Spanish-American War
The United States went to war with Spain in 1898 over Cuba and came out of it holding the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam, which is not what anyone had said the war was for. Cuba had been in revolt since 1895, and Spain's answer under General Weyler was reconcentration: moving the rural population into guarded towns where perhaps a hundred thousand and possibly far more died of disease and hunger. American newspapers, above all those of Hearst and Pulitzer, reported the camps in terms that made intervention popular before it was policy. The battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbour on 15 February 1898, killing 266 men; a naval court found a mine, later investigations have favoured a coal-bunker fire, and the cause is still argued. Congress declared war in April and attached the Teller Amendment, disclaiming any intention of annexing Cuba. No equivalent promise was made about anywhere else, and that omission is the whole subsequent history of the war. Dewey destroyed the Spanish squadron at Manila Bay on 1 May without losing a man, seven thousand miles from the island the war was ostensibly about. The Caribbean campaign was short and badly organised: the fighting around Santiago in July, including the assault on the San Juan heights in which Theodore Roosevelt made his political reputation, cost fewer American lives than the typhoid and yellow fever in the camps. Spain sued for peace in August after ten weeks. The Treaty of Paris in December transferred the Philippines to the United States for twenty million dollars, with no Filipino representative present, although Emilio Aguinaldo had declared independence in June and his forces held most of the archipelago. The Senate ratified it by one vote more than the required two thirds, after a debate that was explicitly about whether a republic could hold colonies. Fighting between American and Filipino forces began six weeks later and killed far more people than the war with Spain had. Cuba became independent in 1902 under the Platt Amendment, which reserved an American right of intervention and a naval station at Guantanamo. Puerto Rico and Guam remain American territory. Spain, having lost the last substantial remnant of an empire four centuries old, entered a period of national reassessment its writers called the Disaster, and the generation that argued about it took its name from the year.
- Year: 1898 CE
- Category: Military
