Table Of ContentVolunteers of the Empire
Volunteers of the Empire
War, Identity, and Spanish Imperialism,
1855–1898
Fernando J. Padilla Angulo
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First published in Great Britain 2023
Copyright © Fernando J. Padilla Angulo, 2023
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Cover image © Zappers’ Squad of the Volunteers Battalion of Gibara, 1895–1898,
Spanish National Library, sig. 17-174-35.
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Contents
List of Plates vi
Preface viii
Acknowledgments x
Author’s Note xi
1 Crossroads of Empires in the Antilles 1
2 A Reaction against Annexation 15
3 Saved by the Empire: Morocco, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico 29
4 Against the Revolution (1868–78) 43
5 Fighting the Revolution across the Atlantic 87
6 The Volunteers and the Reconstruction of Cuba 97
7 The Volunteers and the Emergence of Party Politics 107
8 The Volunteers and the Military Challenges of Peace 123
9 The Volunteers’ Last Stand (1895–8) 143
10 The Volunteers in the Philippines 191
11 Dismantling the Volunteers 203
12 After the War 207
Sources Consulted 215
Index 239
Plates
Plate 1 Havana Volunteers. La Ilustración de Madrid, May 27, 1870, p. 8
Plate 2 Havana Volunteers. La Ilustración de Madrid, May 27, 1870, p. 9
Plate 3 J ulián de Zulueta, one of Cuba’s biggest landowners and
slaveholders, as colonel of the 2nd Volunteer Battalion of Havana.
José Joaquín Ribó, Historia de los Voluntarios Cubanos, vol. I,
1872, p. 622
Plate 4 C aptain José Gener Batet, owner of the cigar brand “La Escepción”,
one of the responsibles of the murder of the eight medicine
students on November 27, 1871. El Moro Muza, July 31, 1870, p. 1
Plate 5 C astillo de la Real Fuerza, in Havana, former seat of Cuba’s
Volunteer Subinspector General’s Office. Taken by the author in 2015
Plate 6 M onument to the eight medicine students murdered on November
27, 1871, Havana, unveiled in 1890. Taken by the author in 2015
Plate 7 O fficers of the 3rd Company, 1st Volunteer Battalion of Cárdenas
(Matanzas), 1895. National Library of Spain, Sig. 17-174-62
Plate 8 C uban Volunteers who fought on April 23, 1896 against a party of
400 rebels in Socarrás. Published by the magazine La Caricatura,
Havana, on July 9, 1896. Spain, Ministry of Defence, AGMM,
Iconography, Sig. F-05939
Plate 9 P atriotic Flag of the Volunteers Battalion of Holguín (Oriente).
Museum of the City. Palace of the Captains Generals, Havana.
Taken by the author in 2015
Plate 10 Volunteers of Dimas changing the guard at the Tejar Fort.
Published by La Caricatura, Havana, on July 30, 1896. Signed by
José Gómez de la Carrera on July 18, 1896. Spain, Ministry of
Defence, AGMM, Iconography, Sig. F-05953
Plate 11 Staff of the Volunteer Battalion of Puerto Rico No. 1. Ángel Rivero
Méndez, Crónica de la Guerra Hispanoamericana en Puerto Rico,
1922, p. 449
Plates vii
Plate 12 3rd Company, Loyal Volunteers’ Battalion of Manila, taken
by G. Sternberg, 1896. Spain, Ministry of Defence, AGMM,
Iconography, Sig. F-09200
Plate 13 Officers of the Loyal Volunteers’ Battalion of Manila taken
by G. Sternberg, 1896. Spain, Ministry of Defence, AGMM,
Iconography, Sig. F-09196
Plate 14 A Group of Macabebe Volunteers arriving to the port of Barcelona
aboard the steamship Alicante on June 8, 1900. La Ilustración
Artística, June 18, 1900, p. 402
Preface
This is the story of the men who volunteered in defense of the Spanish Empire over
the second half of the nineteenth century. During the last decades of that century,
thousands of civilians from metropolitan Spain and her territories of the overseas
stepped up to join a militia which would become the single most important armed
wing of Spanish Loyalism and the main auxiliary force to the regular army in Cuba,
Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, and the Philippines: the Volunteers. First created in
Cuba in 1855 at a time when an invasion launched from the United States was a major
threat, soon the Volunteers established a pattern which was replicated in territories
where Spanish rule had to be imposed, such as Santo Domingo during the 1860s, but
also defended, like in Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
For over forty years, essentially men of Spanish ancestry born either in the
metropolitan territory—the peninsulares—or in the Antilles—the creoles—but also
men of African descent and natives of the Philippines gathered under the old banner
of Castile to take the last stands of a centuries-old dying empire in the Caribbean
and the South China Sea. The role of the Volunteers to keep Cuba Spanish during
the island’s first war of independence in 1868–78 was essential. In Puerto Rico, they
embodied the staunchest Spanish loyalism against any revolutionary attempt after
1868. In the aftermath of war, the Volunteers had a hard time trying to find their place
in Spain’s colonial policy in the Antilles. And yet, the Volunteers came to the fight’s
forefront during the last years of the nineteenth century, when Spain was at war against
anticolonial nationalists and their allies, the soldiers and sailors of the United States
in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. It ended badly for Spain, which lost all its
overseas territories, known as Ultramar, reminder of its glorious old past, in 1898 at
a time when other European powers were expanding their empires. The defeat was
known in Spain and still is as the '98 Disaster, and popular memory remembers it as
a disastrous war in which thousands of poor young men who could not afford to pay
the economic exemption from the military service died out of tropical diseases rather
than from enemy bullets in the jungles of Cuba and the Philippines. However, little is
remembered about the Volunteers, part-time militiamen who were recruited locally
and made up around a third of all the Spanish forces fighting in the Antilles and the
Philippines during the wars for independence.
