Almost the entire Regular Army with several volunteer regiments were organized into an Army of Invasion and placed under the command of Major-General W.R.  Shafter with orders to prepare immediately for embarkation, and on the 7th and 10th of June this army went on board the transports.  For seven days the troops lay cooped up on the vessels awaiting orders to sail, a rumor having gained circulation that certain Spanish gunboats were hovering around in Cuban waters awaiting to swoop down upon the crowded transports.  While the Army of Invasion was sweltering in the ships lying at anchor off Port Tampa, a small body of American marines made a landing at Guantanamo, and on June 12th fought the first battle between Americans and Spaniards on Cuban soil.  In this first battle four Americans were killed.  The next day, June 13th, General Shafter’s army containing the four colored regiments, excepting those left behind to guard property, sailed for Cuba.[13]

The whole number of men and officers in the expedition, including those that came on transports from Mobile, amounted to about seventeen thousand men, loaded on twenty-seven transports.  The colored regiments were assigned to brigades as follows:  The Ninth Cavalry was joined with the Third and Sixth Cavalry and placed under command of Colonel Carrol; the Tenth Cavalry was joined with the Rough Riders and First Regular Cavalry and fell under the command of General Young; the Twenty-fourth Infantry was joined with the Ninth and Thirteenth Infantry and the brigade placed under command of Colonel Worth and assigned to the division commanded by General Kent, who, until his promotion as Brigadier-General of Volunteers, had been Colonel of the Twenty-fourth; the Twenty-fifth Infantry was joined with the First and Fourth Infantry and the brigade placed under command of Colonel Evans Miles, who had formerly been Major of the Twenty-fifth.  All of the colored regiments were thus happily placed so that they should be in pleasant soldierly competition with the very best troops the country ever put in the field, and this arrangement at the start proves how strongly the black regular had entrenched himself in the confidence of our great commanders.

Thus sailed from Port Tampa the major part of our little army of trained and seasoned soldiers, representative of the skill and daring of the nation.[14] In physique, almost every man was an athlete, and while but few had seen actual war beyond an occasional skirmish with Indians, all excepting the few volunteers, had passed through a long process of training in the various details of marching, camping and fighting in their annual exercises in minor tactics.  For the first time in history the nation is going abroad, by its army, to occupy the territory of a foreign foe, in a contest with a trans-Atlantic power.  The unsuccessful invasions of Canada during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 can hardly be brought in comparison with this movement over sea.  The departure of