I didn’t think I’d be reading James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom again, but I started the first chapter a few weeks ago and I’ve been reading a few pages every day since then. It’s just fascinating reading. And practically every passage I think would make a good blog post.

So here is an excerpt dealing with a little remembered historical figure, except perhaps by folks in Latin America. His name was William Walker.

The only background I think I need to supply is that during the years after the Mexican War, there was a lot of interest in expanding the United States southward to Cuba and Latin America by the South in the hopes of spreading slavery by that means, even though slavery had been outlawed in those countries. So there were many expeditions of filibusters (from the Spanish filibustero, meaning freebooter or pirate) led by various Americans to various Caribbean and Central American countries during that period.

Excerpt from Battle Cry of Freedom:

Meanwhile, public attention shifted a few hundred miles west by south of Havana where the most remarkable and successful filibuster leader was tracing his meteoric career. Born in Nashville in 1824, William Walker bore few outward signs of the ambition for power that burned within him. Shy and taciturn, ascetic, sandy-haired and freckled, five feet five inches tall and weighing less than 120 pounds, his only distinctive feature was a pair of luminous, transfixing, grey-green eyes. After graduating summa cum laude from the University of Nashville at the age of fourteen, this restless prodigy studied medicine in Europe, earned a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania at the age of nineteen, but practiced for only a short time before moving to New Orleans to study law. After a brief career as a lawyer, Walker turned to journalism and became an editor of the New Orleans Crescent.

In 1849 Walker joined the stream of humanity moving to California. But his restive soul found no repose in that golden state. As a journalist he attacked crime and helped inspire the vigilante movement in San Francisco. He fought three duels and was twice wounded. In 1853 Walker finally found his avocation. With forty-five heavily armed men he sailed from San Francisco to “colonize” Baja California and Sonora. His professed intent was to subdue the Apaches, bring the blessings of American civilization and Anglo-Saxon energy to these benighted Mexican provinces, and incidentally to exploit Sonora’s gold and silver deposits.

This was neither the first nor last of many American filibustering expeditions south of the border during the unquiet years following the Mexican War. The chronic instability and frequent overthrows of the government in Mexico City created power vacuums filled by bandit chieftains and gringo invaders who kept the border in a constant state of upheaval. Walker’s expedition enjoyed more initial success than most such enterprises. His filibusters captured La Paz, the sleepy capital of Baja California. Walker proclaimed himself president of this new republic and proceeded to annex Sonora without having set foot in that richer province. This bold action attracted more recruits from California. Walker’s army of footloose Forty-niners, with few supplies and less military experience, marched through rugged mountains, rafted across the Colorado River, and invaded Sonora. Exhausted, starving, and mutinous, fifty of Walker’s men deserted and the rest retreated in the face of a superior force that killed several of them. With thirty-four survivors Walker fled across the border and surrendered to American authorities at San Diego in May 1854. Hailed as a hero by many San Franciscans, Walker stood trial for violating the neutrality law and was acquitted by a jury that took eight minutes to reach its verdict.

This Sonoran exercise was merely a warm-up for the real game. American attention in the early 1850s focused on the Central American isthmus as a land bridge between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. A canal through these jungles would shorten the passage between California and the rest of the United States by weeks. Nicaragua seemed to offer the best route for such a canal, but the difficulty and cost of construction would be great. Meanwhile the New York transportation tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt established the Accessory Transit Company to carry passengers and freight between New York and San Francisco via Nicaragua. Attracted by the tropical climate with its potential for the production of fruit, cotton, sugar, and coffee, other American investors began casting covetous eyes on the region. But the political climate discouraged investment; Nicaragua seemed in a constant state of revolution, having suffered through fifteen presidents in the six years before 1855. The temptation for filibustering there was almost irresistible; William Walker proved unable to resist it.

In 1854 Walker signed a contract with the rebels in Nicaragua’s current civil war and in May 1855 sailed from San Francisco with the first contingent of fifty-seven men to support this cause. Because Britain was backing the other side and American-British tensions had escalated in recent years, U. S. officials looked the other way when Walker departed. With financial support from Vanderbilt’s transit company, Walker’s filibusters and their rebel allies defeated the “Legitimists” and gained control of the government. Walker appointed himself commander in chief of the Nicaraguan army as Americans continued to pour into the country—two thousand by the spring of 1856. President Pierce granted diplomatic recognition to Walker’s government in May.

Although Walker himself and half of his filibusters were southerners, the enterprise thus far did not have a particularly pro-southern flavor. By mid-1856, however, that was changing. While much of the northern press condemned Walker as a pirate, southern newspapers praised him as engaged in a “noble cause. . . . It is our cause at bottom.” In 1856 the Democratic national convention adopted a plank written by none other than Pierre Soulé endorsing U. S. “ascendancy in the Gulf of Mexico.” Proponents of slavery expansion recognized the opportunities there for plantation agriculture. Indeed, Central America offered even more intriguing possibilities than Cuba, for its sparse mixed-blood population and weak, unstable governments seemed to make it an easy prey. Of course the Central American republics had abolished slavery a generation earlier. But this was all the better, for it would allow southerners to establish slave plantations without competition from local planters. “A barbarous people can never become civilized without the salutary apprenticeship which slavery secured,” declared a New Orleans newspaper that urged southern emigration to Walker’s Nicaragua. “It is the duty and decreed prerogative of the wise to guide and govern the ignorant . . . through slavery, and the sooner civilized men learn their duty and their right the sooner will the real progress of civilization be rescued.”

