Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (25 page)

In 1854 Walker signed a contract with the rebels in Nicaragua's current civil war and in May 1855 sailed from San Francisco with the first contingent of fifty-seven men to support this cause. Because Britain was backing the other side and American-British tensions had escalated in recent years, U. S. officials looked the other way when Walker departed. With financial support from Vanderbilt's transit company, Walker's filibusters and their rebel allies defeated the "Legitimists" and gained control of the government. Walker appointed himself commander in chief of the Nicaraguan army as Americans continued to pour into the country—two thousand by the spring of 1856. President Pierce granted diplomatic recognition to Walker's government in May.

Although Walker himself and half of his filibusters were southerners, the enterprise thus far did not have a particularly pro-southern flavor. By mid-18 56, however, that was changing. While much of the northern press condemned Walker as a pirate, southern newspapers praised him as engaged in a "noble cause. . . . It is our cause at bottom." In 1856 the Democratic national convention adopted a plank written by none other than Pierre Soul6 endorsing U. S. "ascendancy in the Gulf of Mexico."
⁷⁷
Proponents of slavery expansion recognized the opportunities

77
.
New Orleans Daily Delta
, April 18, 1856, quoted in Franklin,
Militant South
, 120; Schlesinger, ed.,
History of American Presidential Elections
, II, 1039.

there for plantation agriculture. Indeed, Central America offered even more intriguing possibilities than Cuba, for its sparse mixed-blood population and weak, unstable governments seemed to make it an easy prey.
⁷⁸
Of course the Central American republics had abolished slavery a generation earlier. But this was all the better, for it would allow southerners to establish slave plantations without competition from local planters. "A barbarous people can never become civilized without the salutary apprenticeship which slavery secured," declared a New Orleans newspaper that urged southern emigration to Walker's Nicaragua. "It is the duty and decreed prerogative of the wise to guide and govern the ignorant . . . through slavery, and the sooner civilized men learn their duty and their right the sooner will the real progress of civilization be rescued."
⁷⁹

During 1856 hundreds of would-be planters took up land grants in Nicaragua. In August, Pierre Soulé himself arrived in Walker's capital and negotiated a loan for him from New Orleans bankers. The "grey-eyed man of destiny," as the press now described Walker, needed this kind of help. His revolution was in trouble. The other Central American countries had formed an alliance to overthrow him. They were backed by Cornelius Vanderbilt, whom Walker had angered by siding with an anti-Vanderbilt faction in the Accessory Transit Company. The president of Nicaragua defected to the enemy, whereupon Walker installed himself as president in July 1856. The Pierce administration withdrew its diplomatic recognition. Realizing that southern backing now represented his only hope, Walker decided "to bind the Southern States to Nicaragua as if she were one of themselves," as he later put it. On September 22, 1856, he revoked Nicaragua's 1824 emancipation edict and legalized slavery again.
⁸⁰

This bold gamble succeeded in winning southern support. "No movement on the earth" was as important to the South as Walker's, proclaimed one newspaper. "In the name of the white race," said another, he "now offers Nicaragua to you and your slaves, at a time when you have not a friend on the face of the earth." The commercial convention meeting at Savannah expressed enthusiasm for the "efforts being made to introduce civilization in the States of Central America, and to

78
. In the 1850s the population of Nicaragua, for example, was about one-twelfth of its present total.

79
.
Louisiana Courier
, Nov. 12, 1857, quoted in Chester Stanley Urban, "The Ideology of Southern Imperialism,"
Louisiana Historical Quarterly
, 39 (1956), 66.

80
. William Walker,
The War in Nicaragua
(New York, 1860), 263.

develop these rich and productive regions by the introduction of slave labor."
⁸¹
Several shiploads of new recruits arrived from New Orleans and San Francisco during the winter of 1856–57 to fight for Walker. But they were not enough. Some of them reached Nicaragua just in time to succumb to a cholera epidemic that ravaged Walker's army even as the Central American alliance overwhelmed it in battle. On May 1, 1857, Walker surrendered his survivors to a United States naval commander whose ship carried them back to New Orleans. They left behind a thousand Americans dead of disease and combat.

This did not end the matter. Indeed, in the South it had barely begun. A wild celebration greeted Walker's return. Citizens opened their hearts and purses to the "grey-eyed man of destiny" as he traveled through the South raising men and money for another try. In November 1857 Walker sailed from Mobile on his second expedition to Nicaragua. But the navy caught up with him and carried his army back to the states. Southern newspapers erupted in denunciation of this naval "usurpation of power." Alexander Stephens urged the court-martial of the commodore who had detained Walker. Two dozen southern senators and congressmen echoed this sentiment in an extraordinary congressional debate. "A heavier blow was never struck at southern rights," said a Tennessee representative, "than when Commodore Paulding perpetrated upon our people his high-handed outrage." The government's action proved that President Buchanan was just like other Yankees in wanting to "crush out the expansion of slavery to the South." In May 1858 a hung jury in New Orleans voted 10–2 to acquit Walker of violating the neutrality law.
⁸²

This outpouring of southern sympathy swept Walker into a campaign to organize yet another invasion of Nicaragua. A second tour of the lower South evoked an almost pathological frenzy among people who believed themselves locked in mortal combat with Yankee oppressors. At one town Walker appealed "to the mothers of Mississippi to bid their sons buckle on the armor of war, and battle for the institutions, for the honor of the Sunny South."
⁸³
The sons of Mississippi responded. Walker's

81
. May,
Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire
, 108–9; Russel,
Economic Aspects of Southern Sectionalism
, 140.

