Tycoon's War

George Aspinwall continued to try to compete with Vanderbilt on the Pacific run, despite losing the mail contract to him. But before a year had elapsed, Vanderbilt had done a deal with Aspinwall, and the pair merged their East Coast and West Coast shipping concerns. Several of Vanderbilt’s ships joined Aspinwall’s Pacific fleet, and Vanderbilt became a major share-holder of Aspinwall’s Pacific Steamship Company. All California traffic was cornered by the partnership, which continued to use Panama. The Nicaraguan Transit Route lay dormant.

William Walker, meanwhile, had not given up on his dream of empire in Central America. In his own words, his return to Nicaragua obsessed his every waking and sleeping thought.² In December 1858, within months of being returned to the United States by Commodore Paulding, Walker had dispatched Frank Anderson and 111 men in the schooner Susan to establish a bridgehead on the Mosquito Coast. In the last stages of a Neutrality Act trial in New Orleans—he would be exonerated—Walker planned to soon follow Anderson with more men. But on December 14, when the Susan became stuck fast on Glover Reef off the coast of Belize, the mission had to be abandoned. Walker stubbornly launched a fourth venture in the summer of 1860. British settlers on the Caribbean island of Roatan had not been happy with the British government’s plan to transfer the island to Honduras and had approached Walker in New Orleans to help them gain their independence, after which, they promised, they would help him regain Nicaragua.

In June, shortly after the publication of his hastily written memoirs, The War in Nicaragua, which he had penned in the third person in emulation of Julius Caesar’s Commentaries and which quickly became a U.S. best seller, Walker and 130 other men sailed for Roatan aboard two schooners loaded with arms, leaving Fayssoux in New Orleans to organize reinforcements. But one vessel was caught by British forces waiting at Roatan—it is possible that the whole operation was set up by the British government to entrap Walker. After Walker and most of his men escaped on the second vessel, instead of returning to the United States, Walker proposed to land in Honduras, from where he would continue the struggle to regain Nicaragua. “With us there can be no choice,” he had written in his memoirs. “Honor and duty call on us to pursue the path we have entered.”³

Ninety-one of his men voted to go with Walker, who planned to link up with crusty old Democratico leader Trinidad Cabanas, who was fighting a guerrilla war against President “Butcher” Guardiola in Honduras. Walker planned to help Cabanas defeat Guardiola, then, supported by Cabanas’s forces, march into Nicaragua. On August 5, Walker, his deputy Anthony Rudler, and their band landed at Trujillo. At dawn the next day, they attacked a Honduran fortress built by Cortes, taking it after a short, bloody fight.

But on August 12, the British steam frigates Icarus and Gladiator—two of fifteen British warships scouring the Western Caribbean for Walker—dropped anchor in the bay off Trujillo. After the Royal Navy’s Captain Norvell Salmon demanded Walker’s surrender, Walker, leaving his wounded at the fortress, escaped up the coast with 64 men. Ambushed by 150 Honduran troops, Walker struggled on until forced to surrender to a British lieutenant leading 40 Royal Marines. To the horror of Walker and his survivors, the British captain then handed them over to the Hondurans. Both Walker and Rudler were tried and sentenced to death, although Rudler’s sentence was commuted and he was repatriated to the United States through the intercession of the state of Alabama. Just a dozen of Walker’s followers lived to return home.

At first light on September 12, 1860, slight thirty-six-year-old William Walker was led onto the beach at Trujillo, escorted by seventy Honduran soldiers. As a firing squad lined up on the sand in front of him, the officer in charge read the death sentence aloud. Then, holding a crucifix, having converted to Catholicism prior to this last, ill-judged venture to Central America, a composed Walker addressed the Hondurans in Spanish. According to Honduran tradition, Walker apologized for making war on the Honduran people and said that he faced death with resolution and with the hope that it was for the good of mankind. He was still speaking when his executioners fired. The officer in charge then walked to Walker’s fallen body, put a pistol to his face, and fired at point blank range, so that the corpse could never be recognized. Walker’s naked body was buried in the sand. Requests from supporters in the United States for the return of his remains were denied by the Honduran government, which later relocated them to the Trujillo graveyard; the name on the tombstone was misspelled.

