxed degrees twist of the rifling, because 46 complete turns in an 8 in / 35 caliber gun is IMPOSSIBLE.  The shell would jam mid-barrel travel and the gun would burst. M.) 

The closing apparatus was of the split thyme system (Interrupted screw, M.), with three threaded sectors and three smooth fields, and were built of molten steel and tempered in oil. The movement was obtained in the barrels of 20, 18 and 16 cm., by means of an open zipper (Cam block. M.) in the cylinder head plane that rotates at the end of a lever linked to the closing screw; in the barrels of 12, 9 and 7 cm., there is only one lever for the handling of said screw with a hole in its inner part to lighten its weight. The sealing of the gases is obtained by means of a copper ring fixed inside the barrel and on it supports a steel saucer that is fixed to the screw with the help of the grain (which was also made of molten steel with a small copper cylinder through which the ear passes, threaded in its anterior part). The pressure of the gases in the shot compresses the shutter ring against the walls of the chamber and at the same time against the crown of the saucer. The closing maneuver is achieved by means of a lever that turned the thyme and handles to push and pull.

(That is the Krupp obturator ring, which is different from the de Bang creosote pad doorknob shaped obturator plug. It makes for a faster open and close action cycle; but it leaks gas. It also can overpressure and blow out the breechblock. That is not too good, if one is a Spanish gun crew. Krupp guns used the wedge breech block to press the fas seal tight. An interrupted screw system was not as "wedgy". M.)    

The fire apparatus consists of a slide that covers the ear (Ignition port) and with an arrangement such that it does not allow (it) to discover the ear as long as the closure is not in a position to make fire; the slide carries a needle that is actuated by the firing pin or hammer. As a complement and safety, all the cannons have a guarantor that works automatically and that prevents the closure from being unscrewed by the effect of the shot, a fact that is very difficult to occur, unless excessive pressure develops at the bottom of the anima (combustion chamber) and the screw of the closure is excessively greased. All these devices were identical in all calibers except for the 7 cm., which presented some differences, lacking a firing pin and needle since by being used in that caliber friction stops (pull lanyard match), the ear was exposed when the closure reached its position of making fire. (When the spring was charged. M.)

The outer profile of all new guns was the same in all calibers except the 7 cm., that of all transformed guns was very similar to that of the new ones. The projectiles were also very similar to each other, both for the new and the transformed cannons and carried two copper rings or bands, the first to avoid the pitch of the projectile when traveling the anima (tube) while the second (forcing) slows the movement of the projectile in the first moments producing a perfect seal and giving rise to the rotation of the projectile; with both and the arrangement of the rifling, a perfect centering of the projectile is achieved and that its axis constantly coincides with that of the anima *(tube) during its journey in it.

With this brief description we can realize the leap that meant at that time the enormous changes introduced by González Hontoria in our cannons. The essential ideas have remained practically to this day, with the exception of the subsequent improvements, some of them due to Hontoria himself, as will be seen later.

The provisional approval of this complete gun system led to the immediate manufacture in Trubia of two experimental cannons of each caliber, which were ready for testing in 1880. The success obtained in these led to its final approval and the beginning of its production on a larger scale and to cover the needs of our ships in service to which their foreign artillery was partially changed by the Hontoria guns, as well as those ships that were under construction. Among the first ships that were armed with Hontoria guns of the 1879 model, were the armored frigate Numancia, and the 1st class cruiser Aragon because for the other two cruisers of the same type Navarra and Castilla had to mount Krupp and Armstrong cannons. Other small ships such as the contractors invented by the corvette captain Don Femando Villaamil, each carried a Hontoria cannon of 9 cm.

Faced with the premature and pressing need to arm these ships with cannons of modern conception, it was necessary to contract with foreign houses the serial manufacture of some of the calibers, so the nationalization that was sought could not be total. In Seville, the company Portilla White (of which I have not been able to find documentation on whether it disappeared later or changed its name or owner), manufactured a total of 27 guns of the Model 1879 (12 of 7 cm).

In 1882 the situation of our Navy was so precarious that even the press tried to make the Government see the need to reconsider the lack of a naval mentality in the political classes, which imposed a budget shortage, a slowness in the granting of credits and a lack of advanced technology. While a series of small ships were built in the Spanish weighs very slowly, and with the same slowness the Hontoria guns of the 1879 model were manufactured, abroad many important innovations were taking place both in the conception of combat ships and in artillery. With Rear Admiral Antequera as Minister of the Navy and a little later with Admiral Beránger, supported by the President of the Government, Cánovas del Castillo, a plan for the renewal of the Squadron was undertaken in 1884 with the purpose of putting an end to this state of affairs. Within that plan was included the installation of a modern national artillery completely updated, belonging to a new system devised by the already Colonel of Artillery and Brigadier of Marine Infantry González Hontoria that he had presented in 1883 and that is described in the interesting work Course of Artillery published in 1903 by the colonel of the Corps D. Germán Hermida Alvarez, in collaboration with the commander D. José M. Ristori.

The system is composed of eight calibers: 32, 28, 24, 20, 18, 16, 14 and 12 cm., all of them much more powerful than those of the 1879 model, with enough piercing power to artillerize the largest ships of our Navy. All of them, with the exception of the 18 cm., came to be manufactured in greater or lesser number. As can be seen, Hontoria added new calibers (32, 28, 24 and 14 cm.) to the Model system of 1879, while maintaining the lighter calibers, as they were considered good enough for the task entrusted to them, proof of which is that those of 7 and 9 cm., of the Model 79 continued in service until 1910 and the 12 and 14 cm. were transformed into rapid fire guns.

*(Which rapid fire guns the USN as of 1883 did not have in its inventory. M.)

