IT is safe to say that to members of the younger generation the name of
William Walker conveys absolutely nothing. To them, as a name, “William
Walker” awakens no pride of race or country. It certainly does not
suggest poetry and adventure. To obtain a place in even this group
of Soldiers of Fortune, William Walker, the most distinguished of all
American Soldiers of Fortune, the one who but for his own countrymen
would have single-handed attained the most far-reaching results, had to
wait his turn behind adventurers of other lands and boy officers of
his own. And yet had this man with the plain name, the name that
to-day means nothing, accomplished what he adventured, he would on this
continent have solved the problem of slavery, have established an empire
in Mexico and in Central America, and, incidentally, have brought us
into war with all of Europe. That is all he would have accomplished.
In the days of gold in San Francisco among the “Forty-niners” William
Walker was one of the most famous, most picturesque and popular figures.
Jack Oakhurst, gambler; Colonel Starbottle, duellist; Yuba Bill,
stage-coach driver, were his contemporaries. Bret Harte was one of his
keenest admirers, and in two of his stories, thinly disguised under a
more appealing name, Walker is the hero. When, later, Walker came to New
York City, in his honor Broadway from the Battery to Madison Square was
bedecked with flags and arches. “It was roses, roses all the way.” The
house-tops rocked and swayed.
In New Orleans, where in a box at the opera he made his first
appearance, for ten minutes the performance came to a pause, while the
audience stood to salute him.
This happened less than fifty years ago, and there are men who as boys
were out with “Walker of Nicaragua,” and who are still active in the
public life of San Francisco and New York.
Walker was born in 1824, in Nashville, Tenn. He was the oldest son of
a Scotch banker, a man of a deeply religious mind, and interested in
a business which certainly is removed, as far as possible, from
the profession of arms. Indeed, few men better than William Walker
illustrate the fact that great generals are born, not trained.
Everything in Walker’s birth, family tradition, and education pointed
to his becoming a member of one of the “learned” professions. It was
the wish of his father that he should be a minister of the Presbyterian
Church, and as a child he was trained with that end in view. He himself
preferred to study medicine, and after graduating at the University of
Tennessee, at Edinburgh he followed a course of lectures, and for two
years travelled in Europe, visiting many of the great hospitals.
Then having thoroughly equipped himself to practise as a physician,
after a brief return to his native city, and as short a stay in
Philadelphia, he took down his shingle forever, and proceeded to
New Orleans to study law. In two years he was admitted to the bar of
Louisiana. But because clients were few, or because the red tape of the
law chafed his spirit, within a year, as already he had abandoned
the Church and Medicine, he abandoned his law practice and became
an editorial writer on the New Orleans _Crescent_. A year later the
restlessness which had rebelled against the grave professions led him to
the gold fields of California, and San Francisco. There, in 1852, at
the age of only twenty-eight, as editor of the San Francisco _Herald_,
Walker began his real life which so soon was to end in both disaster and
glory.
Up to his twenty-eighth year, except in his restlessness, nothing in his
life foreshadowed what was to follow. Nothing pointed to him as a man
for whom thousands of other men, from every capital of the world, would
give up their lives.
Negatively, by abandoning three separate callings, and in making it
plain that a professional career did not appeal to him, Walker had
thrown a certain sidelight on his character; but actively he never had
given any hint that under the thoughtful brow of the young doctor and
lawyer there was a mind evolving schemes of empire, and an ambition
limited only by the two great oceans.
Walker’s first adventure was undoubtedly inspired by and in imitation
of one which at the time of his arrival in San Francisco had just been
brought to a disastrous end. This was the De Boulbon expedition into
Mexico. The Count Gaston Raoulx de Raousset-Boulbon was a young French
nobleman and Soldier of Fortune, a _chasseur d’Afrique_, a duellist,
journalist, dreamer, who came to California to dig gold. Baron
Harden-Hickey, who was born in San Francisco a few years after Boulbon
at the age of thirty was shot in Mexico, also was inspired to dreams of
conquest by this same gentleman adventurer.
Boulbon was a young man of large ideas. In the rapid growth of
California he saw a threat to Mexico and proposed to that government, as
a “buffer” state between the two republics, to form a French colony
in the Mexican State of Sonora. Sonora is that part of Mexico which
directly joins on the south with our State of Arizona. The President of
Mexico gave Boulbon permission to attempt this, and in 1852 he landed at
Guaymas in the Gulf of California with two hundred and sixty well-armed
Frenchmen. The ostensible excuse of Boulbon for thus invading foreign
soil was his contract with the President under which his “emigrants”
were hired to protect other foreigners working in the “Restauradora”
mines from the attacks of Apache Indians from our own Arizona. But there
is evidence that back of Boulbon was the French Government, and that
he was attempting, in his small way, what later was attempted by
Maximilian, backed by a French army corps and Louis Napoleon, to
establish in Mexico an empire under French protection. For both the
filibuster and the emperor the end was the same; to be shot by the
fusillade against a church wall.