During 1856 hundreds of would-be planters took up land grants in Nicaragua. In August, Pierre Soulé himself arrived in Walker’s capital and negotiated a loan for him from New Orleans bankers. The “grey-eyed man of destiny,” as the press now described Walker, needed this kind of help. His revolution was in trouble. The other Central American countries had formed an alliance to overthrow him. They were backed by Cornelius Vanderbilt, whom Walker had angered by siding with an anti-Vanderbilt faction in the Accessory Transit Company. The president of Nicaragua defected to the enemy, whereupon Walker installed himself as president in July 1856. The Pierce administration withdrew its diplomatic recognition. Realizing that southern backing now represented his only hope, Walker decided “to bind the Southern States to Nicaragua as if she were one of themselves,” as he later put it. On September 22, 1856, he revoked Nicaragua’s 1824 emancipation edict and legalized slavery again.

This bold gamble succeeded in winning southern support. “No movement on the earth” was as important to the South as Walker’s, proclaimed one newspaper. “In the name of the white race,” said another, he “now offers Nicaragua to you and your slaves, at a time when you have not a friend on the face of the earth.” The commercial convention meeting at Savannah expressed enthusiasm for the “efforts being made to introduce civilization in the States of Central America, and to develop these rich and productive regions by the introduction of slave labor.”81 Several shiploads of new recruits arrived from New Orleans and San Francisco during the winter of 1856–57 to fight for Walker. But they were not enough. Some of them reached Nicaragua just in time to succumb to a cholera epidemic that ravaged Walker’s army even as the Central American alliance overwhelmed it in battle. On May 1, 1857, Walker surrendered his survivors to a United States naval commander whose ship carried them back to New Orleans. They left behind a thousand Americans dead of disease and combat.

This did not end the matter. Indeed, in the South it had barely begun. A wild celebration greeted Walker’s return. Citizens opened their hearts and purses to the “grey-eyed man of destiny” as he traveled through the South raising men and money for another try. In November 1857 Walker sailed from Mobile on his second expedition to Nicaragua. But the navy caught up with him and carried his army back to the states. Southern newspapers erupted in denunciation of this naval “usurpation of power.” Alexander Stephens urged the court-martial of the commodore who had detained Walker. Two dozen southern senators and congressmen echoed this sentiment in an extraordinary congressional debate. “A heavier blow was never struck at southern rights,” said a Tennessee representative, “than when Commodore Paulding perpetrated upon our people his high-handed outrage.” The government’s action proved that President Buchanan was just like other Yankees in wanting to “crush out the expansion of slavery to the South.” In May 1858 a hung jury in New Orleans voted 10–2 to acquit Walker of violating the neutrality law.

This outpouring of southern sympathy swept Walker into a campaign to organize yet another invasion of Nicaragua. A second tour of the lower South evoked an almost pathological frenzy among people who believed themselves locked in mortal combat with Yankee oppressors. At one town Walker appealed “to the mothers of Mississippi to bid their sons buckle on the armor of war, and battle for the institutions, for the honor of the Sunny South.”83 The sons of Mississippi responded. Walker’s third expedition sailed from Mobile in December 1858, but their ship hit a reef and sank sixty miles from the Central American coast. Despite the humiliation of returning to Mobile in the British ship that rescued them, the filibusters received their customary tumultuous welcome.

But Walker’s act was growing stale. When he set out again to recruit support for a fourth try, the crowds were smaller. Walker wrote a book about his Nicaraguan experiences, appealing to “the hearts of Southern youth” to “answer the call of honor.” A few southern youths answered the call. Ninety-seven filibusters traveled in small groups to a rendezvous in Honduras where they hoped to find backing for a new invasion of Nicaragua. Instead they found hostility and defeat. Walker surrendered to a British navy captain, expecting as usual to be returned to the United States. Instead the captain turned him over to local authorities. On September 12, 1860, the grey-eyed man met his destiny before a Honduran firing squad.

His legacy lived on, not only in Central American feelings about gringoes but also in North American feelings about the sectional conflict that was tearing apart the United States. When Senator John J. Crittenden proposed to resolve the secession crisis in 1861 by reinstating the 36° 30′ line between slavery and freedom in all territories “now held, or hereafter acquired,” Abraham Lincoln and his party rejected the proposal on the ground that it “would amount to a perpetual covenant of war against every people, tribe, and State owning a foot of land between here and Tierra del Fuego.”

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