In New York, Cornelius Vanderbilt had forgotten all about William Walker; the Commodore’s attention was now focused on beating competitors on the transatlantic route. Eighteen days after Walker’s execution, Costa Rica’s President José Rafael Mora was executed by firing squad at Puntarenas in Costa Rica. Deposed by his former business partner José Maria Montealegre, Mora had led a failed countercoup. His brother-in-law, General José Canas, was executed by Montealegre’s troops the following day. Eighteen months later, President José “Butcher” Guardiola of Honduras was assassinated by his own bodyguard. General Ramon Belloso, former commander in chief of the Allied army, died in 1858 from cholera. His successor as Guatemalan commander in the war against Walker, General Geraldo Barrios, became president of Guatemala in 1859, only to be deposed and executed by firing squad six years later. After the war with Walker, the governments of Central America never again combined in a common cause.

William Walker, during his short life, was the most talked-about man in the United States. Yet news of his violent death in 1860 excited little interest when it came. One or two newspapers lamented that it was a pity he had not used his obvious talents in aid of his country, rather than trying to create one of his own. But mostly the press passed over his end or, like the New York Tribune, dismissed him as “insane.”⁴ President Buchanan, in an address to Congress in December, described Walker’s death as “a happy change.”⁵ The United States had moved on, and no longer did the subject of Central America animate Americans. The nation’s attention was fixed on matters closer to heart and to home, matters that were turning the component parts of the United States into the disunited states. Within months of Walker’s death, on December 20, 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union. The following year, ten more Southern states followed its example, and the American Civil War began—the War of the Rebellion, as it was called in the North; and the War of Northern Aggression, as it was labeled in the South.

Estimates of the number of Americans who had fought for Walker in Nicaragua ranged between twenty-five hundred and ten thousand, with all accounts agreeing that at a minimum, half of those who joined his Army of the Republic of Nicaragua died in Central America from wounds or disease. Walker’s Nicaraguan War veterans served on both sides during the U.S. Civil War. Men who fought for Walker were valued for their experience, particularly by the South. Henningsen became a Confederate brigadier general. Birkett D. Fry, as a Confederate colonel, commanded Archer’s Brigade and survived Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg and was taken prisoner. Wheat led his own Confederate battalion, the First Louisiana, or “Wheat’s Tigers,” calling the battalion’s A Company “the Walker Guards.” He was killed at the Battle of Gaines Mills, Virginia, in 1862. Robert Harris, one of Walker’s artillery men in Nicaragua, took over command of Wheat’s battalion. Rudler, a Georgia Infantry colonel, was seriously wounded at the Battle of Missionary Ridge. Tom Green was colonel of the Second Texas Cavalry; Sam Lockridge was his deputy. Other Walker veterans served in the U.S. Army during the Civil War. Charles Doubleday was a brigadier general of Union cavalry. Theodore Potter served as a captain with the Minnesota Infantry. James Jamison also fought for the North. The one-armed Parker French spent time in Boston’s La Fayette federal prison as a Confederate spy, then turned up in the Confederacy as a Northern agent. Henry Titus lived to have a town in Florida, Titusville, named after him following the Civil War.

Both Jamison and Doubleday survived the Civil War. Jamison always remained loyal to Walker but disputed his claim, in The Nicaraguan War, that all his officers were proslavery; Jamison named several officers who, like himself, had never supported slavery. Doubleday sailed on Walker’s second and third Nicaraguan ventures, but not the fourth, having lost faith in Walker’s cause by that time. Though not in favor of slavery, he still considered Walker a great man.