The material of all the pieces was already cast steel, hammered and tempered in oil; they consisted of an inner tube and one or two reinforcement orders, depending on the caliber. The 12 cm. carried a single reinforcement composed of a cylinder head handle and four straps (Hoops.), one of them being the wrist (trunnion) holder; in the other calibers the tube was reinforced by a sleeve and four straps (Hoops.), being also reinforced the part that occupies the cuff (Muzzle bell.) and the first two straps (Hoops.) by a series of the latter. The sleeves and straps (Hoops.) were barred and turned to the convenient diameter to produce a given initial tension. The anima (Tube) had a length of 35 calibers, except in the 14 cm guns which was 36 calibers; the chamber was expansive with a cylindrical part ending in two cone trunks; the number of rifling bands was variable according to the caliber, from 80 inclines or grooves in those of 21 cm. to 30 inclines or grooves in those of 12 cm. The closing apparatus, made of cast steel, forged and tempered in oil, was also split screw very similar to that of the model 79 with some variants and improvements; in the smaller caliber cannons the mechanisms were simplified to the maximum. The observation of the gases in all the pieces was of the De Bange system and was composed of a biscuit (pad) located between two cups; the biscuit in the form of an annular disc (doorknob) was made of a paste made of asbestos and tallow wrapped in a canvas lining; the copelas (seal rings) were cymbals of also annular shape, the anterior of copper and the posterior of tin, with brass rings embedded in their edges that open more or less during the shot, adapting to the accommodation of the chamber and returning to its relaxed position after the shot. This shutter device is attached to the closing screw by means of a moving head with four fins that are fastened by a central vastago (Cam.) that is fixed by a pin.

The fire apparatus is the same and arranged in the same way as that of the model 79 system. The closure drive is also very similar to that of the model 79. The charge of brown prismatic gunpowder manufactured by the company Santa Bárbara de Lugones, gave the projectile an initial speed of more than 600 m / s compared to the 500 m / s that was achieved in the model 79. With this an excellent drilling (piercing) capacity was achieved, which with the barrel of 32 cm. reached 71.5 cm. of thickness of (cast or wrought iron) plate located at 1,500 m. from the mouth of fire and with the barrel of 28 cm., in the same conditions pierced the 60.2 cm. of thickness.

(That would be equivalent to 12 inches of rolled homogenous steel armor or 10 inches of Vickers Cemented Armor for the 12.6 inch gun. Since the shells were typically cast iron with a steel cap in European service of this era, the Harvey plate the US is about to introduce, will present the Spanish with a hitherto, unseen by Europeans, problem, called "the shatter gap". The Spanish shells will shatter at certain strike angles and ranges on American plate. M.).  

Although at first glance you might think that the differences between this Model system 83 with respect to the 79 are small, in terms of their closing, sealing and firing mechanisms, the main difference lies in the design of the tube and consequently in its advanced steel manufacture of all its components in the eight calibers that formed the complete system, because as has been seen, in the 1879 model of those 12 calibers only the, 9cm and 7 cm were completely steel constructed; while in those of 20 cm, 18 cm  and 16 cm. they wereof  cast iron with an inner tube that was made of steel. Another very important difference was the incorporation of the larger calibers of 32cm, 28cm and 24 cm. that being the artillery of the battleship Pelayo and other large ships of our Squadron.

Of all these cannons of the Model year 1883, 58 were manufactured in Portadilla, white in Seville González Hontoria was authorized to contract in France with the Society Forges et Chantiers de la Mediterranée in Le Havre, the manufacture of experimental pieces of 12 and 16 cm. under the direction of the author of the project. In April 1884 the fire tests took place with extraordinary results that surprised, first in France and a little later to the entire artillery world, which proved the superiority of these guns over all those then known. (In those calibers. M)

Especially the 16 cm. was noticed in numerous technical journals from various countries in which it had caused an extraordinary amazement and admiration for its author. Specifically, our Revista General de Marina published several articles and news on the subject, leading to some controversy; there were supporters of continuing with the policy of buying all the naval artillery from foreign houses as prestigious as Armstrong or Krupp, while González Hontoria and the vast majority of his Corps comrades who had faith in him believed that although it was very comfortable to entrust these houses with their excellent artillery material and pay the high sums they asked for protected by their great prestige, this did not achieve anything other than to impoverish our country more, handing out fabulous amounts of monies that could be directed to help the national industry, in addition to the fact that in case of war, in such conflict, such foreign industry could not provide the war material that we would need, nor the national one might improvise it if not present already.

This is related in one of the articles of the Revista de Marina of that time, a fact that occurred in the company Creusot and that is a clear example of what has just been said. This house signed a contract with the Italian Government to forge the armor plates for the battleships Duilio and Dándolo and needed a powerful hammer of 100 tons; they did not hesitate to acquire such an expensive and powerful manufacturing element, since with the profits obtained only with that contract, not only the cost of the hammer but all the costs of installation, accessories, cranes, furnaces, etc. were covered, thus aiding the French industrialist with whom the Italian Government had made him such an expensive gift.

(The Australians would know about gifting a foreign nation's tech base by underwriting it. First the French tried to hook them and bungled the effort, then AUKUS anybody? M.) 

It is curious that on this subject too, history continues to repeat itself a century later. In fact, already in the present century there were times when the Navy was inclined to buy almost all its weapons abroad forgetting that it had a very usable industry, while shortly after it stopped importing the armament to enhance national manufacturing, having remained to this day so eternal controversy among the supporters of one or another solution.

(Spain has had its own recent experience with its Skorpene S-75 submarine clone project. How could one bungle reserve buoyancy in a submarine? Ask Electric Boat how they think it happened. They had to FIX that French screwup. Sabotage? From a French competitor Spain asked for a little design help? Nah... that would not happen. M.)

