William Walker (filibuster)

William Walker (May 8, 1824 – September 12, 1860) was a filibuster, adventurer, and soldier of fortune who attempted to conquer several Latin American countries in the mid-19th century. He held the presidency of the Republic of Nicaragua from 1856 to 1857 and was executed by the government of Honduras in 1860.

Biography

Of Scottish descent, Walker was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1824. His mother was Mary Norvell, the daughter of Lt. Lipscomb Norvell, a Revolutionary War officer who could trace his lineage back to the founding of Williamsburg. Lipscomb was also the father of U.S. Senator John Norvell, one of the first senators of Michigan and founder of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

William Walker graduated summa cum laude from the University of Nashville at the early age of fourteen. He then traveled throughout Europe, studying medicine at the universities of Edinburgh and Heidelberg. At the age of 19 he received a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania and practiced briefly in Philadelphia before moving to New Orleans to study law.

After a short stint as a lawyer, Walker became co-owner and editor of the New Orleans Crescent, a local newspaper. In 1849 he moved to San Francisco, California, where he worked as a journalist and fought three duels, in two of which he was wounded. Around that time Walker conceived the project of privately conquering vast regions of Latin America, where he would create states ruled by white English speakers. Such campaigns were then known as filibustering.

Expedition to Mexico

On October 15, 1853 with 45 men, Walker set out on his first filibustering expedition: the conquest of the Mexican territories of Baja California and Sonora. He succeeded in capturing La Paz, the capital of the sparsely populated Baja California, which he declared the capital of a new Republic of Lower California, with himself as president. Although he never gained control of Sonora, less than three months later he pronounced Baja California part of the larger Republic of Sonora. Lack of supplies and an unexpectedly strong resistance by the Mexican government quickly forced Walker to retreat. Back in California, he was put on trial for conducting an illegal war. In the era of Manifest Destiny, his filibustering project was popular in the southern and western United States and the jury took eight minutes to acquit him.

Ruler of Nicaragua

A civil war was then raging in the Central American republic of Nicaragua, and the rebel faction hired Walker as a mercenary. Evading the federal U.S. authorities charged with preventing his departure, Walker sailed from San Francisco on May 4, 1855 with 57 men, to be reinforced by 170 locals and about 100 Americans upon landing. On September 1, Walker defeated the Nicaraguan national army at La Virgen and, a month later, conquered the capital of Granada and took control of the country. Initially, as commander of the army, Walker controlled Nicaragua through puppet president Patricio Rivas. Despite the obvious illegality of his expedition, U.S. President Franklin Pierce recognized Walker's regime as the legitimate government of Nicaragua on May 20, 1856. Walker's agents recruited American and European men to sail to the region and fight for the conquest of the other four Central American nations: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica. He was able to recruit over a thousand American and European mercenaries, many of whom were transported free by the Accessory Transit Company under the control of businessmen Cornelius K. Garrison and Charles Morgan.

At the time, a major trade route between New York City and San Francisco ran through southern Nicaragua. Ships from New York would enter the San Juan River from the Atlantic and sail across Lake Nicaragua. People and goods would then be transported by stagecoach over a narrow strip of land near the city of Rivas, before reaching the Pacific and being shipped to San Francisco. The commercial exploitation of this route had been granted by a previous Nicaraguan administration to Wall Street tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt's Accessory Transit Company. Garrison and Morgan had wrested control of the company from Vanderbilt and then supported Walker's expedition. Vanderbilt spread rumors that the company was issuing stock illegally in order to depress its value, allowing him to regain controlling interest. As ruler of Nicaragua, Walker then revoked the Transit Company's charter, claiming that it had violated the agreement, and granted use of the route back to Garrison and Morgan.

Outraged, Vanderbilt successfully pressured the U.S. government to withdraw its recognition of Walker's regime. Walker had also scared his neighbors with talk of further military conquests in Central America. Vanderbilt helped to finance and train a military coalition of these states, led by Costa Rica, and worked to prevent men and supplies from reaching Walker. He also provided defectors from Walker's army with free passage back to the U.S. In April of 1856, Costa Rican troops penetrated into Nicaraguan territory and inflicted a defeat on Walker's men at the Battle of Rivas, in which Juan Santamaría, later to be recognized as the country's national hero, played a key role.

