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Today, if I told you to imagine a filibuster, you might envision a boring bit of parliamentary procedure, a senator droning endlessly in an attempt to impose gridlock. But the word filibuster has a more interesting past: it comes from the Spanish word filibustero, which means “freebooter” or “pirate.”
Before it came to describe the hijacking of a legislative body, a filibuster referred to an actual act of international violence committed by private citizens in pursuit of money or power. There was, as you might imagine, a lot of this kind of filibustering during the golden age of piracy in the 1600s and 1700s, when bloodthirsty marauders terrorized the Caribbean. But there was a later age of filibusters, too.
In the 19th century, a shocking number of private “adventurers” tried their hand at conquest, especially in the Americas. These marauders took advantage of weak governments and a lack of international law to make a play for glory and riches. It may not surprise you to discover that most of them were from the United States of America, which was in the midst of an orgy of westward expansion. If Americans could push across the plains to claim western lands, why not do the same elsewhere?
These expeditions were technically against the law — several American statutes wisely prohibited private citizens from launching private military attacks on sovereign nations. You might also think that simple morality would make this sort of obviously disruptive and needlessly violent activity unpopular. But you’d be wrong. Much of the American public loved filibusters, seeing them as intrepid, heroic adventures.
Filibustering would have been ugly enough had it just consisted of some greedy Americans creating havoc across Latin America for their own enrichment. But the wave of filibusters peaked in the first half of the 19th century for a reason — many of the filibusters were trying to push the United States’ borders south to expand the number of states and territories that allowed people to own one another.
This was certainly true of the most famous filibuster of all, William Walker. Walker charmed the press and much of the public (in the United States, at least) with his repeated, relentless attempts to conquer territory outside the country. Walker represented the audacity of an increasingly powerful United States — right up until a Honduran firing squad executed him at age 36.
William Walker was, it’s fair to say, a smart and restless man.
He graduated from the University of Nashville in his hometown at the tender age of 14. He had finished his medical degree at Penn before he turned 20, and traveled to Scotland and Germany to study and practice medicine. He then got bored with this line of work and moved to New Orleans to become a lawyer. He tired of that, too, and reinvented himself as a journalist, editing papers in New Orleans and San Francisco. He managed to find time to fight several duels, gaining notoriety for getting shot in the leg by William Hicks Graham, an honest-to-God Wild West gunslinger.
All this happened before Walker turned 30. In 1853, at the age of 29, having found traditional sources of prestige, wealth, and adventure unsatisfying, he decided to take over his own country.
Walker, like many filibusters, saw opportunity in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War; after the conflict had ended in 1848 with the United States annexing much of northern Mexico, much of the new northern frontier of the country was lightly defended and only nominally under centralized control. The war had been sold to the American people as a righteous exercise of manifest destiny — why not, the filibusters thought, take a little more land?
Walker seemed to be a leader born for this sort of ambitious adventure. J.C. Jamison, who fought in one of Walker’s filibuster attempts, described him as an incredibly charismatic figure:
He was a man of small stature, his height being about five feet five inches, and his weight close to 130 pounds. His body, however, was strong, and his vital energy surprisingly great. The expression of his countenance was frank and open, and heightened by the absence of beard of any kind. His aggressive and determined character was plainly indicated by his aquiline nose, while his eyes, from which came his sobriquet, ‘Grey-eyed Man of Destiny,’ were keen in their scrutiny and almost hypnotic in their power. A woman’s voice was scarcely softer than Walker’s … But with all his placidity of voice and demeanor, men leaped eagerly into the very cannon’s mouth to obey his commands.
Walker put together a small fighting force and conquered a mostly empty part of Baja California. He declared himself the new president of the “Republic of Sonora,” kidnapping the provincial governor for a while. Overall, however, the venture was laughable. Walker commanded only 50 men, and once the Mexican government awakened to his invasion, its forces (and angry Mexicans outraged at the way his army was stealing from them to feed itself) chased his little band around Baja and eventually back into the United States.
This all looks to modern eyes like a cruel, greedy, and ineffective attempt at self-aggrandizement. But it apparently looked different to the 19th-century public. Walker’s exploits were seen as an extension of the nation’s conquest. He justified his expedition by saying that he was just doing what the government should have done, but was too slow and inefficient to do. Besides, he said, he was bringing order and civilization to backwards places. Newspapers all over the country carried his justification for his actions:
Walker’s forces, having been chased out of Mexico, turned themselves in to the American military in San Diego. He and his associates were put on trial for violating federal law. Though some of the others were convicted, the jury acquitted Walker, who turned on the charm at his trial, after only eight minutes, even though he was plainly guilty of violating the Neutrality Act.
Walker did not lack self-belief, so his reaction to having launched an invasion of a country, being defeated, and being put on trial was to keep at it. His next target was Nicaragua, a country which, because of its position on the isthmus of Central America, was becoming a major conduit of trade between the American east and west coasts in the days before the transcontinental railroad and the Panama Canal.
Aware of the commercial potential of this region, Walker jumped at the chance to intervene in a 1854 civil war between conservatives and liberals in Nicaragua. He and his mercenaries — a group called La Falange Americana — were invited to join the liberal cause. Since they were fighting on behalf of a foreign entity, they wouldn’t be violating the Neutrality Act this time around.