In 1852, two years before Boulbon’s death, which was the finale to his
second filibustering expedition into Sonora, he wrote to a friend in
Paris: “Europeans are disturbed by the growth of the United States. And
rightly so. Unless she be dismembered; unless a powerful rival be built
up beside her (_i.e._, France in Mexico), America will become, through
her commerce, her trade, her population, her geographical position upon
two oceans, the inevitable mistress of the world. In ten years Europe
dare not fire a shot without her permission. As I write fifty Americans
prepare to sail for Mexico and go perhaps to victory. _Voila les
Etats-Unis_.”
These fifty Americans who, in the eyes of Boulbon, threatened the peace
of Europe, were led by the ex-doctor, ex-lawyer, ex-editor, William
Walker, _aged twenty-eight years_. Walker had attempted but had failed
to obtain from the Mexican Government such a contract as the one it had
granted De Boulbon. He accordingly sailed without it, announcing that,
whether the Mexican Government asked him to do so or not, he would see
that the women and children on the border of Mexico and Arizona were
protected from massacre by the Indians. It will be remembered that when
Dr. Jameson raided the Transvaal he also went to protect “women and
children” from massacre by the Boers. Walker’s explanation of his
expedition, in his own words, is as follows. He writes in the third
person: “What Walker saw and heard satisfied him that a comparatively
small body of Americans might gain a position on the Sonora frontier
and protect the families on the border from the Indians, and such an
act would be one of humanity whether or not sanctioned by the Mexican
Government. The condition of the upper part of Sonora was at that time,
and still is [he was writing eight years later, in 1860], a disgrace to
the civilization of the continent...and the people of the United States
were more immediately responsible before the world for the Apache
outrages. Northern Sonora was in fact, more under the dominion of the
Apaches than under the laws of Mexico, and the contributions of the
Indians were collected with greater regularity and certainty than the
dues of the tax-gatherers. The state of this region furnished the best
defence for any American aiming to settle there without the formal
consent of Mexico; and, although political changes would certainly have
followed the establishment of a colony, they might be justified by the
plea that any social organization, no matter how secured, is preferable
to that in which individuals and families are altogether at the mercy of
savages.”
While at the time of Jameson’s raid the women and children in danger of
massacre from the Boers were as many as there are snakes in Ireland, at
the time of Walker’s raid the women and children were in danger from the
Indians, who as enemies, as Walker soon discovered, were as cruel and as
greatly to be feared as he had described them.
But it was not to save women and children that Walker sought to conquer
the State of Sonora. At the time of his expedition the great question of
slavery was acute; and if in the States next to be admitted to the Union
slavery was to be prohibited, the time had come, so it seemed to
this statesman of twenty-eight years, when the South must extend her
boundaries, and for her slaves find an outlet in fresh territory.
Sonora already joined Arizona. By conquest her territory could easily
be extended to meet Texas. As a matter of fact, strategically the spot
selected by William Walker for the purpose for which he desired it was
almost perfect. Throughout his brief career one must remember that the
spring of all his acts was this dream of an empire where slavery would
be recognized. His mother was a slave-holder. In Tennessee he had been
born and bred surrounded by slaves. His youth and manhood had been spent
in Nashville and New Orleans. He believed as honestly, as fanatically
in the right to hold slaves as did his father in the faith of the
Covenanters. To-day one reads his arguments in favor of slavery with the
most curious interest. His appeal to the humanity of his reader, to his
heart, to his sense of justice, to his fear of God, and to his belief
in the Holy Bible not to abolish slavery, but to continue it, to this
generation is as amusing as the topsy-turvyisms of Gilbert or Shaw. But
to the young man himself slavery was a sacred institution, intended for
the betterment of mankind, a God-given benefit to the black man and a
God-given right of his white master.
White brothers in the South, with perhaps less exalted motives,
contributed funds to fit out Walker’s expedition, and in October, 1852,
with forty-five men, he landed at Cape St. Lucas, at the extreme point
of Lower California. Lower California, it must be remembered, in spite
of its name, is not a part of our California, but then was, and still
is, a part of Mexico. The fact that he was at last upon the soil of the
enemy caused Walker to throw off all pretence; and instead of hastening
to protect women and children, he sailed a few miles farther up the
coast to La Paz. With his forty-five followers he raided the town, made
the Governor a prisoner, and established a republic with himself as
President. In a proclamation he declared the people free of the tyranny
of Mexico. They had no desire to be free, but Walker was determined,
and, whether they liked it or not, they woke up to find themselves an
independent republic. A few weeks later, although he had not yet set
foot there, Walker annexed on paper the State of Sonora, and to both
States gave the name of the Republic of Sonora.
As soon as word of this reached San Francisco, his friends busied
themselves in his behalf, and the danger-loving and adventurous of
all lands were enlisted as “emigrants” and shipped to him in the bark
_Anita_.
Two months later, in November, 1852, three hundred of these joined
Walker. They were as desperate a band of scoundrels as ever robbed a
sluice, stoned a Chinaman, or shot a “Greaser.” When they found that to
command them there was only a boy, they plotted to blow up the
magazine in which the powder was stored, rob the camp, and march north,
supporting themselves by looting the ranches. Walker learned of their
plot, tried the ringleaders by court-martial, and shot them. With a
force as absolutely undisciplined as was his, the act required the most
complete personal courage. That was a quality the men with him could
fully appreciate. They saw they had as a leader one who could fight,
and one who would punish. The majority did not want a leader who would
punish so when Walker called upon those who would follow him to Sonora
to show their hands, only the original forty-five and about forty of
the later recruits remained with him. With less than one hundred men
he started to march up the Peninsula through Lower California, and so
around the Gulf to Sonora.
