Spanish American War: USS Maine

In January 1898, Spanish military forces had begun to turn the tide against Cuban insurrectionists, but they faced pressure from the U.S. president William McKinley to make concessions. When in response to reforms from Madrid, Spanish officers and Cuban loyalists rioted in Havana, the U.S. consul Fitzhugh Lee requested a warship to protect American lives and property. There also was concern about rumored Spanish intentions to turn Cuba over to Germany. These circumstances induced McKinley to dispatch USS Maine to Havana. The Maine was a second-class battleship whose keel was laid in 1888, though it was not commissioned until 1895.

The Maine arrived off Havana on 25 January; Spanish authorities reluctantly allowed it entry to the harbor and assigned an anchorage. On the night of 15 February, an explosion ripped the ship's hull open, and it sank: more than 260 men, or two-thirds of its complement, were killed. Encouraged by sensationalist newspapers, many Americans believed that the explosion resulted from an external mine set off by the Spaniards. On 21 March 1898 a U.S. Navy court of inquiry concluded that an external explosion caused by unknown persons had detonated one of the Maine's forward ammunition magazines. The court rejected an alternative explanation, that spontaneous combustion in a coal bunker had set off nearby ammunition. So did a second inquiry, held in 1911 when the Maine's half-submerged hulk was raised and examined before being disposed of at sea. In 1975 another inquiry, headed by Admiral Hyman Rickover, definitively reassessed the 1911 photographs and evidence from the wreckage and concluded that the Maine was the victim of an internal explosion from spontaneous combustion in an inadequately ventilated bituminous-coal bunker, which then exploded adjoining magazines. But the explosion's true cause remains a mystery.

Many regard the sinking of the Maine as the primary catalyst for the Spanish–American War. Such simplistic explanations ignore that McKinley tried to avoid war for a month after the court finding; it is best to understand the sinking of the Maine as one more inflammatory event in the combination of factors—economic considerations, ideas of expansionism, patriotism, and nationalism, passions roused by sensationalist journalists, humanitarian considerations—that culminated in the U.S. war declaration in April 1898.