But returning to the thread of purely technical comparisons, it seems to be interesting to give here some data that palpably demonstrates the superiority of Hontoria guns over foreign equivalents that were considered the best, some of which we had in our Navy. Referring only to the 16 cm cannon, it would be enough to look at the data of the total existent force, which is what best characterizes the power of a cannon; it can be seen that it exceeds all other pieces including the Krupp of 17 cm. by 6.8 percent and by more than 66 percent to the other Krupp of 15 cm. that had been imported to install it in the cruiser ship Castilla. The extraordinary power of penetration is also striking; the projectile crosses a plate width of 43 cm. thick at muzzle range, which exceeds from 15 to 33 percent the thickness that the other pieces can pierce, and when one placed the plate 2,000 m. from the muzzle which exceeds even more, from 18.5 percent to 46 percent. The most remarkable thing is that these brilliant results are obtained with a maximum interior pressure of 2,370 kg./cm2, much lower than those obtained in the others but above all to the aforementioned Krupp of 15 cm.

The Lieutenant Colonel of Artillery of the Navy Don José Eady expressed in 1884 when talking about The Artillery in Our Ships, what can be compared in a tangible way the characteristics of the González Hontoria cannons of 7, 9 and 12 cm of the Model system 1879 and that of 16 cm. of the Model system 1883 with the foreign equivalents. After some comments Mr. Eady said: "The logic of numbers is irresistible, and in the face of evidence there is no other recourse than to confess that the Spanish system of naval artillery surpasses that of all nations, and we see why we are in favor of the Navy building its own artillery, and that in the meantime where it is not possible, so acquire abroad what we need, but the Spanish system is preferred, because it should not take significantly longer or cost more money to acquire it, than at present because it was from one or another system, since the manufacturers do not have, as we know, the cannons stored, but they are building them as they receive the orders, and the manufacture of the González cannons. Hontoria, does not require more work than that of other systems we could acquire."

As we always say in this blog, the best and most documented articles are always those made by authentic professionals of the Navy.


Photo 1. Painting of Brigadier Gonzalez Hontoria. Potada of the Notebook Number 16 of the Institute of Naval History and Culture.

Photo 2. Portilla White Workshops. Seville. From the same Notebook No. 16.

Photo 3. Battleship Pelayo. Piece of 320 mm González Hontoria system. From the magazine El Mundo Naval Ilustrado. Year 1.898.

Photo 4. One of the two 280 mm guns of the battleship Pelayo. From the book La España Maritima. De Leandro de Alesson.

Photo 5. 280 mm bow cannon of the armoured cruiser Emperor Charles V. From the book La Construcción Naval Militar Española.

Photo 6. The 280 mm aft cannon of Emperor Charles V. From the Revista General de Marina.

Photo 7. 240 mm cannon of the armored cruiser Catalonia. Although of Hontoria design, they are modified by the Brigadier of Artillery of the Navy D. Enrique Guillen. From the magazine La Vida Maritima. Year 1908.

Photo 8. Protected cruiser 1st Class Alfonso XIII. 200 mm aft pieces. Great photo from the magazine El Mundo Naval Ilustrado. Year 1.897.

Photo 9. Although of poor quality, very interesting photo of the stern of the old frigate rebuilt Vitoria. You can see the 200 mm port piece and several others of less caliber in the awning. From the magazine La Vida Maritima. Year 1.904.

Photo 10. 160 mm piece of the armored corvette Aragon. Photo Naval Museum. From the book Ships of the Spanish Navy through Photography. (1849-1900)

Photo 11. The 140 mm cannon mod. 1.879 modified Hontoria system. It was the crew of the Biscay-class armoured cruisers. With its new rate of fire of 15 rounds per minute it was a formidable weapon. Magazine El Mundo Naval Ilustrado year 1898.

Photo 12. Although the photo indicates modern 160 mm cannon, they were added to the ships... Possibly it is one of 120 mm. El Ferrol. Anonymous. Reg. No. 1.099. From the book Men and Boats. The Photograph of the Spanish Navy at the Naval Museum. (1850-1935).

Well, if nothing else, one should realize that once Hontoria went insane in 1889, that was the end of Spain's home manufacture of modern guns. 

Still, the Model system 1883 naval artillery program would suffice if they had put their financial backing behind it, but our favorite navy minister decided he preferred French guns to what Spain had in the works. How did that work out for them? NOT TOO GOOD.  

[miletus12]

Americans and their funny ways.

The Hague Convention of 1899.



Right to left.
1. Andrew D. White. (Conflict Thesis theorist and historian)
2. Theodore Roosevelt. He is the heavyweight.
3. Stanford Newel. A relative nonentity and a McKinley hack.
4. William Crozier. US Army artillerist. He is the junior guy in the delegation.
5. Alfred Thayer Mahan. If not for the presence of Teddy Roosevelt, this man would be the heavy hitter in that delegation.

For our immediate purposes, we are concerned with three men chiefly, who were involved with the Army Ordnance debacle:

a. Adelbert Rinaldo Buffington.
b. William Crozier.
c. and the idiot who selected the Krag rifle; who was Daniel Webster Flagler.

Brigadier General Daniel W. Flagler

Brigadier General Daniel Webster Flagler was born in Lockport, New York, on 24 June 1835. He graduated fifth in his West Point class on 24 June 1861 (this was the second of two classes graduated that year), and one week later, he was drilling volunteer soldiers in Washington. On 21 July 1861, he participated in the Battle of Bull Run. During the Civil War period, he served in a variety of posts, including that of Chief of Ordnance for General Ambrose Burnside's invasion of North Carolina 1861 to 1862) when only a first lieutenant and as Chief of Ordnance for the Army of the Potomac while still only a captain. In this latter capacity, he had charge of the supply trains during the Battle of Gettysburg. Though he received three brevets for his Civil War service, he was not promoted to the rank of major until June 1874. For five and a half years following the close of the war. Flagler had charge of a succession of former Confederate ordnance establishments, including depots and storage facilities; his task in essence having been the disposition of unneeded surplus materiel.

