The Man Who Would Be King of Nicaragua

William Walker in the late 1850s.

(Library of Congress)

On this day 150 years ago, as he prepared to surrender his small force of soldiers, William Walker assured them they had “written a page of American history which it is impossible to forget or erase.” The whims of historical amnesia proved him wrong. Today Walker’s spectacular and absurd military adventures in the mid-nineteenth century are barely remembered.

At the time of his surrender, Walker was president of Nicaragua. He had reached that position through a combination of audacity, idealism, and unlikely turns of fate. He was the premier example of a class of adventurers known as “filibusters,” a variation of the word freebooter—a pirate.

Born in Tennessee in 1824, he had grown up at a time when “manifest destiny” was in the air and many Americans thought the United States should span not only the continent but the entire hemisphere. The Mexican War, the revolutionary fervor of 1848, and the rampant idealism of the Romantic age all helped convince him that the expansion of American ideals was inevitable, and that he could be the agent to bring it about.

Though small and unassuming physically, Walker had a capacious mind. He studied medicine in his twenties and later worked as a lawyer and journalist. He ran a newspaper in San Francisco, where he was jailed for his criticism of a corrupt judge. He displayed an intensity of purpose that inspired men to follow him—“magnetic attraction,” one of his followers called it, “such as is rarely witnessed.”

In the 1850s Central America was attracting attention in the United States as the shortest route to the California gold fields. The New York capitalist Cornelius Vanderbilt was among those who imagined cutting the isthmus with a canal. In the meantime Vanderbilt set up the hugely profitable Accessory Transit Company in Nicaragua, which used a river-lake-land route to move travelers to the Pacific coast.

Britain had claimed interests in the region dating to the seventeenth century and controlled considerable territory along the Caribbean coast of Guatemala and Nicaragua. In the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, the United States and Britain agreed not to establish a canal except in cooperation with each other, and not to colonize the region.

In Walker’s view, that meant that only a private army could act to preserve U.S. interests in the region. He had already led one such army, on an unsuccessful mission to take over the Sonora region of Mexico. In June 1855 he took a force to Nicaragua, calling it “a column of Progress and Democracy.”

The press referred to his band of 58 men as “the Immortals.” The notion that they could change the course of history was colored with a preposterousness that Walker never recognized. The newspaper editor Horace Greeley called him “the Don Quixote of Central America.”

Nicaragua was in the midst of civil war. Fifteen different presidents had ruled there during the previous six years. Walker took the side of the liberal Democrats, who were facing defeat by the conservative Legitimists. He and his men, joined by Nicaraguan troops, were able to turn the tide in the war and in a bold move take the Legitimist stronghold of Granada. The victory effectively put him in charge of the country.

Now he desperately needed aid from the U.S. government to bring Nicaragua under “the civilizing influence of the American people.” But the administration of Franklin Pierce was opposing his operation, which was illegal under U.S. neutrality laws.

He now found himself at the center of a whirlwind of social and political forces. The British were determined to block a Central American canal. Americans were still anxious to find a way to California. Conservatives in other Central American countries worried about the spread of reformist ideas. Slave owners in the U.S. South wanted to expand their institution to Central America. Nicaraguan peasants chafed under the feudal peonage system of their overlords. It would have taken a statesman of rare ability to deal with these forces and at the same time negotiate the labyrinth of Nicaraguan politics—and Walker was not a skillful politician.

For one thing, he turned against Vanderbilt, who had initially viewed him favorably, and helped two rivals to take over Accessory Transit. Vanderbilt became Walker’s bitter enemy and worked behind the scenes to thwart him.

Yet for the moment the winds of fortune blew favorably for Walker. In March 1856 his army was defeated by a force of Costa Ricans, but battle losses and a cholera outbreak compelled the invaders to withdraw. The Pierce administration decided to recognize the government that Walker had installed in Nicaragua. In June, in response to factional bickering, Walker ran for president and was victorious, though it was an election of questionable honesty.

Now 32, he began to Americanize of his adopted land. He made English an official language, brought the currency in line with the dollar, reformed taxes, and confiscated land from supporters of the recent invasion.

Even as the conservative forces gathered for a new attack, no material aid came from the United States. Now Walker took a step that went against his earlier idealism. To make his project appeal to Southerners in the U.S., he declared void the provision of the Nicaraguan constitution that outlawed slavery. The move eroded his support among Nicaraguans.

In October 1856 a force that would eventually total 17,000 soldiers invaded from a confederation of other Central American countries. Walker, with only 2,500 men, had to fall back. In March 1857 he reminded his men, “We have come here as the advance guard of American civilization.” To no avail. He was forced to surrender to a U.S. naval officer sent to limit American casualties.

When he returned stateside, he was welcomed as a hero. Crowds turned out to greet him in New Orleans and New York. The charge of breaching neutrality laws was dropped. He immediately set about raising money and men for another expedition to Nicaragua. This effort came to nothing.

His last chance arrived in the summer of 1860, when a contingent of liberals in Honduras suggested he might help them overthrow the conservative government there and set up a progressive confederation. The adventure misfired, and Walker and his men were pursued into the Honduran jungle. This time he surrendered to a British naval officer, who turned him over to the Hondurans. They quickly executed him by firing squad in September 1860. He was only 36. “He was no vulgar adventurer,” The New York Times wrote in its obituary. He was a man of “moral force and personal integrity.”

The American Civil War largely blotted out the memory of Walker and the filibusters. When the United States renewed its interest in the Nicaragua in the early twentieth century, its object was not the type of civilizing reforms that Walker had envisioned. U.S. Marines invaded the country in 1912, and America actively supported conservative or reactionary forces in the country for the next 80 years.

Last year U.S. officials saw fit to wade into the Nicaraguan presidential election, threatening to cut off aid and investment if the former Marxist revolutionary Daniel Ortega was elected. The tactic backfired. Ortega won.

—Jack Kelly writes often for American Heritage magazine and is the author of Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics—A History of the Explosive That Changed the World (Basic Books).