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  But the war did not come to an end. Led by deceptively capable leaders, the insurgents weathered Spain’s initial counterattack, and as the insurrection lasted, enthusiasm mounted in the United States, where friends of Cuba Libre continued to recruit troops, raise money, and funnel weapons to Cuba. So great was pro-Cuban support in towns and cities up and down the American seaboard that even the Times acknowledged what amounted to a popular mobilization in the United States. “Steamships leaving [Havana] for Key West, Tampa, New-York, New-Orleans, and Mexico are crowded with passengers,” the paper noted. “Many young men of the best families are joining the insurgents, and students are leaving college for the same purpose.”11 By June 1895 evidence of private American interference in Cuba had become so overt that President Cleveland felt obligated to denounce it. After all, the president chided, Spain was “a power with which the United States are and desire to remain on terms of peace and amity.”12 It was one thing for the American government to imagine a Cuba free of Spanish rule; it was another thing entirely for the Cubans to want to govern the island by themselves.

  Emboldened by success at home and sympathy abroad, the insurrection swept out of the east in the summer of 1895. That July an incendiary announcement from Liberation Army headquarters sent Atkins and other planters scurrying to beat their plowshares into swords. “Whereas all exploitations of any product whatsoever are aids and resources to the Government that we are fighting,” General Gómez announced, “it is resolved … that the introduction of articles of commerce, as well as beef and cattle, into the towns occupied by the enemy, is absolutely prohibited. The sugar plantations will stop their labors, and whosoever shall attempt to grind the crop notwithstanding this order, will have their cane burned and their buildings demolished.” Those who thought “to profit from the present situation of affairs … shall be considered as an enemy, treated as a traitor, and tried as such in case of his capture.”

  It took a couple of months for the rebel forces to reach Cienfuegos, that ominously named land of “one hundred fires.” Atkins defied the general’s order and farmed that summer. He ground cane that autumn, too, describing journalists’ accounts of upheaval in central Cuba as “exaggerated.” Still, Atkins himself soon abandoned Cuba for his home in Belmont, Massachusetts, where he received news in October that Gómez had “invaded the villas,” making matters “now serious.” By the end of November, Atkins’s fields were ablaze, payback, he later learned, for his efforts to convince the Cleveland administration not to recognize the insurgency. But the reason hardly mattered. That same month, a second proclamation from Gómez authorized the complete and total destruction of all plantations, irrespective of their owners’ allegiances, including fields, outbuildings, and railroads.13 Cuba was bound for total war.

  Gomez’s success in taking the battle to the heart of Cuba brought turnover atop the Spanish chain of command. In February 1896, Valeriano Weyler replaced Arsenio Martínez Campos as captain-general of Cuba. Like Martínez Campos, Weyler was a veteran of the Ten Years’ War, and is said to have greeted his latest appointment with the cryptic remark that “war should be answered with war.”14 Long before Weyler arrived in Havana, Cubans interpreted his appointment “as a prophesy of a reign of blood and terror.” In the last war, Weyler had distinguished himself by “cruelty to women and defenseless prisoners”; in this war, sources predicted, he would alienate even the United States by abusing anyone “unfortunate enough to fall under suspicion.”15 He did not disappoint. Within days, he began corralling peasants into concentration camps while destroying the fields they left behind. Within months, he had so alienated even American interests on the island that a collection of U.S. businessmen, Atkins in the lead, called on President Cleveland to intervene on the side of the insurgents.16

  U.S. newspapers reflected the drastic change in fortunes. Papers that had once brimmed with tales of insurgent license now bristled with reports of American suffering at Spanish hands. Americans were being driven from “their homes,” reported The (New York) World, “the torch applied to their belongings, and their employees, Cubans and mulattoes, killed before their very eyes.” Individuals under suspicion “have been brutally carried away and thrust unceremoniously into prison.”17