In June 1871, he began his longest assignment, that of commandant of Rock Island Arsenal, Illinois, a position he held for fifteen years. When he arrived at his new post, he found that the vast plans for a massive arsenal complex conceived by his predecessor, General Thomas, J. Rodman, had gotten no further than the preliminary stages. Flagler not only developed and completed the major portion of Rodman's great enterprise, but he also authored a highly respected history of the arsenal and its operations, which was published in 1877. By 1881, he had been advanced to the grade of lieutenant colonel. His service at Rock Island was punctuated by a series of shorter temporary assignments, including membership on the Board of Heavy Gun Carriages in New York (January-March 1873); special inspection duty at Fort Union Arsenal, New Mexico Territory (September 1880), with the specific assignment of winding down the work of that agency; and finally inspection duty at several posts in California, Texas, and New Mexico, completed in February and March 1883.

A permanent transfer to the command of Frankford Arsenal occurred at the end of May, 1886. Flagler's three-and-a-half years in Philadelphia were frequently interrupted by a variety of special tasks, including presidency of a board designated to testrifled cannon and projectiles in 1889. By November 1889, Flagler had begun what was to be a tour of nearly thirteen months as commandant of Watertown Arsenal, during which period he was promoted to the rank of colonel on 15 September 1890.

Flagler was named Chief of Ordnance and promoted brigadier general on 23 January 1891. He entered on his new duties admirably equipped by reason of his wide experience, but the Congresses of the 1890s were not disposed to grant the appropriations he considered necessary for the maintenance and upgrading of the Ordnance Department. He therefore did what he could with what he was allotted. Efforts were made to improve the nation 's coastal defense posture. Considerable testing was done on Gatling guns, the Colt machine gun, gun carriages, armor-piercing projectiles, rifled cannon, various types of gunpowder, and pneumatic dynamite guns.

During his tenure, the Army's first smokeless powder and its first bolt action, magazine rifle, the model 1892 Krag, were adopted. This weapon was first issued to the Fourth Infantry in 1894. Despite failing health in the spring of 1898, General Flagler was able to overcome the problems of low peacetime production during the brief war with Spain. He orchestrated the country's production facilities in such a manner as to make it possible for the Ordnance Department to meet and exceed production quotas. General Flagler also oversaw the Army's first efforts to ship needed materiel overseas, using, in many instances, new depots in California and Florida for this purpose. Overburdened by these responsibilities, General Flagler did not long survive the war, dying in office on 29 March 1899, at the age of 63.

What did he pick for the first Army bolt action rifle?

Model 1896 Krag-Jorgensen Rifle

By Patrick McSherry

General:

The Model 1896 Krag-Jorgensen Rifle was the more advanced of the two main longarms generally available to the American forces. Unfortunately, it was also in shorter supply and was provided to only a few units.

Background:

The United States government began searching for a magazine longarm for its military forces in 1877. Finally after fifteen years, in 1892, it adopted a bolt-action magazine rifle - the Krag-Jorgensen Model 1892. This weapon was developed Ole Krag and Erik Jorgensen at the Konigsberg Arms Factory in Norway. The magazine rifle provided many advantages over the single-shot United States .45-70 "Trapdoor" Rifle, such as rapidity of fire, ammunition reserve, ease of loading etc.

The reason why a magazine rifle was not adopted by the United States government sooner was that the United States had not yet discovered how to make "smokeless" powder, which magazine rifles required. Smokeless powder was developed by the French and had been a closely regarded secret. Once the United States was able to produce smokeless powder, the way was cleared for the adoption of the rifle.

The first Model 1892 Krag-Jorgensen Rifle were not produced until 1894. Several minor modifications were later made to the rifle, creating the Model 1896 Krag-Jorgensen Rifle. Practically all of the Model 1892 weapons were altered to Model 1896 weapons, which included about twenty-five thousand rifles produced between 1894 and 1896. The Model 1896 Krag-Jorgensen Rifle was produced between 1897 and 1899, during which time close to thirty thousand were produced.

The Krag-Jorgensen Rifle, later modified with Model 1898 after the War, was eventually replaced by the Model 1903 Magazine Rifle which utilized a Mauser-type action.

Apparently, the United States Regular Army and New York volunteer units in the Spanish American War were supplied with this weapon. The "Rough Riders" carried a carbine version of the same gun. Most other units, with the exception of those from Wyoming, were equipped with the older United States .45-70 rifle.

Advantages/Disadvantages:

The Krag-Jorgensen Rifle had several advantages over the United States .45-70, which was the more predominant longarm used by the American forces in the Spanish American War. Most importantly, the "Krag" fired ammunition that contained smokeless powder. The smokeless powder would not betray the location of the shooter as readily as would the cloud of white smoke from the blackpowder ammunition used by the .45-70. Also, the shooter did not have to wait for the smoke to clear to see his target.

Secondly, the weapon utilized a five shot magazine. The .45-70 was a single shot weapon. The extra shots were a definite firepower advantage, though something not acknowledged by the War Department at the time. The War Department claimed that the average soldier required a minute to aim and shoot. The fourteen shots a minute which could be fired by the "Krag" were therefore considered to be wasteful. The government wanted its troops to treat the gun as a single-shot weapon, with the magazine acting as a reserve in case of an emergency. The weapon was designed to be capable of being used as a single shot weapon in accordance with this theory.

The ammunition for the Krag-Jorgensen Rifle was of a smaller caliber than that of the .45-70, therefore, a trooper could carry more rounds with him (one hundred .30 calibre cartridges weighed the same as sixty .45 caliber cartridges).

Lastly, the Krag-Jorgensen Rifle fired on a flatter trajectory and therefore could be aimed more accurately with less training.

The weapon had several disadvantages which became apparent with time. The muzzle velocity was relatively low, and the mechanism had a tendency to fail. The smaller caliber "Krag" did not have the "take down" capability of the large .45 caliber weapons that were used previously.

