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 newspaper New Orleans Crescent. 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 or freebooting.
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.
Conquest 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. 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 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.
In the role-playing game GURPS' book
Alternate Earths, one of the alternate Earths mentioned has its point of divergence in the moment where Walker decided to revoke Vandelbirt's Transit Company's
charter. In this alternate Earth, Walker decides to support it, and as a result he remains as the president of Nicaragua,
conquers most of Central America and supports the Confederacy in the
American Civil War, which ends with the victory of the South and the official
secession of the United States of America into two different countries.
Works
- Walker, William. "The War in Nicaragua". New York: S.H. Goetzel, 1860.
See also
References
Secondary sources
"Biographical entry in "Real
Soldiers of Fortune"" on Wikisource. by Richard Harding Davis; from Project Gutenberg- 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.
External links
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