  In Weyler the press corps met a subject whose cruelty matched its own penchant for hyperbole. Under Weyler, every peasant became a rebel sympathizer, every planter or “autonomist” an enemy of Spain. As Weyler tightened restrictions on the press and civilian populations in cities, Cuban civic life ground to a halt. Weyler’s clampdown did nothing to end the insurrection, of course; less than a year after his arrival in Cuba, the number of rebel troops in the country had swollen from a mere three thousand at the start of the conflict to fifty thousand. By the following year, the war had reached a stalemate, with Weyler controlling the cities and Gómez patrolling the countryside.18 Neither place could be considered much of a prize. Cities aren’t really cities without the freedoms Weyler denied. Meanwhile, the countryside had been thoroughly ravaged, first by the rebel campaign against the planters, then by Weyler’s persecution of the peasants. Still, stalemate favored the underdogs. And when another year went by with Spain unable to end the insurrection, even formally staunch Spanish interests began, in the words of one American official, to “wish and pray for annexation to the United States.”19

  If the United States intended to intervene in the Cuban War of Independence, it would have to hurry. By winter 1897–98, the war turned decidedly in favor of the insurgents. Once confined to the countryside, the insurrection began to target cities, and Spanish troops more or less threw down their arms. “Spanish forces seldom sally forth in the east,” reported Emory W. Fenn, a filibustering American fighting with the Cuban Army, just as U.S. forces prepared to join the war. “In order to fight, the Cubans were obliged to attack fortified towns. With the exception of the large cities on the seaboard, and a few large inland towns, the entire eastern part of Cuba was free and might truthfully be called ‘Cuba Libre.’”20 Just a month or two earlier, Gómez himself declared the conflict “dead” and the enemy “crushed,” and for the first time claimed to see an end to the fighting.21

  Despite popular support for the insurrection in the United States, the Cleveland administration remained cool to the idea of intervention from the first. In early December 1896, President Cleveland delivered a speech on the Cuban conflict to Congress. He began by acknowledging the calls for intervention. He conceded that the United States had an interest in the war more than merely “sentimental” or “philanthropic.” Some $30–$50 million in U.S. capital was tied up in Cuban railroad, mining, sugar, and other industries, and U.S.-Cuban trade had reached nearly $100 million on the eve of the war. The president also noted the inconvenience and expense the U.S. government faced in having to defend American property owners suffering damages in Cuba, all the while meeting its legal obligation to stem the flow of arms and money to the insurgents.

  These interests and inconveniences, together with “considerations of philanthropy and humanity,” generated various calls for the U.S. government to accord the insurgents belligerent rights, to recognize Cuban independence, to intervene in the conflict, or to buy Cuba from Spain. Cleveland insisted that all such actions were either impractical or unworthy of a nation that desired “nothing so much as to live in amity with all the world,” and whose “ample and diversified domains satisfy all possible longings for territory, preclude dreams of conquest, and prevent any casting of covetous eyes upon neighboring regions, however attractive.” Secure in its principles, institutions, and resources, the United States would continue to demonstrate “restraint,” notwithstanding the evidence of Spanish atrocities.

  Cleveland’s hopes for Cuba shaded his analysis of the situation. Spain had begun to rethink its Cuban policies, the president insisted; it was ready to exchange real autonomy for an end to the insurrection. Surely autonomy was consistent with “all the reasonable objects of the insurrection,” and indeed “all
rational requirements of her Spanish subjects.” Besides, Cubans would need time to “test their capacity for self-government,” something autonomy, not independence, would facilitate.

  Still, American patience had its limits. The void of law and order in Cuba grew costlier by the day. Should the contest further “degenerate into a strife which means nothing more than the useless sacrifice of human life and the utter destruction of the very subject matter of the conflict,” the president warned, then American “obligations to the sovereignty of Spain will be superseded by higher obligations which we can hardly hesitate to recognize and discharge.” Cleveland cautioned Congress that the United States must avoid behavior that could precipitate a war, while acknowledging that there may come a time when “considerations of American interests, along with considerations of humanity and a desire to see a rich and fertile country, intimately related to us, saved from complete devastation” would compel him to intervene.22

