THE PROTAGONISTS’ MOTIVES

EVER SINCE WILLIAM Walker’s death, many authors, academics, and historians have ascribed his motive for invading Central America to an intention to reintroduce slavery there. Yet, close analysis of Walker’s short life reveals that this was not his original intent.

On the contrary, until he went to Nicaragua, Walker was against the spread of slavery. He had grown up in a house where slavery was abhorred; his deeply religious father had in fact retained several paid black employees. During his newspaper days in New Orleans, Walker wrote in favor of phasing out slavery and penned biting editorials against slavery advocates such as former U.S. vice president John C. Calhoun.

The slavery issue did not feature in any of Walker’s rhetoric leading up to his arrival in Nicaragua in 1855 and never raised its head during his first eighteen months in the country, not even when he became president of Nicaragua. Just as the chameleon Walker led U.S. ambassador John Wheeler to believe that he agreed with the North Carolinian’s bigoted views of Central Americans, all the while numbering colored locals among his closest allies, he allowed Southern slavery supporters such as William and Jane Cazneau to believe he shared their proslavery view. It was only when Louisiana’s Pierre Soule arrived in Granada in the summer of 1856 and made it clear to Walker that he and other wealthy Southerners would only invest heavily in Nicaragua if Walker permitted them to use slave labor on their properties that he issued the infamous Slavery Decree, repealing the 1838 Nicaraguan law banning slavery.

Even then, Walker, highly intelligent and trained in the law, attempted to play fast and loose with his Southern supporters. As he himself was to write, his decree, quite deliberately only “gave the appearance” that slavery had been reintroduced, to fool backers such as Soule. In fact, it would have taken a second decree to physically reintroduce slavery, a decree Walker never made. This ploy was his way of salving both his conscience and his moneyed Southern supporters.

But Walker was too clever for his own good, and in the end, he was hoist on his own petard. The appearance of the reintroduction of slavery, while enough to cement his support in the Southern states of the United States, was also enough to lose him significant support in the North. So much so that, after his ejection from Nicaragua in 1857, he based himself in the American South and largely confined his personal appearances and speaking engagements to Southern cities as he went about the task of raising money for a fresh invasion of Nicaragua.

By the time Walker published his autobiography, The War in Nicaragua, in 1860, he had capitulated to circumstances. Having lost the sympathy of the North, he realized that if he was to overcome Cornelius Vanderbilt, the man behind his initial defeat in Nicaragua, and win the moral, financial, and manpower support he needed, he would have to embrace the South and all that it stood for, including black servitude. And so he wrote his self-serving book as if he were slavery’s greatest champion and declared that “on the reestablishment of African slavery there (Nicaragua) depended the permanent presence of the white race in that region,” a claim he had never made prior to going to Nicaragua nor during his two years there.

Walker’s real motive for going to Nicaragua was clearly one of empire-building, as he spelled out to follower Charles Doubleday in 1855 within months of entering the civil war in Nicaragua. That he was indeed bent on the creation of a Central American empire, with himself at its head, is supported by the fact that one of his first acts as president of Nicaragua was the dispatch of a letter to all the heads of government of the surrounding Central American nations seeking a conference to discuss the reestablishment of the old Central American federation of states. In the end, slavery, or the appearance of slavery, became one more tool employed by an increasingly desperate Walker in his failing attempt to create that empire.

At the same time, it is clear that even before he landed in Nicaragua, Walker had perceived the importance, strategically and financially, of the Nicaraguan Transit Route to any Nicaraguan government. Prior to departing California, he had approached William Garrison offering to play a role in ending the difficulties existing between the Accessory Transit Company and the then government of Nicaragua, only to receive short shrift from Garrison. Subsequently, just weeks after landing in Nicaragua, Walker was able to convince naive Provisional Director Don Francisco Castellon to sign a contract that gave Walker the power to settle differences between the Transit Company and the Nicaraguan authorities. Later, once Cornelius Vanderbilt resumed control of the Transit Company, at the expense of Garrison and Charles Morgan, Walker was able to negotiate the deal that took the Transit charter from Vanderbilt and gave it to Garrison and Morgan.

In doing so, Walker brought the wrath of Cornelius Vanderbilt down upon himself and ultimately sealed his own fate. Yet there can be no doubt that Walker’s stripping of the charter from the Commodore was not personal. To find a shipping company that would pay the Nicaraguan government a fair and honest share of its Nicaraguan Transit profits, he would have taken the contract from whoever was running the Accessory Transit Company at the time.

On the other hand, Cornelius Vanderbilt took the loss of the Transit charter very personally indeed. It caused him to launch a very personal war on William Walker, a war that he would fight tooth and nail, to the bitter end—as only a tycoon as pragmatic, powerful, and unprincipled as Cornelius Vanderbilt could.