In 1863, even while the Civil War was raging, the Accessory Transit Company was wound up, and investors holding worthless Transit Company scrip sued Vanderbilt for mismanagement. His acceptance of bribes to keep the Transit Company ships off the Panama run was declared immoral, but the investors never saw any of the millions that the Commodore reaped from those deals.

From late in 1862, an attempt was made to revive the Nicaragua route by Marshal Roberts, who had been Vanderbilt’s partner in the Atlantic and Pacific Steamship Company only to later fall out with him. For a few profitless seasons, Roberts and New York shipbuilder William Webb ran several trips a year to San Francisco via Nicaragua; business was not aided by the Civil War. After the war, in 1867, John and Elizabeth Hollenbeck, of the El Castillo hotel renown, bought the aging Nicaraguan lake and river steamers for a song, only to go broke trying to make money from the Transit.

Nicaragua, which enjoyed decades of peace following Walker’s brief reign, never again saw Americans thronging along the San Juan, over the lake, and down the Transit Road. There was talk of a Nicaragua railroad, like the Panama railroad. Joseph L. White even visited the country to look into railroad possibilities, only to be shot and killed while there on that visit. It was indeed a railroad that finally sealed the fate of the Nicaraguan Transit and ended the heyday of the Panama steamers—in 1869, the intercontinental railroad opened, linking California and the East Coast via Chicago. By the 1960s, U.S. interests still held the rights to build a canal across Nicaragua, and the route had been freshly surveyed.⁶

A canal was built across Central America, but in Panama, not Nicaragua. A French company began construction of the Panama Canal in 1879. Financial difficulties caused a collapse of the enterprise ten years later. In 1904, the United States acquired the rights, and after many problems and much loss of life due to accidents and disease, the Panama Canal opened in 1914. In 2000, the Republic of Panama assumed control of the canal and, in 2006, embarked on a $5.25 billion project to significantly increase the capacity of the waterway. In the early 2000s, the Nicaraguan government floated a proposal to build a series of locks on its San Juan River to improve navigation.

Both of Vanderbilt’s former Nicaragua Transit rivals Cornelius Garrison and Charles Morgan went on to invest in railroads. Garrison moved to New York in 1859, initially to run Vanderbilt’s Atlantic and Pacific Steamship Company, of which he had become a director. But before long, Garrison found himself sidelined by Vanderbilt, so he sold his interest in the line’s ships to the Commodore and became heavily involved in the Missouri Pacific Railroad, only to lose a $5 million lawsuit connected to the line and die without assets and heavily in debt. Morgan owned railroads in Texas and Louisiana and died a rich man in 1878, but his wealth was never in the same league as that of Vanderbilt.

Vanderbilt had seen the future of railroads well before many others. Despite having been nearly killed in a railroad accident in New Jersey in 1833, he would accumulate controlling interests in sixteen key lines. During the Civil War, he chartered a number of his steamships to the U.S. government, which converted them into warships, but after the war, he consolidated his shipping interests and concentrated on the iron rail, buying up railroad after railroad. His crowning glory was the construction of New York City’s first Grand Central Terminal. His statue stands outside Grand Central Station to this day. Steamships had made Vanderbilt wealthy, but railroads made him the richest man in America.

Many people in the United States today will recognize the Vanderbilt name and will associate it with wealth and success. Ask anyone in Central America, and most will not have heard of the Vanderbilts. But mention William Walker, and Central Americans will tell you all about the king of the filibusters. Throughout Central America today, Walker’s name ranks with that of Hitler and Stalin. In Costa Rica, their national day is April 11, in celebration of the defeat of Walker’s filibusteros at Rivas—since 1865, they have called it Juan Santamaria Day, in honor of the drummer boy who gave his life to set fire to Guerra’s Inn. And the hacienda of Santa Rosa in Guanacaste, scene of the rout of Louis Schlessinger’s Corps of Observation, is a Costa Rican national monument. Luis Pacheco, who also gained fame on April 11 and later helped George Cauty put an explosive end to the filibuster attempt to reopen the San Juan River, was, in his sixties, given a gold medal by his government and made a general for his part in defeating Walker.