TECHNOTES:
Action:.....................................................Bolt action
Total length:.............................................48 7/8 inches, two bands
Length of barrel:.......................................30 inches
Rifling:.....................................................4 grooves, one turn in 10 inches.
Stock length:............................................46.05 inches
Weight:....................................................9 pounds, 5 ounces with bayonet
Ammunition:............................................30-40 flanged cartridge
Magazine capacity:....................................5 rounds, but also capable of functioning as a single shot weapon.
Charge:...................................................40 grains of smokeless powder
Weight of projectile:..................................220 grains
Muzzle Velocity:........................................1,968 feet per second
Bayonet:..................................................Knife-type, 11-5/8" long, weighing 14 ounces

Bibliography:

Chapel, Charles Edward, The Collector's Handbook of Values. (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1960).
Clerk of Joint Committee on Printing, The Abridgement of Message from the President of the United States to the Two Houses of Congress. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1899).
Gluckman, Arcadi, United States Muskets, Rifles and Carbines. (Buffalo: Otto Ulbrich Co., Inc., 1948).
Peterson, Harold L., Encyclopedia of Firearms. (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1964).
Roosevelt, Theodore, The Rough Riders (Da Capo Paperback). (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920).
Tanner, Hans, ed., Guns of the World. (New York: Bonanza Books, 1977).
Young, James Rankin, History of Our War with Spain. (Washington DC: J. R. Jones, 1898).

What can be said is that Flagler historically failed to do the following when chief of US Army Ordnance.

a. develop smokeless powder for the US field artillery before 1900.
b. develop smokeless powder for the US siege and coast defense artillery before 1900.
c. select the correct bolt action rifle in 1890. 
d. procure in quantity either the Maxim machine gun or develop the Browning "potato digger" into an acceptable alternative before 1900.
e. notice the Hotchkiss machine gun at all.
f. notice the US Navy was selecting better solutions or solving these problems before the army did.

BG Flagler might be called ineffective for not accomplishing those goals a through f. It can be argued that the USN and USMC managed to select better with the 6 mm Navy Lee and Colt Navy Potato Digger. Interestingly the 'gentleman' who managed that feat was the incredibly inept, William T. Sampson who was USN  Bu-Ord Actual from 1893-1897.   

[miletus12]

Jun 9, 2022 22:44:13 GMT miletus12 said:

a. develop smokeless powder for the US field artillery before 1900.
b. develop smokeless powder for the US siege and coast defense artillery before 1900.
c. select the correct bolt action rifle in 1890. 
d. procure in quantity either the Maxim machine gun or develop the Browning "potato digger" into an acceptable alternative before 1900.
e. notice the Hotchkiss machine gun at all.
f. notice the US Navy was selecting better solutions or solving these problems before the army did.

Were there options?

a. Ballistite or a near copy was possible.  This could be used in the Krag, 

However the US had other options.

The Anglo-American Explosives Company began manufacturing its shotgun powder in Oakland, New Jersey in 1890. DuPont began producing guncotton at Carneys Point Township, New Jersey in 1891.[3]: 146–149  Charles E. Munroe of the Naval Torpedo Station in Newport, Rhode Island patented a formulation of guncotton colloided with nitrobenzene, called Indurite, in 1891.[5]: 296–297  Several United States firms began producing smokeless powder when Winchester Repeating Arms Company started loading sporting cartridges with Explosives Company powder in 1893. California Powder Works began producing a mixture of nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose with ammonium picrate as Peyton Powder, Leonard Smokeless Powder Company began producing nitroglycerine-nitrocellulose Ruby powders, Laflin & Rand negotiated a license to produce Ballistite, and DuPont started producing smokeless shotgun powder. The United States Army evaluated 25 varieties of smokeless powder and selected Ruby and Peyton Powders as the most suitable for use in the Krag-Jørgensen service rifle. Ruby was preferred, because tin-plating was required to protect brass cartridge cases from picric acid in the Peyton Powder. Rather than paying the required royalties for Ballistite, Laflin & Rand financed Leonard's reorganization as the American Smokeless Powder Company. United States Army Lieutenant Whistler assisted American Smokeless Powder Company factory superintendent Aspinwall in formulating an improved powder named W.A. for their efforts. W.A. smokeless powder was the standard for United States military service rifles from 1897 until 1908.[3]: 146–149  

That takes care of the smokeless powder, but how about a better rifle than the Krag? Range shooting showed the Krag was a good rifle, but good on the range is not good in battle. What other 1890 options were present?

Mauser was obvious, was tested and rejected because of the reload issue of topping off. Crozier and Flagler were not going to go for a non-single bullet top-off design. Single shot ammunition conservation measures were really a US army 'stupid idea' of the time. The American civil war myth of paced volley fire and the lesson of The Little Big Horn, where Native American superior volume of individual aimed fire had wiped out Custer's alleged volley firing marksmen, had not sunk into those guys of army ordnance. 

Was there a bolt action rifle that could be topped off at single bullet options and not be a Mauser, and that was better than a Krag?

There was one. (Translated)
    

General Information"

Following the adoption by France of the Lebel ammunition in 8 mm, the Austrians found themselves in a position of inferiority because their service rifle was still the Mannlicher 1886 in 11mm caliber. It was therefore decided to develop a new ammunition similar to that French and thus the Mannlicher model 1888 was born in 8x50R caliber with black powder.
A total of about 290,000 were produced from the arsenals of Steyr OEWG (Österreichische Waffenfabrik Gesellschaft of Werndl in Steyr). The weapon is almost identical, apart from the caliber and size, to the 1886 model (to which reference is made)
In 1890, following the introduction of the smokeless powder and the corresponding ammunition, it was modified, as reported below, in the 1888/90 model. The 1888 model but especially the 1888/90 was widely used during both world wars by the Austrians and the Italians.
Many of these rifles were captured by the Italians as spoils of war in 1917 and later used in World War II. The 1888/90 model was also officially adopted by Greece, Hungary and Bulgaria. The 88/90 was the first fast-loading rifle to be used in a conflict (Chilean Civil War of 1891).
At the time the dictator Balmaceda ordered 3500 of these rifles from Austria but the supply was intercepted during transport, by Chilean government forces. The weapons were then seized and used shortly afterwards against Balmaceda in the battles of Concon and Placilla which with the defeat of the dictator's troops ended the Chilean civil war.
It is said that the speed of fire, the use of jacketed projectiles and the greater range of these weapons caused terror in the garrisons of the dictator.
In the Battle of Concon, orders were even given to the rear of the dictator's troops to fire on their comrades on the front line who fled in terror in the face of enemy fire.
In the Battle of Placilla the impressive (for that time) volume of fire completely demoralized the troops of Balmaceda, caused their total disarray and marked their definitive defeat.

