The Spanish-American War

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the causes that drove the United States into war with Spain in April 1898, including the Cuban war for independence, yellow journalism in the Hearst and Pulitzer press, the de Lome Letter, and the explosion of the USS Maine.
• Trace the course of the war from the May 1898 Battle of Manila Bay through the July land campaign at San Juan Hill and Santiago to the August armistice.
• Account for the territorial settlement produced by the Treaty of Paris, including the cession of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines and the conditional independence of Cuba under the Platt Amendment of 1901.
• Account for the causes and consequences of the Philippine-American War of 1899 to 1902, including the role of Emilio Aguinaldo and the human cost of the American counterinsurgency.
• Use Skill 2.B (Sourcing and Situation) to read at least two primary sources for what they reveal about the political, journalistic, and racial assumptions that produced an American overseas empire in 1898.

By the middle of the 1890s, three currents were running together. The first was a Cuban war for independence. Cuban revolutionaries under the writer and political organizer José Martí launched a renewed war against Spanish rule in February 1895. Spanish authorities responded by appointing General Valeriano Weyler, who in 1896 began herding rural Cubans into fortified reconcentration camps to deny the insurgents food, shelter, and recruits. Disease and starvation killed roughly 150,000 civilians inside those camps by the end of 1897. The second current was the most aggressive newspaper press the United States had yet produced. William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's New York World were locked in a circulation war and discovered that lurid coverage of Spanish atrocities sold papers. The style they invented, what contemporaries called yellow journalism, treated Cuba as a moral emergency that demanded American intervention. The third current was an emerging imperialist faction, led by Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and the naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan, who had been arguing since the late 1880s that the United States needed coaling stations, a battle fleet, and overseas markets to keep up with the European great powers (KC-7.3.I.A).

Two events in February 1898 made war almost impossible to avoid. On February 9, the New York Journal published a stolen private letter that the Spanish minister to Washington, Enrique Dupuy de Lome, had written to a friend in Havana. The de Lome Letter dismissed President William McKinley as a weak and pandering politician and revealed that Spain was negotiating with the United States in bad faith. Six days later, on the night of February 15, the battleship USS Maine exploded at anchor in Havana harbor. Two hundred sixty-six American sailors died. Subsequent investigations have suggested that the explosion was probably caused by a coal-bunker fire that ignited an adjacent powder magazine, but in February 1898 the country and the press blamed Spain. Within days the slogan "Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain" was on placards from Boston to San Francisco. President McKinley resisted intervention through the rest of February and March, but on April 11 he sent a war message to Congress that asked for authority to use military force in Cuba on humanitarian, strategic, and commercial grounds. Congress passed the war resolution on April 20 with the Teller Amendment attached, a self-denying provision that promised the United States would not annex Cuba. Spain broke diplomatic relations on April 21 and Congress formally declared war on April 25, 1898.

The fighting lasted just over ten weeks. The first blow fell halfway around the world. Commodore George Dewey, in command of the Asiatic Squadron at Hong Kong, had standing orders from Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt to attack Spanish forces in the Philippines on the outbreak of war. On May 1, 1898, Dewey steamed into Manila Bay and destroyed the entire Spanish Pacific squadron without losing a single American sailor. In Cuba, an expeditionary force under General William Shafter landed near Santiago in late June. The First Volunteer Cavalry, organized largely by Theodore Roosevelt and known as the Rough Riders, fought alongside African American regulars from the 9th and 10th Cavalry in the July 1 assault on the heights east of Santiago. Press coverage of the action at San Juan Hill made Roosevelt a national hero and put him on the path that led to the governorship of New York in 1898, the vice presidency in 1900, and the presidency in 1901. Two days later, the Spanish Caribbean squadron tried to break out of Santiago harbor and was destroyed by an American blockading force. Spain sued for peace on July 17, and an armistice took effect on August 12, 1898.