In July 1856, Walker set himself up as president of Nicaragua, after conducting a farcical election. Realizing that his position was becoming precarious, he sought support from the Southerners in the U.S. by recasting his campaign as a fight to spread the institution of black slavery, which many American Southern businessmen saw as the basis of their agrarian economy. With this in mind, Walker revoked Nicaragua's emancipation edict of 1824. This move did increase Walker's popularity in the South and attracted the attention of Pierre Soulé, an influential New Orleans politician, who campaigned to raise support for Walker's war. Nevertheless, Walker's army, thinned by an epidemic of cholera and massive defections, was no match for the Central American coalition and Vanderbilt's agents.

Returned by the U.S. Navy

On May 1, 1857 Walker surrendered to Commander Charles Henry Davis of the United States Navy and was repatriated. Upon disembarking in New York City he was greeted as a hero, but he alienated public opinion when he blamed his defeat on the U.S. Navy. Within six months he had set off on another expedition, but he was arrested by the U.S. Navy Home Squadron under the command of Commodore Hiram Paulding and once again returned to the U.S. amid considerable public controversy over the legality of the Navy's actions.

Death in Honduras

After writing an account of his Central American campaign (published in 1860 as War in Nicaragua), Walker returned to the region yet again. He disembarked in the port city of Trujillo, in the Republic of Honduras, and soon fell into the custody of Captain Salmon of the Royal Navy. The British government controlled the neighboring regions of British Honduras (now Belize) and the Mosquito Coast (now part of Nicaragua) and had considerable strategic and economic interest in the construction of an inter-oceanic canal through Central America. It therefore regarded Walker as a menace to its own affairs in the region.

Rather than return him to the U.S., Capt. Salmon delivered Walker to the Honduran authorities, who executed him near the site of the present-day hospital by firing squad on September 12, 1860. Walker was 36 years old. He is buried in the Cementerio Viejo in the coastal town of Trujillo.

Influence and reputation

William Walker convinced many Southerners of the desirability of creating a slave-holding empire in tropical Latin America. In 1861, when U.S. Senator John J. Crittenden proposed that the 36°30' parallel north be declared as a line of demarcation between free and slave territories, Abraham Lincoln, of the anti-slavery Republican Party, denounced such an arrangement, saying 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."

Before the end of the American Civil War, Walker enjoyed great popularity in the southern and western United States, where he was known as "General Walker" and as the "grey-eyed man of destiny." Northerners, on the other hand, generally regarded him as a pirate. Despite his intelligence and personal charm, Walker consistently proved to be a more limited military and political leader, as well as a man given to impractical, grandiose scheming.

In Central American countries, the successful military campaign of 1856-1857 against William Walker became a source of national pride and identity, and it was later promoted by local historians and politicians as substitute for the war of independence that Central America had not experienced. April 11 is a Costa Rican national holiday in memory of Walker's defeat at Rivas. Juan Santamaría, who played a key role in that battle, is honored as the Costa Rican national hero.

Although Walker is far better known today in Central America than he is the United States, he does have a number of interesting ties to Nashville, Tennessee, the city of his birth. He was a close friend of Dr. John Berrien Lindsley, who had been his classmate at both the University of Nashville and at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Both Walker and Lindsley were Southern Presbyterians who believed in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race and in its civilizing mission in the world. Lindsley succeeded his father, Phillip Lindsley, as head of the University of Nashville in 1855, and later founded Montgomery Bell Academy, a secondary school tied to the university. The University of Nashville failed to recover from the U.S. Civil War and closed its doors after Lindsley resigned as its chancellor in 1870. In 1873 it was succeeded by Vanderbilt University, an institution funded by a gift from Walker's nemesis, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Locally, Walker is remembered as the only native Nashvillian ever to become a head of state, and a historical marker commemorates his birthplace, downtown not far from Second Avenue.