Now the 1890 Mannlicher was improved in 1895 to withstand the second-generation smokeless powders coming into service. It was a straight pull rifle. Spent brass was bottom dropped out of the well and this might have been an issue for the Americans. It appears to not have mattered in Chile and Bolivia, where the  fighting conditions in the Atacama are 'horrible' as to dust. Since the enbloc clip auto-dropped when emptied, out the well, it also had the feature that one could pull the slide back and top off bullets and earn an early version of the Garand Thumb. Who cares? He was not going to write home anyway.

Another drawback is that the rifle wears out an infantryman. Moving that straight pull bolt back and forth a couple of hundred times and your average American will be too tired to go out and get liquored up to do something stupid like the 1st Alabama Volunteers did when they rioted and tried to lynch somebody.   

Another downside is that it is more expensive and harder than a Mauser to make. But then the Krag was more expensive as well.   
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How about a machine gun? 


 
That is what the Americans have. 

What better options are present in the 1890s? 

Colt Browning M1895 (Too late.)
Madsen machine gun 1896 *(Too late.)
Maxim gun 1885
Salvator-Dormus M1893 Might as well look at it. 
Hotchkiss M1897

Either the Colt or the Maxim? Choose the Colt.  But it needs development, until the weird lever action toggle is reverted to the rear of the machine gun *(which will emerge as the Martin in 1914, but it could have been done as early as 1895.).  That requires government investment, a LOT of government investment.
====================================================



From wiki.

Specifications
Mass.......................................................... 830 lb (380 kg) gun & breech;
Mass total.................................................2,130 lb (970 kg) gun & carriage 
Barrel length..................................................26 calibers, 83.2 inches (2.11 m) (bore)[1]
Shell..................................................................Separate-loading, bagged charges and projectiles.
.........................................................................Black powder (M1885 and original M1890)
.........................................................................Smokeless powder (M1897 and converted M1890)
.........................................................................Shell weight 13 lb 8 oz (6 kg)
.........................................................................Calibre 3.2-inch (81 mm)
Breech................................................................de Bange style interrupted screw
Recoil.................................................................Wheel brakes, no recoil mechanism
Carriage..............................................................Box trail
Elevation.................................................... +20° max
Traverse..............................................................None
Muzzle velocity............................................1,685 ft/s (514 m/s)
Maximum firing range...................................6,530 yd (5,970 m)
Feed system.........................................................Hand

That was the US state of the art army field gun of 1897. With brown powder it rolled back and ran the gun crew over. With smokeless powder it jumped like a kangaroo and somersaulted atop the gun crew and crushed them. The problem was RECOIL. The wheel brakes were spring loaded and were supposed to allows a limited rollback and then return to battery. The springs broke or the thing jumped and somersaulted, so the wheel brakes were just an added kill the gun crew feature. Could this have happened instead?

Source Credit HERE.

The Carouselambra Kid
U.S. M1902 3-Inch Field Gun

The display reads: U.S. M1902 3-Inch Field Gun


Introduced in 1902, this gun replaced the M1897 3.2-inch Field Gun as the U.S. Army's standard light artillery piece for the Field Artillery. Slight modifications in the breech mechanism resulted in the models of 1904 and 1905. It is the first American-designed breech loading gun with an on-carriage recoil system. It utilized a hydro-spring system which used both an oil filled cylinder with a piston and springs to keep it stable in recoil and to return the tube to the in-battery position. When the U.S. entered World War I in April 1917 there were 544 of the 3-inch guns in service. The guns did not see action in World War I for a number of reasons: they were first needed for training in the U.S.; the difficulty of manufacturing and shipping enough of the uniquely American ammunition to Europe; and lastly, the availability and superiority of the French M1897 75 mm Gun. The M1902 saw service during the Punitive Expedition against Mexican revolutionary Poncho Villa in 1916. This gun was made at Watervliet Arsenal, New York in 1904.


Caliber: 3 inch (76.2 mm)
Weight: 2,520 lb. (1,143 kg)
Range: 8,500 yards (7,772 m)
Shell Weight: 19 lb. (8.6 kg)
Muzzle Velocity: 1,700 ft/sec (518 m/sec)
Elevation: - 5 to + 15 degrees (- 89 to + 267 mils)
Traverse: 0 degrees (0 mils)
Rate of Fire: 4-6 rpm
89.48.19
Taken June 24th, 2013.

Was it doable a decade earlier? Yes, if the field artillery ninnies had been aware of the Kangaroo Hop, they would encounter in Cuba in 1898. There is no reason that a US gun with a recuperator could not have been developed. Once the Spanish American War ended, it took only three years to make one.    



Mark I 3-inch Rapid Fire Landing Gun

The display reads:

Mark I 3-inch Rapid Fire Landing Gun    1896

This gun was designed as a landing force or amphibious assault gun for the US Navy and Marine Corps. It has a screw breechblock and carries 32 rounds of ammunition in boxes on either side of the gun. When the First Battalion of Marines was formed for the Spanish-American War in 1898, Company F was organized as a battery of four Mark I Guns. The battalion landed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba on 10 June, 1898 and established the naval base there. During the Boxer Rebellion in China, Captain Ben Fuller's Marine Artillery Company fought with three of the guns in the capture of Tientsin on 24 June 1900.