From sugar barons to humble peasants, from tobacco factory owners to cigar makers,
from business tycoons to shopkeepers, from railway owners to coachmen, thousands
of men donned the Volunteers’ uniform in defense of the Spanish sovereignty in far-
flung territories during the second half of the nineteenth century. Theirs was the
story of the Spanish Ultramar during a tragically eventful period in the history of the
Antilles, the Philippines, and Spain itself. World-renowned producers of Cuban rum
and cigars, railway developers and sugar barons in Puerto Rico, business tycoons in
Preface ix
the Philippines, and Spanish thinkers who would later end their lives violently during
the Civil War were counted among their members. But most especially thousands of
young men who left their place behind the counter or the cigar factory bench after
their work shift to take up a rifle and perform unpaid military duties in the many forts,
prisons, and military hospitals scattered throughout the main cities of Spain’s Ultramar.
In the fields, hardworking peasants switched the plow for the rifle and the machete
to defend their town and land plot from harassing revolutionary armies and bandits.
Service could be boring and monotonous during peacetime, but during wartime
the Volunteers gallantly served side by side with the regular army, especially in the
countryside, away from the relative safety of cities like Havana, San Juan, or Manila.
Galvanized by a staunch defense of Spanish sovereignty in far-flung territories,
the fiery patriotism of the Volunteers served well during the wars but could also
degenerate into hatred and gratuitous violence against groups of people they perceived
as enemies of Spain. Poorly educated hardworking young men could easily fell prey
to bigotry and inflammatory speeches against anyone perceived as a foe of Spain. The
Havana of the late 1860s and early 1870s was a good witness of this, as we will see. The
execution of eight innocent university students at the hands of a group of fanaticized
militiamen in Havana in 1871 has been ever since regarded by many as the landmark
in the Volunteers’ history and the epitome of Spanish colonial rule. And yet, the history
of the Volunteers reveals a much more complex past, which impels us to reconsider the
nature of the struggle for independence in the Spanish colonies, especially in Cuba.
Written only twelve years after the end of the last war for independence (1895–8),
when the country was still licking its wounds, in 1910 a local journalist wrote a piece
in Havana’s Diario de la Marina, the most widely read newspaper in Cuba back
then, that Spaniards alone were not to blame for the atrocities that might have been
committed before 1898. After all, he honestly recalled, after thirty years of struggling
for independence, by the time the war started, half the Volunteers and two-thirds of the
Guerrillas—another militia—were Cubans.1 Something very similar can be said about
Puerto Rico’s Volunteers, while many natives of the Philippines joined Volunteers units
during its war for independence. In line with what a Cuban journalist wrote over a
century ago, this book reveals that anticolonial wars in the Spanish Empire during
the second half of the nineteenth century were essentially civil wars, during which the
Volunteers played an essential role.
In Spain, the history of these men remains essentially forgotten. In Puerto Rico,
the events around 1898 are basically understood as the brief war which caused the
change of colonial ruler. In Cuba and the Philippines, their wars for independence
are essentially remembered and celebrated as fights for freedom in which the people
summoned under the flag of freedom against the old Spanish colonial yoke, often
concealing the fact that thousands of Cubans and Filipinos stood loyal to Spain and
fought against the very independence ideal in the Volunteer units. In Spain as well as
in the territories lost in 1898, the history of the Volunteers remains largely untold and
forgotten. This book aims at telling their story.
1 The journalist was Mariano Aramburu. Diario de la Marina, 26-03-1910, p. 2.