From the very start the filibusters were overwhelmed with disaster. The
Mexicans, with Indian allies, skulked on the flanks and rear. Men who
in the almost daily encounters were killed fell into the hands of the
Indians, and their bodies were mutilated. Stragglers and deserters were
run to earth and tortured. Those of the filibusters who were wounded
died from lack of medical care. The only instruments they possessed with
which to extract the arrow-heads were probes made from ramrods filed to
a point. Their only food was the cattle they killed on the march. The
army was barefoot, the Cabinet in rags, the President of Sonora wore one
boot and one shoe.
Unable to proceed farther, Walker fell back upon San Vincente, where he
had left the arms and ammunition of the deserters and a rear-guard of
eighteen men. He found not one of these to welcome him. A dozen had
deserted, and the Mexicans had surprised the rest, lassoing them and
torturing them until they died. Walker now had but thirty-five men. To
wait for further re-enforcements from San Francisco, even were he sure
that re-enforcements would come, was impossible. He determined by forced
marches to fight his way to the boundary line of California. Between him
and safety were the Mexican soldiers holding the passes, and the Indians
hiding on his flanks. When within three miles of the boundary line, at
San Diego, Colonel Melendrez, who commanded the Mexican forces, sent in
a flag of truce, and offered, if they would surrender, a safe-conduct to
all of the survivors of the expedition except the chief. But the men who
for one year had fought and starved for Walker, would not, within three
miles of home, abandon him.
Melendrez then begged the commander of the United States troops to order
Walker to surrender. Major McKinstry, who was in command of the United
States Army Post at San Diego, refused. For him to cross the line would
be a violation of neutral territory. On Mexican soil he would neither
embarrass the ex-President of Sonora nor aid him; but he saw to it that
if the filibusters reached American soil, no Mexican or Indian should
follow them.
Accordingly, on the imaginary boundary he drew up his troop, and like
an impartial umpire awaited the result. Hidden behind rocks and cactus,
across the hot, glaring plain, the filibusters could see the American
flag, and the gay, fluttering guidons of the cavalry. The sight gave
them heart for one last desperate spurt. Melendrez also appreciated
that for the final attack the moment had come. As he charged, Walker,
apparently routed, fled, but concealed in the rocks behind him he had
stationed a rear-guard of a dozen men. As Melendrez rode into this
ambush the dozen riflemen emptied as many saddles, and the Mexicans and
Indians stampeded. A half hour later, footsore and famished, the little
band that had set forth to found an empire of slaves, staggered across
the line and surrendered to the forces of the United States.
Of this expedition James Jeffrey Roche says, in his “Byways of War,”
which is of all books published about Walker the most intensely and
fascinatingly interesting and complete: “Years afterward the peon
herdsman or prowling Cocupa Indian in the mountain by-paths stumbled
over the bleaching skeleton of some nameless one whose resting-place was
marked by no cross or cairn, but the Colts revolver resting beside
his bones spoke his country and his occupation--the only relic of the
would-be conquistadores of the nineteenth century.”
Under parole to report to General Wood, commanding the Department of the
Pacific, the filibusters were sent by sailing vessel to San Francisco,
where their leader was tried for violating the neutrality laws of the
United States, and acquitted.
Walker’s first expedition had ended in failure, but for him it had been
an opportunity of tremendous experience, as active service is the best
of all military academies, and for the kind of warfare he was to wage,
the best preparation. Nor was it inglorious, for his fellow survivors,
contrary to the usual practice, instead of in bar-rooms placing the
blame for failure upon their leader, stood ready to fight one and all
who doubted his ability or his courage. Later, after five years, many of
these same men, though ten to twenty years his senior, followed him to
death, and never questioned his judgment nor his right to command.
At this time in Nicaragua there was the usual revolution. On the
south the sister republic of Costa Rica was taking sides, on the north
Honduras was landing arms and men. There was no law, no government. A
dozen political parties, a dozen commanding generals, and not one strong
man.
In the editorial rooms of the San Francisco _Herald_, Walker, searching
the map for new worlds to conquer, rested his finger upon Nicaragua.
In its confusion of authority he saw an opportunity to make himself
a power, and in its tropical wealth and beauty, in the laziness and
incompetence of its inhabitants, he beheld a greater, fairer, more kind
Sonora. On the Pacific side from San Francisco he could re-enforce his
army with men and arms; on the Caribbean side from New Orleans he could,
when the moment arrived, people his empire with slaves.
The two parties at war in Nicaragua were the Legitimists and the
Democrats. Why they were at war it is not necessary to know. Probably
Walker did not know; it is not likely that they themselves knew. But
from the leader of the Democrats Walker obtained a contract to bring
to Nicaragua three hundred Americans, who were each to receive several
hundred acres of land, and who were described as “colonists liable to
military duty.” This contract Walker submitted to the Attorney-General
of the State and to General Wood, who once before had acquitted him of
filibustering; and neither of these Federal officers saw anything
which seemed to give them the right to interfere. But the rest of San
Francisco was less credulous, and the “colonists” who joined Walker
had a very distinct idea that they were not going to Nicaragua to plant
coffee or to pick bananas.
