Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire

by Joe Jackson

This immersive epic reveals the origins of the American empire and the lives of those who promoted it and those who resisted it.

In 1898, the United States won an empire, and—many allege—lost its soul. In Liberators, Joe Jackson offers an epic narrative of the Spanish-American War, the world-spanning conflict during which the United States freed Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from Spanish control only to confront resistance and resentment. The acclaimed author of Black Elk, Jackson brings the times to full, teeming life via portraits of the many leading characters—from the impetuous warrior Teddy Roosevelt, the prophetic Cuban revolutionary José Martí, and the Philippines’ dignified first president, Emilio Aguinaldo, to the Red Cross’s Clara Barton and the foe of empire Mark Twain. He ranges from the heroic theaters of San Juan Hill and Manila Bay to disease-wracked camps in Florida and Cuba where soldiers died en masse and to the White House and halls of Congress, where America’s leaders overcame enduring reluctances to seize an overseas dominion. He also follows the exploits of the legendary African American soldier David Fagen, who joined the rebels of the Philippines and fought his compatriots, and the swashbuckling Colonel Fred Funston, who was dispatched into the jungle to hunt him down.

Overturning familiar scripts, Liberators is the first work of narrative nonfiction to look at this far-flung war through American, Cuban, and Filipino eyes, and to gauge the consequences and costs of America's first major imperial adventure.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Military History, Audiobook

816 pages, Hardcover

Published October 14, 2025

About the author

Librarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Joe 2^ Jackson: GR Author, Sports, Self Help
Joe 3^ Jackson: GR Author, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality
Joe 4^ Jackson: British musician
Joe 5^ Jackson: GR Author, Fantasy, Horror
Joe 6^ Jackson: History
Joe 7^ Jackson: Irish journalist, author, broadcaster

Reviews

['Aussie Rick' · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received an ARC from NetGalley of "Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire" by Joe Jackson in exchange for this review. The hardback edition of this book runs to over 800 pages with a number of maps providing details of the area of military operations in Cuba and the Philippines. There is also six pages of Dramatis Personae to help you keep track of who is who and detailed notes.

This book is a detailed, but easy to read account of the Spanish-American War in which the author tracks how Americans came as liberators but later morphed into oppressors. The story is told through American, Cuban, and Filipino eyes, with first-hand accounts from soldiers, guerillas, civilians and politicians. In the Prologue the author provides an outline of the story he is about to tell:

"The consequences were as momentous as casualties were light: overnight it seemed the nation morphed into an imperialistic power in the mold of the European empires it disparaged. This was the war in which General Jacob Smith demanded, “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn”; in which American doctors and a nurse martyred themselves against yellow fever; in which black Americans watched prejudice grow worse; in which an exhausted Clara Barton wrote, “Had the nation gone mad?” Others felt uneasy about a change they did not understand. On October 12, 1899, Minnesota governor John Lind tiptoed around his misgivings when welcoming home state volunteers from the Philippines: “The mission of the American volunteer soldier has come to an end. For the purposes of conquest he is unfit, since he carries a conscience as well as a gun.” The United States was born in revolt; it survived the cataclysmic rebellion of 1861–1865. But not until the conflict in Cuba and the Philippines did America’s love of war become so bold that one can track the transformation. On June 2, 1897, Theodore Roosevelt told students of the Naval War College: “All the great masterful races have been fighting races, and the minute that a race loses the hard fighting virtues, then … no matter how skilled in commerce and finance, in science or art, it has lost its proud right to stand as the equal of the best … No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war.” The speech was published to glowing reviews and would be, in one form or another, justification for military buildup throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With the events in Cuba and the Philippines, the United States increasingly became a “culture of war” with a sense of global purpose, prone to jingoistic eruptions. The rhetoric of war became that of patriotism: “God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration,” claimed the Roosevelt ally Albert Beveridge. “No, he has made us the master organizers of the world” in order to govern “savages and senile peoples.” Even the Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper scribe William Allen White would rationalize the change: “It is the Anglo-Saxon’s manifest destiny to go forth in the world as a world conqueror. He will take possession of all the islands of the sea. He will exterminate the peoples he cannot subjugate. That is what fate holds for the chosen people. It is so written. Those who would protest will find their objections overruled. It is to be.”"