Walker’s several dozen American and European fighters worked with Nicaraguan troops to defeat conservative forces in a series of battles in 1855. By the end of the year, Walker had made himself the power behind the president, Patricio Rivas. One of the new regime’s first acts was to get rid of Nicaragua’s 30-year-old abolition laws, making the nation a haven for slavery and winning the support of many American Southerners who wanted to expand slavery to new territories. He soon offered a kind of Homestead Act to Americans who wanted to move to Nicaragua; white settlers started to move to Central America the way they had flocked to the Great Plains.
For nine months, Walker operated as the power behind President Rivas, but he eventually tired of puppetry and declared himself president of Nicaragua in the summer of 1856. American President Franklin Pierce quickly recognized him as the rightful ruler of Nicaragua.
Walker’s unlikely conquest of a country captivated the public back home in the United States. He was certainly popular in the South, but perhaps equally so in the North. A theater in New York put on a play glorifying his actions:
There were popular songs about the mercenary’s life in Central America:
News outlets, too, were eagerly covering the dramatic events in Central America. The pro-slavery New York Herald loved Walker and breathlessly chronicled his exploits:
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper dramatized the events for its readers with drawings of battles:
And Walker’s execution of a political enemy, the previous Minister of War:
This map, published in 1856, is especially interesting. Perhaps in anticipation of an American annexation of Nicaragua, Walker and his conquests are shown in their relation to the United States and placed alongside the great military victories of the Revolution and War of 1812:
But Walker’s moment of triumph was short-lived. First, he alienated some of his support in the United States by threatening the stability (and therefore wealthy Americans’ investments) in the region. He soon found himself at odds with powerful families like the Vanderbilts.
On top of that, his Central American neighbors were unwilling to allow an American adventurer to conquer their region. Understandably worried about what Walker might try next, Costa Rica stood up to him. When Nicaraguan forces invaded, the Costa Ricans won several important battles (the nation would pay a terrible price after a cholera epidemic, possibly caused by Walker’s tactic of dumping corpses down wells to poison them, swept through the country).
Costa Rica’s success in the south encouraged Honduras and El Salvador to attack Walker from the north. Soon, Walker was under siege; after destroying the city of Granada — his soldiers left behind a sign reading “Here was Granada” — he ran once again into the arms of the United States military, surrendering himself into their custody.
You might think that, having failed twice to make himself the potentate of a private Central American kingdom, Walker might have moved on to some other pursuit. You’d be wrong. He couldn’t get dreams of glory out of his head.
He tried another invasion of Nicaragua, attacking Greytown with 270 men in 1857. But this time, the U.S. Navy, unwilling to allow him to sow more chaos in the region, intervened. Walker was dragged back to the United States, but he remained popular, touring the South and speaking before pro-slavery audiences who saw in his activities validation of their system of oppression. One group of Mississippi slaveowners wrote to him that he represented a “bold and indomitable effort to organize in Central America, a republic founded on the supremacy of a superior race, and on the industrial subordination of an inferior race.’
In the tumultuous year of 1860, as the United States began to convulse toward a civil war, Walker tried once again. He invaded Honduras this time with the intention of moving south into Nicaragua. The British Navy, weary of his shenanigans, arrested him and handed him over to the Honduran government.
Harper’s noted with ambivalence this latest and last attempt:
It is the manifest destiny of William Walker to go a filibustering in Central America, and it is likewise his manifest destiny to come to grief in the pursuit of his filibustering enterprise. His latest exploit has been to land at the head of two or three hundred adventurers near Truxillo, in Honduras, which State he probably proposes to conquer. Meanwhile both British and American vessels of war are in chase of him; and if the Spanish Americans don't demolish him before they arrive on the scene of action he will again be seized and carried off a prisoner, as he was when he last landed in Nicaragua.
Mr. William Walker is a living illustration of the adage about "seizing the tide at the flood." Time was, not many years ago, when this country and the whole civilized world would have gladly hailed him as the ruler of Nicaragua. He failed to appreciate his situation, got drunk with good luck, fell, and that fortunate time has never recurred. Since Walker's capitulation men's minds have undergone change in regard to filibusterism. It is not, by any means, the popular diversion it was when crowded meetings in New York, headed by men of character and substance, voted complimentary resolutions tothe "Dictator" of Central America…
Had Mr. Walker retained power in Nicaragua and devoted his energies to opening that country to civilization instead of closing it to commerce, as he did, mankind would have overlooked the informalities of his rise to applaud the practical benefits of his sovereignty... He has no right to expect the world to forgive him any more crimes, or to revive hopes which he has so bitterly disappointed. He has exhausted all that was favorable in his manifest destiny; that which is now most manifest for him is shameful defeat and perhaps a halter.
Walker was executed by firing squad. The New York Times’ account of his demise was suitably dramatic — and still ambivalent about the character of a man who had done so much harm:
Three soldiers stepped forward to within twenty feet of him and discharged their muskets… but, it being observed he was not dead, a fourth soldier mercifully advanced so close to the suffering man that the muzzle of the musket almost touched his forehead, and being there discharged, scattered his brains and skull to the winds. Thus ends the life of the “Gray-eyed man of Destiny,” and though we may differ in our several estimates of the character of the man… I believe none will be found that he was not a man of true courage, and that he believed his conduct was correct in attempting to “extend the area of liberty,” and thus benefit his fellow man.
Americans soon forgot Walker and the positive publicity he attracted as the country plunged into a terrible Civil War. But people in Central America had longer memories. His expeditions, though they were often seen in the United States as daring exploits or charming adventures, were direct assaults on the sovereignty of Central American nations, and they represented just part of a very long history of American attempts to dominate the region.
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