In May, 1855, just a year after Walker and his thirty-three followers
had surrendered to the United States troops at San Diego, with fifty new
recruits and seven veterans of the former expedition he sailed from
San Francisco in the brig _Vesta_, and in five weeks, after a weary and
stormy voyage, landed at Realejo. There he was met by representatives of
the Provisional Director of the Democrats, who received the Californians
warmly.
Walker was commissioned a colonel, Achilles Kewen, who had been fighting
under Lopez in Cuba, a lieutenant-colonel, and Timothy Crocker, who had
served under Walker in the Sonora expedition, a major. The corps
was organized as an independent command and was named “La Falange
Americana.” At this time the enemy held the route to the Caribbean, and
Walker’s first orders were to dislodge him.
Accordingly, a week after landing with his fifty-seven Americans and one
hundred and fifty native troops, Walker sailed in the _Vesta_ for Brito,
from which port he marched upon Rivas, a city of eleven thousand people
and garrisoned by some twelve hundred of the enemy.
The first fight ended in a complete and disastrous fiasco. The native
troops ran away, and the Americans surrounded by six hundred of the
Legitimists’ soldiers, after defending themselves for three hours behind
some adobe huts, charged the enemy and escaped into the jungle. Their
loss was heavy, and among the killed were the two men upon whom Walker
chiefly depended: Kewen and Crocker. The Legitimists placed the bodies
of the dead and wounded who were still living on a pile of logs and
burned them. After a painful night march, Walker, the next day, reached
San Juan on the coast, and, finding a Costa Rican schooner in port,
seized it for his use. At this moment, although Walker’s men were
defeated, bleeding, and in open flight, two “gringos” picked up on
the beach of San Juan, “the Texan Harry McLeod and the Irishman Peter
Burns,” asked to be permitted to join him.
“It was encouraging,” Walker writes, “for the soldiers to find that
some besides themselves did not regard their fortunes as altogether
desperate, and small as was this addition to their number it gave
increased moral as well as material strength to the command.”
Sometimes in reading history it would appear as though for success the
first requisite must be an utter lack of humor, and inability to look
upon what one is attempting except with absolute seriousness. With forty
men Walker was planning to conquer and rule Nicaragua, a country with a
population of two hundred and fifty thousand souls and as large as the
combined area of Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Hampshire,
and Connecticut. And yet, even seven years later, he records without
a smile that two beach-combers gave his army “moral and material
strength.” And it is most characteristic of the man that at the
moment he was rejoicing over this addition to his forces, to maintain
discipline two Americans who had set fire to the houses of the enemy
he ordered to be shot. A weaker man would have repudiated the two
Americans, who, in fact, were not members of the Phalanx, and trusted
that their crimes would not be charged against him. But the success of
Walker lay greatly in his stern discipline. He tried the men, and they
confessed to their guilt. One got away; and, as it might appear that
Walker had connived at his escape, to the second man was shown no
mercy. When one reads how severe was Walker in his punishments, and
how frequently the death penalty was invoked by him against his own
few followers, the wonder grows that these men, as independent and as
unaccustomed to restraint as were those who first joined him, submitted
to his leadership. One can explain it only by the personal quality of
Walker himself.
Among these reckless, fearless outlaws, who, despising their allies,
believed and proved that with his rifle one American could account for a
dozen Nicaraguans, Walker was the one man who did not boast or drink or
gamble, who did not even swear, who never looked at a woman, and who, in
money matters, was scrupulously honest and unself-seeking. In a fight,
his followers knew that for them he would risk being shot just as
unconcernedly as to maintain his authority he would shoot one of them.
Treachery, cowardice, looting, any indignity to women, he punished with
death; but to the wounded, either of his own or of the enemy’s forces,
he was as gentle as a nursing sister and the brave and able he rewarded
with instant promotion and higher pay. In no one trait was he a
demagogue. One can find no effort on his part to ingratiate himself with
his men. Among the officers of his staff there were no favorites. He
messed alone, and at all times kept to himself. He spoke little, and
then with utter lack of self-consciousness. In the face of injustice,
perjury, or physical danger, he was always calm, firm, dispassionate.
But it is said that on those infrequent occasions when his anger
asserted itself, the steady steel-gray eyes flashed so menacingly that
those who faced them would as soon look down the barrel of his Colt.
The impression one gets of him gathered from his recorded acts, from his
own writings, from the writings of those who fought with him, is of a
silent, student-like young man believing religiously in his “star of
destiny”; but, in all matters that did not concern himself, possessed of
a grim sense of fun. The sayings of his men that in his history of the
war he records, show a distinct appreciation of the Bret Harte school of
humor. As, for instance, when he tells how he wished to make one of them
a drummer boy and the Californian drawled: “No, thanks, colonel; I never
seen a picture of a battle yet that the first thing in it wasn’t a dead
drummer boy with a busted drum.”