The first few chapters covers Spain's efforts to hold Cuba and the Philippines against increasing resistance from its inhabitants. Things are going so badly for Spain that they send Weyler, the "Butcher" to get things under control:

"On January 21, 1896, Campos left for Spain. Twenty days later, Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau arrived. Born in 1838 to a Prussian father and a Spanish mother, the man called the 'Butcher' had a knack for crushing revolts, first in Spain, next around Santiago, and finally in the Philippines from 1888 to 1891. 'I know I am merciless,' he once told a reporter, 'but mercy has no place in war.' When Campos returned to Spain, he told friends that 'even the dead will rise out of their graves to fight Weyler'."

On arrival in Cuba, Weyler adopts the strategy of 'reconcentrado' - similar to the concentration camps set up by the British during the Boer War with the following drastic results:

"No one knows how many reconcentrados died. Census figures show that Cuba's 1894 population stood at 1,631,696; in 1899, one year after America's invasion, it dropped by 58,851 to 1,572,845. Death emptied the countryside, dropping population density from 42.05 people per square mile in 1896 to 36.68 two years later. Even this is debatable. According to an 1897 fact-finding mission by the Spanish newspaper editor Jose Canalejas, 'at least a third of the rural population,' or 400,000 Cubans, had already died, and another 200,000 faced death before Weyler's policies could be reversed. If true, this would be proportionally higher than Russia's death toll during World War II. Fitzhugh Lee estimated 75,000 deaths in Havana alone, and 300,000 across the island. Today the best estimate seems based on the census and the work of the Spanish historian Jordi de Motes, who concluded the 155,000 to 170,000 reconcentrados died. Though not quite the 300,000-400,000 of legend, this is still enormous, accounting for nearly 10 percent of Cuba's total population."

The author not only details events occurring in Cuba and the Philippines but also back home in America, where Black soldiers serving as Buffalo Soldiers face increasing racism and hostility. This is a consist theme throughout the book as we follow these men to the battlefields and then back home. One example that the author highlighted was the Tampa riot:

"At dawn on June 7, the most infamous moment occurred: some drunken white Ohioans snatched up a two-year-old African American boy and used him for target practice. One held him up by his feet and spanked him with a shingle as others cheered; he then held the boy at arm's length as others used him for target practice. One bullet pierced the boy's sleeve and grazed his arm. Only then did the soldiers hand the child back to his hysterical mother and move on.

Members of the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth who'd witnessed this were not laughing. They raged through the streets, firing pistols, wrecking saloons, mobbing white brothels. By nine a.m. matters were so serious that a battalion of the Second Georgia was called to supress the riot: 'Killing niggers,' they said, was their job. 'Bring me back a scalp,' onlookers cried. Order was resorted that afternoon. Though the Tampa Morning Tribune called the 'riot' nothing more than a string of isolated incidents, several Georgia volunteers and twenty-seven black soldiers were rushed to the hospital at Atlanta's Fort McPherson, all in serious condition. Two black soldiers were found dead; no one was arrested or charged. It was safer to fight in Cuba than to stay home."

Once American soldiers hit the shores of Cuba and later the Philippines, the biggest danger was not the battlefield, but disease, and sadly the U.S. Army was not prepared for what was to come.  It didn't take long before Yellow fever hit U.S. troops in Cuba:

