"--_Colored American_.
* * * * *
The foregoing compliments to the Negro soldiers by Colonel Roosevelt
started up an avalanche of additional praise for them, out of which
the fact came, that but for the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry (colored)
coming up at Las Guasimas, destroying the Spanish block house and
driving the Spaniards off, when Roosevelt and his men had been caught
in a trap, with a barbed-wire fence on one side and a precipice on
the other, not only the brave Capron and Fish, but the whole of his
command would have been annihilated by the Spanish sharp-shooters, who
were firing with smokeless powder under cover, and picking off the
Rough Riders one by one, who could not see the Spaniards. To break the
force of this unfavorable comment on the Rough Riders, it is claimed
that Colonel Roosevelt made the following criticism of the colored
soldiers in general and of a few of them in particular, in an article
written by him for the April Scribner; and a letter replying to
the Colonel's strictures, follows by Sergeant Holliday, who was an
"eye-witness" to the incident:
Colonel Roosevelt's criticism was, in substance, that colored
soldiers were of no avail without white officers; that when the white
commissioned officers are killed or disabled, colored non-commissioned
officers could not be depended upon to keep up a charge already begun;
that about a score of colored infantrymen, who had drifted into his
command, weakened on the hill at San Juan under the galling Spanish
fire, and started to the rear, stating that they intended finding
their regiments, or to assist the wounded; whereupon he drew his
revolver and ordered them to return to ranks and there remain, and
that he would shoot the first man who didn't obey him; and that after
that he had no further trouble.
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