Who won the Battle of San Juan Hill?
The Battle of San Juan Hill was fought on 1 July 1898 near Santiago de Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and was an American victory. US troops, including Theodore Roosevelt's volunteer Rough Riders and the regular army's African-American Buffalo Soldiers, stormed the Spanish-held San Juan Heights. The victory led to the fall of Santiago and helped establish the United States as a world power; it also made Roosevelt a national hero.5
On a hot Cuban day in 1898, American soldiers charged uphill into Spanish rifle fire on the San Juan Heights. Among them was a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, and the charge would carry him toward the White House.6
The Spanish-American War
In 1898 the United States went to war with Spain, and an American army landed in Cuba to take the port of Santiago, where a Spanish fleet lay trapped. Blocking the way were fortified ridges east of the city, the San Juan Heights and the village of El Caney.7
The road to war ran through Havana Harbor, where the battleship USS Maine blew up on 15 February 1898, killing more than 250 American sailors; war was declared in April. In May Admiral Pascual Cervera's squadron slipped into Santiago and was blockaded there. Major General William R. Shafter's Fifth Corps, some 17,000 men including nearly 3,000 Black regulars, began landing at Daiquirí on 22 June. According to the Library of Congress, about 5,000 Cuban revolutionaries under General Calixto García joined them, and on 24 June the cavalry won a first fight at Las Guásimas.8
The heights above Santiago
On 1 July the Americans attacked. At El Caney a small Spanish force held up a much larger American column for hours. Before the San Juan Heights, US troops crowded in the open under accurate Spanish fire, taking losses while they waited to advance.9
Shafter's plan, as the National Archives' Prologue magazine reconstructs it, was for Brigadier General Henry W. Lawton's division of about 6,600 men to take El Caney in a couple of hours and then swing in beside the main attack. Instead some 500 Spanish soldiers held the village and its stone fort until late afternoon, and their commander, General Joaquín Vara de Rey, was killed in the fighting. That left about 8,000 men of Brigadier General Jacob F. Kent's infantry division and the dismounted cavalry division, led by Brigadier General Samuel S. Sumner in place of the sick Joseph Wheeler, to face the heights alone, with a Signal Corps observation balloon overhead that gave the Spanish gunners a perfect aiming mark.10
The charge
At last the order came and the Americans went up the slopes, supported by Gatling guns. Regular infantry and dismounted cavalry, including Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders, drove the Spanish from Kettle Hill and the San Juan ridge in a series of rushes that became the famous charge up San Juan Hill.11
Crucial support came from Lieutenant John H. Parker's Gatling guns, which by the National Archives' account raked the Spanish trenches for a little over eight minutes; the historian David Trask credits this fire with forcing the defenders off the summit of San Juan Hill. The cavalry went up Kettle Hill, a smaller rise that the same account says was named for the sugar kettles of an abandoned mill, while Kent's infantry climbed San Juan Hill, some 400 yards to the southwest. The Spanish fell back to a second line, and the exhausted Americans dug in on the crest overlooking Santiago.12
Did Roosevelt charge up San Juan Hill or Kettle Hill?
Mainly Kettle Hill. Roosevelt rode at the head of the Rough Riders up Kettle Hill, the knoll in front of the main ridge, beside regulars of the 1st, 9th and 10th Cavalry. Only then did the cavalry cross to the northern end of San Juan Hill, so in his legend "San Juan Hill" means the whole heights.13
Roosevelt's own reports and his 1899 book The Rough Riders blurred the two hills, and the correspondent Richard Harding Davis made him the hero of the day. His commanders recommended him for the Medal of Honor, but the War Department turned the request down. President Bill Clinton presented the medal posthumously on 16 January 2001; its citation still speaks of "a desperate and gallant charge up San Juan Hill."14
Roosevelt, the Rough Riders and the Buffalo Soldiers
Roosevelt's leadership made him a celebrity, but much of the hardest fighting was done by the regular army, including the African-American regiments known as the Buffalo Soldiers, whose part was long underplayed in popular accounts. The victory on the heights was a shared feat of volunteers and regulars alike.15
The 9th and 10th Cavalry went up Kettle Hill beside the Rough Riders, and the 24th Infantry joined the assault on the San Juan blockhouse. In The Rough Riders Roosevelt recorded that on the far right of Kettle Hill the men of the Ninth "were first up." Edward L. Baker Jr. of the 10th Cavalry pulled a wounded comrade out of the San Juan River under fire and later received the Medal of Honor; Lieutenant John J. Pershing wrote that the Black regulars "fought their way into the hearts of the American people." Yet the same book of Roosevelt's disparaged Black soldiers, and Trooper Presley Holliday of the 10th wrote in reply that his statement was "uncalled for and uncharitable."16
How many soldiers fought and died at San Juan Hill?
Roughly 8,000 Americans attacked the heights and about 6,600 more fought at El Caney, against somewhere between 500 and 1,200 Spanish on the San Juan line and about 500 at El Caney. American losses that day came to some 1,300 to 1,500 killed and wounded, more than 200 of them killed; Spanish losses were roughly 550 to 600.17
The cost fell unevenly. The Rough Riders, about 490 strong that morning, lost 15 killed and 73 wounded by the National Archives' count, and 26 Buffalo Soldiers died in the fight for the heights. The Army Medical Department's official history counts as many as 1,200 wounded from the two battles, 932 of them from San Juan Hill.18
Why San Juan Hill mattered
Taking the heights sealed off Santiago, whose Spanish fleet was destroyed trying to escape days later, and the city soon surrendered. The short war left the United States a power with overseas territories, and carried Theodore Roosevelt toward the vice presidency and then the presidency.19
On 3 July Cervera's squadron tried to break out of the harbor and was destroyed by the American fleet. Santiago's new commander, General José Toral, agreed on 16 July to surrender the roughly 23,500 Spanish troops around the city, and the formal ceremony followed on 17 July. Then disease took over: by the end of July almost a fifth of Shafter's men were in the hospital, and of the roughly 3,000 Americans who died in the war, about 90 percent died of illness. The Treaty of Paris of 10 December 1898 ended Spanish rule in Cuba, ceded Puerto Rico and Guam and sold the Philippines to the United States for $20 million; there a new war soon followed, at places such as Tirad Pass.20
How is San Juan Hill remembered today?
Through Roosevelt and, increasingly, the Buffalo Soldiers. According to Arlington National Cemetery, which holds more Spanish-American War memorials than any other American site, friends of the regiment raised a Rough Riders Memorial there in 1906, dedicated on 12 April 1907, and President Roosevelt dedicated its Spanish-American War Memorial on 21 May 1902.21
Historians have since put the Black regulars back into the story: the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library now calls the popular narrative of "Theodore Roosevelt's victory at San Juan Hill" incomplete. For Roosevelt's road to the White House, see our profile of Theodore Roosevelt, and for other soldiers who became American legends, America's greatest military heroes. Pershing later made our list of the greatest American commanders.22
