The Notorious William Walker

[DCR]

I believe there was a movie made about this some years back.  But, here is the life story of one of Nashville's most infamous sons: 

William Walker

. 

There is a historical marker in downtown Nashville that marks where he was born.

Quotes below from the Wikipedia article on him.  He was a well-educated man...

William Walker graduated summa cume 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.

...who conceived this plot to lead a rag-tag band of mercenaries whose goal would be to invade and conquer some Latin American countries:

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.

He first attempted to invade, Mexico, but alas he failed::

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.

However, a civil war raging in Nicaragua afforded an opportunity for Walker to make another attempt, at the end of which, the U.S. President actually recognized Walker's regime as the legitimate government of Nicaragua:

A civil war was then raging in the Central American republic of Nicaragua. To circumvent U.S. neutrality laws, Walker obtained a contract from President Castellón of the Democratic Party to bring as many as three hundred "colonists" to Nicaragua. The mercenaries received the right to bear arms in the service of the Democratic government. Walker sailed from San Francisco on May 3, 1855 with 60 men. Upon landing, the force was reinforced by 170 locals and about 100 Americans, including then well-known explorer and journalist Charles Wilkins Webber and the English adventurer Charles Frederick Henningsen, a veteran of the First Carlist War, the Hungarian Revolution, and the war in Circassia.

A young man from the Sacramento Union went to Nicaragua to cover the Walker's adventures there. This young man sent back reports that Walker was attempting to set up a slave holding republic in Nicaragua. This young man was sentenced by Walker to death by a firing squad. But he escaped disguised as a woman. This young man would later be known as Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain. [Murder at White Sands]

With Castellón's consent Walker attacked the Legitimists in the town of Rivas, near the trans-isthmian route. On September 1, during the First Battle of Rivas, Walker defeated the Nicaraguan national army at La Virgen. One month later, on October 13, he conquered the capital of Granada and took effective 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.

As this was in the years leading up the American Civil War, Walker also played on Southern sympathies and actually repealed a slavery emancipation act that had been in effect in Nicaragua since 1824 (interesting that this had been nearly 40 years before the Emancipation Proclamation in the U.S.).  Cornelius Vanderbilt (the railroad tycoon and namesake of Vanderbilt University here in Nashville) was involved in this situation, as he opposed Walker.

Walker set himself up as president of Nicaragua, after conducting a farcical election. Walker was inaugurated on July 12, 1856, and soon launched an Americanization program declaring English an official language and reorganizaing currency and fiscal policy to encourage immigration from the United States. 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.

Walker finally met his end in Honduras on the eve of the American Civil War in 1860.

After writing an account of his Central American campaign (published in 1860 as War in Nicaragua), Walker once again returned to the region. He disembarked in the port city of Trujillo, in the Republic of Honduras, but 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, Colón.

I was not aware of this story or Walker until fairly recently.  But, I found the story of this person from my hometown to be rather interesting.  Just one of the interesting and infamous characters from the annals of American history. 




(By the way, yes, "summa cume laude" is misspelled in the first quote above.  The forum's profanity controls apparently don't like the way that middle word should be spelled, so the Latin word there was replaced with a different word when I originally posted it.  )