The Roughest Riders Read Free

disarray.
    But the battle for San Juan Hill itself was still in progress, with five thousand American troops engaged in the action, including the Buffalo Soldiers of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry, who had made the climb from Siboney and another hill called El Pozo. Black and white soldiers from three different brigades launched their own attack onSan Juan Hill, with the Twenty-Fourth leading the way. There, too, they overcame enemy resistance after hours of bloody combat. As they swarmed over San Juan Hill, they could see the Spaniards running as fast as they could down every path available to them. It was all over now, except for the final mopping up, which would include the conquest of the main Spanish fortifications around the city of Santiago de Cuba.

    The air stank with blood, burned flesh, and spent shells. Roosevelt strode among the wreckage and counted the dead and wounded. The army’s official tally of those who fell in battle was far smaller than the number of casualties reported by eyewitnesses to the action; the pantheon of black and white men who lost their lives or were wounded fighting with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders was much larger than first reported. The popular press also perpetuated inaccuracies regarding the battle itself, claiming Roosevelt and his volunteers chased the Spanish from San Juan Hill virtually unaided, when the reality was that they did not even make it into the thick of battle until most of the heavy fighting was over.
    A major omission by the press was the role the black soldiers played in these campaigns. To understand how the black troops came to be here, in this hellhole on a hill, we must go back to the beginning, when freedom was no more than an empty promise.

PART ONE
The Landing

     1
    T hey knew all too well how it felt to be freed but not yet free. Following the Civil War, the shackles of slavery had been undone, but the reality of the master-slave relationship still reigned across the land. Black Americans had little or no access to the mainstream economic system of their country, yet there was always room for them in the military. All nations need fodder for the battlefield, for their ongoing campaigns to slaughter other human beings in war, and the US government was no exception. Of the two million men who put their lives at risk to preserve the Union, 10 percent of them were African Americans.
    Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew commissioned one of the first black units in March 1863, with the encouragement of Northern abolitionists including Ralph Waldo Emerson and the two younger brothers of Henry and William James, Wilkinson and Robertson. The “all-colored” Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment trained at Camp Meigs outside of Boston and then was sent south on May 28 of the same year. After arriving in Beaufort, South Carolina, it joined up with the white Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought Confederate forces with them onJames Island on July 16, stopping a Southern assault and losing forty-two men in the skirmish. Sergeant William H. Carney with the Fifty-Fourth later received the Medal of Honor for carrying the Union flag up to the enemy ramparts, singing, “Boys, the old flag never touched the ground!”
    Two days later, the Fifty-Fourth led an attack with fixed bayonets against Fort Wagner near Charleston, the birthplace and bastion of the Southern rebellion, which was defended by Confederate soldiers under the command of General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, the “Little Napoleon of the South.” The black troops surged over the sharpened wooden stakes ringing the fort and continued into a water-filled ditch. Two of their captains were killed immediately, and Sergeant Major Lewis Douglass, the son of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, was wounded when his sword was ripped from his side by a canister shell. “Men fell all around me,” Douglass wrote later. “A shell would explode and