"The specter they’d dreaded was here. The first case was reported on July 6; three more in Siboney on July 9. On July 13 the official count was 150. “Yellow Jack,” named for the quarantine flag, was the army’s great fear. It was the Black Death of its day, a plague of unknown origin that had been in the Americas since the 1600s, breaking out in periodic urban epidemics that claimed tens of thousands. It began with severe aches, headache, and fever, and at this stage resembled calenture, which meant that severe calenture was often misdiagnosed as yellow fever. Its final act fueled the fear—an eruption of black blood and stomach lining that covered everyone near. Though rarely mentioned in war histories, a “disease panic” set in. Malaria and tuberculosis killed just as many people, yet the yellow fever epidemics of 1793, 1878, 1888, and the 1890s had spread with no known reason, and there seemed no place to hide. Many soldiers fighting in Santiago had been children during the terrible 1878 epidemic that raged through the Mississippi and Ohio valleys. George Kennan believed that yellow fever and calenture would kill them all. “In less than a fortnight,” he wrote, “there were thousands of cases, and nearly one half of the army was unfit for active service, if not completely disabled.” But one did not write about this: to do so meant being called “unpatriotic, disloyal, and even seditious.” Do so, and the army revoked your press credentials. And so, at first, silence reigned."

And;  

"“The question is now, which nation shall possess the world?” scribbled the forty-two-year-old Princeton professor. “It is not simply a matter of expediency … It is a question also of moral obligation. What ought we to do?” The answer was obvious to Charles Post, still outside Santiago: Get us out of here! On July 26, 630 new fever cases sprang up among American troops; the next day, another 822 cases were recorded. The total sick list stood at 4,122, of which 3,193 were diagnosed as fever. That day, a mere 542 men reported for duty. The entire corps slid into a “wretched condition”: men entertained the “darkest forebodings.” And people kept dying. Each morning after reveille, Post would hear rifle volleys from burial details in the hills, then the simple notes of the bugle: “Taps, those slow, steady, and plaintiff notes that mark the end of a day or the end of a soldier’s life.” Each day, more died: Joe Howard and John Dinan, in separate hospitals; Johnny Shaw, in his dog tent; Fred Engels, on a mercy ship. “The volleys became more frequent and one bugle followed another throughout the day.” They followed one another “as if they were but echoes among the hills.”"

The campaign in Cuba was relatively civilized but once in the Philippines the war dragged on and many American soldiers struggled with why they were there and what they were trying to accomplish against a deadly climate, harsh terrain and a people who did not want them there. Before long American soldiers started committing atrocities in the Philippines:

"To one Englishman, the Yanks seemed possessed by a 'mad fury': he watched as 'houses were ransacked, women raped, jewels taken and villages burned under the pretext of searching for hidden arms.' In Pandacan, when soldiers chanced upon some 'bewildered women carrying their smallpox-stricken children,' they ripped them from their embrace 'and threw them in the flames.' A letter in The North American Review gloried: 'I tell you that this war is great and I love it, as long as I am not killed in it ... Destroy, burn, kill - It's beautiful! As soon as your blood is heated up, nothing stops you; you become enraged and destroy as much as you can'."

We start to read about moving the native populations into concentration areas, opening up 'free-fire' zones, killing all livestock and burning all produce and huts, killing anyone in the area without a pass. Atrocity and retribution piles up on both sides with American soldiers and administrators seeming to lose its moral compass. Then we read about big business moving in, like in Cuba:

"Before 1899, almost every tobacco company on the island was Cuban- or Spanish-owned. By May 1902 North American companies controlled more than 50 percent of cigar and cigarette production and more than 90 percent of the export trade."

And:

"Wood granted more than 218 mining concessions to U.S. companies, which soon owned more than 80 percent of the country's ore exports. Cuba might seem independent, but controls had been set allowing the U.S. to dominate its economy and government for the next sixty years."

So in the end, America had gained an empire but seems to have lost part of its soul in the bargain, and the repercussions still reverberate even today. The war seemed to justify notions of white supremacy and racial hierarchy that was carried over into other later wars involving America and which ended up with the same type of callous treatment of civilians and atrocities.

In closing the author makes this point:

"Memory has not been kind to what is known in the United States as the Philippine-American War. Today, few Americans know the details, and few memorials remain. It produced no great works of American literature or film. It made a national hero of Frederick Funston and a demon of David Fagen, but both have been forgotten. It led Mark Twain to despair about the changing nature of his nation’s soul. Where the Cuban campaign lasted a few weeks, that in the Philippines slogged from 1899 to 1902, by some accounts to 1906, by others to 1913. Scholars believe that some twenty thousand Filipino soldiers died in battle, while up to one million civilians succumbed to disease, starvation, genocidal madness, and American cruelties that became known worldwide."