The peace settlement produced an island empire (KC-7.3.I.C). The Treaty of Paris, signed on December 10, 1898, required Spain to renounce sovereignty over Cuba, cede Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States outright, and transfer the entire Philippine archipelago to the United States in exchange for a payment of twenty million dollars. Ratification of the treaty in the U.S. Senate became the focus of a sustained anti-imperialist campaign led by William Jennings Bryan, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, and the broad Anti-Imperialist League, which warned that holding overseas colonies would betray the country's republican tradition (KC-7.3.I.B). The Senate ratified the treaty on February 6, 1899, by a margin of just two votes over the two-thirds threshold. Cuba received nominal independence under American military occupation, which became conditional independence in 1901 when the United States required Cuba to incorporate the Platt Amendment into its new constitution as the price of American military withdrawal. The amendment forbade Cuba to enter into agreements that might impair its sovereignty, capped Cuban public debt, granted the United States a perpetual lease on a naval station at Guantanamo Bay, and reserved to the United States a unilateral right of intervention. Under the Platt Amendment the United States sent troops back into Cuba in 1906, 1912, and 1917. The amendment was finally repealed in 1934 under Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy. The Guantanamo Bay lease has remained in force ever since.

The Philippines went a different way. Filipino nationalists under Emilio Aguinaldo had fought beside American forces against Spain in the summer of 1898 in the expectation that victory would deliver Philippine independence. When the Treaty of Paris instead transferred the islands to the United States, Aguinaldo declared an independent Philippine Republic in January 1899, and on the night of February 4 American and Filipino troops exchanged fire on the outskirts of Manila. The Philippine-American War ran officially from 1899 to 1902, although fighting in the southern Muslim regions of the islands continued for more than a decade. The American counterinsurgency was unusually brutal. Civilians were relocated into camps that drew explicit comparison with the Spanish reconcentration camps the United States had only just gone to war to oppose. The water-cure interrogation method, an early form of waterboarding, was used routinely. Towns and crops in resistance districts were destroyed. Estimates of Filipino dead range from roughly 200,000 to one million, a substantial portion of them civilians killed by famine and disease. American casualties amounted to roughly 4,200 dead, about ten times the number lost to Spain in the war of 1898. In 1901 the Supreme Court ruled in the Insular Cases that the Constitution does not "follow the flag" to unincorporated territories, and that Filipinos and Puerto Ricans were therefore not entitled to the full constitutional protections that residents of the contiguous United States enjoyed. The doctrine remained the legal framework of American territorial governance through the 20th century and parts of it survive into the present.

The 1898 war and what followed it produced a recognizable American world power. By 1900 the United States held permanent naval coaling stations from Puerto Rico in the Caribbean to Guam and the Philippines in the western Pacific. The country had a battle fleet that within a decade Theodore Roosevelt was confident enough to send around the globe in the Great White Fleet of 1907 to 1909. American business had treaty access to Asian markets, and an American governor-general sat in Manila. The price was a four-year insurgency, a permanent argument over how a republic could rule colonies it refused to admit as states, and a Cuban relationship that was not corrected until the mid-1930s. Topic 7.4 takes up the Progressive Era at home, but the foreign-policy thread that 7.3 opens runs forward through Topic 7.5 (the First World War), Topic 7.11 (interwar foreign policy), and Topics 7.12 through 7.14 (the Second World War and the postwar order) and supplies the Theme WOR backbone of the unit (LO 7.C).

The four sources below sample the war as it was made and as it ended. Use Skill 2.B (Sourcing and Situation) to ask of each one who produced it, for what audience, and for what purpose.

1. (Causation) Rank the four immediate causes of American intervention in Cuba in April 1898 (the Cuban war for independence, yellow journalism in the Hearst and Pulitzer press, the de Lome Letter, and the explosion of the USS Maine). Defend the order of the ranking with specific evidence.
2. (Sourcing) Apply Skill 2.B to the February 17 New York Journal coverage of the Maine. Identify the producer, the intended audience, the purpose, and the historical situation, and account for how each one shapes the credibility of the source as evidence about what destroyed the battleship.
3. (Causation) Account for why the United States annexed the Philippines outright in 1898 but accepted only a quasi-independent Cuba under the Platt Amendment in 1901. What does the asymmetry reveal about the racial and strategic assumptions of American policymakers?
4. (Continuity and Change) Compare the Spanish reconcentration policy of 1896 with the American counterinsurgency in the Philippines from 1899 to 1902. Identify two continuities and one significant shift, and account for how Americans of the time reconciled the comparison.
5. (Causation) Account for the relationship between the imperialism debate of 1898 to 1900 and the broader Theme WOR arc that runs forward into the First World War, the interwar period, and the Second World War. At which point in the chain does the country reach the foreign policy of 1945?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.