In Walker the personal vanity which is so characteristic of the soldier
of fortune was utterly lacking. In a land where a captain bedecks
himself like a field-marshal, Walker wore his trousers stuffed in his
boots, a civilian’s blue frock-coat, and the slouch hat of the period,
with, for his only ornament, the red ribbon of the Democrats. The
authority he wielded did not depend upon braid or buttons, and only when
going into battle did he wear his sword. In appearance he was slightly
built, rather below the medium height, smooth shaven, and with deep-set
gray eyes. These eyes apparently, as they gave him his nickname, were
his most marked feature.
His followers called him, and later, when he was thirty-two years
old, he was known all over the United States as the “Gray-Eyed Man of
Destiny.”
From the first Walker recognized that in order to establish himself in
Nicaragua he must keep in touch with all possible recruits arriving from
San Francisco and New York, and that to do this he must hold the line
of transit from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific. At this time the sea
routes to the gold-fields were three: by sailing vessel around the Cape,
one over the Isthmus of Panama, and one, which was the shortest, across
Nicaragua. By a charter from the Government of Nicaragua, the right to
transport passengers across this isthmus was controlled by the Accessory
Transit Company, of which the first Cornelius Vanderbilt was president.
His company owned a line of ocean steamers both on the Pacific side
and on the Atlantic side. Passengers _en route_ from New York to the
gold-fields were landed by these latter steamers at Greytown on the west
coast of Nicaragua, and sent by boats of light draught up the San Juan
River to Lake Nicaragua. There they were met by larger lake steamers and
conveyed across the lake to Virgin Bay. From that point, in carriages
and on mule back, they were carried twelve miles overland to the port of
San Juan del Sud on the Pacific Coast, where they boarded the company’s
steamers to San Francisco.
During the year of Walker’s occupation the number of passengers crossing
Nicaragua was an average of about two thousand a month.
It was to control this route that immediately after his first defeat
Walker returned to San Juan del Sud, and in a smart skirmish defeated
the enemy and secured possession of Virgin Bay, the halting place for
the passengers going east or west. In this fight Walker was outnumbered
five to one, but his losses were only three natives killed and a few
Americans wounded. The Legitimists lost sixty killed and a hundred
wounded. This proportion of losses shows how fatally effective was the
rifle and revolver fire of the Californians. Indeed, so wonderful was it
that when some years ago I visited the towns and cities captured by the
filibusters, I found that the marksmanship of Walker’s Phalanx was still
a tradition. Indeed, thanks to the filibusters, to-day in any part of
Central America a man from the States, if in trouble, has only to show
his gun. No native will wait for him to fire it.
After the fight at Virgin Bay, Walker received from California fifty
recruits--a very welcome addition to his force, and as he now commanded
about one hundred and twenty Americans, three hundred Nicaraguans, under
a friendly native, General Valle, and two brass cannon, he decided to
again attack Rivas. Rivas is on the lake just above Virgin Bay; still
further up is Granada, which was the head-quarters of the Legitimists.
Fearing Walker’s attack upon Rivas, the Legitimist troops were hurried
south from Granada to that city, leaving Granada but slightly protected.
Through intercepted letters Walker learned of this and determined to
strike at Granada. By night, in one of the lake steamers, he skirted the
shore, and just before daybreak, with fires banked and all lights out,
drew up to a point near the city. The day previous the Legitimists had
gained a victory, and, as good luck or Walker’s “destiny” would have
it, the night before Granada had been celebrating the event. Much joyous
dancing and much drinking of aguardiente had buried the inhabitants in a
drugged slumber. The garrison slept, the sentries slept, the city slept.
But when the convent bells called for early mass, the air was shaken
with sharp reports that to the ears of the Legitimists were unfamiliar
and disquieting. They were not the loud explosions of their own muskets
nor of the smooth bores of the Democrats. The sounds were sharp and
cruel like the crack of a whip. The sentries flying from their posts
disclosed the terrifying truth. “The Filibusteros!” they cried.
Following them at a gallop came Walker and Valle and behind them the men
of the awful Phalanx, whom already the natives had learned to fear: the
bearded giants in red flannel shirts who at Rivas on foot had charged
the artillery with revolvers, who at Virgin Bay when wounded had drawn
from their boots glittering bowie knives and hurled them like arrows,
who at all times shot with the accuracy of the hawk falling upon a
squawking hen.
There was a brief terrified stand in the Plaza, and then a complete
rout. As was their custom, the native Democrats began at once to loot
the city. But Walker put his sword into the first one of these he met,
and ordered the Americans to arrest all others found stealing, and to
return the goods already stolen. Over a hundred political prisoners in
the cartel were released by Walker, and the ball and chain to which each
was fastened stricken off. More than two-thirds of them at once enlisted
under Walker’s banner.
He now was in a position to dictate to the enemy his own terms of peace,
but a fatal blunder on the part of Parker H. French, a lieutenant of
Walker’s, postponed peace for several weeks, and led to unfortunate
reprisals. French had made an unauthorized and unsuccessful assault
on San Carlos at the eastern end of the lake, and the Legitimists
retaliated at Virgin Bay by killing half a dozen peaceful passengers,
and at San Carlos by firing at a transit steamer. For this the excuse of
the Legitimists was, that now that Walker was using the lake steamers
as transports it was impossible for them to know whether the boats were
occupied by his men or neutral passengers. As he could not reach the
guilty ones, Walker held responsible for their acts their secretary
of state, who at the taking of Granada was among the prisoners. He was
tried by court-martial and shot, “a victim of the new interpretation of
the principles of constitutional government.” While this act of Walker’s
was certainly stretching the theory of responsibility to the breaking
point, its immediate effect was to bring about a hasty surrender and a
meeting between the generals of the two political parties. Thus, four
months after Walker and his fifty-seven followers landed in Nicaragua,
a suspension of hostilities was arranged, and the side for which the
Americans had fought was in power. Walker was made commander-in-chief
of an army of twelve hundred men with salary of six thousand dollars a
year. A man named Rivas was appointed temporary president.