  In his speech to Congress, Cleveland presumed to speak on behalf of the insurgents, distinguishing their rational demands (autonomy) from their irrational ones (independence). It took a few months for Máximo Gómez, the insurgent general, to respond. By early 1897, Gómez explained, the insurgents sought not so much U.S. recognition (much less U.S. intervention) as U.S. influence on Spain to halt the slaughter of innocents. Of course the civilized world differed on the merits of the insurgent cause; but the civilian toll of the war threatened the ideals of humanity itself, of which the United States had traditionally been “so noble an exemplar.” The insurgent leadership had fully expected mercilessness from the country that had expelled the Jews and Moors, unleashed the Inquisition, annihilated the Native Americans, and butchered South American revolutionaries. But “not to pause at the holy and venerated hearth, personification of all most peaceful and noble; nor at women, emblem of weakness; nor at children, overwhelming symbol of inoffensive innocence”—these were offenses beyond the capacity, one might have thought, of even Spain. Would the United States really do nothing, Gómez demanded, as these atrocities continued?

  For over a century, U.S. statesmen had referred to a set of hemispheric interests that distinguished “American” peoples and republics from their European counterparts, a perspective immortalized in the Monroe Doctrine. Gómez challenged the United States to make good on a century’s worth of rhetoric. It was not enough to prevent “the usurpation of American territories” without defending “the people of America against European ambitions”—not enough to “protect American soil and leave its helpless dwellers exposed to the cruelties of a sanguinary and despotic European power.” A revised Monroe Doctrine, based on a genuine and reciprocal understanding of a hemispheric public good, could be the blueprint for a true confederation of American states. Expanded “to the defense of the principles which animate modern civilization,” this Cuban Jefferson suggested, such a doctrine might “form an integral part of the culture and life of the American people.”23

  In November 1896, Americans elected Republican William McKinley president of the United States after a vigorous election campaign in which questions of foreign policy and events in Cuba scarcely came up. In his inauguration speech the following March, McKinley managed barely a paragraph on overseas developments. “We want no war of conquest,” the new president told the nation. “We must avoid the temptation of territorial aggression. War should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed; peace is preferable to war in almost every contingency.” By appearances, anyway, McKinley planned to carry on the policies of his predecessor, whose only intervention in the Cuban conflict had been to try to stop the flow of money and arms to the insurgents.

  Through late 1897 talk of U.S. intervention in Cuba remained hypothetical. On New Year’s Eve, a correspondent of The New York Herald visited General Gómez in his camp, as if to size up the year’s events and anticipate the year ahead. Asked whether he still opposed U.S. intervention in the conflict, Gómez replied not necessarily, so long as intervention did not mean “arbitrary annexation.” With this distinction, Gómez struck preemptively at those who said that Cubans were incapable of self-government. How could anyone be sure just what Cubans or anybody else was capable of before they had been given the opportunity to prove themselves? In the meantime, annexation interested Gómez no more than autonomy. “Our object is independence,” the general declared; “we have among us young men who have sacrificed everything to this sacred cause.” The aging general confessed to having “but one object in life, and this is to see the flag of Cuba supreme from Cape Maisí to San Antonio.” Again anticipating later events, Gómez worried lest the Cubans “be robbed of any share in the honor of the expulsion of the Spaniards,” while at the same time expressing confidence that “the people of the United States will never balk us in this, our hour of victory.”24

  Had Gómez known the plans for Cuba being formulated in the U.S. War Department as the year drew to a close, he would have been mortified. While President McKinley struggled to maintain the formal neutrality established by his predecessor, his military officials were preparing for what they had come to regard as the nation’s inevitable entry into war. The planning and execution of this war differed dramatically. U.S. strategists anticipated no “splendid little war,” as Secretary of State John Hay would later put it, but a long and bloody battle for Cuba that would begin in the east and culminate in the west with an assault on the Cuban capital, Havana. If taxing militarily, a protracted campaign would serve the purpose of creating a clean slate in Cuba, allowing the United States to remake Cuba in its own image, which the slave revolution had precluded in Haiti.

