Walker, WILLIAM

Walker, WILLIAM, filibuster, was born 8th May 1824, at Nashville, Tennessee, the son of an emigrant Dundee banker. He graduated at the university there in 1838, studied medicine at Edinburgh and Heidelberg, but soon gave this up for law and afterwards journalism at New Orleans and in California. In 1853 he failed in an attempt to conquer Sonora and to found a new republic there and in Lower California; with forty-four companions he did capture La Paz, but the native Mexicans refused to be 'liberated,' and on 8th May 1854—his thirtieth birthday—'President' Walker fought his way across the frontier into California and surrendered with the gaunt, starved, wounded survivors of his expedition to the United States commander. A trial for breaking the neutrality laws ended in his acquittal, and a year later he was on his way to Nicaragua, with fifty-five followers, invited to help the Democrats against the Legitimist party. The strange story of Walker's adventures in Central America cannot be more than outlined here. In June 1855 he was repulsed at Rivas with a loss of twenty; but in September, at the head of 110 men, he took the capital, Granada, with the loss of only a drummer. A new government was constituted, with Walker as generalissimo, and in four months he raised an American force of 1400 men, whom he kept under an iron discipline. In February 1856 Costa Rica declared war for the express purpose of driving out the foreigners; but battle and cholera thinned the ranks of the invaders, and of 3000 men only 500 escaped to carry the pestilence back with them across the border. In June Walker was elected president of Nicaragua, and his government was recognised by the United States. Walker's support came chiefly from the southern states, and his aim was to extend the area of slavery southward; accordingly almost the first act of the new administration was to restore slavery, which had been abolished in 1824. Meanwhile his enemies had gathered a force of allies from the surrounding republics, and, though he destroyed nearly 800 of them, he was compelled before the end of the year to burn and abandon Granada. Gradually the allies closed in upon him at Rivas, and on May 1, 1857, he was forced to capitulate to a United States sloop-of-war sent out for the purpose. But in November he landed again at S. Juan del Norte, with a force of 150 men—only to be compelled to surrender, in December, to a United States frigate and carried prisoner to New York, where, as his arrest on foreign soil was illegal, he was soon liberated. In 1860 he published The War in Nicaragua, and turned Catholic. In August he sailed from Mobile for Honduras, with a force of 100 men. He took Trujillo in half an hour, but had to evacuate it on the order of a British man-of-war, by whose commander he was given up to the Honduras authorities. By them he was tried by court-martial, and shot at Trujillo on 12th September 1860. Personally pure, temperate, honest, and fearlessly brave, Walker appears to have been led away by an unquestioning belief in his 'destiny.' See C. W. Doubleday's Reminiscences (1886), and J. F. Roche's Story of the Filibusters ('Adventure' series, 1891).