To Walker this pause in the fight was most welcome. It gave him an
opportunity to enlist recruits and to organize his men for the better
accomplishment of what was the real object of his going to Nicaragua. He
now had under him a remarkable force, one of the most effective known
to military history. For although six months had not yet passed,
the organization he now commanded was as unlike the Phalanx of
the fifty-eight adventurers who were driven back at Rivas, as were
Falstaff’s followers from the regiment of picked men commanded by
Colonel Roosevelt. Instead of the undisciplined and lawless now being
in the majority, the ranks were filled with the pick of the California
mining camps, with veterans of the Mexican War, with young Southerners
of birth and spirit, and with soldiers of fortune from all of the great
armies of Europe.
In the Civil War, which so soon followed, and later in the service of
the Khedive of Egypt, were several of Walker’s officers, and for years
after his death there was no war in which one of the men trained by him
in the jungles of Nicaragua did not distinguish himself. In his memoirs,
the Englishman, General Charles Frederic Henningsen, writes that though
he had taken part in some of the greatest battles of the Civil War he
would pit a thousand men of Walker’s command against any five thousand
Confederate or Union soldiers. And General Henningsen was one who spoke
with authority. Before he joined Walker he had served in Spain under Don
Carlos, in Hungary under Kossuth, and in Bulgaria.
Of Walker’s men, a regiment of which he commanded, he writes: “I often
have seen them march with a broken or compound fractured arm in
splints, and using the other to fire the rifle or revolver. Those with a
fractured thigh or wounds which rendered them incapable of removal, shot
themselves. Such men do not turn up in the average of everyday life, nor
do I ever expect to see their like again. All military science failed
on a suddenly given field before such assailants, who came at a run
to close with their revolvers and who thought little of charging a gun
battery, pistol in hand.”
Another graduate of Walker’s army was Captain Fred Townsend Ward, a
native of Salem, Mass., who after the death of Walker organized and
led the ever victorious army that put down the Tai-Ping rebellion,
and performed the many feats of martial glory for which Chinese Gordon
received the credit. In Shanghai, to the memory of the filibuster, there
are to-day two temples in his honor.
Joaquin Miller, the poet, miner, and soldier, who but recently was a
picturesque figure on the hotel porch at Saratoga Springs, was one of
the young Californians who was “out with Walker,” and who later in
his career by his verse helped to preserve the name of his beloved
commander. I. C. Jamison, living to-day in Guthrie, Oklahoma, was a
captain under Walker. When war again came, as it did within four months,
these were the men who made Walker President of Nicaragua.
During the four months in all but title he had been president, and as
such he was recognized and feared. It was against him, not Rivas, that
in February, 1856, the neighboring republic of Costa Rica declared war.
For three months this war continued with varying fortunes until the
Costa Ricans were driven across the border.
In June of the same year Rivas called a general election for president,
announcing himself as the candidate of the Democrats. Two other
Democrats also presented themselves, Salazar and Ferrer. The
Legitimists, recognizing in their former enemy the real ruler of the
country, nominated Walker. By an overwhelming majority he was elected,
receiving 15,835 votes to 867 cast for Rivas. Salazar received 2,087;
Ferrer, 4,447.
Walker now was the legal as well as the actual ruler of the country,
and at no time in its history, as during Walker’s administration, was
Nicaragua governed so justly, so wisely, and so well. But in his success
the neighboring republics saw a menace to their own independence. To the
four other republics of Central America the five-pointed blood-red star
on the flag of the filibusters bore a sinister motto: “Five or None.”
The meaning was only too unpleasantly obvious. At once, Costa Rica on
the south, and Guatemala, Salvador, and Honduras from the north, with
the malcontents of Nicaragua, declared war against the foreign invader.
Again Walker was in the field with opposed to him 21,000 of the allies.
The strength of his own force varied. On his election as president the
backbone of his army was a magnificently trained body of veterans to the
number of 2,000. This was later increased to 3,500, but it is doubtful
if at any one time it ever exceeded that number. His muster and hospital
rolls show that during his entire occupation of Nicaragua there were
enlisted, at one time or another, under his banner 10,000 men. While in
his service, of this number, by hostile shots or fever, 5,000 died.
To describe the battles with the allies would be interminable and
wearying. In every particular they are much alike: the long silent
night march, the rush at daybreak, the fight to gain strategic
positions either of the barracks, or of the Cathedral in the Plaza,
the hand-to-hand fighting from behind barricades and adobe walls. The
out-come of these fights sometimes varied, but the final result was
never in doubt, and had no outside influences intervened, in time each
republic in Central America would have come under the five-pointed star.