  American plans for Cuba were the subject of a letter from U.S. undersecretary of war Joseph C. Breckenridge to the commander of the U.S. Army, Lieutenant General Nelson A. Miles, dated December 7, 1897. U.S. military planners expected to begin the war not in Puerto Rico, where Spanish defenses were considerably lighter and where a supposedly sympathetic population eagerly anticipated annexation to the United States. It is the job of the military to keep the nation safe, and just as racial conflagration was on everybody’s mind in late-eighteenth-century Cuba, so it remained on Americans’ minds a century later. U.S. military planners sought to expel Spain from Puerto Rico not as an end in itself, Breckenridge informed Miles, but to establish Puerto Rico as a colony for African Americans, thereby once and for all resolving the nation’s “internal racial conflict.” With its “cosmopolitan” and “peace loving” inhabitants, Breckenridge suggested, Puerto Rico could be taken with “relatively mild measures.” Miles should steer clear of population centers and respect “all the laws between civilized and Christian nations.”25

  Cuba was another story. Comprised of “whites, blacks, Asians and people who are a mixture of these races,” Cuba’s population was “indolent and apathetic,” “indifferent to religion,” at once “immoral” and impassioned, possessed of only “a vague notion of what is right and wrong.” Absorbing such a people into the American federation “would be sheer madness.” The army would first have to “clean up the country, even if this means using the methods Divine Providence used on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.” Miles must “destroy everything in our cannons’ range,” Breckenridge announced; he must “impose a harsh blockade so that hunger and its constant companion, disease, undermine the peaceful population and decimate the Cuban army.” First fighting with the Spanish, Miles should force the Cubans to take “dangerous and desperate measures.” Then taking Cuba’s side, the United States must precipitate “a phase of indeterminate duration” during which an independent government would alienate autonomists and Spaniards, thus creating conflict and unrest and jeopardizing the Cuban government’s ability “to meet our demands and the commitments made to us.”

  In short, Breckenridge concluded, U.S. military policy in Cuba “must always be to support the weaker against the stronger, until we have obtained the extermination of them both, in order to annex the Pearl of the Antilles.” With
the likely start date of the operation the following October, Breckenridge urged Miles to “tie up the slightest detail … in case we find ourselves in the need to precipitate events.”

  Breckenridge need not have worried. An insult and an explosion catapulted the United States into the Cuban conflict more swiftly than the War Department had anticipated and, it turns out, could be ready for. On February 11, 1898, the pro-intervention New York Journal greeted readers with a letter from Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, Spain’s minister to Washington, to a confidant back home describing the U.S. president as a “weak and popularity-seeking … hack politician.” Though probably few Americans found Dupuy de Lôme’s remarks to be “THE WORST INSULT TO THE UNITED STATES IN ITS HISTORY,” as the Journal put it, it was an insult nonetheless. When coupled with the explosion of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor four days later, the de Lôme letter brought cries for intervention to a fever pitch. In a nation eager for martial adventure, it did not take an inquiry to reveal the source of the Maine’s demise. “The Maine was sunk by an act of dirty treachery,” Theodore Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the navy, wrote a friend the following day. The Journal, meanwhile, blamed “AN ENEMY’S SECRET INFERNAL MACHINE.”26

  McKinley did not want to go to war. If there was ever a time for the president to prove Dupuy de Lôme wrong, this was it. He wasn’t up to it. Over the course of the next few weeks, McKinley struggled to retain control of U.S. foreign policy as his opportunistic young assistant secretary of war dispatched Admiral Dewey to the Philippines, as Congress passed a $50 million war appropriation (without a dissenting vote), and as Spanish general Ramón Blanco y Erenas suspended hostilities in Cuba. On April 11 the president petitioned Congress for authorization to intervene in Cuba. On April 19, Congress passed its war resolution, which the president signed the next day. On April 21 the president ordered a naval blockade of Cuba. On April 25 the United States declared war on Spain.27