transitioned from being governor of Santiago to serving as military governor of all of Cuba during the crucial years 1899–1902, during which time he superintended the process of demobilizing the Cuban Army of Liberation and installing a framework for circumscribing Cuba’s sovereignty for the next three decades.
Popular accounts of the War of 1898 and its aftermath in the Philippines, Cuba, and the other colonies of Spain that became American protectorates or outright possessions in 1898 tend to stress the novelty of the moment when the United States landed troops overseas and installed its first colonial regimes abroad. According to the textbook view, the Spanish-American War represents the moment the United States emerged on the world stage and began to grapple with the challenges and contradictions of having an empire. In contrast to this view of U.S. colonies as an aberration or afterthought in the nation’s course of development, there is another well-developed strain in the history of U.S. empire that focuses on continuity, rather than disjuncture, in American territorial expansion at the end of the nineteenth century. It is this tradition of examining the legacies and transformations of ongoing practices of American empire that I follow in this book.19
Of particular significance for my analysis of how colonial relations abroad were patterned on domestic Indian policy is an oft-cited but little heeded article published by Walter L. Williams in 1980. Williams’s article, “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism,” which appeared in the Journal of American History, made a compelling case for considering U.S. relations with Indians as a form of domestic colonialism. He demonstrated that turn-of-the-century politicians on both sides of the annexation question, as well as leaders in the fields of religion, philanthropy, and the military, all invoked the precedent of U.S. relations with Indian wards as a model for overseas colonial relations. Nineteenth-century Indian policy, wrote Williams, “served as a precedent for imperialist domination over the Philippines and other islands occupied during the Spanish-American War.”20
Among the institutions surveyed in Williams’s article—Congress, the Supreme Court, religious denominations, and philanthropic Friends of the Indians—the frontier army receives some attention. Williams spends a few pages analyzing continuities between the army’s most recent experience of Indian Wars in the West and the idea that American soldiers abroad viewed—and fought—the 1899–1902 insurrection in the Philippines as more of the same.21
Although Williams focused his analysis on the Philippines, his observations on the continuity of personnel and the saliency of their recent Indian fighting for subsequent colonial policy making applies equally to the U.S. military enterprise in Cuba and Puerto Rico. In one sense, none of this is remarkable. In the three decades following the Civil War, the army’s main function was to support the westward course of territorial expansion, a task that involved policing Indians and enforcing Grant’s Peace Policy of confining them to reservations and defining as hostile those who resisted. In a calculation of the cost of the nation’s Indian Wars, the U.S. Census Office reported in 1894 that the government had spent $800 million on military actions against indigenous people since independence. Excepting the War of 1812, the U.S.-Mexican War, and the Civil War, “at least three-fourths of the total expense of the army is chargeable, directly or indirectly, to the Indians,” the report found.22
The army sent overseas in 1898 was preeminently an Indian-fighting army, in other words. Military historians have certainly taken note of this fact. In his book about the U.S. War in the Philippines, David Silbey makes this connection explicitly. Brian McAllister Linn’s definitive histories of the Philippine-American War acknowledge the Indian fighting backgrounds of individual commanders as they trace institutional continuities between the frontier army and the adaptation of that army to the requirements of colonial service abroad.23
Senior military leaders—men like Miles, Merritt, and Wood—who led invasions and commanded the initial occupation of Spain’s former colonies, are important to our story of the domestic Indian Country roots of overseas colonial rule. These generals all have their place in the chapters that follow. To describe the arc of imperial expansion, however, the book focuses in greatest detail on the experiences of three junior army officers.
The men profiled in these pages, Hugh Lenox Scott, Robert Lee Bullard, and John J. Pershing, were all shaped as soldiers and as future colonial officials by their formative experiences in what each of them referred to as “Indian Country.” Like others in the military enterprise of which they were a part, each internalized ways of behaving in Indian Country that shaped his actions in later colonial appointments in Cuba and in the Philippines. In 1916 all three played prominent roles directing the massive force of roving occupation known as the Punitive Expedition dispatched across the border by President Woodrow Wilson, in which northern Mexico figured as the new Indian Country.
Upon graduating from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1876, 1885, and 1886 respectively, each of the officers whose career is traced here received a commission on the frontier which involved him in the final skirmishes, punitive expeditions, and policing actions that were hallmarks of Indian fighting on the Great Plains and in the borderlands in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
During the time he was stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, Hugh Lenox Scott served as Geronimo’s jailer, and also commanded a troop of Indian scouts in which he served. Mustered out of service in 1897, the Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche scouts of Fort Sill’s Troop L constituted the last of such units of indigenous auxiliaries created by Congress in 1866 for service in the Territories and Indian Country. In his later career as a colonial official in Cuba and the Philippines, and as special emissary to Pancho Villa, Scott drew heavily on his experience of frontier warfare and diplomacy and especially on methods he had developed for interacting with those he called wild men.
Born on a cotton plantation in Alabama in 1861, William Bullard changed his name to Robert Lee in honor of the Confederate general and claimed to be the first southerner to carry that name back to West Point after the Civil War. Following his graduation in 1885, Bullard took part in the last campaign against Geronimo on the Arizona-Sonora border. At the start of the Spanish-American War, Bullard leveraged his home-state connections to get command of a black volunteer regiment.
Like Bullard, John J. Pershing began his army service chasing Apaches in the borderlands. When Nelson Miles summoned troops from all over the West to form a cordon around the Sioux reservations during the Ghost Dance scare, Second Lieutenant Pershing was part of an eight-company contingent of the Sixth Cavalry that made the train trip from New Mexico to South Dakota, along with all their horses and mules. In the aftermath of the Wounded Knee massacre, Pershing remained on the Pine Ridge Reservation until the company of Oglala scouts he commanded was disbanded the following summer. From policing Indians on both the Mexican and Canadian borders in the 1880s and 1890s, Pershing’s career followed the trajectory of American expansion to Cuba and the Philippines. Twenty-three years later, in the final year of his governorship of Moro Province in the Philippines, Pershing’s efforts to disarm Tausug warriors on the island of Joló would again lead to fear and resistance and a desperate last stand by Tausug men, women, and children inside the fortified mountain crater of Bud Bagsak in June 1913. In the military assault on that stronghold, Pershing deployed two specially organized companies of Moro Scouts as well as Philippine Scouts.24 Key to the army’s ability to track, engage, and treat with Indians in the West, indigenous auxiliaries (scouts, interpreters, and constabulary) became an integral part of pacification in the Philippines and Cuba as well.25 In 1916 the Punitive Expedition led by Pershing crossed the border in pursuit of Francisco “Pancho” Villa just seventy miles south of Fort Bayard where Pershing had begun his career in Indian Country thirty years earlier.
The origins of Indian Country can be traced to the commitment of Anglo-American colonists to racial exclusion. In contrast to the French and Spanish who regarded native populations as “intrinsic to their imperial projects,” the British sought to distance and exclude natives, both politically and geographically.
