Abstract
This paper examines Tampa’s role in the Spanish-American War of 1898, when the small Gulf city became the principal port of embarkation for the United States invasion of Cuba. It argues that Tampa was chosen for concrete infrastructural and geographic reasons—Henry Plant’s railroad, the deep-water docks at Port Tampa, and proximity to Cuba—but that the very features which recommended it could not bear the weight placed upon them, and that the resulting chaos exposed the unpreparedness of an American army that had spent a generation as a frontier constabulary. The paper describes the concentration of the Fifth Army Corps around Tampa, the transformation of Plant’s opulent Tampa Bay Hotel into a headquarters and a theater of the so-called society war, the presence of the Rough Riders and of the regular regiments including the African American units, and the logistical breakdown at the port. It closes by assessing the war’s lasting consequence: the emergence of Tampa’s identity as a hub of national force projection, an identity that the twentieth century would greatly enlarge.
1. Introduction
The Tampa of Paper V was a war-worn Gulf village that languished through the 1870s. The Tampa of 1898 was a small but rapidly growing city, connected to the nation by rail and about to be thrust, for a few crowded months, onto the center of the national stage. When the United States went to war with Spain over Cuba in the spring of 1898, it selected Tampa as the main port of embarkation for the expeditionary force that would invade the island. For roughly two months the town swelled with soldiers, correspondents, and dignitaries; for a few days its single-track approach to the sea nearly strangled the whole enterprise. This paper takes up that episode—why Tampa was chosen, what gathered there, and why the embarkation went so badly—and assesses what it meant for the city’s future as a military center.
2. Why Tampa: Rail, Port, and Proximity
Tampa’s selection followed directly from the work of one man’s enterprise. In the 1880s the developer Henry B. Plant had extended his rail system to Tampa and pushed a line some nine miles southwest to Port Tampa, where he built docks reaching into deep water; he had also raised, in 1891, the extravagant Tampa Bay Hotel, a Moorish-style resort of silvered minarets meant to draw the nation’s travelers to the Gulf (Gannon, 1996). By 1898 Tampa therefore possessed the three things a port of embarkation required: a rail connection to the interior of the country, dock facilities on the bay, and a position on the Gulf relatively near to Cuba.
The comparison with the alternatives sealed the choice. New Orleans and Mobile had also been considered, but they were judged unhealthy for the concentration of large bodies of troops, and Tampa became the principal port by default (see Note 1). Yet the same facilities that recommended Tampa carried a hidden defect that would prove nearly fatal to good order: the port at the end of Plant’s line was served by essentially a single track, and the whole flow of men and matériel to the sea had to pass through that narrow channel (Cosmas, 1994; Trask, 1981). What made Tampa suitable in principle made it a bottleneck in practice.
3. The Concentration of the Fifth Corps
The buildup began even before the formal declaration of war on April 25, 1898. The War Department ordered troops to Tampa, and Major General William Rufus Shafter, chosen to command the expedition, arrived at the end of April; the Fifth Army Corps was constituted in early May (Cosmas, 1994; Trask, 1981). Over the following weeks something on the order of thirty thousand troops concentrated in and around the city—regular infantry and cavalry regiments drawn from posts across the country, newly raised volunteer units, and the four regular regiments of African American soldiers known as the Buffalo Soldiers, the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Infantry (Cosmas, 1994; Gatewood, 1975). Shafter himself had once commanded the Twenty-fourth Infantry.
The camps sprawled across the sandy flats around Tampa in the mounting subtropical heat. For an army that had not mounted a large expedition since the Civil War, the mere assembly of this force was an unfamiliar undertaking, and the strain showed from the first in confusion over billeting, supply, and command (Cosmas, 1994). The corps that gathered at Tampa was, in the judgment of its principal historian, an amateur instrument for the imperial task it was about to attempt.
4. The Tampa Bay Hotel and the Society War
The center of gravity of this gathering was Plant’s hotel. The Tampa Bay Hotel became the headquarters of the expedition’s senior leadership—Shafter, the commanding general of the Army Nelson A. Miles when he was present, and the volunteer officer whose name would eclipse them all, Theodore Roosevelt—and its long verandas filled with the personnel and hangers-on of a war not yet begun (Gannon, 1996; Roosevelt, 1899). War correspondents of national reputation, most famously Richard Harding Davis; foreign military attachés come to observe; and Clara Barton of the Red Cross all passed through its rooms and porches (see Note 2).
The incongruity of the scene—an army bound for a hard campaign lounging amid the luxury of a resort hotel—gave the period its enduring nickname, the “society war” or the “rocking-chair war.” The phrase captures something real about the interval of waiting at Tampa: a strange suspension in which officers dined and correspondents filed dispatches while, a few miles away, the machinery of embarkation ground toward a crisis. The glamour of the hotel and the muddle at the docks were two faces of the same unpreparedness.
5. The Rough Riders and the Regulars
Among the units that made their way to Tampa, none became more celebrated than the First United States Volunteer Cavalry—the Rough Riders. Mustered in the spring of 1898 in Texas, New Mexico, and the Indian Territory under Colonel Leonard Wood, with Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt as his second, the regiment was ordered from San Antonio to Port Tampa in late May and reached the port area on June 9 aboard an empty coal train, having found no better transport in the confusion (Roosevelt, 1899). What followed became one of the war’s famous anecdotes. Arriving at a chaotic quay where the orderly loading of troops was impossible, Wood seized an available transport, the Yucatan, and Roosevelt double-quicked the regiment aboard—only to discover the same ship had been assigned to two other regiments, whose men arrived a little too late to claim it (Roosevelt, 1899). The episode, which Roosevelt himself recounted as a scramble won by individual initiative, is less a story of dash than a symptom of a system that had broken down.