82
.
CG
, 35 Cong., 1 Sess., 562; May,
Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire
, 113–26.

83
.
Aberdeen
[Miss.]
Prairie News
, July 1, 1858, quoted in Percy Lee Rainwater, "Economic Benefits of Secession: Opinions in Mississippi in the 1850's,"
JSH
, 1 (1935), 462.

third expedition sailed from Mobile in December 1858, but their ship hit a reef and sank sixty miles from the Central American coast. De-pite the humiliation of returning to Mobile in the British ship that rescued them, the filibusters received their customary tumultuous welcome.

But Walker's act was growing stale. When he set out again to recruit support for a fourth try, the crowds were smaller. Walker wrote a book about his Nicaraguan experiences, appealing to "the hearts of Southern youth" to "answer the call of honor."
⁸⁴
A few southern youths answered the call. Ninety-seven filibusters traveled in small groups to a rendezvous in Honduras where they hoped to find backing for a new invasion of Nicaragua. Instead they found hostility and defeat. Walker surrendered to a British navy captain, expecting as usual to be returned to the United States. Instead the captain turned him over to local authorities. On September 12, 1860, the grey-eyed man met his destiny before a Honduran firing squad.

His legacy lived on, not only in Central American feelings about gringoes but also in North American feelings about the sectional conflict that was tearing apart the United States. When Senator John }. Crittenden proposed to resolve the secession crisis in 1861 by reinstating the 36° 30' line between slavery and freedom in all territories "now held, or hereafter acquired," Abraham Lincoln and his party rejected the proposal on the ground that it "would amount to a perpetual covenant of war against every people, tribe, and State owning a foot of land between here and Tierra del Fuego."
⁸⁵

This was only a slight exaggeration. Having begun the decade of the 1850s with a drive to defend southern rights by economic diversification, many southerners ended it with a different vision of southern enterprise—the expansion of slavery into a tropical empire controlled by the South. This was the theme of a book published in 1859 by Edward A. Pollard, a Virginia journalist and future participant-historian of the Confederacy. "The path of our destiny on this continent," wrote Pollard,

lies in . . . tropical America [where] we may see an empire as powerful and gorgeous as ever was pictured in our dreams of history . . . an empire . . . representing the noble peculiarities of Southern civilization

84
. Walker,
The War in Nicaragua
, 278.

85
.
CG
, 36 Cong., 2 Sess., 651.

. . . having control of the two dominant staples of the world's commerce—cotton and sugar. . . . The destiny of Southern civilization is to be consummated in a glory brighter even than that of old.
⁸⁶

Another Virginian, George Bickley, put this fantasy on an organized basis with his Knights of the Golden Circle, founded in the mid-1850s to promote a "golden circle" of slave states from the American South through Mexico and Central America to the rim of South America, curving northward again through the West Indies to close the circle at Key West. "With this addition to either our
system
, the
Union
, or to a Southern Confederacy," wrote Bickley in 1860, "we shall have in our hands the Cotton, Tobacco, Sugar, Coffee, Rice, Corn, and Tea lands of the continent, and the world's great storehouse of mineral wealth."
⁸⁷

Thus had Thomas Jefferson's Empire for Liberty become transmuted by 1860 into Mississippi Congressman L. Q. C. Lamar's desire to "plant American liberty with southern institutions upon every inch of American soil."
⁸⁸
But the furor over this effort to plant the southern version of liberty as slavery along the Gulf of Mexico took a back seat to the controversy sparked by the effort to plant it in Kansas.

86
. Pollard,
Black Diamonds
(New York, 1859), 52–53, 108–9.

87
. May,
Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire
, 150.

88
.
CG
, 35 Cong., 1 Sess., 279.

4
Slavery, Rum, and Romanism

I

The year 1852 turned out to be the last one in which the Whig party contested a presidential election. Millard Fillmore's efforts to enforce the fugitive slave law won him the support of southern Whigs for re-nomination. But the president had alienated antislavery Whigs, especially the Seward faction in Fillmore's own state of New York. Seward favored the nomination of Winfield Scott, a Virginian (but not a slaveholder). The Whig convention presented the curious spectacle of most southern delegates favoring a northern candidate, and vice versa, while many anti-war Whigs of four years earlier once again backed a general who had led American troops to victory in the war these Whigs had opposed. Maneuvers at the convention heightened the impression of Whig stultification. Southerners obtained enough support from northern moderates to adopt a plan pledging to "acquiesce in" the Compromise of 1850 "as a settlement in principle and substance" of the "dangerous and exciting" slavery question. All votes against this plank came from those northern Whigs who provided half of Scott's delegate support. Balloting for a presidential nominee ground through 52 roll calls as Yankee delegates furnished 95 percent of Scott's vote and southern delegates cast 85 percent of Fillmore's. On the fifty-third ballot a dozen southern moderates switched to Scott and put him over the top.
¹