In Nicaragua, they have two national days, September 14 and September 15. The latter commemorates the day Nicaragua wrested its independence from Spain in 1821. The former celebrates the day in 1856 that Colonel José Estrada’s Nicaraguans defeated Walker’s Yankee filibusteros at the San Jacinto ranch—the hacienda is today a Nicaraguan national monument. Yet the day was to come when Nicaraguans and Americans fought side by side. Graduates from the José Estrada military school led the Nicaraguan Army contingent, which, in 2004, joined the American-led Coalition in Iraq and served alongside U.S. troops.

What did Vanderbilt think about Walker? Vanderbilt had no moral objections to Walker or to filibustering. To begin with, when the Commodore regained control of the Transit Company, he had supported Walker’s regime—until Walker disenfranchised his company. And after Walker’s death, Vanderbilt went into an ultimately unsuccessful partnership with filibusters aiming to overthrow the government of Peru. Vanderbilt was only interested in two things—making money and winning. Often, he temporarily subjugated the need for the former to achieve the latter. Vanderbilt had an unquenchable thirst for conquest—at the card table, driving his horses, in his countless business deals, and, reputedly, in the bedroom with numerous mistresses. There was nothing he would not do, short of outright murder, to conquer. He probably cheated at cards and was even compelled to beat his own son at harness racing.

Vanderbilt and Walker were alike in several respects. Both were opportunists, and both were prepared to suffer through short-term adversity to achieve long-term victory. Both Vanderbilt and Walker were loyal to those who were loyal to them, attracting lifelong allegiance from their closest associates. But there the similarities ended. Walker, because of his limited resources, was prepared to give his trust too readily to achieve his ends, giving that trust to men who turned out to be liars, braggarts, and fools—the likes of Parker H. French, Louis Schlessinger, Domingo de Goicuria, and Henry Titus. The cunning Vanderbilt was a much better judge of character. And here is where the two men differed most—if you crossed Walker, he would banish you from his world; if you crossed Vanderbilt, he would set out to conquer you, no matter how long it took. Ultimately, that conquest would be signified by a surrender, and that surrender would usually take the form of a deal.

At one time or another, Vanderbilt got into bed with all his enemies—if they were prepared to submit to him, and most, being businessmen, were. George Law, William Aspinwall, Marshall Roberts, Cornelius Garrison, Charles Morgan, and many others fought Vanderbilt, lost the battle, and surrendered on his terms, ending up doing business with him. The exception was William Walker. He was not a businessman. He achieved his short-lived successes using war and the law as his tools. And unlike Vanderbilt’s other adversaries, Walker was not afraid of the Commodore, when he should have been.

After Walker’s enforced return to the United States in the summer of 1857, Harper’s Weekly had suggested that it would be a good thing for Walker and for Central America if he could do a deal with Commodore Vanderbilt and the Transit Company and, in so doing, resume his Nicaraguan presidency. But Walker would not contemplate going cap in hand to Vanderbilt, as he must if such a deal were to be consummated.

Besides, Vanderbilt had already attempted that course, agreeing to Domingo de Goicuria’s proposal that he loan Walker’s government $250,000 in exchange for the return of the Transit charter. But Walker had flatly rejected that deal, one that made great commercial sense but meant going back on his agreement with Morgan and Garrison. Walker, driven by joint fixations with loyalty and the law, had dismissed an eminently suitable solution and dismissed its proponent, Goicuria, making firm enemies of both Goicuria and Vanderbilt. As a consequence, the former would prove a nuisance, the latter, Walker’s nemesis.