Overall this was a sober but very interesting read and at no stage did I get bored with the narrative. It was well told and gripping and I am sure any fan of military history will find this book an excellent account.

[Clyde Toland · Rating 1 out of 5]

Some Red Flags: 1. No bibliography, preventing potential readers from evaluating scope of author’s research and thus its quality. Impossible to tell easily whether book relies on outdated scholarship or includes latest scholarship, which frequently refutes prior scholarship and provides new information. In 2022, I published after 24 years researching and writing my Becoming Frederick Funston Trilogy (vol. one received a 2023 Spur Award from Western Writers of America). Author appears not to have consulted this work, since, concerning Funston, a major book subject, he at times repeats certain canards now proven false, omits information providing different perspectives, and trilogy not cited in endnotes that I have reviewed to date. 2. Cover illustration: “Battle of Desmayo.” Book’s subject is Spanish-American War of 1898, so logically battle occurred during that war. NOT SO, battle occurring on Oct. 8,1896, between revolutionary Cubans and their Spanish oppressors. 3. Photograph: Frederick Funston in uniform of “U. S. 20th Kansas Volunteer Infantry.” NOT SO, Funston being in uniform of U. S. Army.
Additional information about #2 above: The cover illustration has this complete title on the book jacket: “Battle of Desmayo---The Cuban Balaklava.” This is nearly the same title (“Desmayo---The Cuban Balaklava”) of the article by an American-battle-participant which appeared in Harper’s Weekly, March 5, 1898, before the start of the Spanish-American War. The participant/author? Frederick Funston. And the battle illustration used on Splendid Liberators’s cover? It accompanied this article!
Author Joe Jackson does not discuss the Battle of Desmayo, the illustration of which adorns his book’s cover, anywhere that I can find in his book. There undoubtedly are countless photographs and illustrations of various battles of the Spanish-American War of 1898. Why did the author or publisher or whoever was responsible take an illustration from an 1896 battle which occurred during the Cuban War of Independence (1895-1898) and use it on the cover of an 816-page book which focuses on a completely different war? This may be a first: illustrate the cover of a book about a war with a battle scene from a different war!
P. S. According to author Jackson, Funston was awarded two Medals of Honor, one for service in the Philippine War, and one for capturing Aguinaldo. The former is true; the latter is not. And finally, Funston had no middle initial according to the family Bible of his parents. The author gives him the middle initial of “N.”

[David Dayen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a scrap of history that escaped me; the moment of American foray into imperialism, reached so easily and without much second-guessing (outside of a sharp Mark Twain, years after the nation was already committed). I really enjoyed the depth here, not only about McKinley and Roosevelt and more minor players like Frederick Funston (so that's why there's a street named after him in San Francisco) and Black dissident turned Phillippine guerilla David Fagen, but the Cuban and Filipino leaders of their respective revolutions, the ones in the Phillippines who keep fighting, etc. This filled a knowledge gap and also reinforced the eternal recurrence of history: the "sinking" of the Maine like the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the massacres in the Phillippines reminiscent of My Lai, the justifications for war and brutality ever familiar. Terrific work.

[JARRETT Robinson · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book has serious issues! For the casual reader, without concern for facts and sources, this book is deceptively thick and flowery. However, if you know enough about the subject matter, you will see numerous errors. Even the illustrations include two glaring errors! Many outdated or discredited sources are used, but it is hard to tell the sources in many cases. The book lacks real notes to verify. It is a frustrating book that does not do the subject justice.

[J.Istsfor Manity · Rating 5 out of 5]

Violence is woven too deeply in the history and practice of American culture to be ignored.

***

On July 3, before victory, Governor William O. Bradley of Kentucky worried that the war would turn Americans into an aggressive and war-waging people." He predicted that "the acquisition of one piece of territory begets a desire for another, and in the end an effort to take by force that which justly belongs to others will lead to the loss of all we have."

