WHY DID WE FIGHT THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR?

[Judi Lynn]

Hulton Archive/Getty Images
BY CODY COPELAND/DEC. 31, 2020 1:25 PM EST

In the 16th century, Spain began extending its empire in the Americas. At its peak, it controlled lands from as far north as Virginia down to the Argentinian province of Tierra del Fuego, on the southernmost tip of South America (excluding Brazil, which was Portuguese), and westward as a far as California and even Alaska. By the 19th century, however, Spain had lost the vast majority of its colonies to independence movements. According to the British Library, countries from Mexico to Costa Rica to Colombia, Chile, and Argentina had all gained independence by 1821. By the end of the 19th century, the only Spanish colonial remnants in the Americas were Cuba and Puerto Rico. Aside from these two islands, Spain's only other imperial holdouts in the Western Hemisphere were in the Philippines, Guam, and the Northern Mariana, Marshall, and Carolina Islands in Micronesia. By the dawn of the 20th century, it had lost them all.

As noted by the Library of Congress, trouble began brewing for Spain in Cuba in 1868, when guerrilla fighters called mambises began a campaign for independence. Their struggled ended with a treaty that wasn't honored, and by the 1890s, the fight for Cuban independence was back on. Led by the poet José Martí, who died during the first few weeks of the armed conflict that ensued, this second crack at gaining autonomy set the stage for the Spanish-American war.

POLITICAL DISSENT IN PUERTO RICO AND UNREST IN THE PHILIPPINES

In the last two decades of the 19th century, the push for Puerto Rican independence manifested in the formation of several political parties that campaigned for a break from Spain in one way or another. Some advocated for independence, while others espoused an alliance with the United States. In November 1897, pressure from the United States led Spain to grant Puerto Rico autonomy, and a new government was installed when news finally made it to the island the following year.

Meanwhile, in the Philippines, José Rizal was leading a movement that challenged Spanish authority. After studying in Madrid and writing seditious novels during his travels through Europe in the 1880s, he returned to Manila and founded a peaceful political movement called the Liga Filipina, for which he was promptly exiled to the island of Mindanao. During his exile, a man named Andrés Bonifacio started up a secret society called Katipunan, which pushed for the violent overthrow of the Spanish colonizers. He issued a call to arms on August 26, 1986 called the Grito de Balintawak, and was later betrayed and killed by his successor, Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy. In May 1897, Aguinaldo worked out a deal with the Spanish to be exiled to Hong Kong with a sum of 400,000 pesos, which he invested in weapons in order to continue his plight. Now all the situation needed was a catalyst to propel all of this unrest into all-out war.

THE SINKING OF THE USS MAINE GIVES THE UNITED STATES CAUSE TO DECLARE WAR WITH SPAIN



The Spanish employed increasingly violent tactics to try and quell the revolution in Cuba. Spanish General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau implemented a Reconcentration Policy that rounded up Cuban citizens and concentrated them in centralized locations in order to better control them. He also declared martial law across the entire island. According to History.com, this brutality was vividly portrayed in the U.S. media. Several newspapers engaged in yellow journalism (the original, and actual, fake news) to sensationalize the violence and drum up support for U.S. intervention in the conflict. The New York Journal published a copy of a letter in which the Spanish Foreign Minister harshly criticized President William McKinley. The catalyzing moment came when a ship sent to provide protection to U.S. and property in Havana, the USS Maine, blew up in Havana Harbor on February 15. An inquiry by the U.S. Naval Court found the cause to have been a Spanish mine, though a 1976 report lays the blame on a fire that ignited the ship's ammunition.

Read More: https://www.grunge.com/305059/why-did-we-fight-the-spanish-american-war/?utm_campaign=clip

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From another source, a memorable quote, written by the "Undersecretary of War" Breckenridge on Christmas Eve, 1898. Apparently he wasn't really in the "Christmas mood," yet:

Cuba: The weight of a long history
By Manuel R. Gomez Last updated Mar 2, 2015

President McKinley again unsuccessfully offered to buy Cuba in 1898, shortly before declaring war on Spain. Only a year before, his Undersecretary of War, I.C. Breckenridge, had reflected the annexationist thinking in a memo arguing that: “We must impose a harsh blockade so that hunger and its constant companion, disease, undermine the peaceful population and decimate the Cuban Army….in order to annex the Pearl of the Antilles [Cuba].” He meant the Cuban independence army, who had all but defeated the Spanish well before Roosevelt with his Rough Riders arrived to clean up. It was advocacy of a policy to starve the Cuban population and its army, just to make sure that the U.S. alone could determine the future of the island. The push for annexation eventually failed, in no small part because its supporters realized that Cubans would likely continue their war if the U.S. tried to impose it. Yet those who favored annexation were able to impose the Platt Amendment on the new Cuban Constitution in 1904, in effect granting the US the right to intervene in Cuba for practically any reason the US saw fit. Cuba’s independence was brutally truncated, and the U.S. intervened on the island again in 1906, 1912, 1917 and 1920.

More:
https://progresoweekly.us/cuba-weight-long-history/

[left-of-center2012]

1. Interesting

However in the first paragraph it says the Philippines are in the Western Hemisphere.

Isn't the Western Hemisphere North America and South America?