When an Advanced Base Battalion was organized in August 1911, Company G was created and armed with the 3-inch Rapid Fire Guns. During the expedition to Vera Cruz, Mexico in 1914, an artillery battalion was organized with three companies armed with the guns. Several models of the Mark I continued to serve the Marine Corps throughout the "Banana Wars" in Latin America during the early 20th Century.

Caliber: 3 in (76.2 mm)
Weight: 500 lb. (227 kg)
Range: 3,000 yards (2,743 m)
Shell Weight: 12 lb. (5.4 kg)
CN# 109829
Taken November 30th, 2013.
Credit HERE.
  

I have read that this gun was designed with a recuperator. As I see in the photo, I adjudge the barrel to be sleeve mounted on what looks like a hydraulic shock absorber table. This is not a recuperator as the gun still rolls out of battery on its wheels, but the major shock that would cause the gun to hop or suddenly run back seems to have been a bit mitigated. Anyway, it was a better solution than the Army 3.2 inch gun as built.   

[miletus12]

Americans and their funny ways. How about their navy?

Suppose you had to choose in 1885 some kind of coast defense ship to build?



Seems like there is a basic choice of three types:
a. citadel battery for example the SKS Sachsen
b. echelon end fire turret ship for example the RMS Italia 
c. Chaser guns and casemate guns HMS Collingwood. 



You really only have two choices as the Americans pick through the pile of submissions of foreign and domestic shipwrights. Which one would you pick?

The design choice for which you show preference is purely based on what you expect steam powered warships to do in battle and what you expect you can build.


CSS Virginia tries to ram USS Monitor ( March 1862..


Italian Ironclad Re d'Italia sinking after being rammed by SMS Erzherzog Ferdinand Max at the Battle of Lissa. 20th of July 1866. [1,416 x 936] [Art]
    
Knowing what they knew in 1885, they choose the echelon citadel layout. It was because they wanted end-on fire to be applied during the anticipated ram event. How that was supposed to work, frankly, was not well thought out. Maybe the Americans thought it would be like Hampton Roads, or maybe Lepanto? Meanwhile, the American propellant technology was transitioning from the black-powder American civil war base that the US artillery had been using in its reworked and modified Parrott and Dahlgren type guns.  These guns remained the basic American naval artillery until the New Steel Navy was initiated. The Americans had introduced prismatic shaped black powder as a result of work done by Lammot Dupont in the American civil war, but they were still behind the Europeans in design of breach loading cannons by a good decade when it came time for modernization in the mid 1880s. Many of the examples of breach-loading ordnance in US service were in the American army and were bought from overseas suppliers. This was "unacceptable" for an army, and was recognized as a national security disaster for the navy, if it had to buy its artillery from Schneider or Armstrong or Krupp. Plus the Germans had just invented brown powder propellants in 1884. The British had duplicated this work also by 1884 and adopted it as the propellant for their own naval ordnance and land artillery. It was rapidly matched by the French in 1886 with something called "slow burning cocoa" (due to its color before deflagration), which the Spanish obtained and used for most of their Ordonez and Hontoria artillery. The Americans were able to duplicate the German prismatic brown powders by 1890, but at this time, the French had surpassed the rest of the world with "poudre blanche", which became a French state secret.  

United States Naval Academy Ordnance Textbook. 2nd Edition 1905.  

The Americans were going to have to design new guns with the black and brown prismatic propellants they had as throw charges (1885). They would have to duplicate or imitate, as much as they could, European developments in breach loading guns, too, because the Europeans were not sharing secrets, especially the French and or the Germans.  Inevitably there would be a time lag as the Americans played catchup. So while the Europeans were mounting breach loading guns with the Krupp sliding wedge and propellant case or ring seal obturator, or the de Bange interrupted screw and doorknob obturator as early as 1870. the Americans were lagging so far behind, that even the entire Model System 1883 Hontoria guns was introduced before the first native designed American all steel breach loading naval rifle entered service which was the 6 inch/30 caliber gun in 1885. The complete American family of naval artillery did not actually show up as metal until 1895; hence the observation that the Americans were "a decade behind Spain" when it came to naval artillery. 

A brief look at this family of guns:           

1. Dynamite gun.
2. 37mm (1 pounder) gun
3. 47mm (3 pounder) gun
4. 57mm (6 pounder) gun
5. 3 inch/21 caliber gun
6. 3 inch/50 caliber gun
7. 4 inch/40 caliber gun
8. 5 inch/31 caliber gun
9. 5 inch/40 caliber gun
10. 6 inch/30 caliber gun
11. 8 inch/30 caliber gun
12. 10 inch/30 caliber gun
13. 12 inch/35 caliber gun
14. 13 inch/35 caliber gun

shows that most of the quickfire or rapid-fire guns were licensed and purchased copies of French designs, while the medium bore and large guns were brown powder or black powder guns designed with American variations of the de Bang system of interrupted screw and doorknob obturator. The most popular of these systems was the Fletcher breech block. Though the Driggs-Seabury and Driggs-Schroeder, rolling block breach blocks for American versions of the Hotchkiss French rapid fire guns was also used.   
 

[miletus12]

So we have an American army and navy explained somewhat as to why they are what they are and even some hints as to how to counter-fact the outcome.

We could have Lieutenant Crozier take a liking for things, Austrian, such as the straight-pull rifle. It could be a Mannlicher that wins the 1892 trials.

BG Flagler might push RUBY smokeless powder much harder and earlier and the USN might work on it as a propellant by 1888 or 1890, creating W.P. (White Powder) before 1900 as it historically did.

That would mean a further delay in the breach-loading naval rifles or maybe the brown powder guns are adopted anyway with the proviso that these ships guns' mounts will be re-barreled as they were in 1900-1905 when smokeless powder became the fleet standard.

Then there is the question of just what kind of fleet to build?