***

Yet executing ten-year-olds seemed beyond the pale. Even Funston did not endorse killing children. Balangiga changed that: one can make the case that this is the pivotal moment, not only in the war itself but in the American way of making war. Jake Smith's statement echoed Phil Sheridan's call for total annihilation of the enemy in the Civil and Indian wars. The easy success of the Splendid War transformed America into a martial society, and Smith's template appears over the next two centuries in conflicts in which an entrenched enemy, of a different race, turns to guerrilla tactics; it informs "police actions" in the many "Banana Republics," Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq's Abu Ghraib. The Philippine War was the first time Sheridan's dictates spread beyond America, during our premier attempt to "civilize the world." There is no great difference between Smith's command to Waller and Captain Ernest Medina's nearly identical March 16, 1968, briefing before the My Lai Massacre. "Our job is to go in rapidly, and to neutralize everything," he allegedly told Charlie Company. "To kill everything." After Balangiga, the American public accepted the fatal logic of "pacification": it becomes a "necessity" lodged inside American memory that refuses to disappear.

— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire

[Scott Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This work reexamines a lesser studied aspect of American history, mainly the Spanish American War, looking at the near concurrent campaigns against Cuba and Philippines. The author starts with the set up to the war, between the long-standing interest that the US had in Cuba and the rise of American power. The controversy with the Maine set off the nation into a degree of war footing that McKinley had no choice but to follow. From there, this work jumps into the military campaigns, doing a fairly effective job of puncturing some of the mythology of the actual fighting, especially in Cuba. While the Cuban campaign was a relatively short conflict, the seeds of long-simmering dissent would come from that war. This work doesn’t focus so much on a deeper analysis of the post-war occupation much beyond the first couple of years, but how the US acted and treated its new Cuban “subjects” did much to set the stage for Castro, etc. Then you get to the Philippines. This one turned into a counterinsurgency campaign, with long-standing difficult terrain fights and cruelty meted out on both sides of the conflict. It was a longer term operation, one that the US did actually suppress, but at a cost in manpower and prestige.

Given the recent political turn in the US, with emphasis on American interest and potential direct intervention back in Latin America, works like this can be fairly useful in considering what worked and what didn’t in such pursuits. Yes, the Philippines are not Latin America, but direct military intervention and longer-term “securing of US interests” are applicable to today’s geo-political environment. How much policy-makers will learn from this history is unknown, but it is good to consider the past to at least where things could go in the future. Worth the read regardless of format.

[Critter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an audio ARC.

This is a very thorough look at the Spanish American war. Jackson attempts to look at the conflict through the eyes of different players during this event. I think the author does a good job portraying some attitudes and thoughts that people had during the time. I do think this book is well written and provides a look at the time period, places, and people involved in the Spanish American war and in trying to show the lives of the people involved. I also think the narrator was fantastic and a great choice for this book.

[Kyle Foley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew the very basics about the Spanish-American War, but not much else. Jackson does a wonderful job of giving an in-depth look at all of the actors, including some more obscure ones just to give added context and humanity to the conflict. It’s essentially the start of the United States Empire, so it was fascinating to learn so much in a digestible way. Highly recommend if you want to learn more about this time period in American history.

I was provided an ARC by the publisher, but this review is entirely my own.

[Len Boselovic · Rating 5 out of 5]

When it comes to chronicling everything that makes America "great," Jackson touches all the bases: patriots who rape, pillage, torture and murder the innocent in their righteous commitment to the white man's burden. Hubris, white supremacy, misguided religious fervor, and bigotry complete the picture. This is disturbing history at its best. Jackson's reminder that Theodore Roosevelt, a major proponent of this splendid liberation, was basically a six-year-old whose "forte was accusation and insult" makes one think that maybe Herr Drumpf does belong on Mount Rushmore.

[Bryan Fichter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't say this lightly: Splendid Liberators should win a Pulitzer Prize for history. It's that good. The author brings to life an era that most Americans have forgotten (if they ever knew), and at the same time he examines the corrosive effects of American becoming an empire; those effects linger with us still. Extraordinary writing.

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Spanish American War and Filipino Insurrection were turning points in America’s moral life. Turning points for the worse. The reasons why are well identified.