The Sinking of the USS Maine

Crompton, Samuel Willard. The Sinking of the USS Maine: Declaring War Against Spain. 2009. 114p. ISBN 978-1-60413-049-2. Available at 973.8 CRO on the library shelves.

The battleship U.S.S. Maine was one of the first ships to join the new steel Navy. Built in 1889, the Maine was assigned to the Atlantic fleet and made several trips in the Caribbean. It would come to symbolize America’s anger at Spain.

Long a strong imperial power, Spain had colonized all of Central and South America, but beginning at the turn of the century the Spanish Empire lost its colonies one at a time until only Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under their control. The Cuban people revolted in a bloody civil war that solved nothing, so a few decades later a new civil war began. This time, both sides were brutal in their attacks and their treatment of local populations. Concentration camps were erected, and many starved to death.

Seeing this misery, and agitated by a strong Cuban lobby in New York City, the United States expressed its wishes that peace would come to the island, and by an expansionist vision of US dominance of the American hemisphere. To protect American interests the Maine was dispatched to Havana.

On February 15, 1898, an explosion rocked the Maine, and the ship quickly sank, killing 260 sailors. Amid tensions between the two nations over the status of Cuba, the sinking of the Maine, attributed at the time to a Spanish mine, led down the path to war between the United States and Spain.

Over the course of the year, the United States and Spain fought a series of one-sided engagements which led to the defeat of the Spanish fleet near Santiago, Cuba, as well as of the Pacific squadron near Manilla, in the Philippines. American forces occupied Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, and in the end acquired a colonial empire.

This book tells the story of the Maine, as well as the actions taken by several major historical figures such as Clara Barton and Theodore Roosevelt that led to war, then an uneasy peace with Spain, and in the process vaulted the United States to the rank of world powers to be taken seriously by the old countries in Europe.