It is no accident that the Americans opted for monitors and coast defense battleships. The American congress was leery of armored cruisers. The Americans have no effective torpedo, like the French and the British and the Italians do; so that makes the development of a torpedo boat or torpedo cruiser a bit of a problem as well.

1. Howell
2. Whitehead Mark 1 Type A.
3. Whitehead Mark 1 Type B.

The Americans are building their own torpedoes as licensed copies of the Whitehead design. There are only about 100 fish in service as of 1898.

Cruiser vs battleship. 

One of the things that few naval historians note is that USS Maine ACR-1 was laid down in 1888 and not finished until 17 September 1895. That is seven years (6 years, 11 months.). Now the USS Indiana BB-1 was laid down in 1891. The ship was completed and commissioned in 20 November 1895. That is a long 4 year, 4 month build time for the USS Indiana, but 7 years for a warship in that era will introduce obsolescence during the bui8ld time. The thing to notice here is that the USS Indiana enters service two months after the USS Maine. Now that might no0t be significant because a new ship is a new ship, but take a look:
 

    
The top is the USS Maine, the first US designed steel capital ship. 
The middle is the USS Oregon, a second generation US designed capital ship 
The bottom is the HMS Majestic, a fourth generation British designed capital ship. 
  
Each is introduced in the year 1895. There is functionally about a decade difference between each ship. 

The Maine could handle a top-rank British ship of circa 1880.
The Oregon could handle a top rank British ship of circa 1890. 
There was nothing American that could handle a British Majestic class ship until the 2nd Maine class of 1899. And even then it would be a coin flip. 

if there were lessons here to be learned, it was that appearances could be deceiving. 

In 1895 as the American ships hit the water, the following unseen factors on the world naval stage were in evidence>
a. The USS Indiana actually had a better armor protection scheme than the HMS Majestic, but its artillery was distinctly inferior.  The British 12 inch guns at 10,000 yards could pierce 8 inches of Krupp cemented armor. This was because the British at the time of proof used smokeless powder. The US 13 inch gun at 9,000 yards was able to pierce about the same thickness of plate, but that was a much more massive shell with lower muzzle velocity. This was due to black powder propellant charges. The British 12 inch gun could cycle one round optimistically every 100 seconds. The 13 inch US gun was designed to cycle one shot every five minutes. It would not be until the 1900s that this gun service system would be rebuilt to fire 1 round per minute.  
b. The British ship had a functional 6 inch rapid fire gun capable of 6 rounds per minute. The secondary battery on the USS Maine of 6 inch guns was capable of 1 shot per minute if the gun crew hurried.  The USS Indiana could cycle one shot every two minutes from her 8 inch guns which comprised her secondary battery.  
c. It would not be until the Americans got a look at the Spanish Infanta Maria Teresa class cruisers, that they shot up, that they would learn how to design a fast service from magazine to gun breech weapon cycle. Until then, their gun cycle rates were about half as fast as the British or Italians and one fourth as fast as the French or Spanish. The Germans would be faster than the French. In other words, if the Americans had gone to war against a European navy that could actually shoot, they would have been likely smothered by an adversary with shots out at least at twice the rate of fire the Americans could generate and by an adversary who was not fouled by his own dense clouds of brown or gray smoke.  To take the hypothetical case of the US and German east Asia squadrons facing off in Manila Bay, it could have been a case of superior American armor, shells, and better initial accuracy against German faster firing guns and their own better accuracy over the course of the engagement as American aiming systems were blinded by their own smoke, while German Zeiss optics and the eyes using them remained able to see their targets clearly. Dewey knew he was in a lot of trouble, due to critical defects in American propellant technology.      
d. Smokeless powder, and propellant technology, fire control accuracy, the type shell characteristics (The Americans and Germans used all steel shells, most everyone else used cast iron shells with steel nose caps.) and weapon cycling rates, the stuff you do not see in the book data on ships of this era, are more important than armor and tonnage and speed.  

e. And as mentioned, the Americans did not have a reliable Bliss made torpedo weapon in significant numbers yet. The French did have a Schneider that was unreliable, the Italians had the Whitehead bought from Fiume, the Germans made the Schwartzkopf which worked, The Japanese and Spanish, who bought their  Schwartzkopfs from the Germans could rely on their fish, likewise. The British had the Whiteheads, but there is some question about the reliability of British made ones.

So to put it all together in a matrix square with weighted numbers assigned to the 1898 navies, what does it look like? 
 
On a 1-10 scale

Nation in descending naval rank...............guns............armor................torpedoes.............propulsion............seaworthiness...........accuracy........crews 
1. United Kingdom..................................7.................7......................5.........................6........................7.............................6..................8
2. France...............................................6.................5......................4.........................6........................5.............................7..................6
3. Russia...............................................6.................5......................4.........................4........................3.............................6..................4 
4. Italy..................................................6.................5......................7.........................5........................6.............................5..................5
5. Germany............................................9.................5......................7.........................7........................6.............................7..................6
6. Austria...............................................8.................5......................7.........................5........................5.............................6..................6 
7. Japan.................................................6.................5......................7.........................6........................5.............................9..................9
8. Spain.................................................5..................5.....................7.........................4.........................7.............................2..................2
9. United States......................................4..................8......................5........................6.........................6.............................6..................8
10. Sweden............................................7..................6......................5........................7.........................2.............................5..................7

If the United States wants to navally do better, it has to work on its guns and torpedoes as well as its ship designs overall. 

And to be honest, the Americans should build what they know best. 



Top is USS San Francisco.
Middle is USS Olympia 
Bottom is USS Brooklyn.

I think Grover Cleveland had it right when he wanted to build a cruiser navy. If the Americans wanted a global naval presence without imperialist pretensions or a posture that would incite a foreign aggressor to interfere in American home waters and lacking the technical means or naval geography to practice a Jeune École naval policy, then the traditional American policy of trade warfare and standing behind coastal defense measures makes sense given the politics and available technical means the Americans had.