Dr. William Walker

MD, University of Pennsylvania

He was a doctor, a lawyer, a journalist, a warmonger, a slavery enthusiast, and, clearly, barking mad. Mad but not stupid. William Walker, born in Tennessee in 1824, graduated, summa, from the University of Nashville at the age of fourteen. Then on to study medicine at Edinburgh and Heidelberg, graduating with an MD from Penn. At nineteen! Practiced medicine in Philadelphia for a few nanoseconds before going for his law degree in New Orleans. After another handful of nanoseconds dedicated to the practice of law, he became the publisher of a New Orleans newspaper.

He also began a relationship with a woman who was not only a deaf mute but, soon, a dead deaf mute (cholera). Perhaps this drove him mad. Or perhaps it simply drove him from New Orleans. Or maybe he just wanted to avoid growing moss. In any case, at age twenty-five he rolled on to San Francisco. There, uncharacteristically, he didn’t immediately start a new career, but continued with journalism for a while. On the side he evidently enjoyed quarreling: he was a protagonist, if that’s the word, in three duels. He was wounded in two of them.

This should have tipped Walker off that gunplay was not his strong suit. Or perhaps it was the smell of gunpowder that truly drove him mad. Whatever. The important thing is, he soon reached the exciting, lunatic conclusion that what he required was more gunplay. Specifically, he got it into his head that what he needed to do was raise his own army, invade a bunch of Latin American nations, and establish colonies, under his personal control, in which English was the rule and slavery was cool.

It must be said that beating up on nearby Spanish-speaking nations was already in the air—a third of Mexico, or what we today refer to as “Texas,” had recently been annexed by the USA—and mounting freelance invasions of other neighboring countries had become a fad.* So was the theory that God or Someone wanted the United States to keep growing, an idea that swanned around under the moniker “manifest destiny.” Not that Walker needed all that to justify his plan. He didn’t bother to justify anything. The man was bats.

In his first sortie, a scraggly little invasion of Mexico, Walker barely escaped with his life. That was in 1853. A couple of years later he tried Nicaragua, which, before trains, planes, automobiles, and the Panama Canal, provided a crucial overland link between the eastern states and booming California. In this round of his loopy scheme, Walker briefly succeeded: after forming an alliance with a faction in the target country, he got lucky, stumbled into a victory or two against feeble opponents, and found himself in charge of the ruling junta.

That didn’t sit too well with his “subjects,” not to mention with the governments of the other countries in the region, which launched an unremitting series of invasions. This inspired Walker to fake an election, declare himself president, and proclaim English Nicaragua’s official language and slavery its preferred form of employment. People back home who followed the story were divided into two camps: those who considered Walker a criminal, and those who cherished slavery, detested speakers of Spanish, and idolized Walker, i.e., the nineteenth-century precursors of certain present-day troglodytes.

Walker’s presidential reign was short-lived and inglorious. In May 1857, the US Navy nabbed him—rescued him, really—and brought him home. “That man,” wrote President James Buchanan, “has done more injury to the commercial & political interests of the United States than any man living.” Nonetheless, the government could not convict him of a crime, prevent him from drawing crowds of cheering idiots, or keep him from doing it all over again.

In 1860, after two more invasion attempts, Dr. Lawyer Journalist Walker, age thirty-six, was captured by the Royal Navy (yes, the Brits were also involved) and tossed like a hot potato to the Hondurans, who gave him a firsthand demonstration of the medical, legal, and journalistic consequences of being on the receiving end of a firing squad. He was buried in Honduras, where Spanish is the language and slavery was and is illegal.

Luckily for those who cherish the reputation of Penn Med, the Civil War came along, bumping Walker off the front page and nearly sending him down history’s memory hole. Nearly, but not quite. “His bizarre career,” says Pulitzer-winning historian T. J. Stiles (MA, MPhil, Columbia University), “would leave a legacy that shadows the relationship between the United States and Central America to this day.”

Understandably. But it wasn’t all in vain. Central American countries have historically lacked a defining War of Independence to celebrate. So they fixed on the 1856–1857 campaign against Walker as a substitute. Costa Rica, for example, made April 11 a national holiday in honor of his defeat. Three cheers! Or, okay, two. Okay, none. Is none enough?