In Costa Rica there is a marble statue showing that republic represented
as a young woman with her foot upon the neck of Walker. Some night a
truth-loving American will place a can of dynamite at the foot of that
statue, and walk hurriedly away. Unaided, neither Costa Rica nor any
other Central American republic could have driven Walker from her soil.
His downfall came through his own people, and through an act of his
which provoked them.
When Walker was elected president he found that the Accessory Transit
Company had not lived up to the terms of its concession with the
Nicaraguan Government. His efforts to hold it to the terms of its
concession led to his overthrow. By its charter the Transit Company
agreed to pay to Nicaragua ten thousand dollars annually and ten per
cent. of the net profits; but the company, whose history the United
States Minister, Squire, characterized as “an infamous career of
deception and fraud,” manipulated its books in such a fashion as to
show that there never were any profits. Doubting this, Walker sent a
commission to New York to investigate. The commission discovered the
fraud and demanded in back payments two hundred and fifty thousand
dollars. When the company refused to pay this, as security for the
debt Walker seized its steamers, wharves, and storehouses, revoked its
charter, and gave a new charter to two of its directors, Morgan and
Garrison, who, in San Francisco, were working against Vanderbilt. In
doing this, while he was legally in the right, he committed a fatal
error. He had made a powerful enemy of Vanderbilt, and he had shut off
his only lines of communication with the United States. For, enraged
at the presumption of the filibuster president, Vanderbilt withdrew his
ocean steamers, thus leaving Walker without men or ammunition, and as
isolated as though upon a deserted island. He possessed Vanderbilt’s
boats upon the San Juan River and Nicaragua Lake, but they were of use
to him only locally.
His position was that of a man holding the centre span of a bridge of
which every span on either side of him has been destroyed.
Vanderbilt did not rest at withdrawing his steamers, but by supporting
the Costa Ricans with money and men, carried the war into Central
America. From Washington he fought Walker through Secretary of State
Marcy, who proved a willing tool.
Spencer and Webster, and the other soldiers of fortune employed by
Vanderbilt, closed the route on the Caribbean side, and the man-of-war
_St. Marys_, commanded by Captain Davis, was ordered to San Juan on the
Pacific side. The instructions given to Captain Davis were to aid the
allies in forcing Walker out of Nicaragua. Walker claims that these
orders were given to Marcy by Vanderbilt and by Marcy to Commodore
Mervin, who was Marcy’s personal friend and who issued them to Davis.
Davis claims that he acted only in the interest of humanity to save
Walker in spite of himself. In any event, the result was the same.
Walker, his force cut down by hostile shot and fever and desertion, took
refuge in Rivas, where he was besieged by the allied armies. There was
no bread in the city. The men were living on horse and mule meat. There
was no salt. The hospital was filled with wounded and those stricken
with fever.
Captain Davis, in the name of humanity, demanded Walker’s surrender to
the United States. Walker told him he would not surrender, but that
if the time came when he found he must fly, he would do so in his own
little schooner of war, the _Granada_, which constituted his entire
navy, and in her, as a free man, take his forces where he pleased. Then
Davis informed Walker that the force Walker had sent to recapture the
Greytown route had been defeated by the janizaries of Vanderbilt; that
the steamers from San Francisco, on which Walker now counted to bring
him re-enforcements, had also been taken off the line, and finally
that it was his “unalterable and deliberate intention” to seize the
_Granada_. On this point his orders left him no choice. The _Granada_
was the last means of transportation still left to Walker. He had hoped
to make a sortie and on board her to escape from the country. But with
his ship taken from him and no longer able to sustain the siege of
the allies, he surrendered to the forces of the United States. In the
agreement drawn up by him and Davis, Walker provided for the care, by
Davis, of the sick and wounded, for the protection after his departure
of the natives who had fought with him, and for the transportation of
himself and officers to the United States.
On his arrival in New York he received a welcome such as later was
extended to Kossuth, and, in our own day, to Admiral Dewey. The city
was decorated with flags and arches; and banquets, fetes, and public
meetings were everywhere held in his honor. Walker received these
demonstrations modestly, and on every public occasion announced his
determination to return to the country of which he was the president,
and from which by force he had been driven. At Washington, where he
went to present his claims, he received scant encouragement. His protest
against Captain Davis was referred to Congress, where it was allowed to
die.
Within a month Walker organized an expedition with which to regain his
rights in Nicaragua, and as, in his new constitution for that country,
he had annulled the old law abolishing slavery, among the slave-holders
of the South he found enough money and recruits to enable him to at once
leave the United States. With one hundred and fifty men he sailed from
New Orleans and landed at San del Norte on the Caribbean side. While he
formed a camp on the harbor of San Juan, one of his officers, with fifty
men, proceeded up the river and, capturing the town of Castillo Viejo
and four of the Transit steamers, was in a fair way to obtain possession
of the entire route. At this moment upon the scene arrived the United
States frigate _Wabash_ and Hiram Paulding, who landed a force of three
hundred and fifty blue-jackets with howitzers, and turned the guns of
his frigate upon the camp of the President of Nicaragua. Captain Engel,
who presented the terms of surrender to Walker, said to him: “General,
I am sorry to see you here. A man like you is worthy to command better
men.” To which Walker replied grimly: “If I had a third the number you
have brought against me, I would show you which of us two commands the
better men.”
