Mount for Spanish Cannon
Current location
Cannon acquired February 2, 1900
Installed Fall 1900
Cannon removed October 18, 1942
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Mount for Spanish Cannon, 2019. Historic Columbia collection
Although the state of South Carolina sent fewer than 1,000 soldiers to the Spanish-American War, it is second only to the Civil War as the most-memorialized military conflict on the State House grounds. Spain and the United States fought in the Caribbean and Pacific over ten weeks in 1898, resulting in an American victory and the acquisition of the territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippine Islands. The war was the first military action in which southerners and northerners had fought together since before the Civil War, and white South Carolinians used these monuments to celebrate it as a moment of national reconciliation.
In 1900, the City of Columbia installed a fourteen-foot-long brass muzzleloader on the State House grounds. Made in Spain at the end of the eighteenth century, it was captured by American forces during the Battle of Santiago, Cuba in July 1898. The cannon rested on this granite mount until it was melted to make weapons during World War II. The base remains as a monument to both the Spanish-American War and the civilian effort for World War II.