Vanderbilt seems never to have forgotten that the “tin sojer boy” refused to deal with him and never forgave that slap in the face. Via Spencer and Cauty, Vanderbilt brought about Walker’s defeat in Nicaragua, but Walker never surrendered to Vanderbilt, and that seems to have rankled the Commodore. Walker was the one who got away. It would also have rankled Vanderbilt that after the Civil War, there was still a deal of residual admiration in the American South for William Walker, a Southerner who became president of Nicaragua. At the same time, there was a simmering dislike of Vanderbilt in the South, for his having engineered Walker’s downfall and for supporting the Union during the Civil War. The admiration for Walker was greatest in his home state of Tennessee and greatest of all in his hometown of Nashville. To this day, there is a historical marker honoring Walker outside the Nashville house where he was born and grew up.

Until late in his life, unlike many other wealthy Americans, Cornelius Vanderbilt had no record of philanthropy. Though the recipient of countless approaches for donations for one cause or another, he’d had a lifelong aversion to charity. “What’s the use of giving folks money?” he is reported to have said. “It’s the lazy ones beg.”⁷ In his latter years, he spent fifty thousand dollars buying Mercer Street Presbyterian Church in Manhattan for the Reverend Charles F. Deems, who had become his confidante and adviser. Deems renamed it the Church of the Strangers. Up until 1873, that was the extent of Vanderbilt’s munificence. So, it was a great surprise to many when, in that year, just four years prior to his death, Vanderbilt acceded to the approaches of a Methodist bishop and gave a million dollars to endow a university. This was a huge donation—the single largest philanthropic endowment in the United States to that time. Just how huge can be judged by the fact that Charles Morgan had given fifty thousand dollars to build the Morgan School in his hometown of Clinton, Connecticut.

The lucky bishop in question was Holland McTeyeire, a nephew by marriage of Vanderbilt’s second wife. First wife, Sophia, had died in 1868, and a year later, seventy-three-year-old Cornelius had eloped to Canada to marry thirty-year-old distant cousin Miss Frank Crawford. In 1873, Bishop McTeyeire went to New York City for a medical procedure, after which he spent some weeks recovering at 10 Washington Place as the guest of the Vanderbilts. This gave McTeyeire plenty of time in which to tell the Commodore all about the new Central University that he was planning for his hometown. The college’s charter had been drawn up the previous year, and the bishop had chosen the site. All that was lacking was a little finance. A stunned McTeyeire returned home with a half-million-dollar check. He would receive a further five hundred thousand dollars from Vanderbilt over the next few years, in several installments.⁸ Cornelius Vanderbilt’s endowment came with just one condition—the university must bear his name. McTeyeire hastily agreed and wasted no time changing the charter, renaming his new college Vanderbilt University.

Was it purely coincidence that the new Vanderbilt University was located in Nashville, William Walker’s hometown? At the age of fourteen, Cornelius Vanderbilt had slaved from dawn till dusk on his father’s Staten Island farm, whereas at the age of fourteen, William Walker had graduated from the University of Nashville. By the 1880s, Walker’s old college was being rapidly eclipsed by the affluent new Vanderbilt University across town in Nashville. Before long, Vanderbilt’s university, the richest in the United States apart from several more established colleges in the Northeast, took over the older Nashville University’s medical and teacher colleges, and in 1909, the struggling University of Nashville, Walker’s alma mater, went out of business altogether and ceased to exist. Vanderbilt University thrives to this day.

Why did Vanderbilt, a man who never stepped inside a university and had no time for book learning, give a million dollars to establish Vanderbilt University? Was the Commodore’s mind affected by the syphilis that a recent Vanderbilt biographer claims was diagnosed by Vanderbilt’s physician in 1839? Perhaps. Yet, the Commodore was sufficiently in command of his faculties in his last few years to stipulate that a large part of his gift to the university be in the form of first mortgage bonds of his New York Central and Hudson River Railroad.⁹ There may be another explanation.

Was this massive and totally out-of-character largesse Vanderbilt’s ultimate revenge against Walker? Was his staggering generosity—to a distant Southern city he had never even visited—aimed purely at making Vanderbilt’s name in Nashville and overshadowing Walker’s lingering hometown fame? Did this give Vanderbilt the sense of conquest that Nashville’s son had denied him all those years before?