Cultural references

Walker's campaign has inspired two films, both of which take considerable liberties with his story: Burn! (1969) starring Marlon Brando, and Walker (1987) starring Ed Harris. Walker's name is used for the main character in Burn!, though the character is not meant to represent the historical William Walker.

By coincidence, the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador from 1988 to 1992 was named William G. Walker, a fact that led to derision among some Central Americans.

After the resurgence in interest in United States immigration policy in the spring of 2006, William Walker again came to the attention of popular culture through printed T-shirts and posters emblazoned with his likeness, name, and the phrase "We Tried" (Boston, Chicago, St. Louis).

In his sci fi/time travel trilogy that begins with Island in the Sea of Time, writer S. M. Stirling gave the name William Walker to the main antagonist of the series, a U. S. Coast Guard Lieutenant who goes renegade and uses the technological advantages of coming from the future to carve his own empire out of Bronze Age Europe and the Middle East.

Works

Walker, William. "The War in Nicaragua". New York: S.H. Goetzel, 1860.

References

Secondary sources

Real Soldiers of Fortune, by Richard Harding Davis from Project Gutenberg, 1906
James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, 1988
May, Robert E. Manifest Destiny's Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America, 2002
May, Robert E. "The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire". Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.
J. Preston Moore, “Pierre Soule: Southern Expansionist and Promoter,” Journal of Southern History 21:2 (May, 1955), 208 & 214.
Albert Z. Carr, The World and William Walker, 1963
"1855: American Conquistador," American Heritage, October 2005
Scroggs, William O. "Filibusters and Financiers". New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916.

Primary sources

Doubleday, C.W. “Reminiscences of the Filibuster War in Nicaragua”. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1886.
Jamison, James Carson. “With Walker in Nicaragua: Reminiscences of an Officer of the American Phalanx”. Columbia, MO: E.W. Stephens, 1909.
Wight, Samuel F. Adventures in California and Nicaragua: a Truthful Epic. Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1860.
Fayssoux Collection. Tulane University. Latin American Library.
United States Magazine. Sept., 1856. Vol III No. 3. pp. 266–72
“Filibustering”, Putnam’s Monthly Magazine (New York), April 1857, 425–35.
“Walker’s Reverses in Nicaragua,” Anti-Slavery Bugle, November 17, 1856.
“The Lesson” National Era, June 4, 1857, 90.
“The Administration and Commodore Paulding,” National Era, January 7, 1858.
“Wanted — A Few Filibusters,” Harper’s Weekly, January 10, 1857.
“Reception of Gen. Walker,” New Orleans Picayune, May 28, 1857.
“Arrival of Walker,” New Orleans Picayune, May 28, 1857.
“Our Influence in the Isthmus,” New Orleans Picayune, February 17, 1856.
New Orleans Sunday Delta, June 27, 1856.
“Nicaragua and President Walker,” Louisville Times, December 13, 1856.
“Le Nicaragua et les Filibustiers,” Opelousas Courier, May 10, 1856.
“What is to Become of Nicaragua?,” Harper’s Weekly, June 6, 1857.
“The Late General Walker,” Harper’s Weekly, October 13, 1860.
“What General Walker is Like,” Harper’s Weekly, September, 1856.
“Message of the President to the Senate in Reference to the Late Arrest of Gen. Walker,” Louisville Courier, January 12, 1858.
“The Central American Question — What Walker May Do,” New York Times, January 1, 1856.
“A Serious Farce,” New York Times, December 14, 1853.

1856–57 New York Herald Horace Greeley editorials.

External links

"Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt fought war over route through Central America" from the Vanderbilt Register
"Walker's expeditions" from GlobalSecurity.org
"Filibustering with William Walker" from the Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco
Fuchik, Don "The Saga of William Walker" The California Native Newsletter
"Walker" the 1987 Alex Cox movie, Walker, featuring Ed Harris as William Walker, at the Internet Movie Database

Preceded by Patricio Rivas	President of Nicaragua 1856-1857	Succeeded by Patricio Rivas