The Rough Riders’ experience was emblematic in another way: like the regular cavalry, they were compelled by the shortage of transport space to leave most of their horses behind and would fight in Cuba on foot (Roosevelt, 1899; Trask, 1981). The regular regiments that formed the backbone of the corps, including the Buffalo Soldiers, embarked under the same constraints. The presence of the African American regulars at Tampa also exposed the racial tensions of the era. Black soldiers encountered hostility from white townspeople and from white troops during their weeks in the South, and the friction erupted into a violent disturbance in Tampa in early June 1898 before the force sailed (Gatewood, 1975; see Note 3). The Buffalo Soldiers would go on to fight with distinction in the Santiago campaign, but their passage through Tampa was marked by the discrimination that shadowed their service throughout the war.
6. The Logistical Breakdown
The embarkation itself was a near-disaster of congestion and improvisation—the “Tampa muddle” of contemporary and later accounts. The single rail line to Port Tampa could not clear traffic fast enough, and loaded freight cars backed up along the tracks for miles; because manifests and consignments had fallen into disorder, no one could readily say which car held what, and needed supplies sat unreachable amid the jam (Cosmas, 1994; Trask, 1981). At the port, dock space was so limited that only a small number of transports could load at once, and the double-assignment of ships to competing regiments—the very confusion the Rough Riders exploited—was routine rather than exceptional (Cosmas, 1994; Roosevelt, 1899).
When the troops were at last packed aboard around the first week of June, the ordeal was not over. The order to sail was countermanded almost immediately on the strength of a false report of Spanish warships in the Gulf, and the transports lay for days in Tampa Harbor, crammed with sweltering men in the June heat, before the fleet finally departed in mid-June (Roosevelt, 1899; Trask, 1981). Even then, the shortage of shipping meant that roughly half of the thirty thousand troops assembled at Tampa never embarked at all and remained behind for the duration of the Cuban campaign (see Note 4).
The deeper cause of this breakdown, as Graham Cosmas has argued, lay in the condition of the United States Army itself. Reduced by the congressional economies of the 1890s and shaped by a generation of dispersed frontier duty, the Army possessed neither the staff, the logistical apparatus, nor the experience to mount and supply a large overseas expedition on short notice, and the political pressures of the mobilization—the rapid expansion of the force and the accommodation of state volunteers—compounded the difficulty (Cosmas, 1994). Tampa did not create the Army’s unpreparedness; it merely concentrated and revealed it.
7. Consequence and Assessment
For all its chaos, the enterprise succeeded in its immediate object. The fleet sailed from Tampa in mid-June, landed the expeditionary force on the Cuban coast near Daiquirí toward the end of the month, and within weeks had won the battles before Santiago and forced the collapse of Spanish resistance on the island (Trask, 1981). The muddle at Tampa delayed the expedition and endangered it, but it did not defeat it, and the humiliations of the embarkation became, in the war’s triumphant aftermath, part of the reforming impulse that produced a modern general staff and a reorganized Army in the years that followed (Cosmas, 1994).
For Tampa the consequence was of a different order. The war had made the city, for one intense season, the point through which national military power flowed toward a foreign shore, and it fixed in the national mind an association between Tampa Bay and the projection of American force. The town that had been a blockaded backwater in the 1860s became, in 1898, a port of embarkation for an overseas war—a role that prefigured the far larger military presence the twentieth century would bring. When the United States next needed a base on the Florida Gulf for a war of global scale, it would build one at Tampa Bay. The aviation field that became MacDill, and the World Wars that called it into being, are the subject of Paper VII.
Notes
- The designation of Tampa over New Orleans and Mobile turned on judgments about the healthfulness of concentrating troops at each site as well as on rail and port facilities. Tampa’s own subtropical climate and disease environment were far from ideal, as the sickness that plagued the camps attested; the choice reflected relative rather than absolute suitability.
- The roster of notable civilians at Tampa in 1898 is often expanded in popular accounts to include a long list of correspondents and literary figures. This paper names only those whose presence is securely documented and treats the “society war” as a characterization of the atmosphere rather than as a precise catalog of attendees.
- The violent disturbance involving African American soldiers at Tampa in early June 1898 is documented in the scholarship on Black troops in the war, though accounts of its precipitating incident and its scale vary. It is included here because it belongs to the historical record of the embarkation, not to dramatize it; a fuller treatment lies in the specialized literature on African American soldiers in 1898, particularly Gatewood (1975).
- Figures for the numbers concentrated at Tampa and the numbers actually embarked vary across sources, in part because the force fluctuated and in part because “at Tampa” and “embarked” are counted differently. The round figures used here—roughly thirty thousand assembled, something over half that number sailed—reflect the general consensus rather than an exact muster.
- This paper concerns Tampa as a port of embarkation and does not narrate the Cuban campaign itself—Las Guásimas, El Caney, San Juan Heights, and the siege of Santiago—except as the outcome toward which the embarkation was directed. Readers seeking the campaign history are directed to Trask (1981) and Cosmas (1994).
References
Cosmas, G. A. (1994). An army for empire: The United States Army in the Spanish-American War (2nd ed.). Texas A&M University Press.
Gannon, M. (Ed.). (1996). The new history of Florida. University Press of Florida.
Gatewood, W. B., Jr. (1975). Black Americans and the white man’s burden, 1898–1903. University of Illinois Press.
Roosevelt, T. (1899). The Rough Riders. Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Trask, D. F. (1981). The war with Spain in 1898. Macmillan.