For the third time in his history Walker surrendered to the armed forces
of his own country.
On his arrival in the United States, in fulfilment of his parole to
Paulding, Walker at once presented himself at Washington a prisoner
of war. But President Buchanan, although Paulding had acted exactly as
Davis had done, refused to support him, and in a message to Congress
declared that that officer had committed a grave error and established
an unsafe precedent.
On the strength of this Walker demanded of the United States Government
indemnity for his losses, and that it should furnish him and his
followers transportation even to the very camp from which its
representatives had torn him. This demand, as Walker foresaw, was not
considered seriously, and with a force of about one hundred men, among
whom were many of his veterans, he again set sail from New Orleans.
Owing to the fact that, to prevent his return, there now were on each
side of the Isthmus both American and British men-of-war, Walker, with
the idea of reaching Nicaragua by land, stopped off at Honduras. In his
war with the allies the Honduranians had been as savage in their attacks
upon his men as even the Costa Ricans, and finding his old enemies
now engaged in a local revolution, on landing, Walker declared for the
weaker side and captured the important seaport of Trujillo. He no sooner
had taken it than the British warship _Icarus_ anchored in the harbor,
and her commanding officer, Captain Salmon, notified Walker that the
British Government held a mortgage on the revenues of the port, and that
to protect the interests of his Government he intended to take the town.
Walker answered that he had made Trujillo a free port, and that Great
Britain’s claims no longer existed.
The British officer replied that if Walker surrendered himself and his
men he would carry them as prisoners to the United States, and that if
he did not, he would bombard the town. At this moment General Alvarez,
with seven hundred Honduranians, from the land side surrounded Trujillo,
and prepared to attack. Against such odds by sea and land Walker was
helpless, and he determined to fly. That night, with seventy men,
he left the town and proceeded down the coast toward Nicaragua. The
_Icarus_, having taken on board Alvarez, started in pursuit. The
President of Nicaragua was found in a little Indian fishing village, and
Salmon sent in his shore-boats and demanded his surrender. On leaving
Trujillo, Walker had been forced to abandon all his ammunition save
thirty rounds a man, and all of his food supplies excepting two barrels
of bread. On the coast of this continent there is no spot more unhealthy
than Honduras, and when the Englishmen entered the fishing village they
found Walker’s seventy men lying in the palm huts helpless with fever,
and with no stomach to fight British blue-jackets with whom they had no
quarrel. Walker inquired of Salmon if he were asking him to surrender to
the British or to the Honduranian forces, and twice Salmon assured him,
“distinctly and specifically,” that he was surrendering to the forces of
her Majesty. With this understanding Walker and his men laid down their
arms and were conveyed to the _Icarus_. But on arriving at Trujillo,
in spite of their protests and demands for trial by a British tribunal,
Salmon turned over his prisoners to the Honduranian general. What excuse
for this is now given by his descendants in the Salmon family I do not
know.
Probably it is a subject they avoid, and, in history, Salmon’s version
has never been given, which for him, perhaps, is an injustice. But the
fact remains that he turned over his white brothers to the mercies of
half-Indian, half-negro, savages, who were not allies of Great Britain,
and in whose quarrels she had no interest. And Salmon did this, knowing
there could be but one end. If he did not know it, his stupidity
equalled what now appears to be heartless indifference. So far as to
secure pardon for all except the leader and one faithful follower,
Colonel Rudler of the famous Phalanx, Salmon did use his authority, and
he offered, if Walker would ask as an American citizen, to intercede for
him. But Walker, with a distinct sense of loyalty to the country he had
conquered, and whose people had honored him with their votes, refused to
accept life from the country of his birth, the country that had injured
and repudiated him.
Even in his extremity, abandoned and alone on a strip of glaring coral
and noisome swamp land, surrounded only by his enemies, he remained true
to his ideal.
At thirty-seven life is very sweet, many things still seem possible, and
before him, could his life be spared, Walker beheld greater conquests,
more power, a new South controlling a Nicaragua canal, a network of
busy railroads, great squadrons of merchant vessels, himself emperor of
Central America. On the gunboat the gold-braided youth had but to raise
his hand, and Walker again would be a free man. But the gold-braided one
would render this service only on the condition that Walker would appeal
to him as an American; it was not enough that Walker was a human being.
The condition Walker could not grant.
“The President of Nicaragua,” he said, “is a citizen of Nicaragua.”
They led him out at sunrise to a level piece of sand along the beach,
and as the priest held the crucifix in front of him he spoke to his
executioners in Spanish, simply and gravely: “I die a Roman Catholic.
In making war upon you at the invitation of the people of Ruatan I
was wrong. Of your people I ask pardon. I accept my punishment with
resignation. I would like to think my death will be for the good of
society.”
From a distance of twenty feet three soldiers fired at him, but,
although each shot took effect, Walker was not dead. So, a sergeant
stooped, and with a pistol killed the man who would have made him one of
an empire of slaves.
Had Walker lived four years longer to exhibit upon the great board of
the Civil War his ability as a general, he would, I believe, to-day be
ranked as one of America’s greatest fighting men.
And because the people of his own day destroyed him is no reason that we
should withhold from this American, the greatest of all filibusters, the
recognition of his genius.